REBECCA SHEIR, HOST:
A handful of people in the world, roughly 10 percent of the population, has something rather particular in common. They've been called artistically gifted and self-reliant but also untrustworthy and insincere. A lot of mysteries and misconception surround this group, actually, which is of special interest to me since, well, I'm a part of it.
We're talking about left-handed people, and the man we'll meet next knows a thing or two about the subject. Not only is Rik Smits a lefty himself, but his new book, "The Puzzle of Left-Handedness," dives into the history, culture and science of hand preference.
RIK SMITS: Throughout history, there was - Western history, I should say, there has always been a sort of negative whiff around left-handedness, but it wasn't taken very far, usually. For instance, if you look at the witch hunts of the Middle Ages, left-handedness was never, never used as a real, real sign of the devil, for one thing.
Now, that's strange because everything that they could lay their hands on was used to condemn people in those days. The stigma got worse once psychology was invented at the end of the 19th century, and that's when you find these very stern people who really think that we left-handers are really maladjusted and sick and what have you.
SHEIR: Was it Abram Blau who talked about infantile negativism in left-handed people?
SMITS: Yeah, I think.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SMITS: Oh, he was - he can't have been a fun person.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SHEIR: What did he mean by that, infantile negativism?
SMITS: Well, he thought that children were willfully left-handed just to spite their parents, basically, which is completely bullocks. Try and find left-handers whom you suspect of being left-handed just to spite you. Well, you won't be able to find them. They're just normal, ordinary people.
SHEIR: I know there are places you mention in your book, like China, for instance, where they do not discriminate.
SMITS: The Chinese, they simply don't have the same kind of negative connotations to the left that we have. We have a culture - let's say the Christian culture - Christian-based cultures are very much oriented towards opposites, black and white, good and bad, left and right. It's also dichotomies that we live by. And the Chinese don't do that, don't have this, let's say, this more harmonious idea of opposites that are complements to one another to form a harmonic hole, the yin and yang principle.
And within that idea, the whole idea of good and bad as things that are - all with their backs to one another and really are each other's enemy, doesn't - simply doesn't arise.
SHEIR: Well, you write about several possible explanations for why people are left-handed. But I get the impression we don't really have an answer to why we prefer one hand over another.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
No. And that's basically because science is still sort of guessing at what goes on inside our skulls. And what you see is that left-handedness has some sort of a (unintelligible) component, but it's not neat. It doesn't conform to what you would normally expect. So you have to look for something special, something (unintelligible). And this is what people have tried to do with, well, marginal success, because there's nothing, really, that explains the whole phenomenon.
SHEIR: Like, there are advantages to being left-handed?
SMITS: Yes. If you are a sportsman, like tennis or baseball or boxing, anything that has two adversaries in sort of personal combat, people think that that is because right-handers have very few chances of training with left-handers, whereas left-handers can always train with right-handers.
SHEIR: On the flipside then, do we have clear evidence of when being a lefty is actually a real disadvantage?
SMITS: In the army, in a big orchestra, that's where you're really at a disadvantage. You wouldn't want one violinist to bow away the other way from all the others. You'd get a bloodbath on the stage. I mean, the army is exactly the same thing. You need everybody to have his sword or his gun or whatever throughout history. You always want everybody to behave exactly the same. That's where the strength of an army is. And if somebody sort of breaks ranks, what you get is, well, a real risk for everybody.
SHEIR: So that's a clear disadvantage, although I guess it does help...
SMITS: If you want to go in to the military, yes.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SHEIR: But if you want to be president of the United States, for example?
SMITS: Well, it's a nice coincidence that five out of the seven last presidents are left-handed. But don't get up your hopes too far. It's a very small community, presidents. It's very slow in growing, so your chances are still about nil of getting there. And left-handedness, I don't think it will be a real advantage in that respect. Now, a quick mouth and a quick mind is probably better.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SHEIR: Rik Smits is the author of "The Puzzle of Left-Handedness." He joined me from Amsterdam. Thank so much, Rik.
SMITS: OK. Glad to be here.
REBECCA SHEIR, HOST:
Now, time for music. And how better to end the show looking toward the future than with a Broadway musical called "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever."
(SOUNDBITE OF BROADWAY MUSICAL, "ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER")
HARRY CONNICK JR.: (as Dr. Dr. Mark Bruckner) (Singing) On a clear day rise and look around you...
SHEIR: Those (unintelligible) belong to the star of the show, Harry Connick Jr. He plays the morally conflicted psychologist Mark Bruckner, whose life spins in unexpected directions after he meets a lot of special patients.
JR.: (as Dr. Dr. Mark Bruckner) (Singing) You can see you can see forever and ever more.
SHEIR: The original production of Burton Lane and Alan J. Lerner's musical debuted in 1965. And while reviewers back then weren't so kind, this time around, they've been especially savage, though some have had sweet things to say about Connick, like the fact that his singing voice sounds like caramel.
JR.: Well, it's nice - it's more like peanut butter right now.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SHEIR: All right. So Connick is feeling a wee bit under the weather when I spoke with him. But as I soon found out, the guy is a trouper. I asked him about the reviews, the role, and the fact that director Michael Mayer isn't calling this production a revival, so much is a reincarnation.
JR.: Yeah, it kind of is. I mean, the original concept was based around the female character, Daisy. I never saw the original stage production that Barbara has, but in the movie, it was played by Barbra Streisand. And it was an amazing performance. She had (unintelligible), she could hear phones ringing before the call came in.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER")
BARBRA STREISAND: (as Daisy) Watch. (Unintelligible).
JR.: And she went to see this psychiatrist, and he hypnotizes her and discovers she has this former life.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER")
STREISAND: (as Daisy) My name is Melinda. Melinda Winifred Wayne Tentrees.
JR.: This aristocratic woman in England from, you know, 100 years ago or so. And he falls in love with her, and the only way to get to her is to hypnotize this young Barbra Streisand, which was always a little confusing to me because she was so adorable and charming I couldn't figure out why he wanted this old fuddy-duddy, why didn't want to go after this woman with this great character, you know?
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER")
STREISAND: (as Daisy) I thought he kind of liked me. But all the time he was thinking of someone else.
SHEIR: So many changes from the original to the version we're seeing now on Broadway. The biggest change, arguably, is the fact that your character falls in love with the female past life of a male patient. In the original, the patient was a woman, and now, we have Daisy Gamble becoming Davey Gamble.
JR.: Davey, yes. And he's a young gay florist. And he wants to quit smoking, so he comes to see me. And I say, look, I don't really do hypnosis. He says, look, can you just try it? And he goes under very easily and becomes, at least in my mind, this woman named Melinda Wells, and I fell in love with her.
So when I pulled David out of the hypnosis, I want to see him again because I want to see Melinda again. And he thinks that I just want to see him again.
SHEIR: That's a rather bold experiment.
JR.: It is. But I think the fact that I'm a straight man and this gay man is the vessel in which Melinda goes through, I think that's - it's more suitable dramatically because it provides for this impossible love triangle. I'm in love with this woman. He thinks I'm in love with him. It just makes it more interesting dramatically. I mean, it just makes a lot more sense.
SHEIR: But I'd imagine that's got to be a lot more complicated for you as an actor approaching this role. You're interacting with one character that's actually another, and then the actress comes out, Jessie Mueller comes out when we want to see Melinda versus Davey. There must be more to it as you're approaching this character.
JR.: It's the most complex character I've had to play, only because I'm playing an academic. That alone is a stretch for me.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
JR.: But, you know, what I'm doing to this guy, essentially, is using him like a crackhead would use a crack vial. I'm just abusing him and using him to get to this girl. And it's absolutely the most unethical means of practice you can imagine. My sister is a psychiatrist. And I asked her what would have happened to a patient in real life had a doctor treated the patient in this capacity. And she said, well, you're going to ruin them for the rest of his life.
So for me, to have the audience even like me at the end of the show is a real challenge. And so far, so good. I mean, so far, I think people seem to feel that redemption has occurred. But it's tough.
SHEIR: My guest is Harry Connick Jr. He plays the lead in a Broadway revival of the musical "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever." It features a really lush score with a number of classics by Lerner and Lane, some, I understand it, from the original musical, some were borrowed from real wedding. You've got "Come Back to Me," "She Wasn't You," which I guess in this version becomes "She Isn't you?"
JR.: Yes. Yes.
SHEIR: In fact, let's take a listen to that one right now.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHE WASN'T YOU")
JR.: (Singing) For love me, she may even die for me sweep every cloud from the sky for me (unintelligible) queen she will never be you.
SHEIR: Well, I have read that it's faring better at the box office than a lot of new musicals on Broadway. And I'm sure quite a few people are coming because they love you. They're huge Harry Connick Jr. fans. Do you mind if people buy tickets because they think they're seeing what they might call, you know, a Harry Connick Jr. musical?
JR.: Well, I - listen, I mean, I was doing a show the other day and I start the show off with this monologue, sort of this expository monologue that allows people to sort of gently ramp into this world. And at the end of the monologue the other night, some guy goes: Hey, Harry. You know, oh, my God.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
JR.: So I think there are some people who maybe don't realize that I'm playing a character, which is really scary, because, God knows, I would never do some of the things I'm doing onstage as myself, you know? But I think that's the minority - I think most people realize that I'm playing a part.
SHEIR: I'm sure you're aware of the critical reaction to this show. It's been mixed, but some publications have been, in a word, brutal. The original show wasn't exactly graciously received back in the '60s. Were you surprised by how this production has been received?
JR.: Listen, I - what are my options? Do I change my performance based on what they said? Or do I cry? Do I seek psychological help? I mean, there's nothing I can do. You're talking about a Broadway show, which is a living, breathing organism that changes night after night. It's not like reviewing a CD, which is static, or a movie. It's a bunch of actors that are trying to do something to the best of their ability.
And listen, man, honestly speaking, if people don't dig it, I mean, that's all right. There's no stats in the arts. I mean, I can't go out there and say: Hey, you can't say anything about me because I threw six touchdowns. I mean, it's all subjective. So if a publication doesn't like it, I mean, that's really OK.
SHEIR: In a way, is it easier reading theatrical reviews because they're reviewing you playing a character in a larger production directed by someone else versus you, Harry Connick Jr., on the stage, yourself in live in concert?
JR.: Oh, it doesn't matter. And I never - I see what you're saying, but I didn't really read - I read two or three reviews. I actually kind of enjoy the worst the reviews - all the bad reviews, too, has made me giggle. The one review I did read was in New York Times. And...
SHEIR: Ben Bradlee?
JR.: Ben Bradlee.
SHEIR: Yeah.
JR.: And he said that I looked like I just got out of grueling dental surgery. I mean, that's just funny.
SHEIR: That's funny for you.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
JR.: Well, I mean, I can't change the way I looked when I sing. Oh, man. It's just part of it, you know? It's all right.
SHEIR: That's Harry Connick Jr. He plays Dr. Mark Bruckner in the Broadway revival of "On A Clear Day, You Can See Forever." Harry, thanks so much for joining us.
JR.: Hey, thanks for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
JR.: (as Dr. Mark Bruckner) (Singing) Too late now to imagine myself away from you.
JESSIE MUELLER: (as Melinda Wells) (Singing) Too late now to imagine myself away from you. All the things we've done together I relive when we're apart.
JR.: (as Dr. Mark Bruckner) (Singing) All the tender fun together stays on in my heart.
SHEIR: And for Sunday, that's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Rebecca Sheir. Check out our weekly podcast, the best of WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. You can find it at iTunes or npr.org/weekendatc on Sunday evenings. Guy Raz is back on the program next weekend. Until then, thanks for listening, and happy New Year.
REBECCA SHEIR, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Rebecca Sheir. On this day in 1976, Michigan's Lake Superior State University released its first "List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness." We wanted to know what words you would nominate to banish in 2012, so we hit the streets of Washington, D.C. to find out.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Ping me. I don't know why they don't say IM or instant message me. It's too long for people to say, so they say ping me.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Literally. And bro just in general.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: I want to see hater, hating, any form of the word hate in that context, I want to see it go.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Tote, short for totally.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: Amazing.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #4: Yeah, that. That goes. Everything can't be amazing.
SHEIR: That's the word on the street. But what made the official list? John Shibley of Lake Superior State University helped compile this year's list of banished words.
JOHN SHIBLEY: Amazing, baby bump, shared sacrifice, occupy, blowback, man cave, the new normal, pet parent, win the future, trickeration, ginormous and thank you in advance.
SHEIR: So I was going to thank you in advance for joining us, but I understand that's a phrase I should probably steer clear of this year.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SHIBLEY: In advance, you know, we put these words out. You're free to use them for the rest of your life.
SHEIR: That's great, because I use ginormous all the time, I will confess.
SHIBLEY: So does my wife.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SHIBLEY: So do my students.
SHEIR: Going back to amazing, why were so many people annoyed by that word?
SHIBLEY: This is sort of a tongue-in-cheek endeavor. When people notice they hear it too much on the media or when they're conversing with other people. And people are either really angry at a word or phrase that's overused or just find it's a quirky word it's time to retire.
SHEIR: Can you tell us how this list got started in the first place? I mean, who dreamed this up?
SHIBLEY: The faculty. It was at a New Year's Eve party 1976, and they got talking about, over martinis, words and phrases that are overused. And Bill Rabe, who was the college relations director, made a bet with the faculty that he couldn't go home that night and pull out his Remington typewriter and type up five words and phrases that they talked about that evening.
And mind you, this is New Year's Eve, and it ran on January 1st. Cards and letters start coming in from readers who have seen this story move on UPI, and the next year, he had 20 words that were nominated. 1977, same thing. So he settled into a habit, and it's been going for 37 years.
SHEIR: I'm taking a look at the list right now and I'm seeing shared sacrifice, I'm seeing occupy, I'm seeing win the future. I know the list is just for fun but do you think the list at all reflects the year's, like, social and political themes?
SHIBLEY: Oh, definitely. If you look at the list of all the words Lake State has banished over the years, it's like looking at snapshots of cultural movement back then, times gone by in a linguistics sort of way.
SHEIR: So much fun.
SHIBLEY: So much trickeration.
SHEIR: So much trickeration.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SHIBLEY: I guess that's my favorite on this one this year.
SHEIR: That's John Shibley, who helped compile Lake Superior State University's list of banished words for 2012. John, thanks for being on the show today.
SHIBLEY: Thank you.
REBECCA SHEIR, HOST:
Today, we've been glancing head at 2012 and talking about developments we might see in the world of education, politics, business and foreign policy. We turn now to the world of entertainment.
When we asked NPR's arts reporter Ned Ulaby how we might be entertained this year, she identified two distinct trends: literary adaptations on the large and small screens and smart - yes, smart - superhero movies.
So what are the biggest literary adaptations slated for 2012?
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: A couple of books you might have heard of: "The Great Gatsby."
SHEIR: No.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SHEIR: Never. Sorry. Should I have? I...
ULABY: Well, you know, the movie is coming out, but it's not coming out until late, late next year. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick, and Carey Mulligan as Daisy. The other big movie is "The Hobbit." And its great strength appears to be that it looks exactly like the earlier "Lord of the Ring" films, although actually it's their prequel.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY")
MARTIN FREEMAN: (as Bilbo Baggins) My dear Frodo, while I can honestly say I have told you the truth, I may not have told you all of it.
ULABY: And then there's a little film called "The Hunger Games."
SHEIR: Oh, "The Hunger Games" based, of course, on the super popular young adult novel.
ULABY: Now, if you aren't aware of "The Hunger Games," it's about teenagers fighting to the death in this totalitarian state.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE HUNGER GAMES")
DONALD SUTHERLAND: (as President Snow) And so it was decreed that each year, the 12 districts of Panem shall offer up and tribute one young man and woman between the ages of 12 and 18 to be trained in the art of survival.
ULABY: OK. The book series has sold more than 12 million copies. The studio that's making it, Lionsgate, invested $100 million in the budget. So this is intended to be a mass market blockbuster, not just a movie for kids.
SHEIR: Well, speaking of that, are there any good literary adaptations coming out this year that are just for kids?
ULABY: Well, if you like Dr. Seuss and you like the environment, there is a movie version of "The Lorax" coming out just for you. That's in March. It's coming out on Dr. Seuss' birthday.
SHEIR: Now, another type of movie I know you're keeping your eye on for 2012 is the superhero movie?
ULABY: Mm-hmm.
SHEIR: Although last year, that genre didn't really fare too well in theaters. Do you think this year will be any different?
ULABY: I just have to underscore how last year was the year of the staggeringly disappointing superhero movie. "Captain America," "Green Hornet," they all just seemed like villainous waste of time and money. This year is the year of the smart superhero movie. We've got three very, very promising titles. One is "The Amazing Spider-Man" starring Andrew Garfield, who was so wonderful in "The Social Network," also Emma Stone, and it was directed by the guy who did "500 Days of Summer." Then we've got "The Avengers," which you could almost describe as a kind of prestige ensemble film, except it's also a big flashy action picture.
It's got Robert Downey Jr. as the Iron Man, as well as Gwyneth Paltrow and Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk. And then we've got "The Dark Knight Rises." And this is the third time out in a batmobile for Christopher Nolan, who's the director, and Christian Bale, who's the star. And this time, Anne Hathaway joins them as Catwoman.
SHEIR: Well, speaking of Catwoman, she of course features prominently in "Dark Knight Rises," and that's one of the films that seems, with the superhero genre, they touch on American politics. Here's a clip from the trailer where Catwoman channels the 99 percent.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE DARK KNIGHT RISES")
ANNE HATHAWAY: (As Catwoman) You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you're all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.
ULABY: Right. They actually filmed a battle scene near Occupy Wall Street in November. And on one level, yeah, Bruce Wayne, who's Batman's alter ego (unintelligible), he's the one percent. But this is also a guy who spends his night suiting up and defending the victimized. In terms of politics, superheroes have always reflected what's going on, whether it's Captain America punching Hitler on the cover of a comic book in 1941 or the X-Men that much more recently explicitly critiqued issues like homophobia or the Patriot Act.
SHEIR: Do you think that's why perhaps the superhero movie endures? Are there other reasons?
ULABY: Well, blowing stuff up.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
ULABY: Yeah. That's timeless. It's like, yeah, you know, and they're mythological, Rebecca. People need myths. We've relied on them for thousands of years. And superhero stories are about underdogs who become strong. And, you know, another reason why superhero movies keep getting made might be because studios just aren't doing as well as they used to. And I think they keep hoping someone in a cape is going to swoop in and save the day.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SHEIR: That's NPR's Neda Ulaby. She reports on arts, entertainment and cultural trends for the NPR arts desk. Neda, thanks so much and happy New Year.
ULABY: And happy New Year to you.
REBECCA SHEIR, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Rebecca Sheir.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: All right. So let's go ahead and start for today.
SHEIR: At 11 o'clock on a weekday morning, a couple hundred college students are settling down in a lecture hall for chemistry class.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: All right. So last time, we spent a lot of time talking about derivations and relating equations to each other. What we're going to do today is...
SHEIR: The lecture is one of the oldest forms of education there is, says Joe Redish, a physics professor at the University of Maryland.
JOE REDISH: Before printing, someone would read the books to everybody who would copy them down.
SHEIR: But, he says, lecturing has never been an effective teaching technique. And now that we can find information everywhere, Redish and a few others say lecturing is pretty much a waste of time.
On today's show, we're looking toward the coming year and wondering what the future might bring. And as Emily Hanford of American RadioWorks tells us, some say the traditional lecture is so flawed, it could - or should - be on its way out.
EMILY HANFORD, BYLINE: When Eric Mazur began teaching physics at Harvard, he started out teaching the same way he had been taught.
ERIC MAZUR: I sort of projected my own experience, my own vision of learning and teaching, which is what my instructors had done to me. So I lectured.
HANFORD: And he loved to lecture. Mazur's students apparently loved it too. They gave him great evaluations, and his classes were full.
MAZUR: For a long while, I thought I was doing a really, really good job.
HANFORD: But then in 1990, he came across a series of articles written by David Hestenes, a physicist at Arizona State. Hestenes got the idea for the articles when a colleague came to him with a problem. The students in his introductory physics courses were not doing well: Semester after semester, the class average never got above about 40 percent.
DAVID HESTENES: And I noted that the reason for that was that his examination questions were mostly qualitative, requiring understanding of the concepts rather than just calculational, using formulas, which is what most of the instructors did.
HANFORD: Hestenes had a suspicion students were just memorizing the formulas and never really getting the concepts. So he and a colleague developed a test to probe students' conceptual understanding of physics. It's a test Joe Redish at the University of Maryland has given his students many times. Here's Redish reading the first question.
REDISH: (Reading) Two balls are the same size but one weighs twice as much as the other. The balls are dropped from the top of a two-story building at the same instant of time. The time it takes the ball to reach the ground will be...
HANFORD: The possible answers include about half as long for the heavier ball, about half as long for the lighter ball, or the same time for both. This is a fundamental concept, but even some people who've taken physics get this question wrong.
REDISH: So let's do this by going out to the second floor.
HANFORD: Redish walks up the stairs of the physics building and opens a window. A group of his students is on the sidewalk below.
REDISH: All right. Are we ready?
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Oh.
HANFORD: The two balls reached the ground at the same time. Sir Isaac Newton is the first person who figured out why. He came up with a law of motion to explain how two balls of different weights, dropped from the same height, hit the ground simultaneously.
MAZUR: Most students know Newton's second law F equals MA: force equals mass times acceleration.
HANFORD: Harvard Professor Eric Mazur says while most physics students can recite Newton's law, the conceptual test developed by Hestenes showed that after an entire semester, they understood only about 14 percent more about the fundamental concepts of physics. When Mazur first read the results, he shook his head in disbelief. The test covered such basic material.
MAZUR: So I gave it to my students only to discover that they didn't do much better.
HANFORD: The test has now been given to tens of thousands of students around the world, and the results are virtually the same everywhere. The traditional lecture-based physics course produces little or no change in most students' fundamental understanding of how the physical world works.
HESTENES: The classes only seem to be really working for about 10 percent of the students.
HANFORD: Again, David Hestenes.
HESTENES: And I maintain, I think all the evidence indicates, that these 10 percent are the students that would learn it even without the instructor. They essentially learn it on their own.
HANFORD: He says listening to someone talk is not an effective way to learn any subject.
HESTENES: Students have to be active in developing their knowledge. They can't passively assimilate it.
HANFORD: This is something a lot of people have known intuitively for a long time - the physicists came up with the hard data. Their work, along with research by cognitive scientists, provides a compelling case against lecturing. But with budgets shrinking and enrollments booming, large classes aren't going away. You don't have to lecture in a lecture hall, though.
MAZUR: OK. Let's begin.
HANFORD: Eric Mazur's physics class is now completely different. Rather than lecturing, Mazur makes his students do most of the talking.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: OK. So repeat what you said.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Well, so, like, basically, like, if you have the capacity to put up the battery...
HANFORD: The students in this class - there are nearly 100 of them - are in small groups discussing a question. Three possible answers to the question are projected on a screen. Before the students started talking with each another, they use a mobile device to vote for their answer. Only 29 percent got the question right. After talking for a few minutes, Professor Mazur tells them to answer the question again.
MAZUR: So wrap up your discussions and enter what you now believe to be the correct answer.
HANFORD: This time, 62 percent of the students get the question right. Next, Mazur leads a discussion about the reasoning behind the answer, and then the process begins again with a new question. This is a method Mazur calls peer instruction. He now teaches all of his classes this way.
MAZUR: And what we found over now close to 20 years of using this approach is that the learning gains at the end of the semester nearly triple.
HANFORD: One value of this approach is that it can be done with hundreds of students. You don't need small classes to get students active and engaged. Mazur says the key is to get them to do the assigned reading - what he calls the information-gathering part of education - before they come to class.
MAZUR: And in class, we work on trying to make sense of the information. Because if you stop to think about it, that second part is actually the hardest part. And the information transfer, especially now that we live in an information age, is the easiest part.
HANFORD: But ask anyone involved with efforts to lose the lecture and they'll tell you they encounter lots of resistance. Sometimes the stiffest opposition comes from the students. Ryan Duncan is in Eric Mazur's class.
RYAN DUNCAN: Revamping my entire education, you know, philosophy for this one class was a bit daunting.
HANFORD: But he adapted and says he learned more in Mazur's class than he did in his other physics course at Harvard. The University of Maryland's Joe Redish says when he lays out the case against lecturing, colleagues often nod their heads but insist their lectures work just fine. Redish tells them lecturing isn't enough anymore.
REDISH: With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don't need faculty to do it. Get them to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty.
HANFORD: Some faculty are threatened by this, but Eric Mazur says they don't have to be. Instead, they need to realize that their role has changed.
MAZUR: It used to be just be the sage on the stage, the source of knowledge and information. We now know that it's not good enough to have a source of information.
HANFORD: Mazur sees himself now as the guide on the side, a kind of coach, working to help students understand all the knowledge and information that they have at their fingertips. And, he says, this new role is a more important one. For NPR News, I'm Emily Hanford.
REBECCA SHEIR, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Rebecca Sheir, in for Guy Raz.
So here we are, a brand-new year. And on today's show, we'll be exploring what 2012 might have in store - from foreign affairs, to films, to the economy. But first, we take a look at what's sure to be a memorable year in politics.
The presidential election is in full swing. And with me to predict, or at least take his best calculated guess, at what might happen down the campaign trail is NPR's senior Washington news editor Ron Elving. Ron, thanks for being here.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Rebecca.
SHEIR: So, Ron, you are the pro. Who's going to win?
ELVING: Two simple scenarios. In one, the country has an economy getting better and Obama gets re-elected pretty much regardless of whom the Republicans nominate. On the other scenario, the economy gets worse, Obama gets beaten, almost regardless of whom the Republicans nominate. But there's a third and more complicated and more likely scenario wherein the economy is still stagnating, the jobless rate is still high, it's not really getting worse or better, and the election is a toss-up.
In this case, the Republican nominee is going to matter a lot, and it's critical that the Republicans pick someone who can match up well in the debates, unite the party, and win a couple of the key swing states like Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin and Colorado. Obama needs at least three of those four states to win in November.
SHEIR: Well, on the Republican side, it seems there's a candidate to suit all different types of conservatives, but at this point, no one really stands out as a strong favorite. Do you think the Republicans will be able to effectively unite under one candidate?
ELVING: The Republicans will unite against one candidate, and that candidate will be Barack Obama. As far as enthusiasm for their own candidate, that's much more of a question mark. Now, we do know this about their process. In one sense, it's going to be long. The primary calendar and the delegate allocation rules have changed, and most of the delegates will now be chosen after mid-March instead of before.
So it's possible that two or three candidates could slug it out all the way to June. Or if Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, jumps out to a fast start and his rivals suddenly see their money dry up, the real suspense could be over early. If that happens, there's still plenty of time. There's still February and March. At least theoretically a new candidate could jump in.
If someone has the name recognition and money to make a plausible challenge, of course, if there's someone like that, why didn't they start running in 2011?
SHEIR: What about the chance of a third party? How likely is it that a third-party candidate will step in? And if that happens, what kind of impact might it have?
ELVING: Yes. I think there will be a third-party candidate, an independent candidate, and more than one. The question is whether that person will be on enough ballots to matter and popular enough to force his way or her way into the debates. Now, let's say if Ron Paul, for example, were to run as an independent or a libertarian, he could draw many votes, most of them probably from the Republican side. But it's possible that a more moderate candidate will run and wind up taking more votes from the president.
SHEIR: Moving then, though, from the presidential race to congressional elections, which party will come out on top in the Senate and in the House?
ELVING: The numbers are really stacked against the Democrats with respect to Congress, the Senate in particular. About a third of the seats in the Senate are up, six-year terms. And among those seats, two-thirds of them are currently held by Democrats and seven of their current incumbents have decided to retire. It's much more difficult to defend vacancies, and most of those seven seats are looking quite vulnerable for the Democrats. The Republicans have some, too, but they're in red states that they shouldn't have much trouble defending.
So with this narrow margin in the Senate right now, it would appear highly likely that the Republicans will take control of the Senate in 2012, barring some huge Democratic wave. Over on the House side, it's a little tougher to tell. A lot of district lines are still being drawn around the country, but that process, too, is favoring the Republicans. And while the Democrats may well pick up seats, it's a tough slog for them to pick up enough seats to get back into control of the House.
SHEIR: That's Ron Elving, NPR's senior Washington editor. Ron, thanks so much.
ELVING: Thank you, Rebecca.
SHEIR: As we've heard, a deciding factor of the election will be the economy and whether it'll start to improve. So are there any glimmers of hope, or are we in for more of the same this year? We put those questions to Annie Lowrey, economic policy reporter for The New York Times.
ANNIE LOWREY: So the fundamentals of the economy have absolutely been getting stronger. Economists see a lot of things to be happy about in things like industrial production, consumer spending, unemployment claims. Obviously, the actual unemployment rate has dropped pretty significantly, four-tenths of a point last month.
So folks are expecting a good year next year and nobody is really worried about a double-dip recession, but we had nearly 4 percent GDP growth in the fourth quarter. And for next year, total GDP growth is expected to be about 2 percent.
SHEIR: Are there particular sectors where we might see some especially promising growth?
LOWREY: Yeah. So the recovery has been actually pretty broad-based. It hasn't been, like, there's one sector that's been a real runaway that's really been supporting the recovery. But there's two things to look at. The first is that exports have been doing quite well. The U.S. is exporting more stuff and importing less stuff, so the trade deficit has narrowed, which is a good thing.
And then the second sector, which economists are kind of excited about, which is sort of surprising, is housing. Basically, what happened was we had a huge housing bubble and then a huge housing bust, and they now think that we've underinvested in housing for so long that actually there's some need for some new building, and especially in things like apartment complexes and condos, as opposed to the kind of single-family houses that we saw supporting the boom.
SHEIR: Looking across the pond over at Europe, obviously, the sovereign debt crisis has played a major role over the past few years, how might it fit into how our nation might fare economically in 2012?
LOWREY: There's definitely a lot to worry about with Europe. First, there's the threat of financial contagion. So weakness in European banks extends to U.S. banks. But the other thing to worry about is the strong dollar and trade. If the dollar is expensive relative to other world currencies, that makes our exports less competitive. A lot of people think that that's really going to weigh on us next year because investors are just fleeing to assets that are denominated in dollars.
And you can see that by just the massive prices that we're getting for U.S. treasuries and, in general, just a lot of strength in dollar-denominated investments.
SHEIR: Is there anything we can do to brace ourselves for what's happening in Europe?
LOWREY: One thing that's good is that the U.S. economy is not terribly dependent on trade. So I think that the issue is that it's going to just contribute to this kind of sluggish growth picture that we're seeing. Because the world economy is not going gangbusters, we're not going to go gangbusters either. But we might be sheltered from some of the problems in Europe. So it's kind of the same muddling through picture that we've seen where nobody expects, you know, anything dire to happen. Nobody expects a double-dip recession anymore. But we're not going to see anything great.
And, you know, I think that the other thing to think about is that unemployment is not expected to get that much better. You know, it could still be basically where it is now by the time of the election, by the end of next year, even if the economy is growing.
SHEIR: Your overall prognosis is not too dire, but we're not going to see sudden happy times?
LOWREY: Yeah. It's kind of a meh. It's like a B-minus.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
LOWREY: It's not going to be very good, but it's also not going to be bad.
SHEIR: That's Annie Lowrey, economic policy reporter for The New York Times. Annie, thanks so much for coming in.
LOWREY: Thank you for having me.
SHEIR: Let's look beyond our shores now to the biggest foreign stories coming our way in 2012. David Rothkopf is a contributor to Foreign Policy magazine and a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And he joins me now in the studio. Welcome.
DAVID ROTHKOPF: Pleasure to be here.
SHEIR: Now, obviously, here in the U.S., we have a major election coming up in November, but it looks like we might see some big leadership changes all over the world in the next year.
ROTHKOPF: Next year is going to be a year of change in China where you've got a leadership change. You've got elections in Mexico, you've got elections in Russia, you've got elections across Europe. And given the fact that the Chinese economy is rather precarious, the U.S. economy is precarious, the European economy is precarious, Russia's whole political state is precarious, and, of course, on top of that, we've also got Egyptian elections and other elections in the Arab world, which is almost always precarious, these votes take on even greater significance.
SHEIR: What do you see happening in the Middle East in the next 12 months, say?
ROTHKOPF: Well, you know, if you're predicting the weather and you say that the weather tomorrow is going to be the same as the weather today, you'll be right 85 percent of the time.
SHEIR: Mm-hmm.
ROTHKOPF: With the Middle East, if you predict that next year is going to be tumultuous like this year was tumultuous, you'll also probably be right. We're halfway through just the initial wave of these revolutions, if that. So, you know, if you sort of look at the greater Middle East, there's no place that you can see that is likely to be more calm next year than it was this year.
SHEIR: And you mentioned China. Let's talk about that. Might there be any effect of the death of Kim Jong Il?
ROTHKOPF: Well, were North Korea to have a meltdown, were there to be a refugee crisis, it would be a Chinese problem. No other country has more influence on North Korea than the Chinese. And therefore, the United States and the other powers that have an interest in containing North Korea's nuclear program, avoiding conflict with the South, are going to rely increasingly heavily on the Chinese to take the lead in diplomatic issues.
SHEIR: You've written about the possibility of a major cyberattack, sort of a successor to last year's Stuxnet worm, which was the first computer worm to affect actual infrastructure. How likely is a sequel?
ROTHKOPF: First of all, I think a sequel is certain. I recently made a prediction that 2012 would be considered the year of cyberattacks until it was replaced by 2013 as the year of cyberattacks. I spoke to somebody who was very much involved in uncovering the Stuxnet story, which was the worm that the United States and others sent in to the Iranian program.
And he spoke to one of the scientists and the scientist said: This is just like Hiroshima when we hit the bomb and nobody else did. The only difference is that when the bomb drops on Hiroshima, it explodes and you can't put it back together. When you send a worm into a country, they have the worm. They can analyze it, rebuild it and send it out.
And so I think you're going to see a big escalation. And at some point in the next year or two, a piece of critical infrastructure in the United States or in Europe is going to be shut down by some kind of cyberattack, and we're going to really be tested in terms of how we respond to that in terms of civil liberties, in terms of how we protect ourselves. This is something to watch. It's going to be a game changer in the way countries relate to each other.
SHEIR: That's David Rothkopf. He's a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of the upcoming book "Power, Inc.: The Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government and the Reckoning that Lies Ahead." Thanks so much, David, for coming in.
ROTHKOPF: My pleasure.
REBECCA SHEIR, HOST:
Moving to the small screen now, HBO is premiering a new series today "Angry Boys" from Australian comedian Chris Lilley. Lilley's gained a cult following here in the States with his one-man band mockumentaries in which he plays most of the main and very eclectic characters. In "Angry Boys," he portrays no less than six characters. And as for what this new show is about, well, why don't I let him explain.
CHRIS LILLEY: Well, the main characters are Daniel and Nathan who are these twin teenage boys that live on a farm in Australia. One of the twins is deaf.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ANGRY BOYS")
LILLEY: (As Daniel) Nathan, can you hear me?
And they have these posters on their wall they call the wall of legends. They're big fans of this Australian champion surfer, who I play as well.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ANGRY BOYS")
LILLEY: (As Blake Oakfield) Knocka, knocka, knocka. Oy, oy, oy.
And then this American rapper S.mouse.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ANGRY BOYS")
LILLEY: (As S.mouse) This S.mouse excavation walk.
And then the boys, they want to invite all the legends from the wall to this party to celebrate one of the twins' going away. So they arrange that via their grandmother, who I also play, who's a prison warden at a boy's prison.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ANGRY BOYS")
LILLEY: (As Ruth Sims) Are you guys going out the escape tunnel in block 8? Gotcha.
It's a complicated story. There's a lot going on.
SHEIR: What is your process when it comes to embodying these roles from the mannerisms to the voice? You know, what's your process?
LILLEY: I don't like to sort of analyze it too much because I think it's pretty instinctive. I spend like a year or so just thinking about these characters every day and writing dialogue for them and just planning this sort of world that they're going to be set in. And it's not just a script that I've picked up and two weeks later I'm on set. It's something that I've been living with for a long time.
SHEIR: Here in America, we first got a taste of your humor in "Summer Heights High," which was also on HBO back in 2008. You played a rather, shall we say, quirky high school drama teacher Mr. G, a troubled 13-year-old boy and a self-obsessed 16-year-old girl named Ja'mie, and that's Ja'mie. I want to take a listen here to a scene where Ja'mie, who's coming from a private school to a public school, is introducing herself to her new classmates.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SUMMER HEIGHTS HIGH")
LILLEY: (As Ja'mie) Studies have shown that students from private schools are more likely to get into uni and end up making a lot more money.
SHEIR: In terms of your characters, a lot of female roles in past shows, and in "Angry Boys," we see you playing more women. How difficult is that?
LILLEY: The female characters are definitely a lot trickier than the male characters. And it's a lot more uncomfortable to be them and - but I always just feel like it's not about my comfort levels or even just looking terrible like - because, you know, me as a girl is not that attractive.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
LILLEY: It's definitely just physically uncomfortable. Like a character like Gran in "Angry Boys," that's like a bodysuit type thing that's really hot and really just not good. And then there is just the awkwardness. Like when I played Ja'mie, she goes on a date with a 12-year-old boy because she's decided she's into younger men, and the cameras are often quite far away, and I'm sitting there like running my fingers through his hair and just - it's quite unusual.
But that's what I love about these shows is just I put myself in really crazy situations and - but then I really like the end result, and it's worth the suffering and the humiliating things that I put myself through.
SHEIR: Your characters do push the envelope in one way or another, and you have, I guess, received a bit of criticism for being too provocative. But that doesn't really seem to be your point. Why do you think you tend to gravitate to being a bit edgy?
LILLEY: I guess I'm just fascinated about making people feel a little uncomfortable. And sometimes people get all worked up about the show and they talk about what a bad influence I am and how I shouldn't have said this, shouldn't have done that. And when you get to the bottom of it, you find that they're actually fans of the show. And I just focus on the people that love it and really get it. And it's really nice to just make it for them.
SHEIR: What do you think it'll take to make producers say, you know what, Chris? You've got to rein it in.
LILLEY: Maybe if people stopped watching or something. I don't know.
SHEIR: And you have said in the past you're always thinking people are going to say no to your ideas but they keep saying yes.
LILLEY: Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
LILLEY: It's just weird. And the longer I go on, the more people just - they say nothing now. They're just like, yep, do it. I feel pretty lucky.
SHEIR: Well, that's Chris Lilley. He's creator and star of the new series "Angry Boys" which premiers January 1st on HBO. He's been speaking with me from the ABC studios in Melbourne, Australia. Chris Lilley, thanks so much.
LILLEY: Thank you.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
We leave you this hour with some dystopian visions of the future from novels. Writer Drew Magary grew up watching The Jetsons, that happy futuristic family living in a sky high apartment. Well, for our series, Three Books, Magary recommends three novels that present the future in a darker light.
DREW MAGARY, BYLINE: When I was a kid, I assumed that, in the future, things would get better and better and better 'til we were all driving flying cars and playing badminton with space aliens on top of 500-story buildings. I kind of counted on this happening, frankly, but I don't assume we'll just keep going up anymore.
I think there's probably a point to which civilization will evolve and then all of the gas and water will run out and we'll spend the rest of eternity trying to get back to the awesome times when we had, like, food to eat.
Anyway, here are three books that envision life on earth after that dreaded turning point. Starting with "World War Z" by Max Brooks. Yes, I'm aware that it's physiologically impossible for dead people to get up and start walking around and eating other people. And yet, you never know now, do you?
There isn't a person alive who has read this book that hasn't immediately started making mental plans for the coming zombie apocalypse. I belong to a generation that is constantly taunted by potential worldwide plagues like SARS and avian flu. None of those things have ended up killing us all, but honestly, it's only a matter of time before the other shoe drops.
We've kind of earned it, frankly. God will only accept so many "Real Housewives" franchises before he decides to swing karma the other way.
Richard Matheson's hero in "I Am Legend" experiences both the loss of his wife and of humanity. But just to make things a little more horrible, Matheson also puts him under constant siege from bloodthirsty vampires and that's a fun thing to consider in an age of rapidly dwindling natural resources.
Once we run out of the basics, we may find ourselves at each other's mercy, spending the rest of our lives hiding from one another and just trying to stay alive, never being allowed even the tiny luxury to sit down in peace and process our grief.
When I was in fourth grade, my teacher asked me to do a book report, so because I hated reading, I chose the novelization of "Robocop." This was not a real book. It was merely a product tie-in to one of the most violent films of the 1980s, but it had pages and a cover, which made it legit enough for me. I wound up getting a C.
I am now a published novelist and if that doesn't terrify you about our coming future, well, then you're a stronger person than I. So there you have it - three novels that clearly demonstrate our inevitable future downfall. When you're hoarding gas and roaming the countryside with a shotgun in 2031, don't say you weren't adequately warned.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BLOCK: That's Drew Magary. His novel is a creepy futuristic thriller called "The Post Mortal."
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
There's an unfamiliar trend emerging in America's troubled housing market. Big banks are volunteering to lose money, hundreds of millions of dollars, in order to save homes at risk of foreclosure.
NPR's Aarti Shahani reports on how this solution gained traction in Boston and why it's going national.
(SOUNDBITE OF KNOCKING)
SHARON JORDAN: Well, welcome to my house. You know, we do have a doorbell.
AARTI SHAHANI, BYLINE: Sharon Jordan begins a tour of her three-story duplex. It's on the verge of foreclosure.
JORDAN: This is my living room, nice and quaint as it is, and this is my mother.
SHAHANI: She's pointing to a picture on the mantel. Sheila May Jordan died last year. She was a nurse. In 2006, she bought the family's first ever house here in Dorchester. Sharon Jordan was sorting through her mom's boxes when she stumbled across letters from Bank of America. Turns out, Mom stops paying the mortgage after a heart attack. Jordan called the bank immediately.
JORDAN: Is there any way that you all can help me help myself because I don't want to lose the home. We worked too hard to get it. I don't want to lose it.
SHAHANI: Her mom bought the house for $521,000. Then the housing bubble burst. Now, it's worth half that. Jordan told Bank of America...
JORDAN: Sell it to me and I'll buy it from you, but I don't want to buy it at that price.
SHAHANI: She wanted 50 percent off. That's what it's worth and that would cut monthly mortgage payments in half. Her solution is called a principle write-down. Bank of America said, no. Elyse Cherry took that no for a maybe. She's the CEO of a nonprofit group called Boston Community Capital. Cherry knew the bubble would burst well before it happened.
ELYSE CHERRY: What we saw were housing prices skyrocketing, even though incomes were flat. We had a hairdresser come in who made an annual income of $23,000. She had a mortgage of $325,000.
SHAHANI: Housing prices have plunged back down to earth. Cherry says it's time to match affordable homes with people who can actually afford them. That's her business, in fact. Boston Community Capital runs an investment fund. Cherry's going to the major banks with an offer.
CHERRY: You sell everything that you've got at current market prices so that you clear your books, you take your losses and then you - as a healthier lender - can go back out and lend some more.
SHAHANI: Boston Community Capital is willing to buy the most distressed homes at the going rate and take on the risk of reselling to homeowners like Jordan. The nonprofit actually makes some money by selling at a slight markup.
In a foreclosure, banks make nothing. Worse yet, they lose in missed mortgage payments, taxes, insurance, eviction fees. Cherry's appeal is simple.
CHERRY: We can reduce your cost.
SHAHANI: Bank of America was the first to bite. They launched the pilot project with the nonprofit.
REBECCA MAIRONE: We think this is a very good test in concept.
SHAHANI: That's Rebecca Mairone. She leads efforts at Bank of America to help delinquent customers keep their homes. That job description might sound ironic. Bank of America just settled a $335 million lawsuit for unfair practices related to its countrywide unit. It's the largest settlement for housing discrimination in American history.
A few months ago, the bank mailed distressed borrowers with good news. They could apply to sell and re-buy their homes. A Boston nonprofit would help them. The solution isn't perfect. Some bank execs and investors are concerned that home owners will default on payments. Strategic defaults just to get the benefit of a cheaper house. But Mairone says that fear is overblown.
MAIRONE: In most cases, what we see is real hardship. People want to stay in their homes. They continue to pay and they don't want their credit to be severely impacted as it is when a consumer stops paying their mortgage or other debt.
SHAHANI: Turns out, other banks agree. 2011 closed with a new trend. In 30 percent of private loan modifications, banks are doing a principle write-down. That is, hacking away at the amount owed. Two years ago, that 30 percent was just at two percent.
Laurie Goodman welcomes the shift. Her firm, Amherst Securities, sells mortgage stock securities to investors. Even though her own clients stand to lose millions, they lose millions more with foreclosures.
LAURIE GOODMAN: Most investors understand the fact that they're better off. I actually found it very, very encouraging.
SHAHANI: Encouraging, she says, because it's overdue housekeeping for America's economy. Banks clear their balance sheets, investors get a predictable stream of income, and homeowners stay homeowners, like Sharon Jordan. She's among the first participants in the Boston pilot project.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I'm nervous. I am. I'm nervous, but I can do this. I can do this.
SHAHANI: She's just handed in her first down payment. Aarti Shahani, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BLOCK: This is NPR.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block. And it's time now for All Tech Considered.
Our first story: Grandma's Got a Smartphone. No doubt, lots of seniors received high-tech devices this holiday season. Now the challenge is figuring out how the darn things work.
NPR's Jennifer Ludden has this story on a growing number of programs to guide seniors into the digital age.
JENNIFER LUDDEN, BYLINE: Forget iPads or Smartphones, the digital divide can come down to something as seemingly simple as a camera.
Pamela Norr, in Bend, Oregon, discovered many seniors have been given digital cameras by their children.
PAMELA NORR: They were going around town taking all these great pictures that they wanted to send to their family members, and couldn't figure out how to connect the USB port or take out the SIM card.
LUDDEN: Norr heads the Central Oregon Council on Aging. Her own elder parents often need tech help. And the light bulb went off one day as Norr, yet again, put her parents in touch with - who better - her teenage kids.
NORR: So I thought, you know, if parents need it, I think probably other seniors need it, too.
LUDDEN: And so was born TECH - Teenager Elder Computer Help. Eighty-four-year-old Sigrid Scully signed up because she was struggling to stay connected with far-flung family.
SIGRID SCULLY: My kids were not returning calls and they don't write letters. They are so knowledgeable about texting and email, and so I needed to get to know how to do that.
LUDDEN: Scully worried she'd never catch on. She'd read a computer manual once, but didn't understand words like icon or cookies. She says her teen tutor was personable and used plain language.
SCULLY: So many teenagers think that seniors are just old people that don't know anything. And actually, the camaraderie and the knowledge that we can transmit to one another is so wonderful and so helpful. And I had that feeling with this class.
TUCKER RAMPTON: It has made me think about what life was like without Facebook and the Internet.
LUDDEN: Tucker Rampton is 15, and has helped train more than a dozen Oregon seniors. He's been surprised to have to explain email - something he thought everyone knew. Then again, a lot of seniors ask him about Twitter, which he admits he knows nothing about. Rampton says teaching tech to seniors has changed his perspective.
RAMPTON: Well, I think it's a very good idea to work on your patience. And, you know, be more understanding when it comes to what's going on in their minds.
LUDDEN: At Pace University in New York, college students tutor seniors in local retirement homes. They're prepped with sensitivity training.
PROFESSOR JEAN COPPOLA: So they get to feel what it's like to be 70, 80, 90 years old, because they wear specially prepared glasses that give them different visual impairments.
LUDDEN: Program director Jean Coppola also has them do things like tape two fingers together, to simulate the effects of arthritis or a stroke, then try to navigate a mouse. By the time they're at the computer with an elder, Coppola says, they're not frustrated at all.
COPPOLA: They'll say something like 100 times because they've worn cotton balls or earplugs in their ear. And they understand that they have to speak up, articulate their words.
LUDDEN: Coppola says the whole thing is a bonding experience for both generations. Applause often breaks out the first time a senior receives an email. Some have been able to see new grandchildren for the first time, through emailed photos.
Pamela Norr, in Oregon, says young trainers also gain new confidence from their interaction with seniors.
NORR: They're not criticizing me for the way I'm dressing or clucking their tongue. They're actually respecting me for the knowledge base that I have.
LUDDEN: Perhaps most unexpected: Some teen trainers and seniors have even become friends. They keep in touch long after class ends - through Facebook, of course.
Jennifer Ludden, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
In the world of violins, the names Stradivari and Guarneri are sacred. For three centuries, violin makers and scientists have studied the instruments made by these Italian craftsmen. So far, no one has figured out what makes their sound different. But a new study suggests maybe they aren't so different after all. NPR's Christopher Joyce explains.
CHRISTOPHER JOYCE, BYLINE: OK, here's a test. We're going to hear a musical phrase from Tchaikovsky's "Violin Concerto in D Major," played twice by the same musician. One is played on a Stradivarius, the other on a violin made in 1980. See if you can tell the difference. Ready?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
JOYCE: Pretty sweet. Now try this one.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
JOYCE: Tough choice. But a pro could pick the Stradivarius, right? Well, a research team recently tried to find out. They gathered professional violinists in a hotel room in Indianapolis. They had six violins - two Strads, a Guarneri and three modern instruments. Everybody wore dark goggles so they couldn't see which violin was which. Then the researchers told the musicians: These are all fine violins, and at least one is a Stradivarius. Play, then judge the instruments. Joseph Curtin, a violin maker from Michigan, was one of the researchers.
JOSEPH CURTIN: And there was no evidence that people had any idea what they were playing. That really surprised me.
JOYCE: Curtin says of the 17 players who were asked to choose which were the old Italians...
CURTIN: Seven said they couldn't. Seven got it wrong, and only three got it right.
JOYCE: Claudia Fritz designed the experiment. She's an acoustics physicist from France's National Center for Scientific Research and a flute player, by the way. She says this test was more rigorous than previous ones because it was double-blind - no one knew which instrument was which until after the test. And this one asked players, not listeners, to choose. Fritz says some of the players told her they were certain which were the new violins and which were the old Italians.
CLAUDIA FRITZ: One said, oh, I love the sound of this one. It has really the sound of an old Italian, oh, just so warm.
JOYCE: Warm maybe but it wasn't old. It was new. When Fritz asked the players which violins they'd like to take home, almost two-thirds chose a violin that turned out to be new. She's found the same in tests with other musical instruments.
FRITZ: I haven't found any consistency whatsoever. Never. People don't agree. They just like different things.
JOYCE: In fact, the only statistically obvious trend in the choices was that one of the Stradivarius violins was the least favorite, and one of the modern instruments was slightly favored. Well, when you say this now, I'm thinking back to all the efforts in the research that's gone on for years and years about the varnish, could it be the wood? But if there's no consistency, all of that is useless.
FRITZ: Yes. It is.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
JOYCE: But on second thought, Fritz says, studying the old Italians can help determine what sounds people like and how they make that choice. Preferences are as much about people, she says, as old wood, and everybody is different. Violin maker Curtin has spent years trying to capture the quality of these Old World instruments. Still, he's not discouraged by the results.
CURTIN: If new violins get better, it doesn't mean old ones get worse. The question is, can the sound be gotten from a new instrument as well as an old one?
JOYCE: Apparently, it can. The research appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Christopher Joyce, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
JOYCE: Oh, wait, the test. Which one of the two phrases we played came from a Stradivarius? Well, it was the second one.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BLOCK: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
Now a rare glimpse into police interrogation techniques and the power that detectives wield that can result in false confessions. Our story began in Worchester, Massachusetts, where a teenaged mother was accused of killing her toddler. Nga Troung repeatedly told police she did not do it. But under aggressive questioning, she admitted to suffocating her son. She was arrested and spent almost three years awaiting trial for murder. Finally, a judge reviewed a videotape of her confession and ruled that it had been coerced.
Reporter David Boeri, of member station WBUR, fought in court to get access to that videotape. And he put together this anatomy of an interrogation gone wrong.
SERGEANT KEVIN PAGEAU: Somebody hurt that baby and we need to know who it was. And we're going to find out who it was.
DAVID BOERI, BYLINE: She's a couple days short of her 17th birthday, but Nga Troung is in the box; a tiny interrogation room at the Worchester Police Department.
NGA TROUNG: I'm telling you everything.
PAGEAU: No, you're not. Stop. Don't lie to me.
BOERI: Sergeant Kevin Pageau of the Worcester Police Department presses in on the sobbing teenager.
PAGEAU: Now, you said earlier you were going to tell me the truth. I'm waiting.
TROUNG: I did.
PAGEAU: No you didn't.
TROUNG: Oh, my God.]
(SOUNDBITE OF SOBBING)
BOERI: Only a day has passed since Worcester 911 got a pleading hysterical call for help from the apartment, where the Vietnamese-American teenager lived with her 13-month-old son, Khyle, her boyfriend, her mother and her younger brothers. Khyle wasn't breathing. An hour and a half later, a doctor at a nearby hospital pronounced him dead.
PAGEAU: That baby was smothered. Somebody smothered him. You have some bad luck watching kids. But not really.
BOERI: Bad luck is a stinging reference to another death, that of Truong's brother. When Truong was only eight years old, her mother left her alone with her three-month-old brother, Hein. When Hein suddenly became unconscious, Truong brought him to a neighbor who called 911. But it was too late.
After an autopsy and investigation, the medical examiner ruled that the cause of Hein's death was sudden infant death syndrome. But now, after the Worcester detectives learn about Hein's death eight years later, they've quickly that Truong killed her brother and has killed her baby, too.
PAGEAU: There's no sudden death syndrome. Sudden death syndrome? How about big sister syndrome? You were watching him when he died, right? And now, Khyle is in your care and he mysteriously dies. Either you're a liar or you just got the worst luck in the world.
BOERI: Homicide detectives are often required to confront the people they question. But in the case of a teenage girl whose baby has been dead for 27 hours, who pleads and cries through much of the interview, her attorney, Ed Ryan, says this is psychological torture.
ED RYAN: Their interrogation was designed not to determine the truth, not to get at the facts, their interrogation was designed to force her to confess to doing it in the way they figure she did it.
BOERI: But attorney Ryan was not present for the girl's interrogation. She had no lawyer.
PAGEAU: That medical examiner told me that that baby was smothered.
BOERI: Doctors and the medical examiner have told Sergeant Pageau no such thing. He's lying to Truong.
According to conventional training manuals, the purpose of interrogation is to get the suspect to incriminate herself or, better yet, make a full confession. Confessions are considered the queen of criminal evidence.
TROUNG: Please believe me.
PAGEAU: I don't believe you, because I believe the scientists. I believe the doctors.
BOERI: Sergeant Pageau knows, as he will later acknowledge in court, that the manner of Khyle's death is undetermined. And that the medical examiner - who conducted the autopsy a few hours earlier - has not yet discovered a cause of death. But in the box, the detectives betray no doubt.
PAGEAU: I know how he died, which is why we are in here.
BOERI: In fact, at this point, he does not know how he died.
I played those false statements and the rest of the tape for William Powers, a retired Massachusetts detective who's interviewed thousands of suspects and has trained countless detectives.
In Massachusetts, he says, courts and judges take a particularly dim view of false statements by detectives.
WILLIAM POWERS: And while they have never flat out said: You cannot lie, it's a real negative factor with the courts.
BOERI: The Worcester detectives continually lie to Truong, while at the same time, accusing her of lying to them every time she says she didn't kill her baby.
PAGEAU: Yeah, we're going to go now. Cut the (CENSORED)
TROUNG: I'm not lying.
PAGEAU: If you think this is going to be like that other baby that you were watching so well, you're sadly mistaken.
BOERI: Detectives call this theme maximization. It's meant to convey to the suspect the hopelessness of her situation. Continued denials will fail.
Sergeant Pageau's partner, detective John Doherty, now switches from maximization to minimization. He offers Truong sympathy and plays down her responsibility. After all, he says, you're just a kid.
DETECTIVE JOHN DOHERTY: People will be much more understanding if you come forward and say: I'm a 16-year-old girl and I lost it, this is what happened.
BOERI: The detectives exploit the antagonism between the girl and her mother, who is only 14 years older. They say the house is a mess and that the mother is unfit.
DOHERTY: That would make anybody angry. Your mother is laying in bed, telling you to go get a diaper and put a diaper on her kid.
PAGEAU: Do this, do that. Feed him, take care of him.
BOERI: While offering Truong an excuse, they dangle a motive for why she did what they accuse her of doing.
PAGEAU: It's not fair to you. It's not fair to you. You're a kid. You should be able to be a kid. Right? And that's why you smothered Khyle, didn't you?
TROUNG: I did not.
PAGEAU: That's why you smothered him, didn't you?
TROUNG: I would never kill.
PAGEAU: Really?
BOERI: One way to extract a confession is to make it seem an easier way of escaping the stress than to go on denying. The detectives also make an offer of help if she does confess.
PAGEAU: All everyone's waiting for today is for you to admit to what you did, so that we can start the process of getting you some help, getting your brothers out of that house and get them in a better home.
BOERI: What kind of help am I going to get, Truong asks a few minutes later. It's the sign that tells detectives they are close. Pageau tells her there are women on the other side of the door who help children like you.
There are no women on the other side of the door. But Pageau tells Truong she will get help and leniency in the juvenile court. Listen carefully.
PAGEAU: In the juvenile courts, juvenile system, that's where punishment is minimal if any.
BOERI: Confess and you go to juvenile, he's promising, where punishment is minimal if any.
Our expert detective, William Powers, says the Worcester cops have crossed a big, bright line of the law.
POWERS: We can't make promises. We can't say we can do things that we can't do. To say that she'll be tried as a juvenile versus an adult, that's not our call. That's the call of the district attorney's office.
BOERI: But Troung buys their promises.
TROUNG: Do I have to say it?
PAGEAU: You do.
BOERI: Do I have to say it, she whispers? You do, the sergeant says in an even lower voice. She sobs for a whole minute, then...
(SOUNDBITE OF SOBBING)
TROUNG: I smothered...
PAGEAU: You smothered Khyle?
(SOUNDBITE OF SOBBING)
BOERI: When he asks her if she knows why she smothered Khyle, she says no. Her head drops. Is it okay if I leave now, she later asks the detectives.
She seems clueless, I point out to William Powers. She then asks the cops...
TROUNG: Will me and my brothers get to a foster care?
BOERI: The first thing she asks when they come back is: Will me and my brothers get to go to foster care?
POWERS: Right, which is thinking this is - I'll make the admission and I can go forward in my life and my brothers can go forward in their lives, not processing at 16 years old that she has just admitted to homicide.
BOERI: The detectives tell Truong they are putting her under arrest.
PAGEAU: OK.
TROUNG: This has to be today?
PAGEAU: It has to be today.
TROUNG: Is it going to be more than a day?
BOERI: It was more than a day. It was two years and eight months.
Remember the detectives' promises she would go into the juvenile system if she confessed? Nga Truong was charged as an adult with murder. Denied the right to attend her son's funeral, she was sent to jail, where she spent her first four months in solitary on suicide watch.
RYAN: This interrogation, this entire case went off the rails from the moment these two officers decided that Nga Truong was guilty.
BOERI: That's Ed Ryan, who became her attorney.
Truong had been locked up for two years before Worcester Superior Court judge Janet Kenton-Walker heard Ryan's motion to suppress the confession. At center stage was the police videotape. And problems starting filling the screen as soon as the judge started watching.
PAGEAU: You have the right to remain silent. Do you understand this right?
TROUNG: Yes.
BOERI: As the judge saw in the first three minutes, these detectives don't even know how old the suspect is.
PAGEAU: You're going to be 18 in a couple days.
TROUNG: I'm going to turn 17.
PAGEAU: Oh, you're going to turn 17 in a couple of days?
DOHERTY: Oh, you're not 17 yet?
TROUNG: No.
BOERI: Here's problem number one. Truong is still a juvenile and, as a juvenile, she's entitled to special Miranda rights that the cops have failed to give her. And here's problem number two, and another set of grounds on which the judge threw out Truong's confession last February.
PAGEAU: Are we going to keep doing this? Or are you going to tell me what happened?
NGA TRUONG: I don't know.
BOERI: After watching the tape, the judge concluded that Truong was a frightened, meek, emotionally compromised teenager who never understood the implications of her statements. The judge also found that the detective's use of false statements, deception, trickery and implied promises led to Truong's confession.
Because Truong's statements were not voluntary, the judge ruled they were inadmissible. Six months later, in August, Worcester County district attorney Joe Early dropped the murder charge.
JOSEPH EARLY: There was no longer a confession in the case, nor any physical evidence.
BOERI: No physical evidence, which raises the question of why the two detectives presumed Truong guilty in the first place. The official autopsy states that the cause of death is undetermined and the death certificate reads, asphyxial death consistent with but not exclusively diagnostic of suffocation. Contributing factors, it says, are strep throat and trachea bronchitis. This was on top of a history of asthma.
And the boy's body temperature was 101 degrees an hour after he died. Whatever else may have happened to Khyle Truong, he was a sick boy.
What's it like to get out?
TRUONG: I can't even explain it. Like, I got into school. I got a job, but it's been great.
BOERI: I'm sitting across from Nga Truong. She turned 20 just after the third anniversary of Khyle's death.
Of course, the tape shows that you told them you smothered Khyle, so why would you confess to committing something that you didn't do?
TRUONG: It was a pretty long two hours and all I heard throughout those two hours is that they're going to give me help if I confess. I'm sorry.
BOERI: Truong apologizes for breaking down. She's been free for just four months. She's struggling to rebuild her life, but she's no longer angry at the police, she says. They were just doing their job.
The Worcester, Massachusetts Police Department never responded to our repeated requests for interviews and detective Pageau said department policy prevents him from commenting.
District attorney Joe Early acknowledges that mistakes were made, but he will say nothing more critical than that about the Worcester police.
EARLY: They do very good work and we have a great working relationship with them.
BOERI: The police department released a written statement saying that the detectives in the case continue to perform their duties as investigators with the full support and confidence of the police administration.
For NPR News, I'm David Boeri.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BLOCK: You can watch video of Nga Truong's interrogation at NPR.org.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block. 2011 was a good year for some of us. For R&B singer Chris Brown, it was a great year. You might recall that not long ago, Brown was convicted of assault in a highly publicized domestic violence incident. It could have ended his career.
Then he capped last year with a top selling album and three Grammy nominations. NPR's Sam Sanders reports that Brown's career has been revived in part because many of his fans don't think he did anything wrong.
SAM SANDERS, BYLINE: Two years ago, Chris Brown was at a career low. He had just beaten his superstar girlfriend, Rihanna, right before the Grammys. He was only 19.
NEWS ANNOUNCER: And we begin at 10:00 with breaking news. A Grammy Award nominee has just posted bail on criminal threat charges. Chris Brown is accused of assault and battery.
SANDERS: After the incident, Brown pled guilty to felony assault and was sentenced to five years of labor intensive probation. He virtually disappeared from top 40 radio, but fast forward and Chris Brown may have had his best year ever in 2011, at least musically.
Here's Keith Caulfield, a chart expert at Billboard.
KEITH CAULFIELD: It just makes sense that he would be one of the top artists of the year. Chris Brown got his first number one album on the Billboard 200 chart and Chris has been a force, both on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, as well as our R&B hip-hop singles chart, where he's had, just in the past year, five top tens.
SANDERS: In spite of the success, a cloud still hovers over Brown's career. Just after he beat Rihanna in 2009, the Boston Public Health Commission's Start Strong Initiative polled teens in that city to see how they felt about the incident. Casey Corcoran, former director of Start Strong, led the poll.
CASEY CORCORAN: Close to 50 percent of the young people we surveyed thought that Rihanna was actually responsible for the incident. They were blaming her.
SANDERS: They still are.
KRISTINA COLEMAN: Obviously, she played a part in, you know, getting beat or whatever, however you want to put it.
SANDERS: Nineteen year old Kristina Coleman waits outside of a Chris Brown concert in Baltimore and she wasn't alone in her opinion. Seventeen-year-old Frances Stephenson recalls her reaction to what's come to be called the incident.
FRANCES STEPHENSON: I was like, show me some pictures. I don't believe it.
SANDERS: Pictures of Rihanna's battered face leaked soon after the beating, but two more things make these young women's views surprising. First, Brown has apologized for the incident, denouncing his behavior on national television and in a YouTube video.
CHRIS BROWN: What I did was unacceptable, 100 percent. I can only ask and pray that you forgive me, please.
SANDERS: And, secondly, many of these young women are at a high risk of experiencing domestic abuse themselves.
CORCORAN: We know that, nationally, close to one in five teens experience some form of dating violence before they exit their teen years.
SANDERS: Casey Corcoran says that number is even higher if you count things like emotional abuse and cyber-stalking, but outside of that Chris Brown concert, 17-year-old Alicia Robinson is among the fans who go beyond just forgiving Brown and blaming Rihanna.
ALICIA ROBINSON: He's kind of like what we would like our boyfriends to model after in a way - in a way.
SANDERS: Casey Corcoran says some of Brown's current songs aren't exactly role model material.
CORCORAN: While he hasn't been involved in any dating violence incidents since this one with Rihanna, he's put out a number of songs that have really challenging lyrics.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WET THE BED")
CORCORAN: You know, he may have addressed his behaviors, but we have to question whether he's really addressed his thoughts and beliefs that underlie those behaviors.
SANDERS: The teams Corcoran works with make a list each year of the 10 songs that most promote unhealthy young relationships. Chris Brown made that list in 2010 and may make it again with his latest hit, "Look at Me Now."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOOK AT ME NOW")
SANDERS: Chris Brown declined to be interviewed for this story. Gina McCauley, who writes the blog, "What About Our Daughters," says Brown may be benefiting from a certain mindset that's prevalent in the black community. She thinks black men can get away with almost anything, but black women...
GINA MCCAULEY: It doesn't matter if she's a poor black girl in the middle of the 'hood or one of the most famous and probably commercially successful artists on the planet. She's still a black girl and she's still responsible for every single thing that may happen to her in life.
SANDERS: And so, she says, young black women tell themselves they're invincible, in spite of the data on domestic abuse. It's a bit of a contradiction or, to McCauley, a coping mechanism. If they admit that a young black woman like Rihanna, at the top of her game, can be abused, they have to admit it can happen to them.
MCCAULEY: To not blame Rihanna is to acknowledge that they, as young girls, are vulnerable, too.
SANDERS: McCauley says admitting they're at risk would shatter the myth of the strong black woman so many of these girls have come to internalize. But she says it's not all their fault.
MCCAULEY: We don't have conversations with girls about violence. We don't say, how do you navigate interpersonal relationships with boys?
SANDERS: For her part, Rihanna, in a recent Esquire interview, said she's a Chris Brown fan and has put the incident behind her. Gina McCauley says she isn't surprised that neither star has made more of an effort to advance the dialog about domestic abuse.
MCCAULEY: I don't expect celebrities to be anything other than what they are, which is famous.
SANDERS: Chris Brown is having no problem doing just that. And, for his young fans, that seems to be enough. Sam Sanders, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Now, onto one of the most dangerous things people do with cell phones: talking or texting while driving. States have long sought to restrict cell phone use by drivers, but it turns out that's a hard habit to break. As the New Year begins, several states are toughening their restrictions. Still, stricter rules may not be able to keep up with technological advances. There is at least one new way to use your phone while you drive, but is it any safer?
Tim Fitzsimons reports.
TIM FITZSIMONS, BYLINE: On December 13th, the National Transportation Safety Board took an unprecedented step and recommended that all states enact total bans on driver cell phone use. Why? NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman said the board came to the conclusion after a decade of researching accidents connected to distraction.
DEBORAH HERSMAN: It's really the cognitive distraction, the brain being engaged in another activity, that's dividing the driver's attention from the task at hand that's the problem.
FITZSIMONS: The NTSB meeting was in response to a 2010 accident in Gray Summit, Missouri.
(SOUNDBITE OF A NEWS CLIP)
FITZSIMONS: As it turns out, the teen who caused the crash sent and received 11 texts in the 11 minutes before he plowed into a tractor-trailer and set off a massive chain reaction that killed two and injured 38.
Despite the risks, millions of drivers text while behind the wheel. In a June 2010 Pew Research Center poll, more than one-in-four Americans said they'd done it. And while statistics specifically connecting collisions to cell phone use vary widely, the Pew poll indicated that one-in-six cell phone-owning adults admitted to being so distracted by their phone while driving that they bumped into something - or somebody - with their car.
And now there's one more way to use your phone while your hands are on the wheel.
SIRI: Hello, my name is Siri.
FITZSIMONS: Siri is Apple's courteous robot assistant. She responds to voice commands and can send and read text messages for you.
In a video Apple made to promote the latest iPhone, a man is seen in his car using his voice to perform a variety of tasks.
(SOUNDBITE OF AN APPLE PROMO VIDEO)
FITZSIMONS: But does keeping your hands on the wheel while driving make texting any safer? A March 2010 study by the National Safety Council concluded that hands-free phone technology is still dangerous, because your mind is somewhere else.
Even though more than 30 states have banned or restricted cell use, it hasn't been easy to convince drivers to stop. Oregon, Nevada and North Dakota enacted new laws on January 1st, and many states have had to revisit bans after drivers found loopholes.
JONATHAN ADKINS: Unfortunately, technology is advancing a lot faster than our laws. You know, four or five years ago, we didn't really even know much about texting.
FITZSIMONS: That's Jonathan Adkins, communications director for the Governors' Highway Safety Association. He doesn't expect a total ban on driver phone use any time soon. Instead, he says, it's all about changing habits.
ADKINS: We want to make this like drunk driving where, you know, you don't walk into a party and casually say that you were drunk behind the wheel. People will look at you like you're insane.
FITZSIMONS: Technology is catching up on the side of safety, as well. Researchers at Rutgers University have explored a way to detect driver use of a cell phone with 95 percent accuracy. But implementing that is a ways off.
In the meantime, Adkins has a suggestion.
ADKINS: The best scenario is simply to turn your phone off while you drive. It's more peaceful. It's more restful. And it's safer.
FITZSIMONS: For NPR News, I'm Tim Fitzsimons in Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Today, police in Los Angeles arrested a man in connection with a string of more than 50 arson fires that have left that city on edge. Most of the fires were set in parked cars, and some spread to carports, garages and apartments. Sam Quinones is following the story for the Los Angeles Times and Sam, what else can you tell us about the man who's under arrest?
SAM QUINONES: Well, there's not a whole lot known so far. He's apparently a German citizen, 55 years old, ponytail length hair, driving a minivan with British Columbia plates. We don't know who he is, we don't know the motivation yet in all this, if in fact this is the guy. They have booked him. Initially, he was stopped and detained and questioned as a, quote, "person of interest." But they still have not yet identified him to us, so there's a lot we don't know about this fellow.
BLOCK: Yeah. And is it believed that this is the same man who was seen on a videotape that had been released by the arson task force that's looking into these fires?
QUINONES: Yeah, exactly. The police chief, Charlie Beck, said he feels, quote, "very good" that this is the guy, the same fellow that's connected to most, if not all, these 53 arsons that have taken place since Friday.
BLOCK: It's a little confusing, Sam, because fire department authorities came out earlier today and announced two arrests. I gather neither of those men who they were talking about is the man that you're talking about right now.
QUINONES: Precisely. These are other cases, earlier cases before Friday, is my understanding. The cases that really have the city on edge are the cases that began Friday, really kicked off on Saturday, a lot on Saturday and Sunday. And then, early this morning, it was just â went crazy. There were, in the wee hours of the morning, 12 fires in parts of Hollywood, then over the San Fernando Valley, over the hill into the San Fernando Valley, and then back over into the town of West Hollywood, which is right adjacent to Hollywood. The poor fire guys are running all over the place trying to keep up with this and finally it ended.
BLOCK: And when was the suspect arrested?
QUINONES: This fellow was arrested about 3:00 in the morning on Sunset Boulevard, spotted by a reserve deputy sheriff who just was driving by. I guess he was helping with the investigation. He spotted a minivan that had been mentioned as a possible suspect vehicle in this case, fit the description, he pulls the fellow over and apparently this is the fellow.
In the backseat, I'm told there were, quote, "fire starting material." There have been no arson fires since the detention of this fellow about 3:00 in the morning.
BLOCK: And any injuries connected with these fires?
QUINONES: One person, I believe, suffered some smoke inhalation. But no serious injuries, let's put it that way.
BLOCK: What have you heard from people, Sam, about how they are changing their behavior â if they are - knowing about this risk that's been about these arson fires?
QUINONES: I think the people in Hollywood-West Hollywood area were greatly affected by this. A lot of folks took to being quite vigilant. I spoke to one guy who said he didn't get to sleep last night. HE just was peering out his door because he lives in a densely - a lot of apartments in his neighborhood, a lot of carports. No sooner does he get to sleep, finally, a little bit after 1:00, then all of a sudden he's awakened by screams from the neighbors - there's a big fire, there's a â he runs outside, sure enough, there's a carport on fire. And that's one of the fires that is believed connected to this fellow. So, it really had a lot of people, particularly in the Hollywood-West Hollywood area, greatly on edge.
BLOCK: I read about some people, too, who were â if they had a car parked under their apartment in the carport, were moving it out, parking it on the street.
QUINONES: Exactly, and police were advising people to keep their lights on or any outdoor lights they might have, be very vigilant, lock your doors â all this kind of thing. It was â it kind of gripped the area for several days now.
BLOCK: Sam Quinones, with the Los Angeles Times, thanks very much.
QUINONES: My pleasure, thank you.
BLOCK: And again, news today that police have announced the arrest of one man in connection with the string of what is now more than 50 arson fires.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block. In Iowa today, a final opportunity to win over voters before tomorrow's caucuses.
RICK SANTORUM: We need your help. I know all the candidates say they need your help and support. They're lying. I do.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
REPRESENTATIVE RON PAUL: Today, we're moving in the wrong direction, but the American people are stirring. This is what this...
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
MITT ROMNEY: And I've had jobs in the private sector. I understand how the economy works, and I want to use that expertise to get this country going again.
BLOCK: Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum, along with Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, all campaigned in Iowa today. The state is also digesting a heavy barrage of negative ads. To talk about all of this, we're joined now by NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Mara, this has been a wild and wooly campaign leading up to the caucuses. How does the race look to you in Iowa right now?
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Well, right now, the race looks a little bit - it looks like "Back to the Future." The shape of the race looks very similar to how the race began. Mitt Romney still has about 23 percent of the vote in the polls. He got 25 percent of the vote in Iowa four years ago, so he hasn't budged much. The other candidates are still trying to consolidate the conservative anti-Romney vote, and as long as no one candidate does that, 23 or 25 percent will be enough for Mitt Romney to win.
The top three candidates in Iowa right now are Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum. And the Romney camp would be satisfied either winning or placing second to either Paul or Santorum because Paul is considered too far out of the mainstream to win the nomination, and Santorum would have a very difficult time putting together the money and the organization to beat Romney in the other states where he wouldn't have the time to do the intensive on-the-ground campaigning that he's done in Iowa.
BLOCK: And, of course, the recent shift, Mara, is that we're actually using the word Santorum and surge in the same sentence, which just a week ago, we would have not been doing.
LIASSON: That's right. He bounced along at the bottom of the polls for months and months. Now, there's the possibility that he could win Iowa, if his support continues to grow at the pace it has in the polls in the last couple of days. There are some signs that the evangelical networks in Iowa that powered Mike Huckabee to a win there four years ago might be coming together behind Santorum. And what would be the worst-case scenario for Romney is that Santorum and Paul take first and second place leaving Romney to an embarrassing third.
That would dent Romney's momentum, deny him a coronation, but it still wouldn't present a game-changing obstacle for him. He's still in a much better position than either Paul or Santorum in the states to come.
BLOCK: Mara, what do you think are there lessons emerging from Iowa about how campaigns have changed?
LIASSON: Well, one thing we've learned is that the Iowa backlash against negative advertising can be neutralized by the super PACS. In the past, Melissa, when two candidates started going negative on each other, often a third candidate would benefit because Iowans don't like negative campaigning. But this year, the super PACS, which, of course, are funded by unlimited, anonymous campaign donations, they can do the dirty work for a candidate. Iowa viewers of television have no idea who it is who's attacking Newt Gingrich, for example.
And one ad analysis shows that half of all ads aired in Iowa were anti-Gingrich - $3 million alone from the super PAC that's supporting Romney. And Gingrich collapsed under the barrage. So we learned an old lesson again which, of course, is that negative advertising works.
BLOCK: And any other old rules of campaigning that apply here?
LIASSON: Well, old rules of campaigning still do apply. The rule book has not been thrown out, even though we saw a lot of weirdness in this campaign, candidates who looked like they were campaigning not for the White House but for a potential gig on Fox...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
LIASSON: ...or for book sales. In the end, the three people at the top of the polls in Iowa ran traditional campaigns. Mitt Romney did everything you're supposed to do. He raised money. He f9igured out his message. He lined up endorsements. He organized. Santorum went to all 99 counties in Iowa. Ron Paul has a formidable grassroots operation. Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, they didn't do those things.
BLOCK: OK, Mara, thanks so much.
LIASSON: Thank you.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Obviously, this is a big year for politics. But what about policy or governing? Well, NPR congressional correspondent Andrea Seabrook looks back at last year for clues to what may be in store this year.
ANDREA SEABROOK, BYLINE: Just one year ago, John Boehner took the House speaker's gavel and ushered in the new Republican majority.
REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER: Welcome to the people's House, welcome to the 112th Congress.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
SEABROOK: The freshmen included more than 80 new Republicans. Many were new to politics, elected with Tea Party support. Illinois' Peter Roskam, in the GOP leadership, said they came with a seriousness of purpose.
REPRESENTATIVE PETER ROSKAM: There's no hubris. There's no triumphalism. There's no chest-thumping. These are people who have come to accomplish something.
SEABROOK: To that end, they rushed headlong into a fight over funding the federal government for the rest of the year. It was the first of many times in 2011 that Americans would hear dueling sound bites from the Democratic president, Obama, and the Republican House speaker.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The only question is whether politics or ideology are going to get in the way of preventing a government shutdown.
BOEHNER: There was no agreement reached, and so those conversations will continue.
SEABROOK: But that first battle of the war of 2011 wasn't the thing that woke Americans up.
ANDREW KOHUT: Every week, we do a survey about what news the public is paying attention to.
SEABROOK: Andrew Kohut heads the Pew Research Center.
KOHUT: And for much of the year, we didn't see all that much attention to the disputes and debates here in Washington between the Republicans and Democrats.
SEABROOK: It was the summer - June into July - that awakened people. The government had hit its credit limit, and the Republican majority in the House refused to raise it. That meant, for the first time in history, the U.S. could have defaulted on its debts. From the White House, President Obama gave a televised speech.
OBAMA: This is no way to run the greatest country on Earth. It's a dangerous game that we've never played before, and we can't afford to play it now.
SEABROOK: House Speaker John Boehner gave his rebuttal.
BOEHNER: And the sad truth is that the president wanted a blank check six months ago, and he wants a blank check today.
SEABROOK: After intense, private negotiations, President Obama offered what he called a grand bargain. It had cuts to social programs - sacred to Democrats - and a hike in taxes on upper-income Americans. Some Congressional Democrats felt the president had given away too much. Journalist Ron Suskind wrote about the administration in his recent book "Confidence Men." Suskind says Democrats were miffed, asking themselves...
RON SUSKIND: Why will the president not exercise power that is literally sitting in his hands?
SEABROOK: President Obama could have fought harder, says Suskind. He could have appealed to the public or threatened to raise the debt ceiling by executive order. But he didn't.
SUSKIND: And when there's a vacuum like that, all manner of mischief is unleashed.
SEABROOK: Republicans, especially the new freshman class, said no - no new taxes at all. They dug in. The grand bargain was thrown out, and instead, congressional leaders built a plan more palatable to the House Republicans. It set up a convoluted process for budget cuts and the supercommittee, tasked with finding more cuts. The plan was jammed through Congress, just barely avoiding fiscal calamity. The Republicans, especially Speaker Boehner, had seemed to take the upper hand, politically. But when the dust cleared, says pollster Andrew Kohut, the GOP victory had come at great cost.
KOHUT: I was, you know, quite frankly, shocked when our first poll came back, when we said which party takes more extreme positions, we had a two-to-one margin naming the Republicans over the Democrats - very surprising.
SEABROOK: The fight over the summer had become the poster child, says Kohut, for Washington not working. In the fall, the supercommittee fizzled out. By winter, another face-off over government funding, and just before Christmas, what unity and purpose there had been among House Republicans had fractured, says author Suskind.
SUSKIND: And Boehner can't deliver his troops because there is nothing to deliver. He can't get them in line, and ultimately, all that happens is they default to inaction and obstinacy.
SEABROOK: And now, 2012. Election years are full of smoke and mirrors. Even more than usual, every action is gauged for political effect. Looking back at 2011, it was a year of fits and starts but mostly fits. Now, Americans of all political views are more frustrated than ever at their government, but the outlook for 2012 is not much different. Andrea Seabrook, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block. Episcopalian priests take note. The Catholic Church wants you. The Vatican is making it easier for Episcopalian clergy and their parishes to join the church, and as NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty reports, for a limited time, it is waiving the centuries' old tradition of priestly celibacy.
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY, BYLINE: Mark Lewis, director of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Bladensburg, Maryland, was surfing the Internet for news one morning when something caught his eye. The Catholic Church was announcing a process to allow Episcopal churches to convert as a group.
Lewis, who's theologically conservative, was intrigued.
MARK LEWIS: I was immediately thrilled and I read it to my wife and her response wasn't as exuberant as mine.
HAGERTY: Lewis's wife was also drawn to Catholicism, but was not so sure about answering to the pope. Still, over several months, their church studied the bible and catholic doctrine and concluded that Catholicism was the one true church.
In October, the priest, the church and its 70 members converted en masse. Once that happened, Lewis could no longer lead St. Luke's because he isn't a catholic priest, but he hopes to become one soon. Later this month, he, along with several dozen Episcopal ministers, will begin the process of becoming catholic priests.
So what about celibacy? After all, many Episcopal clergy are, like Lewis, with a wife and family. Well, the Vatican decided to waive the celibacy requirement only for those who are already married.
LEWIS: Oddly enough, that doesn't seem to be that big a deal and what I mean by that is it's so much more important to come home to the place that you believe is truth. Being a catholic means more than anything to my wife and to myself.
HAGERTY: This isn't the first time that Rome has welcomed married Episcopal priests. It's allowed individuals to join the priesthood since 1980, bringing their wives with them. But it is the first time entire parishes can follow them.
Yesterday, the Vatican released the details. The former Episcopal churches will get their own diocese, or ordinariate, which will be based in Houston and led by Jeffrey Steenson, a former Episcopal bishop.
Of course, some Episcopal leaders say the pope is, quote, "stealing sheep," but the pope says his church is simply meeting a need at a time when many Episcopalians are unhappy with their denominations' actions, such as elevating gay men and lesbians to be bishops.
So far, more than 100 Episcopal priests and 1,300 parishioners have asked to join the Catholic Church. Mark Lewis hopes he'll be wearing catholic robes by summer. Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR News.[soundbite of music]
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
The Persian Gulf State of Qatar has emerged as a new power in the Middle East. Last month, it led a reluctant Arab League to take decisive action against Syria. And earlier, jets from Qatar flew with NATO in the campaign against Libya's former dictator Moammar Gadhafi. It's also home to Al Jazeera, the provocative Arab satellite channel.
NPR's Deborah Amos traveled to Qatar and has this report on how it projects its power.
HASSAN AL-IBRAHIM: It's here by the roundabout. Just take a left.
DEBORAH AMOS, BYLINE: Driving through the capital, it's bumper to bumper traffic. Hassan al-Ibrahim gives directions to friends who are lost in Doha's rapidly changing landscape.
AL-IBRAHIM: Because of the speed that Qatar is growing in, every day, you would have a new street, a new construction happening. And that's why it's harder for people to get to the Majlis.
AMOS: He works at one of the country's largest natural gas companies. It's the commodity that makes all this remarkable growth possible, 20 percent a year, and citizens are the richest on Earth. Tonight, Ibrahim is hosting a Majlis, an informal discussion group. The topic: Qatar's new role in the region.
AL-IBRAHIM: I would say Qatar's role now is way bigger than its weight. I mean, it's punching over its weight.
AMOS: Qatar emerged as the champion of the Arab uprisings, funding Libya's rebels, calling on Yemen's president to step down and leading the campaign to isolate Syria for its bloody crackdown on dissent. Ibrahim says Qataris are proud of the new role crafted by the emir, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, Qatar's absolute monarch and its chief policymaker.
AL-IBRAHIM: And because of its size, it gives it the agility needed to move fast and move quick and make a decision and take risks as well.
(SOUNDBITE OF PHONE RINGING)
AL-IBRAHIM: Let me take this phone call. Hello?
AMOS: The risks have paid off. Qatar seems to have picked the winners in the Arab uprisings and now, has close ties with new leaders, says Blake Hounshell based in Doha with Foreign Policy magazine.
BLAKE HOUNSHELL: They keep their ear to the ground, and they have a good finger on who's popular in various countries. They support Islamist movements all across North Africa. They're very influential in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt. And in Syria, they have close ties to a lot of different groups but, you know, especially the Islamists there.
AMOS: With Islamists likely to come to power through the ballot box, Qatar has backed the shift and is poised to play a pivotal role. And that could help the United States, he says.
HOUNSHELL: What the Qataris would say is, we understand these people and we can talk to them. You may not be able to talk to these groups, but we can talk to them, and we can pass messages back and forth.
AMOS: How did this tiny state become such a power? Foreign policy wonks say Qatar is simply following a textbook strategy for a small state in a tough neighborhood seeming to play ball with all sides. Qatar is the only Gulf State to maintain good relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran while it hosts Centcom on the largest American military base outside the U.S.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
AMOS: This is Qatar's soft power. Al Jazeera's Arabic broadcasts are seen as an arm of foreign policy. But another factor in the outsized role, there's a power vacuum, says Fawaz Gerges with the London School of Economics.
FAWAZ GERGES: Where are the Egyptians? Where are the Saudis? Egypt and Saudi Arabia are the two most pivotal states in the Arab State system, yet Qatar now has emerged as the lead player.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken)
AMOS: A parade of camels lopes through this park on Qatar's National Day, a commemoration of the old desert culture, says Amanda Abu Abdullah, a correspondent with Doha TV.
AMANDA ABU ABDULLAH: It's a celebration of tradition, Qatari tradition. You can see what women used to do, the tents where the old Bedouins used to sit and the Majlis.
AMOS: Does anybody do this any more?
ABDULLAH: I don't think so.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
AMOS: But they did only a few decades ago. Qatar's climb to wealth and power began in the mid-'90s when the current monarch ousted his father in a bloodless coup. He modernized and liberalized, opening six U.S. university branch campuses. He built world-class art museums and super highways. He allowed women to drive and provided churches for expat workers. There are more than a million of them. Even alcohol is tolerated here.
These days, the 250,000 Qataris are more likely to be found at Villagio, a massive shopping mall that looks like Las Vegas without the gambling.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER)
AMOS: I am riding in a gondola in a canal through the shopping mall. It's filled with crystal clear water. There's also an indoor merry-go-round and a Ferris wheel. There's an ice skating rink for hockey competitions, where spectators can sit along the edge and drink brand name coffee.
But with all this wealth, what are the long-term intentions of Qatar's leader? No one has a good answer, but the role he plays now draws admiration, as well as irritation, says Blake Hounshell.
HOUNSHELL: Well, there's definitely, I think, an element of Qatar being too big for its britches. There was a famous TV meltdown by a Libyan diplomat a few weeks ago where he said, you know, what is Qatar? Who are these guys? The Qataris population could fit into one neighborhood in Libya. But diplomacy is a confidence game, and Qatar is filled with confidence, and they know how to play this game.
AMOS: Confidence helped Qatar win the bid for World Cup soccer in 2022, that and a promise to change the weather for the playing fields in the desert. But Qatar has already helped change the political climate in the Middle East. Deborah Amos, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The killing of Osama bin Laden was one of last year's biggest news stories. Now, a writer has crafted a novel based on the event. Alan Cheuse has this review of John Weisman's "KBL."
ALAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: December 5, 2010, 0821 hours local time. A legless Pashto-speaking Navy Seal veteran poses as a beggar in the streets of this small Pakistani city, rolling about on a skateboard-like device as he gathers intelligence for his commanders in DEVGRU, or Naval Special Warfare Development Group. Acronyms abound in this narrative.
Back in the U.S., at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, a congressman-turned-spy chief nurtures a military operation that will have worldwide consequences. In Virginia Beach, Virginia, a SEAL team with a black mark on its record - one of their number accidentally killed a civilian they were charged with rescuing - trains hard to regain its confidence and prestige.
We follow, sometimes hour by hour, minute by minute, these strands of narrative, playing fly on the wall of numerous meetings among military and Pentagon and White House officials, which culminate in several sessions with the president, and following the Seals group as it prepares for a mission that remains to them undesignated until almost the final hour.
John Weisman specializes in what I call military procedurals, fiction based on actual events in the field. As a writer, he possesses an attribute similar to that of the congressman-turned-spy chief in this novel, something known in the military as command voice, a gift, as he describes it, linked to an extensive vocabulary and combined with a trial lawyer's ability to spellbind an audience using an articulate, contrapuntal melange of drama, wit and eloquence, sprinkled with occasional flourishes of menace or tenderness.
"KBL" may not tell the entire story of the bin Laden raid - we probably won't hear that for a long while - but spellbind, it does.
BLOCK: "KBL" is a novel by John Weisman. Our reviewer Alan Cheuse teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
A moment now to remember a woman who captured the world in graceful lines and sensuous curves. Eva Zeisel was a renowned ceramic designer. She died on Friday at the age of 105. Seven years ago, Zeisel was profiled on NPR, still hard at work at age 98.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
BLOCK: Over her long career, Eva Zeisel's ceramics could be found at The Museum of Modern Art and at Crate & Barrel. Her tableware has playful, rounded shapes, inspired by the human form, that she intended to feel good in your hand.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
BLOCK: Eva Zeisel was born in Hungary to an intellectual Jewish family. She was drawn to pottery at an early age. And in her 20s, she moved to Stalinist Russia, where she became artistic director of the state's china and glass industry. But then in 1936, Zeisel was arrested, falsely accused of conspiring to assassinate Stalin. She was imprisoned for some 16 months, much of that time in solitary confinement. When she was released from prison, Zeisel went to Austria, only to flee as the Nazis invaded. Ultimately, she made it to New York, where her design career flourished. Zeisel called herself a maker of useful things.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
BLOCK: Designer Eva Zeisel died peacefully at her home in New City, New York, at age 105. She was still designing, by the way, nearly to the end. A new line of glass lamps is due out early this year.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
We end this hour with our latest winter song story. We've been hearing tales of winter inspired by music. And today, a story about everything going wrong, until it goes spectacularly right.
ROBERT EARL KEEN: My name is Robert Earl Keen, and I'm a singer-songwriter and entertainer. And my song that I want to talk about is called "Snowin' on Raton" by Townes Van Zandt.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SNOWIN' ON RATON")
KEEN: (Singing) Well, when the wind don't blow in Amarillo, and the moon along the Gunnison don't rise, shall I cast my dreams upon your love, babe, and lie beneath the laughter of your eyes? Snowing on Raton.
BLOCK: Where is Raton, and what is Raton?
KEEN: Raton is in the northeastern part of New Mexico. It comes out of some real long miles and miles and miles and millions of acres of really flat plains or rolling plains, and then it starts to get mountainous right there at Raton and then - on then to Trinidad and then up into Colorado. So it's kind of the tail end of the Rocky Mountains, I guess.
BLOCK: And for folks who don't know much about Townes Van Zandt, aren't familiar with him or his songs, how do you describe him to people?
KEEN: I always describe him as the great poet among songwriters. If you take his lyrics, they look and feel and read like poetry. You don't necessarily always need the music, but he had a certain lilting quality to his voice that always made it even better.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SNOWIN' ON RATON")
KEEN: (Singing) Well, you cannot turn the circles of the sun. Well, you cannot count the miles until you feel them, and you cannot hold a lover that is gone.
BLOCK: Robert, is there a story or a memory connected with this song for you?
KEEN: Absolutely. We were traveling from Colorado to Flagstaff, Arizona, and on the way, we drove through Raton. And it's about 550 miles, 600 miles to Flagstaff, and we got there late because we had some car trouble and all the things that are involved in those road stories. And when we got there, the manager of the venue was this lady and, for whatever reason, the promoter who was selling the tickets and doing his job, the two of them got in this huge argument.
And we thought, oh, my God, this is going to be bad. So then we still set up, and we had some sound problems. We were in an art center there in Flagstaff, had a huge glass front, and that was our backdrop for our stage. So it would look really good if you were in the audience. For us, it's kind of harder on the sound. And about every few minutes or so, we'd be playing, and there would be this giant eruption, and it would be the promoter fighting with the venue manager.
This guy would be yelling at this lady, and she was trying to hold her position, and he was yelling at her for unknown reasons. And we finally got to the end and finished, and everybody clapped and stuff. And right when we got finished, the cops pulled up and came in there and hauled the guy that was the promoter away. The venue manager felt like that everybody was still a little bit uneasy, and she said, would you mind playing another song just to kind of make this a little better?
And I was thinking, OK, I can play something. And I thought I know this Townes song, "Snowin' on Raton." Let's play this.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SNOWIN' ON RATON")
KEEN: (Singing) Lie beneath...
And we were going along, kind of getting our footing and sounds pretty good, and we get to the chorus, (Singing) snowing on Raton.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SNOWIN' ON RATON")
KEEN: (Singing) Snowing on Raton...
All of a sudden, right behind us, the snow just started coming down in giant, giant flakes, like you've never seen, like you only see on some kind of cartoon snowflakes. You could just put them in your hand almost, and the audience just literally gasped. And we thought, oh, we're really great. And then we realized it was the snow that was falling behind us. The song worked out pretty well too.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SNOWIN' ON RATON")
KEEN: (Singing) Mother thinks the road is long and lonely. Little brother thinks the road is straight and fine. Little darling thinks the road is soft and lovely. I'm thankful that old road is a friend of mine.
BLOCK: Do you remember why you chose that song to go out on in the first place?
KEEN: I think it was because we've driven through Raton that day, and, you know, I'm known as a kind of a honky-tonk, loud, drinking, bar-band guy, whatever I am. Anyway, I like to end some shows with kind of a feeling of peace and goodwill, and that's a great song to end a show with.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SNOWIN' ON RATON")
KEEN: (Singing) Snowing on Raton. Come morning, I'd be through them hills and gone.
BLOCK: Robert Earl Keen, thanks so much.
KEEN: Thank you, Melissa. I really appreciate it.
BLOCK: Robert Earl Keen with his choice of a winter song, "Snowin' on Raton," written by Townes Van Zandt. And we're collecting your winter song stories. Please write to us at npr.org. Just click on Contact Us at the bottom of the page and make sure the phrase winter song is in your subject line.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SNOWIN' ON RATON")
KEEN: (Singing) Snowing on Raton.
BLOCK: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block. Blustery winds and freezing cold temperatures did not slow down the final day of campaigning in Iowa. Romney, Paul, Bachmann, Perry, Santorum, Gingrich, six Republican presidential candidates, most with family members in tow, shook voters' hands and made their final arguments. Our reporters are also braving the cold in Iowa and we're going to hear now from four of them. First, NPR's Ari Shapiro, who's traveling with Mitt Romney's campaign.
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: Romney campaign advisor Eric Fehrnstrom says in this final stretch of the Iowa race, the former Massachusetts governor is looking to deepen, not broaden, his statewide map.
ERIC FEHRNSTROM: You see Mitt Romney visit communities here in eastern Iowa that he won in 2008, places like Davenport and Dubuque and Cedar Rapids. And our goal is to consolidate our base of support and motivate them to go to their caucus locations tomorrow evening and vote for Mitt Romney.
SHAPIRO: So the candidate kicked off his last full day of Iowa campaigning at the Mississippi Valley Fair Grounds in Davenport.
MITT ROMNEY: This county did good things for me last time around. I need you to get out and do that again.
SHAPIRO: Last time, the support in these counties was not quite enough. Iowa was the beginning of the end for Romney in 2008. This year, polls suggest he could win here, but this morning's event was only about half full. Most of the voters I spoke with expressed more pragmatism than enthusiasm for Romney. They believe he's best positioned to unseat the president. Romney said that ability to take on President Obama is why Iowans should choose him. He didn't once mention his rivals.
ROMNEY: These have been a tough three years, but these years have been a detour not our destiny. We remember a time when you didn't have to worry about looking at the gas pump and you didn't have to worry about looking at your retirement account. And when you spent your week thinking about what movie you might take the kids to on the weekend, as opposed to worrying about whether you could put food on the table until the weekend.
SHAPIRO: This weekend, if Romney has his way, he'll have victory under his belt in the first nominating contest of the 2012 presidential campaign. Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Dubuque, Iowa.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: I'm Sonari Glinton, following Rick Santorum in Perry, Iowa.
RICK SANTORUM: Make room, make room. Good go be in Polk City. Thank you so much.
GLINTON: Santorum began his campaign day at the Rising Sun Cafe, where the number of Santorum supporters was rivaled by the number of national and international press.
SANTORUM: Do not defer your judgment to the pundits and to the polls. Well, there's a lot of pundits here. That's why they're not clapping. And by the way, they weren't here last week. They haven't been at our town hall meetings and they haven't been talking to Iowans very much. They talk to each other.
GLINTON: Santorum has been talking to Iowans, traveling to the state's 99 counties. Santorum said he's going to spend his time explaining that he's the true electable conservative in the race.
SANTORUM: If you really care about what Republicans care about, which is freedom, then you have to be for limited government.
GLINTON: Speaking to reporters, the former Pennsylvania senator acknowledged his surge in the polls, but tried to tamp down expectations.
SANTORUM: That's what you're looking for. You're looking for that momentum. What caucuses are about, they're about intensity and momentum. And I'm hopeful that what we're seeing here is a lot of momentum and intensity. And if we can finish in the top three, that's a good finish for us. Having been, 10 days ago, at 5 percent, we feel pretty good at being where we are.
GLINTON: A sign of the momentum in the race, for most of his time in Iowa, Santorum has been traveling by pickup truck. He's still in the truck, but now it's followed by a bus. Sonari Glinton, NPR News, Perry, Iowa.
BLOCK: So we heard from Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney. Now, on to the remaining Republican presidential candidates as they try to close the deal in Iowa. Here's NPR's Don Gonyea, who's been following Ron Paul.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: Texas Congressman Ron Paul is on what his campaign calls a daylong whistle-stop tour across Iowa.
RON PAUL: Good to see everybody. Wow, look at the crowd. Hey.
GONYEA: There are no trains involved in this whistle-stop. The event was in a downtown hotel. But the imagery works for a candidate who has kept chugging along, repeating his libertarian message. Paul brought a special guest with him, his son, U.S. Senator Rand Paul.
SENATOR RAND PAUL: There's only one candidate who stands above, head and shoulders above, who lobbyists will tell you is incorruptible.
GONYEA: Then it was the candidate's turn.
PAUL: This is what the vote is about tomorrow. Are we sick and tired of the expansion of government, the endless spending and the deficit doing the things they weren't supposed to do and forgetting about doing the things they should be doing?
GONYEA: For Paul, it's a simple choice for Iowans looking to challenge the status quo.
PAUL: There's one issue that has made America great, and the issue that you can answer all your questions on is individual liberty. That is the issue.
GONYEA: Ron Paul supporters are intensely loyal, like Mandy Devries, a home-schooling mother of five from Ankeny, Iowa.
MANDY DEVRIES: I stand behind him, but I stand behind his ideas. And even when Ron Paul is no longer on the scene, I know that his ideas are going to stick around.
GONYEA: But she and others in this ballroom hope the Iowa caucuses will help make this year Ron Paul's moment. Don Gonyea, NPR News, Des Moines.
DAVID SCHAPER, BYLINE: I'm David Schaper in Walford, Iowa, at the Schrader Excavating and Grading Company, where Newt Gingrich was flanked by a dump truck and a backhoe. Both here and at an earlier event today, Gingrich attacked President Obama saying that he'll push his agenda with or without Congress.
NEWT GINGRICH: Now, I don't know what country he thinks he's in, but it's constitutionally impossible to govern without Congress.
SCHAPER: Gingrich accuses President Obama and Congress of being childish.
GINGRICH: And for the president's staff to announce he's now going to govern without Congress, well, that means he's not going to govern. He's going to be a candidate for an entire year. He shouldn't take a salary. He shouldn't pretend he's president. He's just a candidate.
SCHAPER: Gingrich talked up his own experience in crafting bipartisan solutions and it impressed Rosie Moser of Oelwein.
ROSIE MOSER: I am not a supporter and I am now. I looked the man in the eye, shook his hand. He totally turned my thinking around.
SCHAPER: Moser says she especially likes Gingrich's promise to put American interests first, not partisan ones.
MOSER: I believe the man really knows how to balance and get inside on both sides and bring the people together, 'cause that's our biggest thing right now. We're too - way too divided.
SCHAPER: Gingrich remains upbeat that many other Iowa Republicans will reject the barrage of negative ads against him. And Gingrich is already looking forward, saying Iowa is like the first three minutes of the Super Bowl and there's much more game to play. David Schaper, NPR News, traveling with the Gingrich campaign in Walford, Iowa.
BLOCK: Finally, two more candidates in Iowa put forward confident faces despite low poll numbers. On the western border of the state, Texas Governor Rick Perry spoke to Iowans at a hotel and conference center. He said that the country is at a precipice, and he presented voters with this question.
RICK PERRY: Why would you settle for anything other than an authentic conservative who will fight for your views and values and not make an apology for them, not one time? Why would you settle for anything other than an authentic conservative that reflects your values?
BLOCK: And Congresswoman Michele Bachmann also fought today for that conservative mantle. Standing outside her bus, Bachmann reminded voters that she won the Iowa straw poll this summer.
MICHELE BACHMANN: And that's why I'm anticipating tomorrow night at the Iowa caucuses, because I believe without a shadow of a doubt Iowans want to get behind a candidate who will represent their values and I believe that I best represent their values. And also, I believe Iowans want the candidate who will be able to stand up on the stage and debate Barack Obama fearlessly. That's what I will do.
BLOCK: The caucuses begin in just about 24 hours. You can find results and analysis tomorrow night on NPR and online at NPR.org.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
There's a lot of debate these days about the cost of medical care, and the risks. Is a drug for breast cancer patients worth the $100,000 price tag if it only adds a few months to a woman's life? Or should men routinely get blood tests for prostate cancer when the exam could cause more suffering than it prevents?
Well, today, a major medical group issued new ethical guidelines on whether doctors should consider costs when deciding how to treat patients. As NPR's Rob Stein reports, the group takes a provocative position.
ROB STEIN, BYLINE: The American College of Physicians represents 132,000 internists across the country, and they're wading back into this debate over cost and quality of care.
VIRGINIA HOOD: The cost of health care in the United States is twice that of every other industrialized country. We're not providing care to as many people as they do in other places, and we don't even have as good outcomes.
STEIN: That's Virginia Hood, the president of the American College of Physicians. Hood argues that one way to get better outcomes is for individual doctors to think harder about the tests and treatments they use.
HOOD: Every time you prescribe something for a patient or subject them to some kind of investigation, there's a risk of harm. So the concept of doing less is actually a really good concept.
STEIN: That's the reason the new ethics guidelines urge doctors to use the latest cost-effectiveness research to guide their care. That, Hood says, would help all patients.
HOOD: While concentrating on our own patients and what they need, we also have to think on this bigger level - both for their benefit, and for the well-being of the community at large.
STEIN: The new ethics manual is being published in this week's issue of the "Annals of Internal Medicine." In an editorial in the journal, Ezekiel Emanuel, of the University of Pennsylvania, praises the idea of cost-effective care. He's advocated this thinking for a long time.
But even experts who agree with this idea have a problem with the new ethics manual. The manual uses the phrase "parsimonious care." And Scott Gottlieb, of the American Enterprise Institute, says that's alarming.
SCOTT GOTTLIEB: Saying that the use of resources should be parsimonious - that implies a whole lot more. I mean, that really implies that care should be withheld.
STEIN: And Gottlieb says that phrase raises fears of doctors withholding care without even telling patients what they're doing.
GOTTLIEB: Parsimonious, to me, implies an element of stinginess, and stinginess implies an element of subterfuge.
STEIN: But Virginia Hood, of the American College of Physicians, argues the manual simply says that efficient care is good care.
HOOD: Parsimonious is a good word, in the sense that it means you use only what's necessary.
STEIN: Daniel Callahan is a bioethicist at the Hastings Center. He agrees that's the way to go, but Callahan says that whenever you begin talking about costs, you raise the specter of rationing.
DANIEL CALLAHAN: If you say certain things will not be cost-effective, they are not worth the money - now, well, that's rationing. That's where it all becomes a real viper's pit, I might say, in one sense.
STEIN: And among the vipers in this pit is the question of whether individual doctors are going to follow the ethics manual's guidance. They're the ones making the tough choices, especially when patients demand that extra test, drug or procedure that they think may save their lives.
Rob Stein, NPR News.
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When it comes to a good thriller, nothing can kick-start a story like a case of mistaken identity, when someone insists they're not who you think they are. Well, today author Alex Gilvarry recommends his favorite fictional case of mistaken identity for our series "You Must Read This."
ALEX GILVARRY, BYLINE: I was a college student in New York City when security checks became the norm. Being half-Filipino with a Scottish last name, I wasn't easy to profile. And since I was always carrying a big backpack of textbooks in and out of the subways on my way to class, I came to expect that I would be stopped once or twice each week.
And the fear, which I felt each time I was asked to step aside, was that I would be mistaken for someone else, a suspect out to disrupt this city I'm from and love most of all.
There is no book that encapsulates this fear better than "I'm Not Stiller," by the Swiss writer Max Frisch, which begins just so. While traveling through Zurich, our narrator is stopped by the authorities because he closely resembles one Anatol Ludwig Stiller, an unsuccessful sculptor, husband, lover, and all-around failure of a man who disappeared six years earlier.
One smack to an official's ear later, Stiller - presumably - is detained in a very humane Swiss prison until he will admit that he is the missing man. From the confines of his cell, Stiller reports on his life in detainment with invigorating rage, insisting that he is most definitely not Stiller but an American named White, a cowboy who has traveled the Mexican desert and beyond, and who isn't afraid to commit a murder or two when pressed.
As Stiller is confronted by his abandoned ballerina wife, his former mistress, an estranged brother, and a cast of bourgeois sophisticates from Stiller's life, the novel intertwines a classic tale of mistaken identity with high comedy and post-war seriousness.
Is Stiller's testimony of his life the unvarnished truth, as he claims, or is his version a last-ditch effort in deception, a denial of an identity he despises? We don't know, and therein lies the beauty of experiencing "I'm Not Stiller." For anyone who likes their narrators served unreliably, you must read this.
Frisch, who first achieved renown in Germany as a dramatist before the publication of "Stiller" in 1954, never ceases to entertain with his plain, direct style and entrancing digressions. And while he probes those daunting existential questions of identity, freedom and morality with sly dramatization, we find ourselves actively piecing together the mystery of a man's identity with much more delight and humor than any of Frisch's post-war compatriots.
I first read "I'm Not Stiller" nearly 10 years ago, just as I was beginning to write my own stories, figuring out my own identity. The novel stuck with me all these years because of the way it resonates with our changed landscape of curtailed freedoms and paranoia.
As we anticipate a new post-war era, perhaps reconciling with our own national identity, I can think of no better time to read Frisch's version of a man trying to flee his own.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BLOCK: Alex Gilvarry is the author of "From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant."
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It's estimated that 37 million Americans have some college credit, but no degree. Getting adult students to finish college is a chief aim of Western Governors University. It's an online school that challenges many traditional ideas about higher education. NPR's Larry Abramson reports that after 15 years, the school is catching on. Enrollment is growing, but the cost of tuition isn't.
LARRY ABRAMSON, BYLINE: Sherrie Shackleford lives outside of Bloomington, Indiana, in a small condo with her 9-year-old daughters, Aubrey and Alissa. Aubrey says she was glad when her mom decided to go back to college.
AUBREY SHACKLEFORD: It's kind of exciting, 'cause then she gets to go like, go to school again and she - like, and I'm like, proud of her.
ABRAMSON: Shackleford worked for years as a medical transcriber, but foreign competition has driven wages for that job way down. She knew she needed to go back to school. But as a single parent, she needed more flexibility than a traditional college could provide.
SHERRIE SHACKLEFORD: WG was made for somebody like me.
ABRAMSON: The school was founded by 19 governors concerned about providing affordable education for students like Sherrie. At 38 years old, Sherrie is close to the typical age for the school. Also typical is that she did not want to start at square one.
SHERRIE SHACKLEFORD: I have life experience. I have – I already have self-discipline. I had worked from home for years, so I even knew how to do things at home, as far as that can be a struggle for a lot of people.
ABRAMSON: Her dad told her about Western Governors, which operates nationally but has special visibility in Indiana.
(SOUNDBITE OF ADVERTISEMENT)
GOV. MITCH DANIELS: Many Hoosiers have put in a lot of hard work pursuing a college degree, only to be interrupted by the demands of life. But you don't have to throw away what you already know...
ABRAMSON: Governor Mitch Daniels helps trumpet the fact that Hoosiers can use state grants at Western Governors, something they can't do in other states. The effort has paid off. The state has over 2,000 WGU students, and that's helped push the school's national total over 30,000.
SHERRIE SHACKLEFORD: This is, you know, the WGU homepage that I sign into...
ABRAMSON: Sherrie Shackleford shows me her home computer set-up. The school has stripped the higher-education machine down to its parts. WGU does not develop its own curriculum. The material Sherrie studies to become a high school biology teacher comes from outside providers. Innovations like this help keep tuition low, around $6,000 per year for this not-for-profit institution.
Sherrie can also keep her costs down by finishing her coursework early, as she's done with one class.
SHERRIE SHACKLEFORD: It was a testing course on how to give proper assessments and tests, avoid bias - all that neat stuff.
ABRAMSON: But the truly unusual thing about this computer-driven system is that it provides a lot of one-on-one attention. Throughout her career at this school, Sherrie will have her own, personal mentor - a combination guidance counselor, career coach and best buddy.
Sherrie has never met her student mentor in the flesh even though she lives just 90 minutes away, just north of Indianapolis. She also works out of her own home office, in a house filled with kids and pets.
(SOUNDBITE OF BARKING DOGS)
STORMI BRAKE: Hi, Larry.
ABRAMSON: Hi, there.
BRAKE: Come on, boys. I'm actually on a call.
ABRAMSON: Stormi Brake is her name. She was wearing a headset, talking on the phone with one of her 90 students when I showed up.
BRAKE: (Talking on phone) Good. Well, that's good then. You were able to get - that stuff was all pretty obvious to you - and able to get that back in. And then,what about that natural-science experiment?
ABRAMSON: As a student mentor, Stormi Brake makes sure that students don't fall through the cracks. She tracks their progress on a computer dashboard that the school uses.
BRAKE: Each student has a progress bar up at the top, with stars that tell them how many assessments they've already passed this term, and if they're on track for their term. So the bar will be green when they're on track; red if they're not on track.
ABRAMSON: Stormi has a strong background in science and teaching, but her main job is to make sure her students get their degree. Students with questions about course content turn to another kind of mentor, a course mentor.
All this support helps students understand when they're ready to show that they've mastered a subject, according to university president Bob Mendenhall.
DR. BOB MENDENHALL: For each degree, we define what we expect a graduate to know and be able to do. We develop the assessments to measure that. When they can demonstrate they've mastered all the competencies, they graduate.
ABRAMSON: This is an ambitious effort to reach adult students, who often struggle to finish school. But right now, WGU is only filling a niche. It offers degrees in just four fields: information technology, teaching, business and health care. Bob Mendenhall says his school cannot replace traditional colleges.
MENDENHALL: We don't pretend to be a research university. We're not providing a residential experience to students.
ABRAMSON: Based on student and employer feedback, graduates are doing well, getting jobs and promotions based on their degrees from WGU. But the school is still new, and it will take time to develop better numbers on how students are doing. In the meantime, WGU has kept one important number in check - tuition has not gone up in five years.
Larry Abramson, NPR News.
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And I'm Robert Siegel. Parents of teens, take heart. You may find yourself arguing constantly with your teenager, but researchers say that's not necessarily a bad thing. NPR's Patti Neighmond reports on a new study in the journal Child Development that finds these teenage arguments can provide lifelong benefits.
PATTI NEIGHMOND, BYLINE: Almost all parents and teenagers argue. But psychologist Joseph Allen, with the University of Virginia, says it's how they argue that makes all the difference.
JOSEPH ALLEN: We tell parents to think of those arguments not just as a nuisance. Think of them as a critical training ground.
NEIGHMOND: Training in how to argue with calm and persuasive points - not with yelling, whining, threats or insults. In Allen's study, 157 13-year-olds were videotaped describing their biggest disagreement with parents. The most common arguments were over grades, chores, money and friends. The tape was then played for both parent and teen.
ALLEN: Parents reacted in a whole variety of ways. You know, some of them laughed uncomfortably. Some of them rolled their eyes, and a number of them dove right in and said OK, let's talk about this.
NEIGHMOND: And talking seriously about it, says Allen, is exactly what parents should do.
ALLEN: We found that what a teen learned in handling these kinds of disagreements with their parents was almost exactly what they took into their peer world.
NEIGHMOND: The peer world, with all its pressures to conform to risky behavior like drugs and alcohol. Allen interviewed the teens again, at 15 and 16.
ALLEN: The teens who learned to be calm and confident and persuasive with their parents acted the same way when they were with their peers.
NEIGHMOND: And were able to confidently disagree - saying no, they didn't want to do drugs or drink alcohol. In fact, they were 40 percent more likely to say no than kids who didn't argue with their parents. For those kids, it was an entirely different story.
ALLEN: They would back down right away. They would say, well, I was going to talk about curfews, but I know you don't want me to have a late curfew, so you know, I guess we're OK on that. And from interviewing those teens, we knew they weren't OK about it. We knew they were just backing down; that somewhere they had learned there's no point in arguing about this. And those were the teens that we really had to worry about. Those were the teens that when their friends would say - you know - hey, let's go out and get drunk tonight, those were the teens that would say well, OK.
NEIGHMOND: Bottom line: Effective arguing acted as something of an inoculation against negative peer pressure. Kids who felt confident to express themselves to their parents also felt confident being honest with their friends. So ironically, the best thing parents can do is help their teenager argue more effectively.
For this, Allen offers one word: listen. In the study, when parents listened to their kids, their kids listened back.
ALLEN: They didn't necessarily always agree, but if one or the other made a good point, they would acknowledge that point. They weren't just trying to fight each other at every step, and wear each other down. They were really trying to persuade the other person.
NEIGHMOND: This doesn't mean parents should give in to everything teenagers want. Take the example of curfew. The teenager wants a later one; the parents aren't so sure. What parents should do, says Allen, is encourage kids to think about ways of making that later curfew acceptable.
ALLEN: How about if my curfew is a half-hour later, but I agree that I'll text you; or, I agree that I'll stay at certain places, and you'll know where I'll be. Or, how about I prove to you that I can handle it for three weeks before we make a final decision about it.
NEIGHMOND: Richard Weissbourd is a child psychologist at Harvard University. He says the findings of this study bolster earlier research.
RICHARD WEISSBOURD: Parents who really respect their kids' thinking, and their kids' input, are much more likely to have kids who end up being independent thinkers, and who are able to resist peer groups.
NEIGHMOND: Weissbourd points to one dramatic study, which analyzed parental relationships of Dutch citizens who ended up protecting Jews during World War II. They were parents who encouraged independent thinking, even if it differed from their own.
So the next time your teenager huffs and puffs and starts to argue, step back a minute, take a breath yourself, and try to listen. It may be one of the best lessons you teach your child.
Patti Neighmond, NPR News.
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Stories of child sexual abuse made headlines in 2011, but few of the victims in those cases were able to sue their abusers. That's because the alleged crimes happened so long ago. Now, lawmakers around the country are pushing to extend or waive the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse charges.
As NPR's Joel Rose reports, the idea also has opponents - including the Catholic Church, which argues the move could unleash a torrent of lawsuits.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: It took almost 30 years, but Richard Fitter is going public with the allegation that he was sexually abused by Reverend John Capparelli. Fitter says the former New Jersey priest groped him repeatedly during the early 1980s.
RICHARD FITTER: I thought I'd done the right thing and come forward 20 years ago and reported him. And it turns out that, you know, he was never held accountable for what he did.
ROSE: Fitter says he first reported Capparelli to another priest in 1992. Capparelli, who denies the allegations against him, was removed from the ministry, and Fitter thought he was no longer working with children. But Capparelli did continue to teach in the Newark public schools until two reports, detailing a long list of allegations against him, appeared in the Newark Star-Ledger last year. When Fitter read those stories, he decided it was time to come forward again.
FITTER: I was satisfied with the fact that he wouldn't be around kids anymore; he wouldn't be a danger. And then to find out 20 years later that that was not true, and he has been a danger all this time - it just doesn't sit right with me.
ROSE: This time, Fitter filed a civil lawsuit seeking damages against Capparelli. But Fitter knows his lawsuit doesn't have much chance of success. So does his lawyer, Greg Gianforcaro.
GREG GIANFORCARO: Almost no chance.
ROSE: That's because the window to file a civil lawsuit in child sexual abuse cases in New Jersey is short - just two years from the time the would-be plaintiff turns 18. At that age, Gianforcaro says, few victims are ready to talk about the alleged abuse at all, let alone file a lawsuit. And in the wake of high-profile stories about Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky and Philadelphia Daily News columnist Bill Conlin, Gianforcaro is urging New Jersey lawmakers to reconsider the statute of limitations.
GIANFORCARO: If we're ever going to find out who these abusers are, who the Sanduskies are, it's through giving men and women who were abused in the past a voice. And the only way they'll get that voice is if there's change in the legislation.
ROSE: Lawmakers in New Jersey are considering a bill that would eliminate the statute of limitations to bring child sexual abuse cases, but that bill also has some powerful opponents.
PAT BRANNIGAN: The reality is that this proposal simply fosters lawsuits.
ROSE: Pat Brannigan directs the New Jersey Catholic Conference. He testified against the bill at a hearing in Trenton, in late 2010.
How can an institution conceivably defend itself against a claim that is 40, 50 or 60 years old? Statutes of limitation exist because witnesses die and memories fade.
The bill's opponents point to what happened in California. The state approved a temporary, one-year window when the statute of limitations for civil lawsuits did not apply. More than 800 claims of clergy abuse were filed against the Catholic Church. Delaware followed California's approach, resulting in about a hundred lawsuits.
Lawmakers in New York and Pennsylvania are pushing similar bills that have stalled there in the past. Pennsylvania State Representative Michael McGeehan is sponsoring a bill that would temporarily waive the statute of limitations for sex abuse charges.
STATE REP. MICHAEL MCGEEHAN: I don't think you can put a timeline on it. People come to the realization; people come to a comfort level. And whether it's a year from now or whether it's 30 years from now, I think those people need to be heard.
ROSE: McGeehan says opponents of his bill have been a lot quieter since the Penn State scandal broke. But his bill, and its counterpart in New Jersey, remain very much stuck in committee.
Joel Rose, NPR News, New York.
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And I'm Melissa Block.
Flyers take note, with the New Year come a number of new rules set to go into effect later this month.
As NPR's Wendy Kaufman reports, they'll give air travelers new rights and compel airlines and travel sites to be more up front about the price of flying.
WENDY KAUFMAN, BYLINE: Right now, some airlines and travel sites lure you in with very low fares and a tiny asterisk. In the fine print or another screen, you'll find government taxes and fees and perhaps a fuel surcharge.
Kate Hanni, FlyersRights.org, says lots of travelers complained.
KATE HANNI: People would get up against the point where they were about to make a purchase, and suddenly the cost of their ticket went up because of these taxes and charges.
KAUFMAN: And comparing prices wasn't easy. Take the currently advertised $79 fare between Los Angeles and Seattle. Taxes and fees bring the ticket to about 90 bucks but it can cost as much as a hundred, depending on the route. And if you're planning to go abroad...
JOE MEGIBOW: International fares, certainly, is where we see the biggest hit.
KAUFMAN: That's Joe Megibow. The vice president of the online travel agency Expedia, says charges on international flights can total hundreds of dollars, sometimes more than the ticket itself. He believes all the charges should be disclosed up front. The federal government thinks so, too.
Here's the Department of Transportation's general counsel Bob Rivkin.
BOB RIVKIN: We think consumers should have the right to know what they're paying for their airfare. They need to have an effective means of comparing alternative methods of travel, and that's what we are trying to provide.
KAUFMAN: With a new rule that goes into effect later this month. It will require airlines and others to include government taxes and fees, along with any mandatory charges in their advertised fares.
Steve Lott, a spokesman for Airlines for America, the industry's largest trade group, says the airlines will comply but they aren't very happy.
STEVE LOTT: The odd thing is this type of regulation does not apply to any other industry.
KAUFMAN: He points out rental car rental companies don't have to disclose taxes and fees in their ads, nor do retailers who sell TVs. Moreover, the airlines say the rule violates their right to free speech. Southwest and a couple of smaller carriers have filed suit in federal court.
Other rules are also slated to go into effect later this month. One will allow you to cancel a reservation within 24 hours with no penalty. Others require additional disclosures concerning baggage fees; compel more timely notification when flights are delayed or canceled; and prohibit post-purchase price increases.
Passenger advocate Kate Hanni says last September, hundreds of travelers bought what they thought were low introductory fare tickets on Korean Airlines.
HANNI: And then two months later, Korean Air sent a letter to every single passenger that purchased those tickets and said: We're going to be cancelling your tickets unless you want to pay us this amount more.
KAUFMAN: Under the new rules, the government could fine the airline for its actions and compel it to honor the original price.
What else can consumers expect in the coming year? Expedia's Joe Megibow says passengers are likely to experience more of what they didn't like about air travel last year.
MEGIBOW: They were paying more money, getting more of those middle seats, you know, crazy check-in and check-outs as you were getting under those very full planes. So, yeah, it was not overall a great year for flying. We haven't seen anything to indicate it's going to be a whole lot different in 2012, but we'll see.
KAUFMAN: Wendy Kaufman, NPR News.
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In Philadelphia's public schools, 51 nurses were laid off last year. In one Houston suburb, 20 nurses, and another 15 in San Diego. Today, more than half of American public schools don't have a full-time nurse.
And as Michael Tomsic of member station WFAE reports, the situation is getting worse as school systems further cut budgets.
MICHAEL TOMSIC, BYLINE: At Githens Middle School in Durham, North Carolina, Suzanne Fuller walks into the office of her son's school carrying a little pill in a Ziploc bag.
SUZANNE FULLER: First of all, we got to get Rock up here because he didn't take this pill this morning.
VALERIE MITCHELL: OK.
TOMSIC: That's school nurse Valerie Mitchell. She's buddies with Rock. He's a 12-year-old with an attention deficit disorder, cerebral palsy, and he also has seizures. He says nurse Mitchell helps him, and one thing stands out.
ROCK: Like in fire drills, I - if something happens and I have a hard time, my ears start hurting and stuff.
TOMSIC: When the school had a fire drill a few months back, the sensory overload of the flashing lights, screaming alarm and rushing students was too much for Rock. His teacher thought he was having a seizure and called Nurse Mitchell.
MITCHELL: Had a bad headache, and he just felt like he was in a tunnel. That's what he kept telling me. I just tried to keep him calm, tried to keep him comfortable. You multitask during that time.
TOMSIC: Mitchell checked his vital signs, told the office to call his mom, and cleared out the nearby students. She says Rock got through it without going into a full seizure, and he was OK by the time his mom got there. She says Mitchell made a huge difference.
FULLER: Very, very lucky. I was very lucky that she's here.
TOMSIC: The thing is, Mitchell is only here two days a week. It was luck the fire drill happened on one of those days. The rest of the week, she bounces between four other schools. She's the only nurse at each one.
The National Association of School Nurses reports a quarter of schools don't have a nurse at all. The association's president, Linda Davis-Alldritt, says that's bad for schools, parents, and students.
LINDA DAVIS-ALLDRITT: Children are coming to school with increasingly complex medical conditions that need to be managed on a daily basis. And when there is no school nurse available, those kids are not going to be well managed in school, and so it puts them at risk for complications.
TOMSIC: And Davis-Alldritt says the staffing is getting worse. In the association's most recent poll, one-third of school districts surveyed said they reduced nurses in the last year. She says the recession has dried up local and state funding for school nurses. The director of nursing in Durham, Sue Guptill, says that's what happened in her district.
SUE GUPTILL: We've had two that were actually cut by the state. One that was actually cut by the county, and so we've lost three positions.
TOMSIC: Guptill says almost none of Durham's public schools have a full-time nurse. And some schools go two weeks without a nurse visiting. She says students' health needs fall to teachers and other staff.
GUPTILL: You're asking someone who is not a health professional to make a decision about is it time to give the child medicine, is it time to call a parent. And if a kid is kind of quiet, and you've got a room full of kids, a teacher just might not notice.
TOMSIC: But there's often no one else to take care of students. At Githens Middle School, the only people trained to help diabetics inject insulin are a janitor and a records specialist.
Ryan Dozier, the records specialist, says nurse Mitchell taught him what to do.
RYAN DOZIER: Of course, you know, you always hope that nothing serious ever happens. So that's kind of the nerve-racking part.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHILDREN)
TOMSIC: Back in the nurse's office, Valerie Mitchell shows a teacher's assistant what to do if a student has a seizure and she's not around. She tells the TA the timing is crucial.
MITCHELL: So he comes to me now at a quarter till and saying, I don't really feel well. You don't time it from there. You time it from the time that he goes out, has a seizure, breathing ragged. Sometimes you'll hear that deep (makes noise). Sometimes they may get a little blue around their mouth 'cause they're struggling to breath.
TOMSIC: Mitchell says this is an essential part of her job. She can't be at five schools at once, so she teaches staff members at each how to handle emergencies and that sometimes it's best just to call 911. For NPR News, I'm Michael Tomsic.
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Aretha Franklin has confirmed that she is getting married. The 69-year-old Franklin quipped that she is not pregnant. She plans to marry her longtime friend William Wilkerson this summer. Franklin is also making news with a new music venture, a kind of singing competition, only not in the vein of "American Idol" or "The Sing-Off." As Michigan Radio's Jennifer Guerra reports, Franklin is turning her searchlight on the world of opera.
JENNIFER GUERRA, BYLINE: Attention all 18- to 40-year-old classically trained singers, Aretha Franklin wants to hear from you. That's right. The queen of soul is searching for the next great opera singer.
ARETHA FRANKLIN: Some of the older classical singers like Jessye Norman and Leontyne, Barbara Hendricks, they are retiring. They're not singing anymore, and I'd like to see some younger singers come along and take their place.
GUERRA: If she likes what she hears, Franklin will sign one, two, maybe even three performers to her label, Aretha's Records, and help the singers get established in the world of classical music. The competition itself, decidedly low-tech.
FRANKLIN: They should send their demos, CDs or cassette tapes to me, send it to me, in care of David Bennett, 30150 Telegraph Road...
GUERRA: No studio audience, no toll-free number where you can call in or text your vote, just your demo, an 8-by-10 headshot and a resume. Also, no original songs allowed.
FRANKLIN: I'd like to hear them sing the classics, the things like "Nessun Dorma."
GUERRA: Which, of course, Franklin sang, filling in for Luciano Pavarotti at the 1998 Grammys.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "NESSUN DORMA")
FRANKLIN: (Singing in foreign language)
GUERRA: I was just wondering if you're going to get a couple, you know, like, (Singing) what you want, baby, I got it. You're - if you're going to get some of those.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FRANKLIN: Well, I'm not looking for that right now, just the classical aspirants and people who are studying, actively studying, someone really who is very close to being accomplished.
GUERRA: And Franklin herself will be the judge.
FRANKLIN: If they're new artists who have really got it, I'd like to hear them.
BRIAN CARTER: My reaction to that is if somebody asked me to judge who was going to be the next big R&B person, I would be equally wary.
GUERRA: That's Brian Carter. He's wrapping up his doctorate degree in vocal performance at the University of Michigan. He doesn't mean to question Franklin's credentials, but...
CARTER: My hope is that if she's going to do this right, that she's going to get good people who are going to help her make the right decision, and that the person they get really is a serious opera singer and not a pop culture version of a good opera singer.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "NESSUN DORMA")
PAUL POTTS: (Singing in foreign language)
GUERRA: Carter says the singers should be peer reviewed by real opera professionals, not pop reviewed like they do on shows like "Britain's Got Talent." That's where amateur opera singer Paul Potts won for his rendition of Puccini's "Nessun Dorma."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "NESSUN DORMA")
POTTS: (Singing in foreign language)
GUERRA: Back stateside, 29-year-old mezzo soprano Sarah Nisbett says pop review, peer review, doesn't matter. She definitely plans to audition.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GUERRA: Besides, she thinks the blending of pure classical music with something a little more funky, a little more mainstream is exciting.
SARAH NISBETT: Anything that can bring opera into a sort of more mainstream world, I think, is great. And I think it would just - it could be good to have a sort of pop music chaperone to sort of say, you know, hi, everybody, I'm pop music. You might enjoy my friend opera, you know?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
GUERRA: Nisbett is so excited about the competition, one might even say she's hallucinating. Like the other day, when she got an email from a friend, telling her about Aretha Franklin's open auditions.
NISBETT: And then as I'm reading it, my phone starts ringing, and it's a 313 area code, so I know it's Detroit, and I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, she knows I'm reading it. She's already selected me. So - but it was not her.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
GUERRA: Well, a girl can always dream. For NPR News, I'm Jennifer Guerra.
ROBYN GEE, BYLINE: The day before the Iowa caucuses, this Panera Bread just outside Des Moines has been turned into a phone bank. Ten Obama for America volunteers make calls to registered Democrats, reminding them when and where to show up.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: And I just wanted to call and let you and Kevin know that we are getting together to caucus for the president tomorrow night...
GEE: The campaign's Iowa Communication Director John Kraus says the caucuses are a chance to show that President Obama's network from 2008 hasn't disappeared. Despite the state's focus on Republican candidates, Kraus says young Iowans are still connected to the campaign and still devoted to Mr. Obama.
JOHN KRAUS: Whether it's the Iraq War or ending don't ask don't tell, making college more affordable, many of the things that he talked about, in 2008 that inspired a lot of young people to get involved, are issues that he's delivered on.
GEE: But how many young people remain inspired and involved four years later? Twenty-three-year-old Nick Cavanaugh is one of the more than 26,000 young Democrats who caucused for Mr. Obama in 2008. Back then, he was any easy choice for Cavanaugh and his friends.
NICK CAVANAUGH: Definitely Barack Obama. I'm pretty sure everybody was excited about Obama in 2008.
GEE: But this year, Cavanaugh says he doesn't know which candidate his peers support. Apart from a few Facebook posts here and there, no one talks about the caucuses.
CAVANAUGH: It's, you know, the arguing in Washington, man, has really turned me off to it. So I've started ignoring it all. I used to be a lot more politically informed, but not anymore. I just kind of let it go.
GEE: Cavanaugh says he'll still probably vote for Obama in November. But caucusing for him? Definitely not.
And that's the prevailing attitude John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard's Institute of Politics, has seen this year when he surveys 18 to 29-year olds.
JOHN DELLA VOLPE: There is a deep pessimism among young people across the country. Only 12 percent of young Americans believe the country is headed currently in the right direction.
GEE: In December, Della Volpe held a focus group in Des Moines with young democrats and independents who supported Mr. Obama's election in 2008. He says they were frustrated that the president, their candidate, hasn't had more success getting his agenda passed Congress. That he didn't change enough in Washington.
VOLPE: I do think young people are certainly kind of sending up a signal, letting both Obama, Republicans know that they're just frustrated. And that they don't see enough change. They don't see as much of an effort of engaging this generation, as they did last election cycle.
GEE: Just how young Iowans send that signal on Caucus Night could be as un-dramatic as not turning out. Others have switched parties, like 25-year-old Matt Heflin of Coralville.
MATT HEFLIN: Never in a million years imagined myself registering as a Republican. Stay away from all Republicans, you know, they're the Dark Side.
GEE: And yet, the former Obama supporter is now running a grassroots campaign office for Ron Paul in this suburb of Iowa City. Heflin says he's a full convert. He'd vote for Paul in November. And he says he's just one of many young liberal voters who are receptive to the Texas congressman's stance on issues, like cutting the military budget and ending the War on Drugs.
HEFLIN: We definitely go to areas that are traditionally much younger, have a higher student population. And when we call people, I (unintelligible) anymore just try to avoid a certain age demographic calling, 'cause I'm just not very successful.
GEE: Which demographic?
HEFLIN: Oh, I'd say anybody over 60 is just not on board with Ron Paul, I've found.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
GEE: Don't trust anyone over 60. A strange slogan for supporting a candidate who is 76 years old. But polls show that young republicans and independents are responsible for making Paul a top contender in Iowa. And in hopes of adding young democrats to that support base, the Paul campaign has been handing out pamphlets with instructions on how to register republican, if only just for Caucus Night.
For NPR News, I'm Robyn Gee in Iowa City.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
That story was produced by the Youth Radio Election Desk.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
The president of Myanmar announced reduced sentences for prisoners today. The move is part of that country's independence celebrations. But the clemency will affect few political prisoners, and it falls far short of the expectations of human rights activists and the Obama administration.
As NPR's Michele Kelemen reports, the U.S. has been trying to encourage Myanmar, also known as Burma, to cement recent signs of political progress there.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: It was one of the more surprising moments in U.S. foreign policy in the last year, watching Secretary Clinton hold meetings with high-level officials in Myanmar's vast, empty, new capital, Naypidaw, and tour a glistening pagoda in the old capital, Yangon or Rangoon.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: What's up?
SECRETARY HILLARY CLINTON: How big is that diamond? It's huge.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Like this one, that one is 76-carat diamond.
KELEMEN: Clinton offered some incentives to keep Myanmar's president, Thein Sein, on track with reforms and told NPR at the time that she's coordinating closely with the country's most prominent dissident Aung San Suu Kyi.
CLINTON: She has expressed her confidence in how we are proceeding. Obviously, we both want to see significant steps taken by the government, starting with the release of all political prisoners, before we are able to do any more.
KELEMEN: Clinton has a special envoy working this issue day to day. Derek Mitchell goes to Myanmar about once a month and says he'll be packing his bags again soon. He thinks Clinton's trip there last month put wind in the sails of a reform process that took many by surprise.
DEREK MITCHELL: This government came in late march, and there was hope that there would be reform over time. But the pace of reform has come fairly rapidly and has encouraged, I think, an atmosphere in Rangoon that is quite optimistic about the future in the new year.
KELEMEN: The U.S. has agreed to let the U.N. Development Programme and the World Bank assess the needs of the country, one of the poorest in Southeast Asia. Administration officials still have to work through U.S. laws and sanctions to make that happen. And Mitchell also has to answer many questions in Congress about how quickly the U.S. should be moving.
MITCHELL: Debates are ongoing about Burma policy, but there's no serious resistance to, certainly, the secretary's trip, what came out of the secretary's trip and the way forward overall.
KELEMEN: The envoy says much will depend on the Burmese government's next steps and whether Thein Sein delivers on the promises he made to the secretary. The U.S. is not only pushing for more political rights in the country but also trying to promote peace efforts in the many, long-running ethnic conflicts that have ravaged Myanmar.
MITCHELL: You continue to have reports of aggression, of abuses, of rape as a weapon of war, of torture and of killings of civilians. All that is very, very, serious and informs our policy as well.
KELEMEN: One expert on Myanmar, David Steinberg of Georgetown University, says so far, the Obama administration has taken a safe, well-paced approach. Steinberg says there will be a flurry of diplomatic activity this month, including a visit by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, a major critic of Myanmar's military rulers.
DAVID STEINBERG: If he comes back and says, well, there are some changes and we ought to adjust our policy, that would be very good. And if he talks to Aung San Suu Kyi, as I'm sure he must on that trip, and she says, well, now is the time for some modification, then I think there are some very positive things that can happen.
KELEMEN: Steinberg says Aung San Suu Kyi once told him that the U.S. sanctions are something she uses as leverage with Myanmar's leaders, but at some point, they could be a liability for her. U.S. envoy Derek Mitchell says the U.S. won't change its sanctions policy until it gets a signal from Suu Kyi that that time has come. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
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This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel. All of the attention that Iowa has gotten in the past year comes to a head tonight. Nearly 2000 precincts across that state will record the first votes in the presidential nominating contest. At most sites, Iowans will write a name on a blank piece of paper and put it in a box.
BLOCK: NPR's Don Gonyea and Ari Shapiro have both been spending a lot of time in Iowa over the last year and they join us now from caucus sites. Don is with caucus-goers in Johnston, Iowa, near Rick Santorum's election night headquarters. And Ari is near Mitt Romney's headquarters at a caucus site in Des Moines. And, Don, first, walk us through the caucus procedures here. What exactly will play out over the next couple of hours?
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: Well, I'm standing in the back room at Precinct Number 3, Johnston, Iowa, Summit Middle School. This is a packed room. They had 600 people here at caucus last year - four years ago, it was. Many, many more than that this year, and a lot of observers.
We had Rick Santorum here, shaking hands and giving a short speech. Anita Perry, the wife of candidate Rick Perry is here.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
GONYEA: The applause you hear in the background is for Rand Paul, Senator Rand Paul, the son of candidate Ron Paul, who just spoke. Also heard from Josh Romney, who's one of Governor Mitt Romney's five sons. These speeches will finish up and there will be some more procedural business but everybody, as they came in, was handed a blank piece of paper. There's some markings on it but no names. At some point, they'll be asked to write the name, the last name of their choice on there. They'll put it in a ballot, they'll count it here. The results here will be reported to the state Republican Party. They'll aggregate all of the votes from around the state, from different precincts. And we'll get the numbers some time not too long from now, couple hours maybe.
SIEGEL: Okay, Don. And these caucuses, well, they all began just about nine minutes ago at 7:00 pm Central Time.
GONYEA: Exactly.
SIEGEL: Ari Shapiro, what are you hearing from the voters at the caucus site where you are?
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: Well, I just snuck out of the room where my caucus is being held. But I was talking to people beforehand. People take this so seriously. It is such an important night for them, and I was struck by the number of people who told me that even now, they're still undecided. The first person to arrive at the caucus site was one of the organizers, a guy named Grant Young, who has been very involved in Republican politics for more than 10 years. And he told me, two hours before voting began, he still hadn't made up his mind. Listen to a bit of what he said.
GRANT YOUNG: Me, along with many other of the – what do they say – 49 percent of the undecideds tonight going to their precincts, they want to get this right. We all know we can't afford the policies and the direction this country – that Barack Obama has taken this country. So, I think there's a lot of pressure 'cause, you know, the old saying – if you don't win, you don't govern.
SHAPIRO: And, you know, that points to the fluidity that we've seen in this race and one of the reasons that people are reluctant to predict what's going to happen tonight. The top three candidates are bunched so close together, with so many people undecided, it could be a surprise.
SIEGEL: And, Don Gonyea, all of those candidates had events today in Iowa, they were campaigning. Give us some last minute snapshots of the campaign frenzy before these caucuses.
GONYEA: Well, they had small rallies. Nobody had anything big and massive because this was about, you know, meeting people, having last minute interviews with television and the like, to get the word out, to make sure people know not just where to go but how to find out where to go and that they had to be here on time. Again, because this is not a primary, you just don't show up and vote. You have to be here for the start of this meeting that you here in the background now and you have to vote.
But ultimately, all of the roads led back to Des Moines. I'm in Johnston, which is a kind of a wealthy suburb of Des Moines. Everybody is in this area, it's the major media market and it's where all of the candidates are holding events tonight.
SIEGEL: And, Ari Shapiro, you were at Mitt Romney's final Iowa event this morning. Romney's been focusing his criticism in speeches not toward the other Republicans but toward President Obama. Here's one thing that Mitt Romney said this morning.
MITT ROMNEY: This has been a failed presidency. I will go to work to get Americans back to work and make sure that job one is concentrating on jobs for Americans not just keeping one's own job.
SIEGEL: How is the Romney campaign feeling about the former governor's chances?
SHAPIRO: I think they're surprised. They're surprised that he has a chance to win. You know, the Romney campaign stayed out of Iowa for a long, long time because they got burned four years ago investing really heavily and then it didn't turn out well. It helped derail his path to the nomination. They held back this year but in recent polls it looked like he was doing well. So, just in the last week or two, Mitt Romney has been spending a lot more time here. In the last day, he was in some of the eastern counties where he did well four years ago. And they're hoping that he might actually – this moderate, New England governor – be able to pull out a win in a state that generally favors social conservatives and evangelicals.
SIEGEL: Do his people refer to him as a moderate New England governor?
SHAPIRO: No, certainly not in the primaries. We'll see what happens in the general election, if he gets there.
SIEGEL: Don, a lot of attention is being paid to Rick Santorum, since a poll over the weekend showed that he was passing Texas Congressman Ron Paul and that Santorum is now on the heels of Mitt Romney. What's happening in the Santorum campaign?
GONYEA: And he describes himself as the true conservative in the race. Well, he has been on the rise just in the last week and a half. It is so sudden, nobody saw it coming. I've been going to Santorum events here, among other events, but going back to the spring and he was always in last place, always in single digits. Nothing but upside, as they say. But he said to me, oh, three or four times over the course of the year, I'm the little engine that could, I'm the little engine that could, I'm the little engine that could. And sure enough, here he is, in a position where he could possibly win. He's certainly hoping to be top three tonight. But give a listen to this tape from former senator Santorum. You can hear him kind of closing the deal in his final day of campaigning.
RICK SANTORUM: Take a look. There are different ways of solving these problems. Barack Obama has one way and I have another. Look at them. Make sure they're real. Make sure that you can see how we can accomplish this vision.
GONYEA: Again, Senator Santorum's rise has been assisted greatly by the stumbles of others who took turns being at or near the top. But again, he says here I am and he's ready to go on to the next step.
SIEGEL: Let's get a word in here about the third candidate who's polling pretty well going into tonight's caucuses. That was Congressman Ron Paul of Texas. Here's what he had to say about today's voting.
RON PAUL: It's a wonderful opportunity to restate our sound principles about why this country had been great and what we need to restore peace, prosperity and liberty to all of us.
SIEGEL: Why the country had been great. Ari, where is Ron Paul drawing his support in Iowa?
SHAPIRO: Really, a difference in policy from so many of the other candidates. He defines conservatism based on a small military, civil liberties, a libertarian approach, which really sets him apart from the rest of the pack.
SIEGEL: Okay. Ari Shapiro, Don Gonyea, thanks to you both.
SHAPIRO: You're welcome. Happy caucus night.
GONYEA: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Okay. Don was in Johnston, Iowa, and Ari Shapiro was in Des Moines.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
South Korea's president delivered this message yesterday to North Korea: It will respond strongly to any provocations under North Korea's new leader, Kim Jong-un. However, in a televised speech, Lee Myung-bak also promised that North-South relations could improve if Pyongyang halts its nuclear weapons program.
Reporter Doualy Xaykaothao recently hit the streets of Seoul, to find out what South Koreans think of the power shift in the north. And for many the answer is simple: They don't care.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DOUALY XAYKAOTHAO, BYLINE: In freezing temperature, Chun Gab-chul listens to Korean music from the 1950s and chops traditional candy into sample-sizes. He sells sesame seed treats, peanut-covered sugar sticks, and pumpkin-flavored snacks for three to 10 bucks a bag.
CHUN GAB-CHUL: (Foreign language spoken)
XAYKAOTHAO: People aren't interested in Kim Jong-il's death, he says. Chun pauses to sell a merry customer a stick of candy.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
XAYKAOTHAO: Then he says he felt no sorrow, no pleasure, when he heard Kim Jong-il had died.
CHUN GAB-CHUL: (Foreign language spoken)
XAYKAOTHAO: The reality for me, he points out, is making money. He asks, who has time to think about North Korea when it's hard enough to earn a living?
Still in uniform from working at a noodle shop, Lee Yong-nam says he doesn't expect North and South relations to improve under the new young North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.
LEE YONG-NAM: (Through Translator) Help? How can he be helpful? He's trying to consolidate his power. Not just military power but control over his people. It's the only way to sustain the system, right?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
XAYKAOTHAO: Just around the corner is an ice-skating rink. A huge tree of light bulbs blink blue and red, making it feel a lot like Christmas still. Two teenage sisters are about to jump onto the ice. The older one, Shin Eun-young, wears a red puffy jacket and has a lollipop stuck in her mouth. She says she read about Kim Jong-il's death on the Internet.
SHIN EUN-YOUNG: (Through Translator) His death doesn't feel real to me. I know someone died, but I don't really think anything of it.
XAYKAOTHAO: Lee Ho-yong is warming himself at a standing heater. His family is skating. He says he's more concerned about local politics and the upcoming South Korean presidential election, then Kim Jong-il's death. But like many Koreans, he's big into fortune telling. During a New Year's reading, he was told Baekdu Mountain in North Korea would erupt soon, bringing both North and South Koreans together.
LEE HO-YONG: (Through Translator) And one of these well-known fortunetellers said that it's also the reunification can happen in two to three years.
XAYKAOTHAO: But Cheon Yu-bin, a hairstylist in Seoul, says he doesn't want reunification.
(SOUNDBITE OF VEHICLES)
XAYKAOTHAO: Outside a back alley, taking a break from cutting hair, he says...
CHEON YU-BIN: (Through Translator) I don't think about North Korea often, or have interest in North Korea. So, North Korea doesn't really affect my life.
XAYKAOTHAO: Lim Jae-min agrees. Asked about North Korea and its young new leader, Kim Jong-un, he looks blank.
LIM JAE-MIN: (Through Translator) That? I don't have time to be concerned about North Korea. I just turned 20. I'm a student. I'm mostly busy studying.
XAYKAOTHAO: Ordinary South Koreans may not be watching developments in the North closely. But the presence of at least 28,000 U.S. soldiers on the Korean Peninsula is a reminder that North and South Korea are still technically at war.
XAYKAOTHAO: For NPR News, I'm Doualy Xaykaothao, in Seoul.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Twenty-twelve isn't just a presidential election year. It is the centennial of one of the great presidential elections. In 1912, no less than three presidents competed: one present, one past and one future. One went on to be chief justice of the United States. Another had been president of Princeton University.
Great ideas about the country were debated in 1912. And we thought that in these early days of 2012, we'd do well to think back on that time, a century ago. It was a Republican age. In the half century from the Civil War to 1912, only one Democrat had made it to the White House. The sitting president had been elected in 1908, Ohio Republican William Howard Taft.
PRESIDENT WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT: We are living in an age in which by exaggeration of the defects of our present condition, by false charges and responsibility for it against individuals and classes, by holding up to the feverish imagination of the less fortunate and the discontented, the possibilities of a millennium. A condition of popular unrest has been produced. New parties are being formed with the proposed purpose of satisfying this unrest by promising a panacea.
SIEGEL: In 1912, Taft's party split. He was opposed by the man who preceded him in the White House, a Republican who took a far rosier view of those less fortunate and discontented, Theodore Roosevelt.
PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT: I believe that the majority of the plain people of the United States will, day in and day out, make fewer mistakes in governing themselves than any smaller class or body of men, no matter what their training, will make in trying to govern them.
SIEGEL: Professor Sidney Milkis, of the University of Virginia, wrote the book, "Theodore Roosevelt, The Progressive Party, And the Transformation of American Democracy."
Professor Milkis, welcome to the program. And tell us what happened to drive these two Republican presidents, Taft and Roosevelt apart.
PROFESSOR SIDNEY MILKIS: Well, there were basically two issues, Robert. One was personal, Theodore Roosevelt enjoyed being president. When he left the White House in 1909, he missed it a lot more than he thought he would. And he was very anxious to get back in and Taft stood in his way.
The other thing was an important principle difference between them: They disagreed on fundamental constitutional issues. Theodore Roosevelt felt that the people needed to be empowered to control the giant corporations that had emerged, at the end of the 19th century. And so, he defended a program of pure democracy that would have created a direct connection between people and representatives.
And that included things like the recall of all public officials, including the president; referenda on court decisions, the courts then were very conservative and strongly defending the right of property; and also, making the amendment - the constitutional amendment process easier, so it would be more majoritorian(ph) than the existing Constitution.
William Howard Taft felt was that this would destroy the Constitution created by the Founders, and create a situation where demagogues like Theodore Roosevelt...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
MILKIS: ...would a rouse public opinion for dangerous purposes.
SIEGEL: Well, now enter the man who won the election of 1912. The Democratic candidate for president was the governor of New Jersey, before that the president of Princeton; a Southerner by birth control. Woodrow Wilson, when he was recorded that year, he also spoke of trust and of monopolists and how to restrain them.
PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON: We're not here to destroy the industry which these men have developed. But we are here to destroy the control over the industry of other people which these men have established.
SIEGEL: Wilson won decisively against the divided field. How would you characterize his view of government and his view of democracy?
MILKIS: He ran as a more moderate reformer than TR. He tried to position himself, triangulate I guess you could say, between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. He embraced some of the reforms TR celebrated like the recall and the referendum, but did not criticize the courts and did not call for a referendum in the courts . Nor did he call for an easier amendment process.
Another very important difference between TR and Wilson is, whereas TR - in taming the trust - called for an extensive regulation of business that would have really required a great expansion of the national government's powers. Wilson said that rather than creating a regulatory juggernaut, a better solution was to break big business up. And he proposed a militant, antitrust policy. He celebrated, in his campaign, The Man on the Make.
And the way to clear the path for The Man on the Make was to break business up, rather than attempt to create a government that would be powerful and dangerous enough to regulate.
SIEGEL: That was not regarded in 1912: The Man on the Make.
MILKIS: No, in fact, it resonated pretty substantially and Wilson argued that by supporting The Man on the Make, that America would not have it to create a big government. And big government was just as controversial then, Robert, as it is now - that we could have a return, as he put it, to normality.
SIEGEL: We should add, there was a fourth candidate in 1912, the socialist, Eugene V. Debs.
MILKIS: Yes. In fact, socialism was at high tide at this time. And a lot of people were beginning to look at the socialist party, which was developing into a very important reform party with a very popular candidate in Debs as the alternative to the Republican Party.
And I've argued that had T.R. not, so to speak, preempted the socialist party, short-circuited it and stolen its thunder by proposing a more moderate form of reform, then the socialist party might have gotten many more votes than it did get in 1912. It got six percent of the vote, its best showing in history, twice what it got in 1908, but I think it would have probably doubled that had the Progressive Party not intervened.
SIEGEL: Professor Milkis, thank you very much for talking with us.
MILKIS: Oh, it's been a great pleasure.
SIEGEL: That's Sidney Milkis, who's professor of politics and director of democracy and governance studies at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Now, a moment to honor the late Bob Anderson. He fenced for Great Britain in the Olympics and for many years was the coach of the British National Fencing Team, but he's probably best remembered for his moves on the silver screen.
In Hollywood, Anderson was known as a sword master for his fight choreography in films such as "The Princess Bride."
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE PRINCESS BRIDE")
MANDY PATINKIN: (as Inigo Montoya) My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
BLOCK: Also, the "Lord of the Rings."
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "LORD OF THE RINGS")
BLOCK: And most famously, for his work on the original "Star Wars" trilogy.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "STAR WARS")
BLOCK: Bob Anderson even appeared on screen as Darth Vader in "The Empire Strikes Back" and "The Return of the Jedi." He wielded a light saber against Luke Skywalker, as played by Mark Hamill. The Darth Vader was voiced by James Earl Jones and played mostly by David Prowse, but the dark lord's light saber skills were all Anderson's, no force necessary.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "RETURN OF THE JEDI")
BLOCK: His part went uncredited until Mark Hamill said in a 1983 interview that Anderson deserved recognition. Credit or no, he was known throughout his career as a perfectionist. It earned him the nickname Grumpy Bob, and while Mr. Anderson's most memorable role was one of cinema's greatest villains, Darth Vader, we remember him today as a protagonist of spectacular fencing.
BOB ANDERSON: I'd always say that I never took up the sword. I think the sword took me up.
BLOCK: That's sword master, Bob Anderson. He died on Sunday at the age of 89.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel. In just a few short hours, Iowa Republicans will travel to their precinct caucus sites around the state, and there, they will cast a ballot for the person they want to be their next president of the United States or for the person they think has the best chance of beating the current president, Barack Obama. NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson joins us now. And, Mara, first of all, can you give us a quick reminder of just how the caucuses will work tonight?
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: The caucuses begin at 7 o'clock sharp. Supporters of each candidate will arrive at their caucus sites with their scripts. They'll have talking points. They'll make the speeches about why their guy is the best guy. And then, it's pretty simple. Republican caucuses are essentiality a straw poll - one secret ballot, pieces of paper dropped in a box, and that's it.
SIEGEL: None of this eliminating the lowest candidate (unintelligible)?
LIASSON: Nope. Only Democrats do that.
SIEGEL: Who is most likely to show up at tonight's caucuses?
LIASSON: Well, I can tell you who showed up last time. In 2008, there were more men than women; 99 percent of the caucus-goers in the Republican Party were white; 1 percent Hispanic or Asian; no black Iowa Republicans; they're generally older; 73 percent were over 45; 60 percent in 2008 described themselves as born-again Christians or evangelicals. 120,000 people showed up four years ago, which is the bar against which Republicans are going to be held tonight.
We think a high turnout will probably help Mitt Romney; a low turnout will probably benefit Ron Paul. The weather doesn't seem to be any barrier in Iowa today. And Democrats don't have a competitive caucus on their side, so some Democrats and independents who voted Democratic last time might turn out for the Republican caucus, which they can do - they can register as Republicans on site. We also know there's been less retail campaigning this year, and the crowds have been smaller for everyone, even in these last days, compared to last year.
SIEGEL: Four years ago, Mitt Romney won 25 percent of the vote in Iowa, in the caucuses. And he's polling just around 25 percent of the vote. Now, this is - it's a magic number for the Romney campaign.
LIASSON: He's the 25 percent man.
SIEGEL: Yeah.
LIASSON: That's right. And it says that 75 percent of Republicans don't want him. I think the conservative grassroots resistance to Romney has been one of the signal features of this campaign. It's been constant, unchanging. One conservative commentator said, today, Mitt Romney is like Kerry without the medals, but conservatives never found an alternative. They tried out each one. There was one surge after another, and none of them caught on. It is worth noting that this was a particularly weak field.
The superstars in the Republican Party stayed home - Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush. And in the end, Republicans may revert to form and fall in line behind someone instead of falling in love with them. But you're right; it raises the question: Will there be a lack of enthusiasm among of Republicans if Romney is the nominee in the general election, or will the desire to defeat Barack Obama overcome that?
SIEGEL: Mara, a year ago, we were marking the beginning of the age of the Tea Party. How important is the Tea Party in the Republican Party in Iowa this year?
LIASSON: Well, it is very important. It's just not monolithic, and they never coalesced around one anti-Romney candidate, even though they did move the party to the right. Rick Perry was the only one who could have given Romney a real challenge, but he stumbled out of the gate and never got up. What it means, though, is that Mitt Romney was never really challenged. He never had a barrage of attack ads aimed at him the way Newt Gingrich did. And that's remarkable considering that he is the most moderate and the least Tea Party-ish candidate in the race.
SIEGEL: Finally, President Obama, the White House says he doesn't plan to watch the returns, maybe he'll listen. But will he be talking with - he will talk with Democratic caucus-goers tonight.
LIASSON: Yes, he is. The Democrats are treating Iowa as an organized exercise. They want Democrats to come to their caucuses tonight. It's a dry-run for the general election. They've made hundreds of thousands of phone calls. They're trying to reactivate the grassroots army they created there in 2007 and '08, and that is for one big important reason: Iowa is a swing state.
SIEGEL: OK. Thank you, Mara.
LIASSON: Thank you.
SIEGEL: That's NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
For Iowa Republicans, it's the end a yearlong getting-to-know-you process with the candidates. NPR's Sonari Glinton sat down with a group of caucus-goers to talk about how they plan to vote and how they made up their minds.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Drive due west of downtown Des Moines on I-80 and you get to Van Meter, Iowa. It's a city that has about 1,300 residents. I met up with nine of them over a few pitchers of beer on the eve of the caucuses to talk politics, the Republican field and Iowa. Hello.
MARK MILLER: Mark Miller.
GLINTON: Sonari. Nice to meet you.
MILLER: Nice to meet you.
GLINTON: How's everyone doing?
MILLER: We're good. We're good.
GLINTON: All these voters will caucus in the lunch room of a combined junior-senior high school. Tom Harbison is making his debut as chairman this year running Van Meter's Republican caucus.
TOM HARBISON: We're going have three areas. We're going to have the main area where we all sit as registered Republicans. And then, we'll have an area for the press. And then, we'll have an area for observers. That's where we're going to go, and they can observe it.
GLINTON: Most of the people I sat down with were pretty well decided about who'd they vote for. There were four for Mitt Romney, two for Rick Santorum and two for Newt Gingrich. Jeanne Harbison is a retired school teacher. She was the lone undecided Republican.
JEANNE HARBISON: A lot of the people that we're looking at in the top three have a lot of the same values and platform to me.
GLINTON: Harbison calls herself a social conservative. Right now, she's leaning toward Gingrich.
HARBISON: All his baggage is pretty much out on the front. Everybody has seen it. The others maybe we don't know yet what's going come, you know, to the forefront.
GLINTON: The major split at this table was between people who consider themselves values voters and those whose first concern is the economy. Pat Hart runs a heating and air-conditioning company. He's a Mitt Romney supporter, and for him, it's all about the economy.
PAT HART: The one nice thing about this election coming up I think is (unintelligible) because you've got about four people that are all playing for the religious right vote and maybe that will split it up enough that middle survive. And I think when they get right down to it, Mitt has the same values, I think, that the people that, say, the religious right.
GLINTON: All the voters say regardless of who wins the caucuses they'll support the nominee. Bev McLinden has participated in caucuses for years. She says she can't remember a political season quite like this one.
BEV MCLINDEN: I've made it a point to go out and see the different candidates on multiple occasions, and there's something about each one that I kind of like, except I do have a little bit of a problem with Ron Paul...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
MCLINDEN: ...if I was to pick one, that, you know, I can flatly say, you know, I would not, you know, support him in any way. But there are personal qualities in each one of the candidates that I truly, truly like.
GLINTON: Meanwhile, Mark Miller, who works for an agri-business firm in Des Moines, says he's never seen the Republican Party in Iowa this galvanized.
MILLER: I don't remember ever being called as much as I've been called by candidates relaying their message. I don't think it would be unusual to say that I get a dozen to 20 calls a day knowing that I'm a Republican and asking me for a vote or trying to clear up some matter. It's unbelievable the amount of information we're getting.
GLINTON: Miller says he enjoys getting up close and personal with the candidates, but this time, he felt more involved in the process in part because of social media.
MILLER: Each candidate, because of technology, has been able to put their best foot forward. And then, when they screw up, you know, it's bad news because it's just that quick, too, so - because the opposition jumps right on it. And boom, you know, you get those wide swings in the polls that we've seen.
GLINTON: Bev McLinden does administrative work from home. She, like all the caucus-goers at the table, says she's excited for tonight and a little wistful.
MCLINDEN: I think it's fun, to tell you the truth. I like the whole political process here. And now, it's coming to an end, and the intensity has increased. It's fun to see that. You know, I'm going to kind of be sad when everything goes away.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
MCLINDEN: Even the phone calls.
GLINTON: Those phone calls will end soon enough. Sonari Glinton, NPR News, Des Moines.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
A series of earthquakes that have shaken Ohio over the last year were most likely caused by the injection deep underground of wastewater generated by drilling. That's the conclusion of a seismologist who's been studying the quakes and their connection to deep-injection disposal wells. Those wells in Ohio hold the waste fluids from hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Sand and chemicals are injected deep into the ground to fracture it, to make extracting natural gas easier. And then, something has to be done with that leftover wastewater, which brings us to John Armbruster, the seismologist, who Ohio regulators brought in to monitor these earthquakes. He's with Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
JOHN ARMBRUSTER: This fracking fluid that you bring back is a waste that goes on a truck and is taken to a well, such as we are going to discuss, in Youngstown, Ohio, where this is disposed of by pumping it back into the ground again.
BLOCK: And we should be clear that there are separate concerns about the fracking process itself, which has to do with contamination of drinking water. We're talking about the aftermath, which is the waste fluid and what you have found, apparently, is that it is tied to this string of earthquakes in Ohio.
How did you come to that conclusion?
ARMBRUSTER: Well, we look at the evidence. Youngstown is an area which doesn't have a history of earthquakes. This disposal well started operating in December of 2010. Three months later, the earthquakes began and the earthquakes are trickling along. From March to November, you have nine earthquakes, all of a similar size, 2.5, 2.1, 2.7.
On Christmas Eve, there was a magnitude 2.7 earthquake. Our location of that Christmas Eve earthquake was about one kilometer from the bottom of the well and the location of the earthquake was sufficient evidence that there could be a link.
BLOCK: Help us understand, Mr. Armbruster, what would be going on seismically. If you have this waste water fluid deep underground, why would that trigger earthquakes?
ARMBRUSTER: I would compare it to a hydraulic jack. You're pumping this fluid into a crack and the pressure of this fluid is pushing against the two sides, encouraging the fault to slip.
BLOCK: The injection well near Youngstown, Ohio, that we've been talking about was actually shut down last week by the Department of Natural Resources in Ohio. There was then a magnitude 4.0 quake on Saturday after that. What would account for that and what does that say about what might happen going forward?
ARMBRUSTER: Well, the well has been pumping for a year. It's going to take a period of time comparable to that for the effects of this pumping to completely dissipate away.
BLOCK: Who is responsible for monitoring or regulating these wells?
ARMBRUSTER: Each state has an environmental protection agency or something with that type of name that licenses and regulates these wells.
BLOCK: Now, Ohio has something like 177 of these deep injection wells. I read a statement from an industry group which says that these kinds of wells have been used safely and reliably since the 1930s to dispose of waste water from drilling. Is the record pretty good, pretty safe, do you think?
ARMBRUSTER: Yeah. I don't argue with that. It's a matter of luck. When you have a well, is there an earthquake waiting to happen close enough to that well that you can trigger it to occur? I would advocate monitoring of wells to know when triggering of earthquakes first begins. Then you can decide whether to continue using that well.
BLOCK: Well, Mr. Armbruster, thanks for talking to us.
ARMBRUSTER: You're welcome.
BLOCK: John Armbruster is a seismologist with Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel. The Afghan Taliban says it has reached a preliminary deal to open a political office to conduct negotiations with the international community. The office would be in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. The move could help the long tangled peace process for Afghanistan, but as NPR's Jackie Northam reports, there are pitfalls along the way.
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: There have been ongoing efforts for years to find some way to initiate peace talks for Afghanistan with no success so far. Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, says the Taliban's decision to open a liaison office in Qatar is significant.
BRIAN KATULIS: It's a very small step, but I think it's an important sign - probably one of the first signs we've seen in a long while - from elements of the Taliban that they want to sit down and talk.
NORTHAM: Katulis says the decision may indicate the Taliban is feeling pressure from an increased military push by the U.S. and its allies, but he stresses that the decision is just the beginning of what will likely be a very long and challenging process. Katulis notes that the Taliban is not a monolithic organization. There are many factions and not always aligned. The members who will be opening the office in Doha represent Mullah Omar, the group's reclusive leader. But Katulis says it's not clear how much authority they will have to negotiate.
KATULIS: I think that's the key question we need to be asking is how much do these individuals that will be in this office truly represent the broader Taliban movement? And I think that's an open question.
NORTHAM: Anand Gopal, a researcher and author of an upcoming book on the war in Afghanistan, says another problem could be Pakistan, where most of the Taliban leadership resides. Gopal says Pakistan could prove to be a major spoiler, as it has in the past.
ANAND GOPAL: There has been instances in which Taliban members have tried to reach out to the U.S. or to the Afghan government and they've been arrested by Pakistan. So, really, I think nothing can happen without Pakistan's acquiescence in any of this.
NORTHAM: As the plan for the opening of the Doha office was announced today, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said the group is also seeking the release of some of its members held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay.
State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland would not be drawn out on the Guantanamo detainee issue, but she reiterated the U.S. policy on peace talks with the Taliban.
VICTORIA NULAND: If this is part of an Afghan led, Afghan supported process and the Afghan government itself believes it can play a constructive role and it is also supported by the host country, then we will play a role in that, as well.
NORTHAM: Afghan president Hamid Karzai initially rejected a Taliban office in Qatar. He said the office should be in Saudi Arabia or Turkey, both of which have good relations with the Afghan leader, but he has since agreed to the plan.
Jackie Northam, NPR News, Washington.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block.
It's time now for your letters. Yesterday, we aired the story of a Massachusetts teen mother named Nga Truong. Her infant son died suddenly three years ago, and police were convinced that Truong was guilty of murder.
Somebody hurt that baby, and we need to know who it was, and we're going to find out who it was.
NGA TRUONG: I'm telling you everything.
SERGEANT KEVIN PAGEAU: No, you're not. Stop. Don't lie to me. Because that baby is dead, and there's no reason for him to be dead.
BLOCK: After two hours of rough interrogation, the 16-year-old Truong confessed to killing her son. She spent nearly three years in jail as she awaited trial. But a judge eventually found that detectives had coerced her confession, and she was set free.
SIEGEL: Truong's story angered plenty of you. JoAnn Lee Frank of Clearwater, Florida, writes this: After listening to this segment, I couldn't help but wonder how many others have been coerced into confessing a crime they had never committed? America should hang its head in shame.
BLOCK: On Friday, we brought you the story of a largely forgotten football great: Emlen Tunnell. The former defensive back played for the New York Giants and Green Bay Packers more than half a century ago. Tunnell was the first black player enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He was also the first defensive specialist to receive that honor and the first African-American to be on the permanent coaching staff of an NFL team.
SIEGEL: Emlen Tunnell is now revered by the Giants organization, but he had to hitchhike to his first tryout back in 1948. Shannon Wise of Fresno, California, writes that the story brought her to tears. My grandfather, she says, went to a small college in Wisconsin. He was invited by George Halas, founder and owner of the Bears, to try out for the team. My grandfather borrowed a teammate's cleats and hitchhiked to Chicago to try out for the Bears. Your story brought back fond memories of hearing my grandfather tell stories of his playing days.
Though I do not ever remember him mentioning Mr. Tunnell, he is the exact kind of player my grandfather would have liked to know and play with. Thank you for bringing back such great memories.
BLOCK: And finally, beets are back. Many people hate them, but the vegetable is enjoying a popularity surge, both at chain restaurants and fancy bistros. Our story on the indomitable beet inspired listeners to send in their favorite recipes and a defense of the maligned root. Mark Betchkal of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, writes this: Who does not like beets? You're nuts. Beets are great, even if you only have canned beets. Put some mesclun on a plate, display a wheel of overlapping beet slices over the lettuce, sprinkle with crumbled goat cheese and warm hazel nuts, serve with a fine vinaigrette. Elegant and easy.
SIEGEL: Well, whether we've left you satisfied or hungry for more or thinking about borscht, we want to hear from you.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: You can write to us at npr.org, just click on Contact Us.
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The third and final phase of Egypt's vote for parliament began today. Voters turned out in rural and remote regions where election-related violence has been the norm. NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson traveled to one of those places, Qena, in Upper Egypt, to hear what jittery residents think of the polls.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: Excited male voters thronged the doorway of this polling station at a Qena school, eager to cast their ballots. Many, like Lufti Azib Gerges, were first-time voters.
LUFTI AZIB GERGES: (Foreign language spoken).
NELSON: The 35-year-old Christian teacher says he was surprised by how safe and organized voting seemed.
GERGES: (Foreign language spoken).
NELSON: Gerges adds that even more surprising was the large number of soldiers and policemen keeping order at the voting centers and on the streets.
BASSEM NASR: (Foreign language spoken).
NELSON: It's as if someone pushed a button and they magically appeared, adds local poll monitor Bassem Nasr. Residents complained they haven't seen enough Egyptian troops and patrolmen in their city since Mubarak was ousted from power 11 months ago. That spurred an increase in crime and violence, including extremist attacks on local members of the large Coptic Christian minority.
In November, a Canadian touring near Qena died after men fired on his car thinking it was carrying members of a rival tribe. The insecurity, plus the fact past elections were notorious for clashes, kept the International Republican Institute from sending election monitors to Qena.
Scott Mastic is the Middle East Regional Director for the U.S.-funded group that has links to the Republican Party.
SCOTT MASTIC: In a lot of Upper Egypt, there's more of a tribal flavor to electoral competition with big families having an influence over voting patterns and behaviors. In the Mubarak days, that oftentimes translated into clashes between candidates' supporters and violence that occurred.
NASR: (Foreign language spoken).
NELSON: But Egyptian election monitor Bassem Nasr says today's polls were surprisingly peaceful, save for reports of a fistfight between members of two rival Islamist parties. The parties belong to the Muslim Brotherhood and ultraconservative Salafists who, together, have captured close to 70 percent of the nationwide vote so far.
ALFI AZMY MARCUS: (Foreign language spoken).
NELSON: Qena obstetrician Alfi Azmy Marcus says he worries an Islamist victory here will make life harder for Christians like himself. Several local election monitors claim a recent unsigned letter widely disseminated in Qena warned Christian voters to stay away from the polls. The monitors say they also observed Brotherhood and Salafist volunteers pressuring voters outside polling centers, which is illegal, but that didn't seem to bother most voters here.
One Muslim voter who would only give his first name, Ali(ph), says the Islamists deserve a chance to rule.
ALI: Actually, I don't know why people are so afraid of the Islamic current in the region. We are sure of them, so we will wait and see and if they don't do anything, we will change them, for example.
NELSON: But the Islamists weren't taking any chances in a place where family and tribal loyalty often determine electoral success.
NASR: (Foreign language spoken).
NELSON: Nasr says the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party allied itself with popular tribal leaders and important families, just as Mubarak's former ruling party used to do. And one prominent Salafist sheik warned his followers that voting for anyone other than the Salafists is a sin.
The elections continue here tomorrow. Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News in Upper Egypt.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
In about an hour, Iowans will begin caucusing in the nation's first presidential contest of 2012. Republicans are gathering at sites representing more than 1,700 precincts. While voters can write in any name they like, six candidates leave the field. The top vote-getters will head into next week's New Hampshire primary with fresh momentum and while those at the bottom could find their campaigns on life support.
We have two live reports now from caucus sites. First, NPR's Ted Robbins at a school in Ankeny, Iowa. And, Ted, what's the scene where you are? How many people have shown up already?
TED ROBBINS, BYLINE: Well, other than the people who are running the show - not many, I'd tell you about - a dozen so far, but they're filtering in slowly. And there are a lot of chairs set up. I was talking with the temporary precinct chair, Ken Hall(ph). We're at the 9th Ankeny precinct. And he expects 200 to 400 people.
SIEGEL: And what's the process that those 200, 400 people might take part in once the caucus begins?
ROBBINS: Right. And, you know, Mr. Hall is aware that most people have, as he puts it, have lives and want to do their thing and get out of here. So the first thing to do, they elect a permanent chair, and it will probably be him because, as he acknowledges, nobody else really wants to run the meeting. And then the question is if you're registered, you get checked off. If you're not registered, there's a table where you can get registered tonight, right there. And as I said, they expect up to 400 people.
And then the next thing that happens is the people stand up and one person each - (unintelligible) it can be more than one person. But each candidate - each of the six gets up to five minutes to speak. Now, we met a couple of people who were from out of state who have come to talk for Rick Perry. They get to talk, but if there's somebody from the precinct who wants to talk for Rick Perry in his (unintelligible), they get first shot at it.
So then they fill out the ballots, which happen to be a little two-inch-by-hour-inch purple slits of blank paper, and they have the seal of the state of Iowa on them. They're blank. People fill out the ballots, they collect them, and they expect to have them all counted by 8 p.m.
SIEGEL: And this will happen in several hundred places all over the state of Iowa.
ROBBINS: Indeed.
SIEGEL: That's our Ted Robbins, speaking to us from one caucus site, in Ankeny, Iowa. Thank you, Ted.
ROBBINS: You're welcome.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The doors have just opened for tonight's Republican caucus in Van Meter, Iowa. That's 20 miles west of Des Moines, and we've sent NPR's Sonari Glinton to the lunchroom of Van Meter High where the caucus is set to begin in about an hour. You've got a chance to talk with several voters who'll be caucusing tonight, Sonari. What did you hear from them?
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Well, most of the people that I talked to say they're not really in love with any one candidate. They like them all. But this is mainly about anybody but the president. So about a half dozen people have shown up so far, and they're sort of split between Rick Santorum, Gingrich and Mitt Romney. And they say that this election is when social networking came to the caucuses.
All the people I've talked to were registered Republicans, say they can't - you can't imagine the sheer number of robocalls that they've been getting. And normally, they feel an intense, you know, they really get involved in the election. But because of social media, they say they feel more directly related to the campaign.
SIEGEL: Sonari, have you gotten a sense of what it means to be a Republican in Van Meter?
GLINTON: Well, you know, there's not really one type of Van Meter Republican. You know, there's the country club types, there are the Chamber of Commerce types, there are the Value Voters. There seems to be a split between two people - two groups of people. There's people who really genuinely concerned with the economy, and those people are tending to be along with Gingrich and Romney, and then the Value Voters that are split between, you know, Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann. And, you know...
SIEGEL: And, Sonari...
GLINTON: ...it's - and it's - I was going to say, Van Meter High School is not the only - the presidential race isn't the only caucus that's going on. The Van Meter Bulldogs wrestling team has got a match down the road.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: I see. OK. Thank you, Sonari. That's NPR's Sonari Glinton who is in Van Meter, Iowa, where he'll be watching a caucus.
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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
The Iowa caucuses are under way. Republican voters are making their choices in the nation's first presidential contest of 2012. And according to early entrance poll results, it appears two of the candidates are running strong - Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.
We'll hear more about that in a few moments. But first, we're going to check in with reporters at two caucus sites to see how things are going. First, NPR's David Schaper joins us from a Republican caucus site in Des Moines. David, tell us about the scene and about the turnout there.
DAVID SCHAPER, BYLINE: Well, Robert, I'm at the Polk County convention complex in downtown Des Moines. And there's a big crowd here. This is a really huge building. So there's just one small meeting room. And the line was out the door. In fact, they got started late because there are so many people still lined up, waiting to register. I'm told about 150 people are in this room and they are now going through the speeches of each of the candidates' representatives. I think they're about ready to wrap those up and will be passing out the paper ballots for people to mark their choices.
Interesting, as people, you know, got up to speak for the candidates, starting alphabetically, there was no one for Michele Bachmann, but when it came time for Ron Paul's turn, two or three people tried to jump up and speak on his behalf, as opposed to just the one anointed by the campaign to speak. And a young Texan who was very, very nervous to be here came and spoke on behalf of Rick Perry.
SIEGEL: And, David, you've been following the Newt Gingrich campaign for the past few days. You heard his closing argument to voters earlier today. He's lost some ground in the polls in recent weeks. How did he make his case today?
SCHAPER: Well, he tried to hit back at his - his main opponent that sees, that's Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor. He's been really teed up, Newt Gingrich has, in the television ads, negative ads have been just fast and furious. By one count, 45 percent of the ads on television in the state of Iowa this campaign season have been negative ads attacking Newt Gingrich. And he waited a long time to respond to these attacks and has just been doing so lately. Today, even agreeing with a questioner who asked him if he thought Mitt Romney was a liar in his positions as - his position as a conservative. So, it's heating up, but he's down and we don't know yet if he'll bounce back.
SIEGEL: Okay, thanks, David.
SCHAPER: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's David Schaper in Des Moines.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Now, to the Democrats, who were also caucusing tonight in Iowa. There, of course, is no drama in those caucuses. President Obama is unopposed. But the president did address Democratic caucus-goers a few minutes ago. And Iowa Public Radio's Sarah McCammon is at a Democratic caucus in Des Moines. Sarah, what was the president's message tonight?
SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: Right. Well, he's talking to voters, trying to sort of marshal support heading into the general election. Obviously, as you say, there's no question who the nominee is on the Democratic side. And he spoke via kind of a webcast to these voters all across the state, at sites across Iowa. And, really, it was a pretty positive message, but also I'd say fairly realistic, challenging voters to maintain the optimism and energy, as he described it, that helped him win last time around. He had a lot of very positive words. He said you guys inspire me. There's nothing we can't accomplish. But he also said, it's going to be a big battle, and he said, I'm excited for that.
SIEGEL: He not only won the presidency, he won in Iowa as well, last time. He's unopposed in Iowa in the caucuses. Why exactly do the Democrats caucus in that case?
MCCAMMON: Well, if you ask party leaders and you ask Obama campaign leaders, they'll say it's really about organizing, about building support as early as possible, heading into what everyone expects to be a tough election. And, you know, if you talk to individual Obama supporters, as I have in recent weeks, some of them will say we also really hope to have a strong showing. We think the president needs a sort of like a boost of support to show that we still support him, we are behind his message. And so, I think it's really about more than one thing. But I think, primarily, reaching out to voters, reaching out to people who will be engaged and energized for the general election.
SIEGEL: How would you describe the mood where you are tonight?
MCCAMMON: It's pretty positive, not exactly buoyant. I mean, you know, I think people were fairly restrained, just walking around, friendly chats. These are neighbors that come together, in many cases, from their local precincts and there are more than a dozen precincts gathered here tonight at a high school near downtown where I'm at. There are maybe a couple hundred, maybe 300 people filling up a common area, milling around, chatting. And everyone I've talked to so far is supportive of the president. There will be an option later to vote other, which could happen. But everybody here so far seems to be pretty supportive of President Obama. That's why they're here, for the most part.
SIEGEL: Okay, thank you, Sarah.
MCCAMMON: Thank you.
SIEGEL: That's Sarah McCammon of Iowa Public Radio.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
I'm joined now in the studio by Andrew Kohut, who's the president of the Pew Research Center, and Matthew Continetti, the contributing editor to the Weekly Standard. Good to see both of you.
ANDREW KOHUT: Good to be here.
SIEGEL: And, Andy, let's begin with you. You've had a chance to look at early entry poll results. Let me say here, by the way, the caucuses only began in Iowa about 40 minutes ago, tonight's caucuses. And as we've heard, people are listening to speeches, then they get a chance to vote – so we really haven't had any votes counted yet in this, we don't see any results. But we do have some entrance poll results.
KOHUT: Yeah, we have the results of about 700 interviews, half of the interviews that the entrance pollsters will be collecting tonight. But what we see for these two front-running candidates, are really dramatically different patterns of support.
SIEGEL: The two candidates being Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.
KOHUT: Yes. For Ron Paul, he's running very well among younger voters, less affluent voters, first time voters, independents, people who describe themselves as moderates, but also very well among people who say they're truly looking for the true conservative. That's Ron Paul's strengths. Romney, on the other hand, is doing better with older voters, not younger voters, people earning more than $100,000 a year, regular Republicans, but not Tea Party Republicans. And his strongest strain here is he's doing very well among people who say the most important thing is the candidate who can beat Obama.
SIEGEL: Electability.
KOHUT: Electability.
SIEGEL: It's been a strong Romney argument and it seems to be holding up in the caucuses today.
KOHUT: Right. We see some support here for Santorum, as well. His constituencies are less well-defined, except he's doing well among evangelicals, among the very conservative and people who are looking for someone with strong moral character.
SIEGEL: Let's turn to Matt Continetti. You've had a chance to look at these entrance polls, as well. What's caught your attention?
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Well, a few oppositions have struck my eye. One is this that Andy mentions between electability and authenticity. If you want the candidate from the Republican perspective who you think has the best chance of beating Obama, you're gonna support Romney. Now, if you wanted someone who's the more authentic person or conservative, in your view as a Republican, where you've cycled through all these various changes over the course of the year, it seems like most people now, at least in Iowa, ending up with Ron Paul.
Another divergence that I think is interesting is between those who consider the economy the most important issue, jobs the most important issue, based on these early entrance polls, well, they of course, unsurprisingly, are backing Romney. Whereas, if you think the deficit and the debt are the most important issue, among these Iowa Republicans, they're going for Ron Paul, who raises that issue more than anyone else.
A final divergence between the Republicans and the independents, and the Republicans backing Mitt Romney, independents overwhelmingly going for Ron Paul. And, you know, that sets my eye looking to New Hampshire, too, where, of course, you have often a lot of independents and Democrats voting in the New Hampshire primary, as well.
SIEGEL: I should point out, one number that struck me was that almost half the people, when asked in the entrance poll, have you been to a caucus before, almost half said no. And Ron Paul did very well among those people. Whether that number will hold up later, I don't know Andy.
KOHUT: Yeah, it's 41% of people in this first entrance poll. That's a very substantial injection of new blood into this process if it holds up.
SIEGEL: Matt Continetti, one pretty strong divergence between Mitt Romney and Ron Paul is how the, if there is one, the Republican establishment views these two candidates remarkably differently.
CONTINETTI: Absolutely. With, you know, that invisible primary that's been going on for the course of the year with the party establishment, the party financiers basically rattling behind Mitt Romney. But then, of course, we just went through an electoral cycle in 2010 where we saw, again and again, Tea Party upsets, conservative insurgents bucking the establishment and voting for the people that they think have the more direct challenge to big government. And I think we're seeing that here with Ron Paul. If it happened in Alaska, or of course Kentucky, with Ron Paul's son in 2010, why couldn't it happen in 2012 with Ron Paul himself.
SIEGEL: If indeed Ron Paul and Mitt Romney continue to run ahead throughout the evening and Santorum does reasonably well, who at the bottom end of the pack here should be really worried tonight?
CONTINETTI: I have my eye on Michele Bachmann. You know, it must be very disappointing, even heartbreaking for Michele Bachmann, after winning the Ames straw poll in August, really coming out as the daughter of Iowa, she's had a steady drop to the bottom. And if she doesn't punch one of those three tickets out of Iowa, I think her campaign's days may be numbered.
KOHUT: Things aren't looking very good in this early poll for former Speaker Newt Gingrich, either. And he's not only not polling well in absolute numbers, there's not one group that stands out as liking Gingrich more than the rest. I mean his – the numbers are very flat for him, very flat for him.
SIEGEL: And we should add here that the Iowa caucuses are, at best, an imperfect forecaster of what happens down the road and Republicans pick a candidate.
KOHUT: And very often, unlike what happens next week in New Hampshire.
SIEGEL: Which has a much better record – and unlike the results that we see in New Hampshire. Andy Kohut of the Pew Research Center, and Matt Continetti, contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, as the Republicans begin their presidential selection season with tonight's caucuses in Iowa.
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Now the latest entry in our series Three Books where authors talk about three books on one theme. Today, the antidote to a recent trend in fiction, the painfully perky female character. Author Heather Havrilesky recommends the stories of three leading ladies who kick and scream their way to the very last page.
HEATHER HAVRILESKY: In this age of bland romantic comedy leads, when the feminine ideal seems to mix two parts sweetly smiling Jennifer Aniston with three parts saucer-eyed Rapunzel, nothing can bring more satisfaction than the anti-heroine. She's a female, short in temper and long in neurotic tics, whose life is defined by her worst choices.
Teddy, the protagonist of Kate Christensen's riveting novel "The Great Man," not only shamelessly flaunts her status as the mistress of a legendary New York artist, but she doesn't even consider making apologies to his wife after he dies. At 74, Teddy steadfastly refuses to become the dignified shell of a woman that society expects of her.
The other women in her lover's life - his loyal but put-upon wife and his competitive, bitter sister - mirror much of Teddy's verve and stubbornness. Incredibly, Christensen manages to make all of these sharp, older women frustrating yet eminently lovable.
Next, we come to what may be the single most detestable female character ever created: Harriet, the protagonist of Iris Owens' 1973 novel "After Claude." She's arrogant yet horribly insecure. But even as her situation goes from bad to unthinkable, and her behavior goes from desperate to unseemly to horrifying, Harriet reflects something essential about how it feels to be a single female. This book is an absolute must-read for every smart, moody woman who's ever been told she loves too much or thinks too much.
Phyllis Theroux may be the biggest over-thinker of them all, and that's saying a lot among this neurotic bunch. The author, who is also oddly enough Jennifer Aniston's possible future mother-in-law, has written a memoir called "The Journal Keeper" that's everything we're told a memoir shouldn't be - rambling, self-indulgent and only loosely chronological.
Luckily, Theroux has plenty of courage in her convictions, revealing a rich inner life that might never be as colorfully expressed in a more traditional format. The irony of it all: This book will make you wish you were Jennifer Aniston so that you might spend more time in the company of a sometimes irascible, always large-hearted anti-heroine like Phyllis Theroux.
Because in a world dominated by perky little girls with sunny dispositions and endless wells of optimism, nothing soothes the soul quite like a foul tempered old lady, spitting fire.
BLOCK: Heather Havrilesky is the author of the book "Disaster Preparedness." She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times magazine.
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Indonesia is Southeast Asia's largest economy, and in recent years, it's become one of the world's best-performing economies. In this era of downgrades, Indonesia's performance and stability recently earned it a major credit upgrade. But even this vibrant economy has vulnerabilities. NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports from Jakarta that Indonesia's crumbling infrastructure is holding it back.
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ANTHONY KUHN, BYLINE: This is the time of year Jakarta's commuters dread: the rainy season. Tropical downpours make the city's notorious gridlock even more hellish. Gaggles of motorcyclists in ponchos struggle through flooded streets, weaving among the cars and trucks. Commuters on Indonesia's overcrowded railways are only slightly better off.
At one train station, Mina balances a large bundle of fruit on her head as she waits for her train. This merchant who uses just one name looks aged far beyond her 37 years. Each day, she spends between an hour and a half to three hours getting from home to market. Getting to and from work can cost up to a fifth of her monthly income and, she says, it's depressing.
MINA: (Through Translator) I am very sad when it rains. I have to travel far to sell my fruit. When it rains, I get soaked getting on and off the train. It's scary and tiring. The rain only makes my load heavier.
KUHN: A security guard tries to pry loose a knot of passengers who get stuck in the doorway after trying to all squeeze in at once. Nimble young men in flip-flops scramble up the train's side and sit on the roof. The train pulls away, leaving Mina on the platform to wait for another one.
On December 15th, the Fitch rating service raised Indonesia's credit rating to investment grade. It praised Indonesia's political stability, low public debt and strong consumer demand from a burgeoning middle class. But Fitch warned of inadequate infrastructure.
Elly Sinaga, who is in charge of urban transport systems at the Ministry of Transportation, says transport bottlenecks are simply costing citizens too much.
ELLY SINAGA MINISTRY OF TRANSPORTATION, INDONESIA: According to our survey, the transportation costs here in Jakarta and the surroundings, it is almost 30 to 40 percent of their income. Also, for our freight transport, cost for the freight transport also still very high.
KUHN: Indonesia's economy is growing at about 6.5 percent a year. It spends about three percent of its GDP on infrastructure. If it were to increase that amount, its growth might compare more favorably to that of China, whose economy grows at eight percent with infrastructure spending of nine percent.
Hans Ulrich Furke is an urban planner from Germany who advises the Indonesian government. He says that traffic has swallowed up almost all of the city's open spaces, leaving residents nowhere to congregate but in shopping malls.
HANS ULRICH FURKE: Public space is just totally occupied by the rich, who have cars and motorbikes, so they don't have the chance to interact in public space.
KUHN: Furke also blames the mess on Indonesia's energy policies.
FURKE: Fuel is subsidized and that makes driving private vehicles so cheap that they compete with public transport. Riding a motorbike in Jakarta is cheaper than going by public transport.
KUHN: Vice Minister of Transportation Bambang Susantono says Jakarta is serious about improving the quality of life. He says pilot projects to clear the downtown area of traffic will be expanded.
BAMBANG SUSANTONO: I think we will start, not for the whole city center, but some part of city center so the people can, for example, think that this is really the way for the future. Yeah. The way we have the car-free day, for example, now, it's getting more and more popular.
KUHN: Sunday mornings in central Jakarta are blissfully car-free. The fumes dissipate. The decibel level drops. It's the sound of what could be. Public buses trundle along. Kids rollerblade and a curbside barista pedals past, selling cups of instant coffee from his bicycle.
Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Jakarta.
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Florida, Texas, Arkansas, and other Southern states are struggling to keep up with a Hispanic population boom. Among many of the challenges states face is finding enough teachers who can help Spanish-speaking students adapt to an American classroom. That is especially difficult in rural areas. In Mississippi, where resources are scarce, Hispanic student enrollment has skyrocketed.
Mississippi Public Broadcasting's Annie Gilbertson takes us to one school where white teachers are the standard and bilingual education is the goal.
ANNIE GILBERTSON, BYLINE: Vardaman, Mississippi is tucked away in the northeast part of the state. It's a small farming community with a population of 1,300. At least a third of the residents are Hispanic and those numbers keep growing each year. You don't have to go far to see the changes.
ANGEL BARNETTE: OK, eyes this way and let's start.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHILDREN PRACTICING PHONICS)
BARNETTE: Not the, but...
(SOUNDBITE OF CHILDREN PRACTICING PHONICS)
BARNETTE: One more time...
GILBERTSON: Angel Barnette is a second grade teacher at Vardaman Elementary School. Each kindergarten class has had more Spanish-speakers than the year before. And Vardaman Elementary is about to become the first predominantly Latino elementary school in Mississippi.
For teachers like Barnette, new Spanish-speaking students mean new approaches to learning.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHILDREN PRACTICING PHONICS)
BARNETTE: Only time that you can stick your tongue out at your teacher.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
GILBERTSON: Many of these students are American-born, but close to half the class is made up of native Spanish-speakers, a language Barnette doesn't speak but does her best to encourage. She says she often picks books with English and Spanish words to read to the class.
BARNETTE: They love it when they see the teacher who can't speak it, or say it in such a country drawl. 'Cause that - they don't roll off my tongue easily. It makes them feel special that they can say those words and the others can't. They love that.
GILBERTSON: Across the country, debate continues on how to best teach English-language learners. Some states, like Arizona, have English-immersion policies where no Spanish is spoken in the classroom. Other states, such as Texas, use a bilingual approach. Mississippi leaves it up to individual districts to determine the best method.
Vardaman Elementary principal Pamela Lee says a big concern for her is finding enough bilingual instructors.
PAMELA LEE: I worry about that every day.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
LEE: I had one position for a certified teacher open last year and I interviewed 10 people. And no one in that pool of 10 people was bilingual.
GILBERTSON: Rural teachers are already in short supply in Mississippi. The starting salary is under 30,000, and Lee says that makes it even harder to recruit bilingual educators. Lee ended up hiring another English-only teacher because Mississippi doesn't require schools with Spanish-speakers to employ a bilingual instructor.
And for education researchers, like Megan Hopkins, that's the problem.
DR. MEGAN HOPKINS: Bilingual instruction isn't valued, so teachers are not pursuing that credential. And my work shows that likely we have fewer and fewer of them. That may not be a good thing for kids.
GILBERTSON: Hopkins studies at Northwestern University. She says schools need Spanish-speaking educators to create the next generation of bilingual professionals - like doctors, executives and teachers.
HOPKINS: So, it's sort of this cyclical issue. And I think that grow your own policies, I fundamentally believe, are kind of the best for communities in local context.
GILBERTSON: Vardaman Elementary does have one bilingual teacher to help with the children of migrant workers. But as the Hispanic population has grown, so have Annie Anderson's responsibilities. Her job is to improve the English of every Spanish-speaking student in the school. Anderson says students can sound out words well, but struggle with understanding what it is they are reading.
ANNIE ANDERSON: What happened last in our story? Come on, what was going on? Remember art?
GILBERTSON: Once a week, Anderson coaches 170 students one-by-one through these English assignments.
Educators here in Mississippi worry schools will fall further behind if they can't find more bilingual teachers.
For NPR News, I'm Annie Gilbertson.
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CBS is relaunching its morning television show on Monday with veteran newsman Charlie Rose. It's a bold move. Rose's cerebral high brow approach will set CBS apart from the chatty, breezy style of "The Today Show" and "Good Morning America."
Commentator Andrew Wallenstein says the network is shaking things up because they're a little desperate.
ANDREW WALLENSTEIN, BYLINE: Charlie Rose may very well be the best interviewer on the planet. If there's something important in the news, chances are he's left his mark on the story.
CHARLIE ROSE: Does this have any political implications as to how China sees itself? Is this going to be one of those years in which conservatives will say, we didn't have one candidate like Ronald Regan to coalesce around? Tell me what you want people to know about Dr. King.
WALLENSTEIN: Rose's style is not the kind you'd expect to see on morning TV. Matt Lauer is better known for cracking wise with Russell Brand or cracking eggs alongside Paula Deen.
MATT LAUER: You do buttermilk mashed potatoes. Why do you like buttermilk in so many recipes?
PAULA DEEN: Well, the buttermilk just gives it a little tang, just a little bite.
WALLENSTEIN: You won't be seeing an in-studio kitchen or even a jolly weatherman on CBS's new show. That's because the network is taking a more serious tact than its competitors and they might as well try something different. Despite relaunch after relaunch, the program has been trailing "Today" and "Good Morning America" for 30 years.
But understand that what CBS is doing now runs counter to the fluff-filled formula that's driven morning TV for decades, not that CBS is zagging entirely to its competitors' zig. While Rose will anchor the seven o'clock hour, at eight the network will bring in Gayle King.
GAYLE KING: We did a story here recently on the show about Mondays because Mondays are the crankiest days for people.
WALLENSTEIN: She's best known for being Oprah's sidekick and she had her own show on Oprah's cable network.
KING: But you have something that your culture - what do you call it? Your culture Mondays? What is it called?
LAURA CHING: Looking forward to Mondays.
WALLENSTEIN: The OWN channel has been struggling since its launch. Why she's jumping out of the frying pan that is Oprah's network into the fire at CBS, only her agent can explain, but here's what I'd like CBS to explain: Why the schizophrenic shift in tone that will come from sober analysis at seven to peppy patter from King an hour later?
It's also strange for CBS to get high-minded at a time when "The Today Show" may be going in the other direction. With Lauer potentially leaving at the end of his contract this year, the network is reportedly talking to Ryan Seacrest.
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RYAN SEACREST: Back here on "American Idol"...
WALLENSTEIN: Now, I respect any network in this day and age for doing something that doesn't contribute to the continual dumbing down of America, but this strategy is a Hail Mary pass headed out of bounds. There's no way it's going to work, but I sort of wish it would.
SIEGEL: Andrew Wallenstein is the TV editor of Variety.
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And I'm Robert Siegel. China's booming economy has long cast a shadow of corruption. The problem is endemic to every level of society. The fact is many aspects of daily life in China require a payoff and the ruling communist party's anti-corruption campaigns have had little effect.
NPR's Frank Langfitt reports on new allegations that the problem has spread to journalism and China's powerful state-run TV.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: The Da Vinci Furniture Company showroom in Shanghai looks like a salon in Versailles. A gild-covered Italian made grandfather clock costs more than $40,000, so it was big news when China Central Television, the government's flagship network known as CCTV, reported some of Da Vinci's ornate furniture didn't come from Italy, but from a common factory in south China.
CCTV even found a factory salesman who appeared to corroborate the claim.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN 1: (Through Translator) Painstaking efforts paid off. Reporters eventually found the mysterious supplier that makes furniture for Da Vinci.
LANGFITT: Da Vinci denied the charges, but its sales tanked. Then, this week, Caixin, an aggressive Chinese business magazine, did something unusual. It published its own investigation of the CCTV story. Caixin pointed out that the salesman had recanted and the general manager of the Chinese company that had supposedly built furniture for Da Vinci denied it in a web video.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN 2: (Through Translator) When I saw your report on Da Vinci and my company, I felt utterly stunned and angry. The content of your report wasn't verified at all and was seriously misleading.
LANGFITT: More damaging, Da Vinci claimed it paid the CCTV reporter more than $150,000 through a public relations company to halt further stories. Da Vinci provided bank transfer documents and a secretly-recorded conversation.
Zhang Zhi'an is an associate journalism professor at South China Sun Yat-sen University. He says the episode highlights a common problem with Chinese journalism today.
ZHANG ZHI'AN: (Through Translator) When there's negative news, a company hires a public relations firm to buy advertisements or pay off journalists to suppress the news from coming out.
LANGFITT: Over the years, reporters at smaller news organizations have been arrested for trying to extort money from various businesses, including a gas station, a food processing company, a coal mine and a TV shopping network.
Zhi'an says the Da Vinci case stands out because it involves the communist party's biggest news institution.
ZHI'AN: (Through Translator) CCTV is the national commercial network. It's a strange monster that has lots of power behind it, so to expose corruption at CCTV takes a lot of courage.
LANGFITT: The case also highlights a broader problem with China's one party state. Its actions have few external checks. Zhi'an put it simply in English.
ZHI'AN: I think that CCTV has too much power. Its power should be, you know, restricted and also should have been monitored by other media.
LANGFITT: The CCTV journalist who reported the Da Vinci story denies taking money and calls the claim, quote, "slander." So far, CCTV has no comment. Does all this mean Da Vinci is blameless?
LAIM BUSSELL: Da Vinci's definitely done something, maybe not to the extent that they're being accused of, but there's definitely something suspicious going on.
LANGFITT: Liam Bussell works in Shanghai as a strategic marketing manager for Mentel, a global consumer research firm. He points out that customs officials have accused Da Vinci of using a Chinese free trade zone to make local furniture appear imported.
Given the corruption in Chinese media and the volume of counterfeit products here, Bussell says it's often hard to find someone in these disputes who's totally clean.
Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Shanghai.
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A Japanese-American man who defied the U.S. government, and stood up for his rights during World War II, died this week at age 93. Gordon Hirabayashi refused to obey the federal government's order to go to an internment camp, where Japanese-Americans were incarcerated. And so he was imprisoned during the war. Hirabayashi was a college senior at the time and later, his appeal made its way to the Supreme Court, where he lost. It took four decades for his conviction to be overturned.
BLOCK: Gordon Hirabayashi's nephew, Lane Hirabayashi, holds an academic chair at UCLA that's dedicated to the study of Japanese-American detention. He joins me now from NPR West. Welcome to the program.
LANE HIRABAYASHI: Thank you.
BLOCK: Your uncle was born in Seattle to Japanese immigrants, and I gather that you've been going through his diaries and his letters from the 1940s. What did he say in those papers about why he refused - first, the government's curfew order, and then the order that sent Japanese-Americans to the camps?
LANE HIRABAYASHI: I think there were two foundations to Gordon's decision in that regard. One was constitutional, and the other was religious. At a constitutional level, he - like many second-generation Nisei - went to American public schools and was fully exposed to the Bill of Rights and the principles of the U.S. Constitution. So at that level, he felt that both curfew and mass incarceration were unconstitutional in nature.
And I think at a religious or spiritual level, Gordon was a Christian. My grandparents had converted to Christianity in Japan even before they came to the United States. And he believed very sincerely in God, in a brotherhood of man. And he felt that the orders were objectionable on that basis as well.
BLOCK: Hmm. His parents were sent to the camps, and it sounds like - from what I've read - that there was a lot of anguish on all of their sides. They didn't know whether they'd ever see each other again, since he was not going.
LANE HIRABAYASHI: Well, I think that in particular, my grandmother - Gordon's mom - was terrified that the family would be split up. And Gordon had said that the FBI interrogations, and the kind of pressure that government officials and lawyers put on him, was strong. But he said his mother's tears, and her pleading that he not break up the family, was probably the most difficult obstacle that he had to face in making this decision.
BLOCK: Hmm. He serves time in jail. His appeal goes to the Supreme Court, and they rule against him. What did he say later about that ruling and the effect that it had on him?
LANE HIRABAYASHI: Well, I think that he was very disappointed in the ruling. I think that he really looked to the Supreme Court to be the ultimate defender of his constitutional rights. And what they did in his particular case was to focus on just the curfew issue, and that they upheld the need of the president, and of the government, to impose curfew as needed, whenever needed, to protect the interests of national security. And he felt that that was not a constitutionally sound decision.
BLOCK: Your uncle did tell his story about this time for an oral history project. Let's take a listen to some of what he said about this time period.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED INTERVIEW)
GORDON HIRABAYASHI: For a while, I thought the Constitution failed me. Then it occurred to me that it wasn't necessarily the Constitution that failed me. It was the people who were placed in the responsibility of upholding the Constitution. And 40 years later, my views were upheld.
BLOCK: Lane Hirabayashi, as a professor who teaches this period of American history, what do you tell your students about this chapter and in particular, about your uncle and his story?
LANE HIRABAYASHI: Well, the thing I like to remind students is that Gordon was a student very much like themselves. And students can really make a difference in terms of U.S. history, in terms of civil rights; and Gordon is a good case study of that kind of perspective.
BLOCK: Professor Hirabayashi, thanks so much for talking with us.
LANE HIRABAYASHI: Thank you very much.
BLOCK: Lane Hirabayashi is a professor of Asian-American studies at UCLA. We were talking about his uncle, Gordon Hirabayashi, who defied internment during World War II. He died this week, at age 93.
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Call it diplomacy with a laugh. Today, three Indian-American comedians began a seven-city tour of India, sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports on the Make Chai, Not War Comedy Tour.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: Three comedians, very different styles.
(SOUNDBITE OF COMEDY ACT)
RAJIV SATYAL: People always ask me if it was tough growing up with the name Rajiv Kumar Satyal in southwest Ohio. What do you think? Right?
BLAIR: Rajiv Satyal is waif thin, a former marketer for Proctor & Gamble, and the founder of Make Chai, Not War.
(SOUNDBITE OF COMEDY ACT)
SATYAL: Pretty much, I was the only kid in class whose name was never called during roll call, OK?
BLAIR: And there's Azhar Usman from Chicago, a big, burly guy with long hair and a full beard.
(SOUNDBITE OF COMEDY ACT)
AZHAR USMAN: I'm perfectly aware most of you have never seen somebody who looks like me smile before. ]
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLAIR: And Hari Kondabolu, an edgy, cerebral comic from Queens, New York.
HARI KONDABOLU: I was doing a festival in Denmark in April, and I got heckled by a member of the audience who stood up and yelled, go back to America, - which is incredible because I have been told to go back to so many countries, and never to America.
BLAIR: The comedy tour Make Chai, Not War has been around since 2007. It's a little like Kings of Comedy, but with Indian Americans. Azhar Usman says so far, they've performed a handful of shows around the U.S.
USMAN: Whenever we've staged it, you know, we've always gotten a solid turnout by Indians of all stripes - Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, you know, atheists - what have you.
BLAIR: On a separate solo tour in London, Usman caught the attention of Michael Macy who, at the time, was the cultural attache for the U.S. Embassy there.
MICHAEL MACY: He's hilarious.
BLAIR: When Michael Macy moved to the embassy in New Delhi, he brought Usman over for some solo shows of India. And that got the ball rolling to bring over three comedians for this seven-city tour. It's costing the State Department about $88,000. Macy says the embassy agreed to sponsor Make Chai, Not War because stand-up comedy is a unique part of American culture.
MACY: This commitment to free speech, this commitment to free discussion of what can be difficult or sensitive topics, it's very American.
(SOUNDBITE OF COMEDY ACT)
USMAN: Me walking into the airport - heads turn simultaneously. Security goes, like, we got a Mohammad at 4 o'clock; 10-4, Mohammad at 4. Over and out. You get the smelly one. I got the hairy one.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLAIR: Azhar Usman is the only one of the three who's performed in India before. And, since so much of comedy is about cultural references and language, Hari Kondabolu says he's excited - but also nervous because he's American.
KONDABOLU: Part of what we do as comedians - or at least, what I do - is to figure out where those boundaries are, and see what I want to push, because I'm trying to make a point. I don't really know where the boundaries are in a different country.
BLAIR: So he's been reading up on Indian news.
KONDABOLU: And then I've been chatting with my mom a lot.
BLAIR: She's originally from Hyderabad, India. One of the jokes Kondabolu says he might do is about an ex-girlfriend from London.
(SOUNDBITE OF COMEDY ACT)
KONDABOLU: When she's over at my place every night of the week eating my food, telling me what to do, hitting me - and that's when I knew this wasn't love. This English woman was trying to colonize me.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLAIR: With some minor tweaks, Kondabolu says his mom gave this one the green light.
(SOUNDBITE OF COMEDY ACT)
KONDABOLU: And after a month, she finally left, and she took most of my best stuff with her - food, art, self-esteem all gone. And she left a few things. She left some clothes and some books and, of course, an extensive railway system.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERS)
BLAIR: There will be no State Department censorship on this tour, says Azhar Usman.
USMAN: We're invited over there as artists, and the whole premise of a tour like this is that we are comedians, and we enjoy freedom of speech and as Americans, we can say whatever we want to say.
BLAIR: All three comedians say it's a thrill to be able to perform in their parents' homeland. Rajiv Satyal says the goal of the Make Chai, Not War tour of India is simple - some great new jokes and, hopefully, a lot of laughs.
Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.
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And I'm Melissa Block. Before the holidays, it seemed Congress had given a present to TransCanada. That's the company behind the proposed Keystone pipeline. The controversial project would carry oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and Congress gave the White House a 60-day deadline to approve or reject it.
As NPR's Elizabeth Shogren reports, that's not the kind of present TransCanada was hoping for.
ELIZABETH SHOGREN, BYLINE: Last year, environmentalists and ranchers in Nebraska succeeded in delaying the Keystone XL pipeline by arguing that it put a huge aquifer at risk. The company is still looking for a new route through Nebraska and it doesn't expect to have it pinned down until next fall.
So the company's James Millar says TransCanada doesn't know what to make of Congress's decision to try to force the Obama administration to put the project on the fast track.
JAMES MILLAR: We're heading into uncharted territory.
SHOGREN: Millar says it's just the latest consequence of just how politicized the Keystone pipeline has become.
MILLAR: We have essentially become the lightning rod for that broader debate around the consumption of fossil fuels.
SHOGREN: The massive amount of oil that would flow through the pipeline would come from tar sands in Canada. It takes a lot more energy to pull oil out of tar sands than it does to pump a well. That translates into extra greenhouse gas pollution.
That's why environmentalists made Keystone their prime target last year. Their protests help persuade the president to delay a decision on whether the pipeline is in the national interest.
In recent weeks, Republicans and some labor unions have turned the project into another kind of litmus test, one that measures the president's commitment to creating new jobs.
David Mallino, a lobbyist for the Laborers International Union of North America, attributes all the controversy around the project to its enormous size.
DAVID MALLINO: Seven billion dollars of private investment don't come along every day. They don't come along every year or every decade.
SHOGREN: So what's a president to do, especially when key parts of his political base are on opposite sides of the issue? People like Mallino are urging the White House to take advantage of the deadline and give the project a quick green light.
MALLINO: The pipeline itself is essential to putting thousands of our members back to work. I mean, it's not just a pipeline. It's a lifeline for those members. This is the right thing to do.
SHOGREN: But many environmentalists and legal scholars say the president can't approve it. It would be like granting a building permit when a construction company hasn't chosen a lot yet. The State Department had warned Republicans that their deadline would make it unable to issue a permit.
Patrick Parenteau is an environmental law professor at Vermont Law School.
PATRICK PARENTEAU: It would be essentially defenseless in a lawsuit if it tried to make a decision, having acknowledged that it doesn't have adequate information.
SHOGREN: Environmental groups say they would sue. Energy expert Amy Myers Jaffe is a director at Rice University's Baker Institute. She thinks the president will reject the pipeline this round, but that's probably not the end of Keystone. The Canadian oil is too valuable.
AMY MYERS JAFFE: The sequence of advance could easily be the president rejects this pipeline. We then have a crisis in the Middle East. We suddenly realize we're not having the oil from Canada when we could have and then people are angry about that.
SHOGREN: If the short deadline forces the Obama administration to reject Keystone on legal grounds, TransCanada would probably reapply. The company says it's committed to the project for the long haul, no matter what political and legal storms it has to weather.
Elizabeth Shogren, NPR News, Washington.
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In Egypt, a disturbing new trend has emerged. In recent clashes between protesters and security forces, children have been fighting on the front lines. Following clashes in December, one out of every four protesters thrown in jail was a child. And activists say several have been killed or wounded recently by gunfire and tear gas. Child advocates claim most, if not all, of these kids live on Cairo's streets.
As NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reports, they see the revolution as a way to escape their isolation from society.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHANTING PROTESTERS)
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: Every Friday, crowds of Egyptians gather in Cairo to chant slogans against their military rulers.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHANTING PROTESTERS)
NELSON: But this small group recently tried bringing attention to a problem few protestors like to talk about, the plight of street children who take part in demonstrations.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHANTING PROTESTERS)
NELSON: They shout that the ruling generals should be ashamed for killing or jailing those kids.
AMIRA ABDELHAMID: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: Rally organizer Amira Abdelhamid hands the children who show up helium-filled balloons. One is 11-year-old Ahmed Adel.
AHMED ADEL: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: He says he likes going to protests to check out what's going on. Adel admits he throws stones at the soldiers and then runs away.
Abdelhamid lauds children like Adel for braving bullets, beatings and tear gas on the front lines with other protestors. The 20-year-old university student says the children are valuable partners in the Egyptian revolution, given their speed, agility, and small size, which make it harder for security forces to stop them.
She adds that it is important to recognize their contribution, which is why she and a teen acquaintance organized the rally.
ABDELHAMID: I wasn't communicating the message of whether it was good or bad because I don't know. It's bad for them but its good, it helps us as well on the front lines. I was just saying thank you.
NELSON: She adds it's frustrating that only a few dozen people showed up at the rally. Many more demonstrated nearby against Egyptian troops for attacking female protestors last month. The photo of one veiled woman stripped down to her blue brassiere and being dragged by soldiers who kicked and beat her, drew worldwide condemnation.
Protestor Abdelhamid says the story of an Egyptian boy who was shot by soldiers during the same series of protests drew far less attention.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
NELSON: In this YouTube video of the incident, rescue workers try to stop the frightened teen from bleeding to death from a bullet wound in his chest.
Again, protestor Abdelhamid.
ABDELHAMID: A lot of controversy happened about the women's march and about that girl who was stripped, why, why, why, was she there - blah, blah, blah. But I don't think anyone would say: Why were the children there.
NELSON: It's a question the ruling generals are asking, however.
GENERAL ADEL EMARA: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: At a recent news conference, General Adel Emara accused activists he did not name of paying children and teens to throw rocks and Molotov cocktails at security forces.
EMARA: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: The general also showed a poor-quality video of a boy named Sami, confessing to his interrogator that he received the equivalent of $33 to attack the buildings.
Many children's rights activists here suspect that confession was coerced. They accuse the generals of using the kids to try to discredit the pro-democracy movement and justify soldiers' use of deadly force.
Lawyer Tarek El Awady is representing 82 children arrested for taking part in last month's violent demonstrations, outside the cabinet and parliament buildings.
TAREK EL AWADY: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: He says these street children sought shelter, food and companionship from protestors encamped downtown.
Activist Amira Abdelhamid adds the kids tell her and other protestors that they are the only Egyptians who make them feel they are important.
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block. The day after the Iowa caucuses, the Republican primary field has narrowed. Last night saw Mitt Romney eek out an eight-vote victory over Rick Santorum. And this morning, Michele Bachmann, who finished sixth, announced she was quitting the campaign. Now, the remaining candidates trade the frigid cornfields of Iowa for the frigid hills of New Hampshire.
SIEGEL: We're going to spend the next few minutes focusing on Rick Santorum. The former Pennsylvania senator managed a remarkable turnaround last night. Not long ago, he was languishing in the polls, a political afterthought. He's now campaigning in New Hampshire, racing to introduce himself to voters there. NPR's Brian Naylor has our story from Manchester.
BRIAN NAYLOR, BYLINE: Tyler Carlisle is having a busy day at Rick Santorum's New Hampshire state headquarters. In between greeting newly converted supporters who want to help out...
TYLER CARLISLE: Hello, sir.
Hi, I'm Tyler. How can I help you?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: I'm looking to join.
CARLISLE: Well, that's great. I'm looking to get you to join.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: All right.
NAYLOR: He also recorded a message for volunteers.
CARLISLE: Hi, my name is Tyler. I'm calling from Rick Santorum's campaign to let you know that Senator Santorum's town hall on Friday has been moved to the Windham High School due to large attendance.
NAYLOR: It's a pretty good problem to have - having to move your event to a larger venue - and it's where Rick Santorum's campaign finds itself after his surge from the lowest ranks of the opinion polls' pre-Iowa caucus to missing a victory there by just a whisker. Santorum's New Hampshire media coordinator, Bill Cahill, also found himself a popular guy today, as reporters lined up for interviews. He says all the welcome attention has also meant something more tangible.
BILL CAHILL: We've had dozens of people walk through the door today; just say, we're - can I drop off a check? That never happened here before last week. So that's the kind of thing that's sort of symptomatic of what's going on.
NAYLOR: Cahill attributes a lot of the newfound interest in Santorum not just to his strong finish in Iowa but to his speech last night, which Cahill calls the most important 15 minutes of the campaign so far. Those who stayed up late enough heard Santorum touch on some traditional Republican themes, like small government and low taxes.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
RICK SANTORUM: I believe in cutting taxes. I believe in balancing budgets. I propose cutting $5 trillion from this budget over the next five years. I support a balanced budget amendment that puts a cap at 18 percent of GDP as a guarantee of freedom for this country.
NAYLOR: But Santorum, as he has throughout his campaign, also spoke with fervor about his faith and his family.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
SANTORUM: These are the basic values that Americans stand for, and those are the values that we need if we're going to go up against Barack Obama and win this election, and restore the founding principles of our country to America.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
NAYLOR: Santorum, who's Catholic, has been a longtime favorite of social conservatives and evangelical voters. He spent two terms in the House, and two terms in the Senate. While there, he helped write the welfare reform legislation that President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996. He's staunchly anti-abortion, including in cases involving rape and incest. He co-sponsored a proposed constitutional amendment to bar certain abortions late in pregnancy. And an opponent of same-sex marriage, he co-sponsored a proposed constitutional amendment to ban it.
While those views won him support from evangelicals in Iowa, it remains to be seen how they'll go over in less socially conservative New Hampshire. His campaign believes his family focus appeals to all voters and most importantly, they say, Santorum is now in the game.
Brian Naylor, NPR News, Manchester.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
NPR's Greg Allen is also in Manchester and he reports on what New Hampshire means for three other Republicans, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: While the other candidates were campaigning in Iowa, former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman was here in the granite state. Today, he was in Pittsfield at Globe Manufacturing, a 150-year-old company that makes firefighter suits. He stopped to chat with one of the workers, Paul Bisque(ph), who was wearing a Harley-Davidson hat. Huntsman owns a Harley and asked Bisque what color is yours?
JON HUNTSMAN: What color?
PAUL BISQUE: Silver.
HUNTSMAN: Mine's black with steel pipes.
BISQUE: I had a black one until I totaled it.
ALLEN: Huntsman has held some 150 events in New Hampshire over the past month and what does he have to show for it? Polling numbers in the single digits behind Romney, Paul and Gingrich. But now, Huntsman told Globe employees in the plant's cafeteria, the race begins in earnest.
HUNTSMAN: You all have a chance to change the world. Let me tell you, as an outsider, you're the window through which everybody else gets to assess and analyze the people running for the highest office in the land.
ALLEN: That's also a role Iowa plays in the presidential process and Huntsman wasn't part of it. But despite Romney's win there, Huntsman says the race is still wide open.
HUNTSMAN: And essentially, you've got 75 percent of the party, at least as stated by Iowa, that is still looking for an alternative, still looking for an alternative. And I say that means there's a whole lot of blue sky for the rest of us in the race and this is anything but settled.
NEWT GINGRICH: Welcome to New Hampshire.
ALLEN: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich started early today in Concord, holding the first of a series of scheduled town meetings. Gingrich says he'll work hard over the next week to differentiate himself from Romney, the person Gingrich holds most responsible for the negative attack ads that knocked him in Iowa from first place to also-ran status. When asked by a reporter today why he didn't congratulate Romney on his Iowa win, Gingrich only raised his eyebrows.
GINGRICH: I find it amazing the news media continues to say he's the most electable Republican when he can't even break out in his own party and I don't think he's going to. He'll do fairly well here. This is one of his three best states. But the fact is that Governor Romney, in the end, has a very limited appeal in a conservative party.
ALLEN: Gingrich comes to New Hampshire with little money and no plans announced yet for any television ads, but he's likely to be a lively presence in the two upcoming presidential debates and he's likely to be gunning for Romney. Gingrich says he expects to pick up new supporters now that there's one fewer conservative in the race.
GINGRICH: And I think that Bachmann's folks will probably end up being split largely between Santorum and me. And almost none of them will go to Romney because he just doesn't fit. He doesn't fit culturally. He doesn't fit ideologically with the people who found Michele Bachmann to be attractive.
ALLEN: And what about Ron Paul? After a strong third place finish in Iowa, the unconventional candidate will not even be here until Friday. At Ron Paul headquarters in Concord, about a dozen staff and a dozen more volunteers were busy today working the phones, putting out yard signs, the things they've been doing for weeks. Field organizer Brian Early said as far as he's concerned, Iowa really doesn't change much.
BRIAN EARLY: We always knew that if we, you know, if we just did our work, what we do, you know, very - come in and just do as much work as we can every day that we would slowly increase in the polls in a nice sort of sustained fashion. And that's - you know, we came away with that, so we're very pleased with how the campaign's turned out so far.
ALLEN: With a week 'til the New Hampshire primary, Romney holds a substantial lead in the polls, but as Iowa showed in this primary season, a lot can happen in a week. Greg Allen, NPR News, Manchester, New Hampshire.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
As a slightly thinner Republican field battles onward from Iowa, we're going to hear now from Republican strategist Mike Murphy about the shape of the fight to come. Mike Murphy, welcome to the program.
MIKE MURPHY: Thank you. Good to be here.
BLOCK: And we should say up front, you have been an advisor in the past to Mitt Romney. You helped him get elected governor of Massachusetts. You're not, I gather, with the Romney campaign now, but you do still consider him a good friend.
MURPHY: No, I'm a friend, but - yeah, I'm friends and I give him a little free advice from time to time, but I'm not working for the campaign in any way.
BLOCK: Okay. Well, let me ask you this. Mitt Romney ended up with a smaller percentage of the vote in Iowa last night than he did four years ago. Why should the campaign look at that as progress? You could say that, you know, caucus-goers are even less enthusiastic about him now that they know more about him.
MURPHY: Well, I think part of the circus atmosphere we have in American politics now is a lot of over-analysis based on the expectations game. Well, he didn't win Lynn County. He won it last time. There must be something wrong in Cedar Rapids. Maybe it's Mormonism. You know, we get all these theories. The bottom line is he essentially tied with Rick Santorum. He can claim that he won and he has a lot of resources in the campaign.
I think the disaster for him would have been to lose and he didn't do that. I'm not sure they managed their expectations that well, but the bottom line is delegates and he came out of Iowa, he can claim he won and he's heading to New Hampshire, where he's quite strong.
BLOCK: OK, we just heard Newt Gingrich scoff at the notion, though, that Mitt Romney is the most electable of the Republican candidates. He said he has a very limited appeal in a conservative party. When you look at this field, the Republican electorate in 2012, do you see a party that's at war with itself, that's having an identity crisis?
MURPHY: No, I don't. I see some of the normal fissures. There's always some stress in the Republican Party between the movement conservative wing and the regular Republican wing. And Romney is kind of the classic regular Republican, center right. And then you've got a lot of energy on the movement conservative side, which isn't always going to nominate the candidate who's most attractive in the general election.
I mean, one thing about Newt Gingrich is he is not an attractive general election candidate for the Republican Party.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
MURPHY: Now, I think Gingrich is right that Mitt does have vulnerabilities in Republican primaries. But the question is, is he conservative enough to be acceptable because people think he has the best shot to win the general election? So, I think it's going to come down to Romney and somebody. My guess is the somebody is Rick Santorum, and we'll see.
BLOCK: Do you think that Rick Santorum has staying power in this campaign?
MURPHY: I think the race wants to reduce itself to Romney, as the regular Republican and the front runner, and a movement conservative alternative that, out of Iowa, certainly looks to be Rick Santorum. So I think from a message point of view and a coalition point of view, Santorum has a lot of potential.
His problem - and I said this on television - is that organizing a campaign overnight in a whole bunch of states is like standing on your head drinking from a fire hose without drowning, while learning Chinese - very hard to do in very little time. What Santorum really needs is a one-on-one race with Romney, and he needs money and organization that he has put together quickly. Not impossible but a daunting challenge.
BLOCK: Mike Murphy, what do you make of the gathering that's coming up of social and religious conservative leaders? They're going to meet in Texas next week and to try to unite on a candidate to support, or not support. They say they don't want to split the vote and leave a clear path for Mitt Romney to become the nominee.
Does this become just a really big division in the party that leaves it too fractured to win in November?
MURPHY: Well, I think you're going to hear a lot from the professional conservative world about uniting. Now, whether or not they can achieve that or not, big open question. Generally, all these leaders have no army - most of them can't deliver a pizza, let alone a vote. Primary voters do what they want to do. But there will be a lot of noise and attempt to give Santorum a unified right to go after Romney. But, you know, that doesn't necessarily mean it'll happen because candidates make their own decisions, as do voters.
As far as a party being too fractured in the general election, you know, you hear that a lot but I think it's a myth. I remember when Barack Obama won the convention. There was all this talk about, well, the Hillary Clinton supporters will never vote for him. They're all going to vote for McCain. The women all hate him. And it's always wrong. Democrats vote for Democrats. Republicans vote for Republicans in the general election.
And the fight comes down to the ticket splitters in the middle. Romney has an opportunity here because, I think, the wrong way for him to handle the Santorum challenge would be to move more to the right, then try out social conservative Rick Santorum, which you cannot do.
Instead, I think, Romney has an opportunity to triangulate a little bit, and keep an eye on those general election swing voters that are going to be the secret to whether or not he actually - if he's nominated, becomes president or not.
BLOCK: OK. Republican strategist Mike Murphy, thanks so much.
MURPHY: Thank you.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
President Obama made an end-run around Congress today. After months of battling with Republicans over his choice to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he resorted to a so-called recess appointment. Senate Republicans have insisted on pro-forma sessions every few days to prevent such a move.
As NPR's Tamara Keith reports, it's not clear who has the Constitution on their side.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Depending on who you ask, President Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray is either long overdue or an unconstitutional executive overreach. But first, a little background. Mr. Obama's nomination this summer was in trouble before it was even announced. Senate Republicans pledged to block any nominee to head the new consumer bureau. They wanted a board instead of a single director, and Congress to control the bureau's purse strings.
When Cordray came up for a vote, Republicans followed through and successfully filibustered, preventing an up or down vote even though a majority of senators supported Cordray. So today, President Obama did what many frustrated presidents before him have done.
PROFESSOR CARL TOBIAS: The Constitution has a recess appointments clause. And the president is exercising his authority under that clause.
KEITH: Carl Tobias is a constitutional law professor at the University of Richmond. He says there's something about this recess appointment that makes it unique: As far as the Senate is concerned, it isn't actually in recess. At least one senator has been showing up every few days for what's called a pro-forma session, a tactical move employed back when President Bush was in office, and now by Senate Republicans, to block a recess appointment by not technically recessing.
TOBIAS: The pro-forma session lasts for about 30 seconds, when someone from nearby comes in and gavels in the Senate to order, and then leaves for the next three days.
KEITH: Tobias says the validity of these pro-forma sessions hasn't been tested. And that's exactly what the president is doing with this nomination.
TOBIAS: And I think the president is saying, I have that authority, because he believes they recessed in December.
KEITH: Senate Republicans and their allies are furious. In a statement, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says the president has, quote, arrogantly circumvented the American people. David Hirschman, head of the Center for Capital Markets at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, echoes this concern.
DAVID HIRSCHMAN: It opens grave constitutional questions about whether this recess appointment was legal. And my guess is, it will make it much harder for the agency to move forward.
KEITH: Hirschman and the chamber have been among the most vocal critics of the way the Consumer Bureau was designed. He says the president should have negotiated with senators who demanded changes to the agency.
HIRSCHMAN: So today's action is a choice of headline-grabbing over effective regulation.
KEITH: Many are saying this bold move by the president to defy Republicans in Congress could further poison already bad relations, and could lead to an election year filled with confirmation wars. Robert Weissman, president of the consumer group Public Citizen, says that was a risk worth taking.
ROBERT WEISMAN: The administration's position can't be: We will accept whatever abuse you heap on us because we're worried about having more abuse heaped on us.
KEITH: And, he says, it's not like the legislative process has been working all that well.
WEISMAN: What's the worst-case scenario, that he's not going to be able to pass legislation? Well, it's not as if legislation is moving forward, and it's not as if the Republicans aren't willing to filibuster all kinds of nominations.
KEITH: Cloud of uncertainty or no, the new director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says he looks forward to regulating non-bank financial institutions - like mortgage brokers and payday lenders, which have been out of the bureau's reach up until now.
Tamara Keith, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
There is a theme running through the special 90th anniversary issue of foreign affairs, the staid journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. In the 20th century, ideas really mattered. Ideas about democracy and society, about capitalism and the role of government, socialism and the individual, and all the permutations you can make of those ideas.
The January-February issue of Foreign Affairs is titled "The Clash Of Ideas." And both in selections from past articles and in contemporary essays, it makes you wonder if there are any ideas on the horizon that might help reconcile the often conflicting claims of prosperity and freedom in the world today.
The kick-off essay is by the editor of Foreign Affairs, Gideon Rose, who joins us from New York. Welcome to the program.
DR. GIDEON ROSE: Thank you, good to be here.
SIEGEL: And how would you describe the point of this issue?
ROSE: Well, the gist of it is that although a lot of people think the world is an ideological crisis at the moment - with Western democracy in trouble and the global economy in turmoil, and authoritarian powers like China on the rise - we actually think that the big picture is one of ideological stability, rather than upheaval. And that the post-war order that emerged out of the turmoil of the first half of the 20th century is still intact. And the keys to that order are mutually supportive liberal democracies with mixed economies, where the governments intervenes just enough to not just keep things prosperous, but to spread the wealth around so that everybody benefits.
And that system has basically proven its worth. And it's in trouble now but more for how to do the things that we know should be done, than a question about what to do.
SIEGEL: But if, indeed, that model does not leave most people in the United States and Europe, let's say, confident that it delivers a better life - materially and spiritually - then ideological stability risks becoming ideological stagnation.
ROSE: Exactly, and so there were two things that are required. One is a recognition of just how well this system has worked in comparison to all the alternatives; how we really are at something like what Frank Fukuyama used to call The End Of History. And second, how to keep the system up to its highest potential; how to keep it working so that it benefits everybody. And Fukuyama actually has a new article in the same issue called "The Future Of History," in which he talks about the problems that are going on now with keeping the middle class robust and growing.
So I think that the current order is fraying around the edges. But it's a matter of going back to what we already know how to do, rather than finding some new Utopian alternative just around the horizon.
SIEGEL: You include edited versions, shortened versions of many articles that appeared in Foreign Affairs over the years. And while it can be interesting to read a book that tells you what happened in Fascist Italy, it's especially interesting to read an article about fascism as it was happening in Italy and even by a fascist.
ROSE: Yeah. As we were putting the articles together for this issue, we realized we had a wealth of material at our archives. And there was a lot of great stuff going on, in which the editors tried to get world events interpreted by the people who were actually making them at the time. And so, we were able to cull selections from our archives, tracing the stories of the ideological battles of the first half of the 20th century and later.
And there are fascists talking about fascism, communists talking about communism, liberals talking about how to revive liberalism from the depth of the Depression.
SIEGEL: There's one article and quotation which for me sums up how insightful writing about international affairs can be, and also how wrong it can be. In 1944, Geoffrey Crowther, the editor of The Economist, wrote an article for Foreign Affairs. And I'll read this quotation.
He said, "The dominant doctrines of the 19th century, if not dead, are so battered that they will not serve us any longer as our main props. We are, indeed, living in a vacuum of faith. But the trouble about a vacuum is that it gets filled. And if there are no angels available to fill it, fools or worse rush in."
That is very smart. He went on however to say that: Whatever happens in the present war - and this was during World War II - Hitler will be hot on our heels for the rest of our lives. He was convinced the Nazis were a going concern.
ROSE: No. See, actually I think what he meant by saying that Hitler will be hot on our heels is not that the actual living creature of Adolf Hitler will be but that the specter of some kind of populist response to domestic and economic crisis will always be there. And that if democracies didn't manage to find some way of filling the emotional and material needs of the bulk of their population, there will always be some demagogue waiting in the wings.
And so, that piece is a crucial piece of the issue because it shows the liberals themselves starting to get their minds around the idea that some kind of government intervention in the economy, some kind of welfare state, some kind of activist government was necessary in order for classical liberalism to gain a new life in the conditions of mass democracy and 20th century capitalism.
And that's actually what the story of the new order after the war that emerges is. And we're still living in the world that you would have seen in 1950, I think, in a way that we're not, let's say, living in the world of 1910.
SIEGEL: Mr. Rose, thank you very much for talking with us.
ROSE: Thank you very much.
SIEGEL: That's Gideon Rose, who is the editor of Foreign Affairs. The 90th anniversary issue of Foreign Affairs is devoted to what is called "The Clash Of Ideas: The Ideological Battles That Made the Modern World and Will Shape the Future."
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
A once proud and now stumbling Internet giant has a new CEO. Scott Thompson is the man picked to run Yahoo. He is currently the president of eBay's PayPal unit.
As NPR's Wendy Kaufman reports, his task at Yahoo is daunting.
WENDY KAUFMAN, BYLINE: Yahoo boasts more than 700 million users. One of them is the new CEO, Scott Thompson. He spoke on an early conference call today.
SCOTT THOMPSON: Yahoo is one of the great, iconic brands of the Internet. And with a solid base of advertisers, it presents both a huge opportunity and a great challenge.
KAUFMAN: Challenge may be the operative word. The Internet pioneer has been struggling for years, overtaken by the likes of Google and Facebook. While it may have a solid base of advertisers, its ad revenues are falling. Leadership and direction have been in short supply. Top engineers have been leaving in droves, and morale is low.
The company's way forward is far from certain, but Thompson says Yahoo's core business assets are stronger than people think. He cited a huge number of users, what he called world-class technology, and access to reams of data - along with a brand that people know and like.
The 54-year-old Thompson was a bit of a surprise choice to head the turnaround effort. His performance at PayPal was impressive, but analyst Mark Mahaney, of CitiGroup, questions whether he's the right man for the job.
MARK MAHANEY: Yahoo is a media company. We just had a CEO at Yahoo over the past two years who came without media background or expertise, and that seemed to have hurt the company's ability to turn around.
KAUFMAN: And Mahaney wonders about the wisdom of choosing someone whose success was in growing a company, not someone who's been focused on creating value and paying of dividends to shareholders.
Another analyst, veteran Silicon Valley watcher Rob Enderle, has a different take. He thinks Thompson, who was at Visa before joining PayPal, might want to take Yahoo in a new direction.
ROB ENDERLE: For Thompson, turning Yahoo into something that's more closely aligned with an eBay or a PayPal - that's probably doable if he starts with Yahoo Finance and works out from there. So it's a stretch and it won't be easy, but at least there's a path to success.
KAUFMAN: One huge decision that still looms over Yahoo is what to do with its 40 percent interest in Chinese search giant Alibaba. Alibaba wants out from under Yahoo, and many analysts think Yahoo should sell its stake and use the cash to refocus the company here at home.
Wendy Kaufman, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel. Mitt Romney charted an early flight out of Iowa this morning. He headed to safer territory after edging out Rick Santorum by only eight votes in the caucuses. Romney hopes to secure a more decisive win next Tuesday in New Hampshire, and that's where his plane landed, in Manchester.
BLOCK: Romney went straight from the airport to a local high school where he picked up the endorsement of former Republican presidential nominee John McCain.
SEN. JOHN MCCAIN: No one will ever say that Mitt Romney will lead from behind. He will lead from in front, the way that Ronald Reagan did, and not lead from behind which is what this president is doing.
BLOCK: NPR's Ari Shapiro is traveling with the Romney campaign. He joins me now from Peterborough, New Hampshire. And, Ari, of course, John McCain was Mitt Romney's rival four years ago. What's the significance of this endorsement today?
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: Well, you know, this is the guy who won the presidential nomination in the Republican Party and won New Hampshire four years ago, so it's a big endorsement and more evidence, I think, that Romney continues to win the endorsement race in this contest as he has from the beginning of the campaign. It's never clear how much any endorsement really sways voters. The other thing, of course, that is on the Romney campaign's mind is the near tie in Iowa last night, the fact that he was almost defeated by Rick Santorum. Listen to how Romney started his comments in Manchester this afternoon.
MITT ROMNEY: My goodness, what a squeaker? But it sure is nice to have a win, I'll tell you. And the question I have for you is: Can we do better here in New Hampshire? Can we...
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING)
ROMNEY: ...yeah, yeah.
SHAPIRO: If you ask the campaign how they feel about Iowa, they'll say a win is a win, but there's no question they would have rather had a wider margin of victory. This near tie just raises some of the same questions that Romney has fought from the very beginning about whether he can appeal to the conservative base of the party, whether there is a ceiling to his appeal within the Republican Party. And he's hoping to overcome some of those obstacles here in New Hampshire.
BLOCK: So hoping for a wider margin than the eight votes they got in Iowa.
SHAPIRO: Than eight votes, exactly.
BLOCK: Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: What else, Ari, did Romney do at the event today in New Hampshire?
SHAPIRO: Well, you know, this is right in his backyard. It's supposed to be friendly territory, as you said, and yet the audience was not friendly at all. The first question came from an Occupy protester who asked about Romney's statement that corporations are people, then a question came from somebody who asked how Romney could oppose Obama's health care plan when he implemented a very similar plan in Massachusetts. As if that weren't enough, there was then third question from a woman who criticized Romney's aggressive stance on China, saying I'm Chinese, and I feel offended by the way you're talking about China.
And then, she said Reagan trickledown economics did not help me. My tin can is still empty. And the audience applauded. Romney, in his reply, sounded somewhat testy and said: Let me ask you a question. Is there anywhere in the world where the income per capita is better? So he was hoping to come back to New Hampshire to a friendly audience, not what he found.
BLOCK: Interesting. Any Romney supporters in that crowd?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SHAPIRO: Yeah. You know, it may have just been bad luck that those are the people he called on. I spoke to half a dozen people before the event, and most of them were typical Romney supporters. A lot of them feel a real disdain for Iowa. One used an old line. He said, look, Iowa picks corn, New Hampshire picks presidents. You have to understand that New Hampshire Republicans and Iowa Republicans are very different from one another. New Hampshire is one the least religious states in the country.
The average New Hampshire Republican primary voter is more pro-choice than the average American. So conservatism just has a different meaning in the Northeast, and it's a meaning that's much more in sync with Mitt Romney's own history. He has tried in the last few years to position himself as a more conservative candidate, but voters here in New Hampshire feel like this is a guy they know. That's one reason he's so optimistic about his chances here, that and the fact that he's doing really well in the polls here.
BLOCK: OK. NPR's Ari Shapiro, who's traveling with the Mitt Romney campaign in New Hampshire. Ari, thanks so much.
SHAPIRO: No problem. Good to talk to you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And while Republicans sort out their nomination, President Obama is busy campaigning against what he calls a do-nothing Congress. On a trip to Cleveland today, Mr. Obama announced that he is installing a director of a new financial watchdog agency, that despite strong opposition from Senate Republicans. As NPR's Scott Horsley reports, the move underscores the president's campaign strategy of painting himself as a defender of the middle class.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: President Obama made the announcement in Ohio - sure to be a battleground in next November's election. He visited with an elderly Cleveland couple: William and Endia Eason. Sitting at their dining-room table, Mr. Obama heard how the Easons were taken advantage of by an unscrupulous mortgage broker. They wound up $80,000 in debt and very nearly lost their modest home.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: They earned the right to retire with dignity and with respect, and they shouldn't have to worry about being tricked by somebody who's out to make a quick buck.
HORSLEY: Mr. Obama says that's exactly the reason he pressed successfully for the new financial watchdog agency. But in order to exercise many of its powers, that agency needs a director. So Mr. Obama has tapped former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray as America's consumer watchdog.
OBAMA: And that means he is going to be in charge of one thing: looking out for the best interests of American consumers - looking out for you.
HORSLEY: Mr. Obama originally nominated Cordray last summer, but Senate Republicans have blocked his confirmation for months. Their objection is not with Cordray, a well-respected consumer advocate and five-time "Jeopardy" champion, but they don't like the way the agency was set up, and they promised not to confirm anyone as director until changes are made. Mr. Obama complains lawmakers are simply trying to water down the new consumer protections.
OBAMA: That makes no sense. Does anybody think that the reason that we got in such a financial mess, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in a generation, that the reason was because of too much oversight of the financial industry?
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: No.
OBAMA: Of course not.
HORSLEY: Ordinarily, a president might use a recess appointment to get around this kind of legislative roadblock. Senators tried to prevent that with a series of pro forma sessions throughout the holidays. White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters, despite those sessions, the Senate has effectively been in recess for weeks now, and that cleared the way for the Cordray appointment.
. JAY CARNEY: Where pro forma sessions are used, as the Senate has done and plans to continue to do, simply as an attempt to prevent the president from exercising his constitutional authority, such pro forma sessions do not interrupt the recess.
HORSLEY: This unusually in-your-face move by the president won praise from consumer groups and predictable outrage from Republicans. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said it fundamentally endangers the Congress's role in providing a check on the excesses of the executive branch. Mr. Obama insists he still wants to work with Congress whenever possible, for example, to extend the payroll tax cut for a full year. But the president also vowed to go around Congress when necessary.
OBAMA: I've got an obligation to act on behalf of the American people, and I'm not going to stand by while a minority in the Senate puts party ideology ahead of the people that we were elected to serve. Now with so much at stake, not at this make-or-break moment for middle-class Americans, we're not going to let that happen.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
HORSLEY: In adopting this go-it-alone re-election strategy, Mr. Obama risks poisoning whatever chance there was on Capitol Hill for cooperation this year, but that was a slim chance at best. Crucially, Republicans no longer enjoy the kind of leverage they did during last summer's debt ceiling debate. Mr. Obama says one of his New Year's resolutions is to spend more time talking to people in places like Ohio, even if that means less time talking to lawmakers in Washington. Scott Horsley, NPR News.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
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And I'm Melissa Block.
Last night's GOP presidential caucus in Iowa has narrowed the field of candidates by one. Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who won Iowa's straw poll in August, bowed out today. She did so after finishing last among the six Republicans who actively campaigned in the state. NPR's David Welna has this report.
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: Despite her bottom-of-the-pack finish in Iowa, Michele Bachmann initially said she'd stick to her plan of going on to campaign in South Carolina. But at a hastily convened Des Moines press conference today, she declared the time had come to call it quits.
REPRESENTATIVE MICHELE BACHMANN REPUBLICAN, MINNESOTA: Last night, the people of Iowa spoke with a very clear voice. And so I have decided to stand aside.
WELNA: Bachmann got less than five percent of the caucus votes. It was a striking reversal of fortune for her five months after becoming the first Republican woman ever to wind a straw poll held in Ames, Iowa, a victory she pointed to once again today.
MINNESOTA: And I will be forever grateful to this state and to its people for launching us on this path with our victory in the Iowa straw poll.
WELNA: Bachmann made much of the fact that she was the only contender who was born in Iowa. And though she often boasted of having a spine made of titanium, many did not seem to take her seriously. Here's Fox News host Chris Wallace interviewing Bachmann last June.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FOX NEWS SUNDAY")
CHRIS WALLACE, HOST:
Are you a flake?
MINNESOTA: Well, I think that would be insulting to say something like that because I'm a serious person.
WELNA: Wallace later apologized for that question. Still, Bachmann continued to struggle with getting her facts straight, both in debates and on the campaign trail.
University of Minnesota political analyst Lawrence Jacobs says that may be what explains her poor showing last night.
LAWRENCE JACOBS: Bachmann's tendency to run undisciplined campaign and to make comments that were not carefully vetted ended up catching up to her. She ended up stepping on the bounds that she got in the August straw poll win.
WELNA: Bachmann today portrayed her quest for the presidency as a mission to stop what she called President Obama's policies based on socialism.
MINNESOTA: And while a congressman by title, a politician I never have been nor will I ever hope to be, because I am not motivated in this quest by vainglory or the promise of political power.
WELNA: As co-founder of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus and a frequent guest on Fox News, Bachmann has developed a national following of social conservatives. She spent three terms in Congress, but political analyst Jacobs has doubts about a fourth.
JACOBS: She may well decide not to run for re-election. In Congress, her seat looks like it may be redistricted in a way that will be unfriendly to her, and instead focus on this national audience and platform that she's created.
WELNA: And if Bachmann was disappointed about dropping out, she was not saying so.
MINNESOTA: I have no regrets, none whatsoever.
WELNA: David Welna, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Now, some thoughts on the Republican race post-Iowa and pre-New Hampshire from our political observers. Columnist E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and the Brookings Institution is in Concord, New Hampshire. And Matthew Continetti, contributing editor for The Weekly Standard, is with me in the studio in Washington. Welcome back to both of you.
E.J. DIONNE: Thank you.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Good to be here.
SIEGEL: And, Matt, as we just heard, Michele Bachmann was eliminated in Iowa. Conservative evangelical Christians preferred Rick Santorum to Bachmann, who's one of their own, and she's Iowa-born to boot. Why do you think? What was it that Santorum had that she didn't?
CONTINETTI: Well, there are many reasons. One, I think Bachmann's case shows the difficulty of running for president from the House of Representatives when you have relatively small name I.D. Another reason is Bachmann, despite being a very socially conservative woman, stressed the economic issues. She talked about ObamaCare, she talked about the debt, she talked about the economy.
And the truth is, if you're an Iowa voter and the economy was the most important issue to you, you voted for Mitt Romney. Whereas, Rick Santorum kind of framed the economics in this larger cultural critique about the breakdown of the family and social values. I think that's what attracted the religious conservatives to him.
SIEGEL: E.J., you see in Rick Santorum a coherent worldview that some of his rivals don't possess. What is it?
DIONNE: And by the way, I should disclose that I'm sitting here in a sweater vest, but that does not bias me toward Rick Santorum, who's made them famous. Rick Santorum is a particular kind of conservative Catholic who, as what renowned analyst Steve Wagner called the social-renewal Catholic. Unlike social justice Catholics, which is kind of what I am, they sort of look upon the government skeptically, abortion is their driving issue, and you really heard it in that very powerful speech he gave last night when he linked the dignity of the unborn to the dignity of working people.
He speaks for a working-class Republican who's largely been ignored by the party. The man who had hoped to speak to them, actually, was Tim Pawlenty who called himself a Sam's Club Republican. And I'm wondering if he has second thoughts about dropping out, given what Santorum did. But I think Santorum has both a coherent worldview and a way of speaking to that kind of Republican who are very important to the coalition.
SIEGEL: I want to hear from both of you about Mitt Romney. Last night, 30,015 Iowans cast caucus ballots for Mitt Romney. Four years ago, 30,021 Iowans did that. Matt Continetti, what does that consistency say to you?
CONTINETTI: Well, if I were Romney - and I know he's not a gambling man - but I would play the number eight in the lottery because it's...
SIEGEL: It's his lucky number (unintelligible).
CONTINETTI: It's the margin he won by yesterday. When I look at Mitt Romney, I see a failure to expand beyond the traditional groups that have support him; moderates, rich Republicans, highly educated Republicans, non-evangelical Republicans. The question is there weren't enough of those people in 2008 to get him the nomination. What's changed in four years to think that he can do it this time?.
SIEGEL: E.J., you've described that slice of the GOP - the one that Mitt Romney won - with a nod to Coca-Cola, as a Republican classic. What's a Republican classic?
DIONNE: Indeed. I mean, these are classical fashion Republicans. They were substantially older than the average of the population. They were more likely to be somewhat conservative in their own self-description, rather than very conservative. They were affluent. These are what we use - called country club Republicans.
And I think Matt's right. I think that's his problem is that he has held the same vote he's always had, but he hasn't been able to expand it. And now, there is at least some consolidation of the conservative vote with Bachmann dropping out, with Gingrich looking weaker and with Gingrich going on the warpath clearly less interested, it seems, in nominating himself than in going after Mitt Romney. So while he is definitely the favorite, still, I think he's going to have some rough water over the next few weeks.
SIEGEL: In today's aftermath of the Iowa caucuses, Newt Gingrich clarified his charge of lying that he made against Mitt Romney. He said today Romney is a liar because he doesn't tell the truth. That cleared that up.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: And Ron Paul called Gingrich a chicken hawk who had a draft deferment during the Vietnam War but sends others off to war. Matt, you first. Am I being hypersensitive, or is this is getting kind of harsh, even for presidential primary politics?
CONTINETTI: Robert, you may be a little sensitive.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CONTINETTI: I love it.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CONTINETTI: You know, we've gone through this year-long, invisible primary where the media speculates but nothing actually happens. Finally, last night, we have the first voting and the actual voters get to decide. And this is where it gets interesting, and I'm at the edge of my seat.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: E.J.?
DIONNE: I feel like calling everybody names just in honor of Matt's response.
I do think that it's getting to the point where there is some danger in - to the Republicans. There's a lot of tape and footage being created where some very nasty things are being said against other Republicans that could well be used by the Obama campaign come the fall.
SIEGEL: E.J. Dionne in New Hampshire and Matthew Continetti here in Washington. Thanks to both of you.
CONTINETTI: Thank you.
DIONNE: Good to be with you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The Iowa caucuses are over. The campaign buses have rolled out of town, and attention is shifting to the rest of the Republican presidential race. You might think Iowans would be reluctant to leave the spotlight. But today, plenty of them are saying good riddance to the candidates and their ubiquitous ads. Iowa Public Radio's Sarah McCammon has this postcard from Des Moines.
SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: You think you've heard a lot about the Iowa caucuses lately? Try living here.
DEB KESSE: I will not miss any of it. I was so tired of hearing all the distortions and the claims that they - there's just no way they can go through with. It just became irritating, which is why we would mute - we'd turn everything off.
LAURIE MERRISS: I'd get tired of the phone calls. I wish they held - were held to the same standards as calls to sell you things. I wish they couldn't call me at home.
MCCAMMON: That was Deb Kesse, from the Des Moines suburb of Urbandale, and then Laurie Merriss, who lives in another suburb, Ankeny. They were eating lunch today at Smokey Row, a coffee shop near downtown Des Moines. Another customer, Tom Wheeler of Clive, was also frustrated by the barrage of ads and calls from candidates fighting for support in this volatile election cycle.
TOM WHEELER: My opinion and - as well as many others is that caucus overload. At my house, I still have a landline, and we just got blasted with phone calls. And so by the end of the period of time, totally turned off by the whole process.
MCCAMMON: So turned off, he says, that he stayed home last night. And Wheeler nearly got rid of that landline.
WHEELER: Mitt Romney hit us the most of anybody. So, you know, that's a sore subject at our house right now, just bringing his name up - at least four or five times a day.
MCCAMMON: I'm at Baby Boomers Cafe in Des Moines' East Village. It's a popular spot for candidates and their entourages, as well as the press, during caucus season. And owner Rodney Maxfield says they've pretty much seen the whole slate this time around.
RODNEY MAXFIELD: Yeah. We're kind of like the political hub here in Iowa. Michele was in here yesterday. Mitt came in a lot. Ron Paul was in here a few times.
MCCAMMON: Maxfield says he won't miss the action, either. While there may be a slight lull in the days ahead, he should get busy again when the Iowa legislature returns next week, and he's looking ahead to the fall.
MAXFIELD: There will be another election, and it's bigger. So that's a good thing.
MCCAMMON: With the general election on the horizon, Maxfield has high hopes for his baked goods.
Since, you know, I am the first cookie of the United States - I mean, Barack will be in here all the time. So I'll have all that activity going on.
As the president and his eventual Republican challenger campaign for votes in this swing state ahead of the November election, they may buy a few of Maxfield's cookies - and, no doubt, a lot more political ads.
For NPR News, I'm Sarah McCammon in Des Moines.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block. They're flat, they're slimy, and they hide under rocks on river bottoms. At up to 2 feet in length, the Ozark hellbender is one of the world's largest salamanders. And they're disappearing. There are fewer than 600 left in the rivers of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. Scientists have been making a huge effort to get them to breed in captivity. Now, as St. Louis Public Radio's Veronique LaCapra reports, it looks like 2012 could be the year of new hope for hellbenders.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'M IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE")
VERONIQUE LACAPRA, BYLINE: It's kind of a honeymoon resort for giant salamanders.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'M IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE")
LACAPRA: But instead of romantic music and champagne to get the zoo's hellbenders in the mood, Jeff Ettling and his staff at the Saint Louis Zoo have given them chilly rocky bottom streams.
JEFF ETTLING: What we're looking at is two 40-foot-long raceways or simulated streams that we've constructed over the last two and a half to three years.
LACAPRA: They also built a mini water treatment plant. It controls the streams' water temperature and chemistry to mimic the hellbenders' cool, spring-fed Ozark rivers...
(SOUNDBITE OF FLOWING RIVER)
LACAPRA: ...minus any distracting predators or pollution.
ETTLING: You'll notice that if you kind of look through the screen, you can see here there's an artificial nest box right here in front of us.
LACAPRA: Buried in the gravel stream bed are concrete boxes with a narrow entrance tunnel at one end. They may not sound very comfy, but to a male hellbender, they're the perfect man cave, just what he needs to hunker down, fertilize and guard his stash of eggs.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'M IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE")
LACAPRA: But a hellbender doesn't exactly fit the image of a romantic Casanova.
JEFF BRIGGLER: It's got these large wrinkles of skin on the side of its body, and it has a large, flat head - it looks almost like a pancake - and little, tiny beady eyes.
LACAPRA: Jeff Briggler is the state herpetologist for the Missouri Department of Conservation.
BRIGGLER: I have to say a lot of people think they're not the prettiest animal in the world, but I've grown very fond of them.
LACAPRA: Zookeeper Chawana Schuette loves them, too, and thinks they've gotten a bad rap.
CHAWNA SCHUETTE: They have been called things like snot otters and lasagna sides because they're slimy and they've got frilly little sides on them.
LACAPRA: Schuette has been helping to try to breed hellbenders at the zoo because wild hellbenders are in trouble. Development has destroyed a lot of their Ozark habitat. Hundreds have been collected for the illegal pet trade. Others have been killed off by pollution and disease. All these problems have made hellbender populations plummet. But even more alarming, says the Missouri Department of Conservation's Jeff Briggler, is that young hellbenders have disappeared.
BRIGGLER: All we're seeing is these large adults. And once these die off, there's not going to be any animals behind them.
LACAPRA: Briggler says scientists realized if they didn't do something, Ozark hellbenders would soon go extinct. He and others started collecting fertilized eggs to raise them in captivity. And at the Saint Louis Zoo, the hellbender breeding program kicked into high gear. At first, things didn't go so well.
ETTLING: We've had females lay eggs indoors, but the males were not fertilizing the eggs. And when we looked at samples of sperm, they looked like they were malformed, and we thought, oh, we just have other problems.
LACAPRA: Ettling says that's when they built the outdoor raceways with their high-tech water treatment system. This September, 16 Ozark hellbenders moved in. No one expected them to breed right away. Then one chilly October morning, zookeeper Chawna Schuette put on her wet suit and snorkeling gear to give the hellbenders their weekly checkup.
SCHUETTE: And so I was just in the process of collecting animals, you know, recording where they were at, getting weights on them and all that sort of stuff, as well as checking just on the off-chance that there were eggs.
LACAPRA: She says she opened one of the nest boxes andâ¦
SCHUETTE: I knew right away. I was like, there's fertile eggs in here. And I almost choked on the water in my snorkel because I was so excited.
LACAPRA: Jeff Briggler was at the zoo that day too.
BRIGGLER: We were - I mean, we were just - I can't even describe it. It excited us tremendously.
LACAPRA: A total of 185 Ozark hellbenders have now hatched at the Saint Louis Zoo. Another 1,000-plus will arrive there this spring, raised from wild fertilized eggs. They'll stay at the zoo for another six or seven years until they're big enough to be released. The hope is they'll keep the wild population going until researchers can figure out and fix whatever is going wrong in the environment. For NPR news, I'm Veronique LaCapra in St. Louis.
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This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel. Seaports up and down the Atlantic Coast are engaged in a race. In 2014, when expansion of the Panama Canal is complete, a new generation of super large cargo ships will begin calling on the East Coast. Miami, Savannah, New York and other cities are vying for the new business and the race is to deepen their ports and expand their facilities to accommodate these new ships.
But as NPR's Greg Allen reports from Miami, some of the cities are running into significant challenges.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: In Miami, dredging is a hot topic. Plans are underway to deepen the port to 50 feet. Some see it as a great business opportunity. To others, it's a threat to the environment. The CEO of Miami's port, Bill Johnson, is one of those who's excited.
BILL JOHNSON: We are the only port south of Norfolk, Virginia, the only port south of Virginia that has full approval from the U.S. Congress to go to that depth. It is the game changer.
ALLEN: After 2014 when expansion of the Panama Canal is complete, ports on the gulf and the East Coast will see more so-called post-Panamax vessels: ships that carry two or three times the load of standard freighters. Miami expects to be ready if it gets the green light to begin dredging its port, but it recently hit a snag.
Environmental groups concerned about how the dredging would affect Biscayne Bay filed a petition with state regulators that, for now, has put the project on hold.
DAN KIPNIS: We're going to lose the bait. We won't survive it.
ALLEN: Dan Kipnis is a former charter boat captain, now an environmental activist who's long worked on Biscayne Bay. He grew up here on nearby Palm Island and was active in efforts in the '70s and '80s to restore the health of the bay. Today, the water is cleaner than in decades past and the bay is a busy place.
Along with the cargo ships, it's one of the world's busiest ports for cruise ships. There are also sail boats, kayaks and jet skis and Kipnis says excellent fishing.
KIPNIS: I will catch you groupers that weigh 12 pounds and hog snappers and Spanish mackerel and it's just amazing the amount of life we've got here, forgetting crabs and shrimp and all that.
ALLEN: Kipnis has joined with Biscayne Bay Waterkeeper and the Tropical Audubon Society in asking Florida to make sure the port dredging project won't damage the bay.
In most ports, dredging means digging and pumping mud, sand and other material from the bottom of a river or a bay, but in Miami, the bottom of Biscayne Bay isn't mud, but limestone. To make the shipping channel wider and deeper, the Army Corps of Engineers wants to conduct nearly two years of underwater blasting.
Kipnis is worried about the amount of sediment the dredging will put into the bay's crystal clear water.
KIPNIS: If you lift all the silt up year in and year out for two years and get it in suspension, you're going to kill the grass beds. When you kill the grass beds, there's no filtration. There's nothing to hold the sediment that's there down any more.
JOHNSON: So we're not about killing manatees. We're not about polluting the bay. We're about doing things that are right and working to ensure that it's done right.
ALLEN: At a recent port presentation, CEO Bill Johnson said he's willing to work with environmental groups and make sure the dredging is done in a way that addresses their concerns.
Miami is not the only city where port dredging plans are controversial. In Georgia, a plan to dredge Savannah's port has riled up both environmentalists and politicians. Environmental groups are concerned about some of the same sediment issues raised in Miami.
Regulators in South Carolina, just across the Savannah River, at first moved to block the dredging, but then South Carolina governor Nikki Haley intervened. In part because of her help, Georgia was able to negotiate a deal with South Carolina regulators that allows the dredging to go forward, but some in the state felt that Haley was unfairly helping the competition.
South Carolina is working to expand Charleston and its other ports to accommodate the new post-Panamax ships. At a news conference, Haley said there will be enough business for ports in both states.
GOVERNOR NIKKI HALEY: Those Panamax ships are coming through Charleston and it is going to be so vibrant and so strong that the overflow is going to go to Jasper and Jasper is going to be a great port. Without question, the ports are the best thing we've got going. It's an opportunity waiting to happen.
ALLEN: That's the message you can hear in New Orleans, Baltimore and other ports along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts. So far, only one port, Norfolk, is deep enough to accommodate the new super large ships.
By 2014, a handful of other cities hope to be ready, but there's a lot of work to be done before then. In New York, the port is deep enough, but there's another problem. It's the Bayonne Bridge, which is currently too low to allow the new container-laden ships to pass. To fix that, the Port Authority is planning to raise the bridge by 64 feet, a job that will take more than $1 billion and five years to complete.
Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Finally this hour, point your web browser to TeaParty.com and you will not find a site devoted to the political movement. You will find the website of The Tea Party, a Canadian rock band that has owned the domain name since the early 1990s.
Well, now the band is hoping to cash in. And, as NPR's Joel Rose reports, there seems to be no shortage of would-be buyers.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: The Tea Party may not be well known in the U.S., but trust me, they're big in Canada.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HEAVEN COMING DOWN")
ROSE: The Tea Party started in Toronto in 1990. They named themselves after the poetry and hash smoking sessions of Beat Generation writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. By the early 2000s, The Tea Party had recorded eight albums, toured the world and sold 1.6 million records. They broke up in 2005, then got back together. And, all along, the band got offers to sell its website, TeaParty.com.
STUART CHATWOOD: There's a bunch of small people kicking the tires and seeing if we'd be interested, but the first real political offer came in this summer that was of serious note, anyway.
ROSE: Stuart Chatwood plays bass for The Tea Party. He doesn't want to say who that offer was from, but he will say it was, quote, "significant."
CHATWOOD: It had a mid-seven digit back end to it and it was like, whoa. All of a sudden, we realized that our little house that we had built happened to be sitting right on top of a gold mine.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WALKING WOUNDED")
ROSE: Chatwood won't say much about his politics, except that he's very happy with his socialized medical care in Canada. Chatwood's first thought was to sell the website to Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, but that didn't work out, so the band decided to sell TeaParty.com to the highest bidder. They hired a broker called Sedo, which sold the domain name Sex.com for $13 million.
Sedo spokesperson Kathy Nielsen doesn't think the Tea Party domain name will fetch that much, but she says it could be worth more than $1 million.
KATHY NIELSEN: You know, say it's a Tea Party group that needs it for fundraising. They can make a business case out of it and understand how much traffic the domain gets and how much search value they can get and they can put numbers to that and say, well, it's worth X amount to me.
ROSE: Others think X is going to be a relatively modest amount in the low to mid six figures. Bill Sweetman is the general manager of YummyNames, a firm that connects companies with domain names.
BILL SWEETMAN: This is one of those types of domains where shelf life or timing is so critical because, right now, the domain looks like it might be worth a lot, but after the election, this domain could be worth almost nothing, so it's a bit of a gamble.
ROSE: Another big question is who's going to cough up the dough? The Tea Party movement doesn't have a centralized top down organization. Some of the better funded groups like the Tea Party Express and the Tea Party Patriots already have websites.
But Sweetman says those groups still have to consider buying TeaParty.com, if only to block their political rivals from doing the same.
SWEETMAN: How much would they pay to keep this out of the hands of another group or a party or somebody that wanted to put up sort of an anti-Tea Party website at that great domain name? Keeping it out of the hands of the wrong people is certainly worth something to them. How much? You know, time will tell.
ROSE: No matter what happens, the proposed sale has already worked out well for the band. The Tea Party reunited last year and toured for the first time in six years. Bassist Stuart Chatwood says all the unexpected media attention on the band's website did help promote those shows, but in the end, it's really worth more to somebody else.
CHATWOOD: As a band, we rely on Facebook and Twitter and the website. It's still very important, but we can easily rename our website to something else and continue on, business as usual. But, to someone else, just the purity of TeaParty.com is just so valuable.
ROSE: The Tea Party's broker expects a deal to close in the next few months, so the next time you click on TeaParty.com, the site could be singing a very different tune. Joel Rose, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WALKING WOUNDED")
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
A much anticipated, much debated trial will finally get underway early this year. The defendants are five men accused of helping plan the September 11th attacks. Initially, the alleged 9/11 plotters were going to be tried in a New York federal court, but congressional opposition forced the Obama administration to reverse course. The trial will now be in a military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. As NPR's Dina Temple-Raston reports, the case has become a litmus test for a new system of justice reserved for suspected terrorists.
DINA TEMPLE-RASTON, BYLINE: The person most associated with pushing to get Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 plotters into a military courtroom is probably Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina.
SENATOR LINDSAY GRAHAM: The reason I want a military commission trial is it balances our national security needs against the rights of the accused better than civilian court.
TEMPLE-RASTON: That's Senator Graham talking to Fox News back in April, when the Obama administration announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would stand trial at Guantanamo.
GRAHAM: We're at war. He did not rob a liquor store, he attacked our country.
TEMPLE-RASTON: You just need to look at the courtroom where the alleged plotters will be tried to understand how important the case has become. The military literally built a courthouse just for the 9/11 trial. The room is enormous, about 50 feet long, with six long conference tables dotted with computer monitors, one table for each defendant and his legal team, with a spare one for any extra lawyers who might attend.
MATTHEW WAXMAN: So, 2012 will be a big year for military commissions.
TEMPLE-RASTON: That's Matthew Waxman. He used to be in charge of detainee affairs during the Bush administration. Now, he's a professor at Columbia Law School.
WAXMAN: The U.S. government has several goals here that they're trying to achieve. Obviously, they want to achieve successful convictions, but they also want to prove that the military commissions system is a legitimate one.
TEMPLE-RASTON: During the Bush administration, military tribunals were criticized as unfair, partly because commission rules seemed stacked against the defendant. Hearsay evidence, for example, was admissible in court. Information obtained through torture could also be used. The perceptions of unfairness got so bad, U.S. allies refused to turn over terrorism suspects if they would stand trial at Guantanamo.
The Obama administration tinkered with the rules and now, the 9/11 case will be one of the first to put those changes to the test.
WAXMAN: This is now the Obama administration taking ownership of military commissions, saying we've improved it, we've corrected the problems of the Bush administration, and we're now going to use this as a tool in combating terrorism.
RAHA WALA: I'm Raha Wala. I'm of the advocacy counsel at Human Rights First.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Wala sees the military commissions a little differently.
WALA: I'd argue that they're already broken, but I think, certainly in the public eye, it's a make-or-break year. We're going to have extreme scrutiny on these processes and we're going to see both the prosecutors and the defense testing these commissions on very basic issues.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Basic issues like attorney-client privilege. That came up just days ago. The prison commander at Guantanamo Bay just issued new rules that essentially allow the prison staff to read the mail between military commission defendants and their lawyers. That means prison authorities would be able to, for example, review drafts of legal motions or evidence that lawyers are trying to share confidentially with their clients. The prison commander said the new rules are necessary for safety and security on the base.
But it seemed like yet another example of how some of the basic rules governing military commissions have still to be worked out. Again, Columbia University's Matthew Waxman.
WAXMAN: There are a lot of doubters out there who see military justice and the military commission system as tainted or illegitimate and the Obama administration wants to turn around that perception.
TEMPLE-RASTON: The charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other alleged plotters haven't been finalized yet, but they could be arraigned in a Guantanamo courtroom as early as April. Dina Temple-Raston, NPR News.
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Now, to a true one of a kind in the waters of Puget Sound. The Kalakala is an historic Art Deco ferry. And as NPR's Martin Kaste reports from Seattle, the vessel's trials and tribulations have become the stuff of legend.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BLACK BALL FERRY LINE")
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: Launched in 1935, the Kalakala was a Seattle icon. It even rated a mention in a song by Bing Crosby & The Andrews Sisters. You still see pictures of it: a steel bullet with round portholes, cruising past the Space Needle. A car ferry for Buck Rogers.
STEVE RODRIGUES: So beautiful. It was silver. And the sun made her glow in the light.
KASTE: Steve Rodrigues has spent eight years trying to restore the Kalakala; to call him an enthusiast would be an understatement.
RODRIGUES: Nothing exists like the Kalakala in the world. It is Art Deco. There is nothing that ever followed that anything looked like it again.
KASTE: But that futuristic beauty has faded. Today, the Kalakala is tied up in an industrial waterway near Tacoma, and under the leaden winter skies, what you notice most is the rust, despite the best efforts of Rodrigues and some volunteers.
RODRIGUES: We have kept her afloat. We have worked with the government and made proposals for waterfront moorage for the Kalakala and preserving it to her glory and sharing it with the community. But it failed.
KASTE: And Rodrigues isn't the first to fail. He bought the Kalakala at a bankruptcy auction from the previous group of would-be restorers. For the last decade, the Kalakala has become something of a sad joke around Puget Sound, evicted from one potential home port after another. Some say it's not even worth saving. It looked cool, they say, but it was hard to maneuver, and it kept running into things. Now, it's overstayed its welcome in Tacoma.
LIEUTENANT REGINA CAFFREY: It has to go.
KASTE: Regina Caffrey is a spokeswoman for the Coast Guard, which has just declared the Kalakala a hazard to navigation.
CAFFREY: If the Kalakala sinks, it would block the entirety of the waterway, and it could impact up to $23 million worth of commerce in one month.
KASTE: Rodrigues denies the Kalakala is a hazard. He gets angry, accusing the media of conspiring with the government to smear the ferry's reputation. Right before a Coast Guard deadline last month, he announced that he'd sold the ferry for $1 to an anonymous billionaire. And he insists that the mysterious patron will spend the necessary millions for a proper restoration. Maybe. People in Seattle have learned to be skeptical, but there's still plenty of sentiment left here too.
CHERYL DEGROOT: I'm getting some pictures today because it's so special.
KASTE: Cheryl DeGroot grew up riding the Kalakala in the 1950s. And then after the ferry's retirement, she stumbled across it again in the '70s, in Kodiak, Alaska. It had been towed up there to house a fish cannery. And now, here it is again, near her current home in Tacoma.
DEGROOT: You know, it looks better than I thought it would, actually. It's not too bad. Still floating.
Given all that the Kalakala has been through, that's no small achievement. Martin Kaste, NPR News, Seattle.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BLACK BALL FERRY LINE")
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Also increase, a top tax official faces criminal charges this week for failing to do his job. That's a common refrain in Greek life, the tax collector who shows little interest in collecting taxes, despite the country's enormous debt.
Chana Joffe-Walt of our Planet Money team introduces us to one man who tried to buck that trend.
CHANA JOFFE-WALT, BYLINE: Diomidis Spinellis has a Mind Map. He's a methodical computer science professor at the Athens University and he has a Mind Map on his laptop.
PROFESSOR DIOMIDIS SPINELLIS: It tries to map how your mind works. It's like a tree.
JOFFE-WALT: Imagine a graphical outline of the tasks before you at any given time, or a flowchart with tasks, subtasks, sub-subtasks. A Mind Map can, for instance, illustrate in a precise, clean manner the situation Greece finds itself in right now.
Greece borrowed too much money. Click, and it branches out to: Greece cannot pay back its debt. Click, two branches here: This fact threatens all euro countries and Greece is surviving off international bailouts. Click, Greece needs to increase revenues.
SPINELLIS: It was actually a no-brainer that I could help with that, or at least I thought I could help with that.
JOFFE-WALT: In 2009, Spinellis brought his methodical approach and his Mind Map to the Greek Finance Ministry. Solving the tax problem, he proposed, was not that difficult. Actually, with the help of information technology, it might even be kind of easy.
SPINELLIS: Because all the data was there; wherever you looked you could see evidence of tax evasion. And I thought you just have to cross-correlate those two tables and you will find the tax evaders, and then we can improve revenue collection.
JOFFE-WALT: For instance, say a corporation lists its officers and their compensation. Have the computer program check the officers' declared income. It should not be less than their compensation, but Spinellis' program found, in many cases, it was.
SPINELLIS: What we found is that some failed to declare that amount completely and others missed a digit so they declared 10 times less what they actually had to declare.
JOFFE-WALT: Spinellis' program found hundreds of thousands of cases of potential tax fraud.
SPINELLIS: Initially, we felt that's simple. We just post those results to the original tax offices, they get the money and we are all happy.
JOFFE-WALT: Greece has 300 regional tax offices. Spinellis shared his data with every one of them. And then he waited for the revenues to come flowing in - nothing. A few weeks later, he sent it out again.
SPINELLIS: The results were disappearing in a black hole.
JOFFE-WALT: Most weeks will tell you there is widespread corruption in the tax offices - collectors take bribes. So an item was added to the Mind Map: management of regional tax offices. Spinellis wrote a small program that would extract each day's performance data from every single tax office.
SPINELLIS: How much revenue was collected through how many cases that were closed; the average number of cases; how many days you would need for all the cases to close if they were working at that rate. And also, a list of tax offices that hadn't closed a single case on that day, and there are hundreds of offices each day that don't close a single case.
JOFFE-WALT: The program sent an email every single afternoon to the finance minister and every tax collection office reporting which offices did absolutely nothing that day.
SPINELLIS: And many days passed without anything happening.
JOFFE-WALT: It is around this point, two years in, that Spinellis had a disturbing thought. Fixing Greece's tax system, and ultimately making the Greek economy work, was not a matter of tweaking his computer programs. It was not an information problem. It was a culture problem.
The people, the tax collectors had to want to go after tax cheats. And if they didn't want to, they needed a boss who would make them want to.
SPINELLIS: This turnaround artist is not somebody we have within the tax collection agency.
JOFFE-WALT: At the end of 2011, Spinellis resigned from his government job. He's back to teaching. And Greece is still surviving off international bailouts.
In just a few weeks, European inspectors will travel to Athens to check if, among other things, Greece has managed to increase tax collections, if the turnaround artists have shown up.
Chana Joffe-Walt, NPR News.
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A scandal is intensifying over faulty French-made breast implants. Hundreds of thousands of women may have the implants, which are said to be defective because they contain industrial-grade silicone. They've been sold in many countries in Europe and beyond, but not in the United States.
NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports that the French government has opened a criminal investigation into the company responsible.
(SOUNDBITE OF A NEWS CLIP)
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Today, French television showed footage of investigators and a judge searching the factory of the Poly Implant Prothese Company, or PIP, in southern France. The probe could eventually lead to charges of involuntary homicide against the firm.
PIP was shut down and its products banned in 2010, after it was revealed that the industrial-grade silicone gel caused abnormally high rupture rates. But it was already too late for the estimated 400,000 women worldwide who now have PIP implants.
Christian Marinetti was one of the first plastic surgeons to notice a problem with them.
CHRISTIAN MARINETTI: (Through Translator) We began informing health authorities about the high rupture rates as early as 2007. And in 2008 and '09, we kept contacting them. It was clear there was a serious problem with these implants.
BEARDSLEY: Both French and German health authorities are now under fire for not taking action sooner. A German company provided the industrial silicone and it has just come to light that another German company paid by PIP was in charge of inspecting the implants.
French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand says investigators will get to the bottom of it.
XAVIER BERNARD: (Speaking foreign language).
BEARDSLEY: At what point were people alerted about these problems, asked Bertrand. How were the controls done? It's clear these implants were substandard, so why didn't we know this earlier?
Fears over the implants spread globally last month after a French woman with ruptured implants died of cancer. French health authorities advised 30,000 French women to have their PIP implants removed. The French state has offered to bear the cost of the removals, which could come to more than $75 million.
Thirty-seven-year-old Murielle Agelo has never had a problem with her implants, but says she will get them removed.
MURIELLE AGELO: (Through Translator) As soon as they tell you the implants are fragile, it radically changes the way you live. You buckle your seatbelt differently, carry your groceries and children in another way. You're worried about doing sports and you're always stressed about any sorts of changes.
BEARDSLEY: Because of PIP implants' low price, they were popular, especially in Britain, where an estimated 50,000 women got them. Catherine Kydd received PIP implants in 2004. In 2009, she found out one had ruptured. Though she had them removed, silicone had already leaked into her lymph nodes.
CATHERINE KYDD: If I was told that I was going to have industrial silicone put in me, then I would never have had it done, as would none of the 50,000 women. If that's what you knew you were going to get, you wouldn't sign the dotted line, would you?
BEARDSLEY: The British government is taking a more cautious approach than the French. It has not yet recommended the mass removal of the implants. Perhaps fearing the cost of such an operation, Britain's health secretary, Andrew Lansley, is urging private clinics to take some responsibility, calling it an ethical and moral obligation.
ANDREW LANSLEY: My expectation is that the private sector, as the providers of these implants - they should give women access to information, to specialists' advice, to scanning and, if necessary, to follow up on remedial treatment.
BEARDSLEY: But many clinics, including those that provide breast reconstruction for cancer patients, say they bought the PIP implants in good faith and will go out of business if made to bear the full costs of removal.
Today, the Czech government recommended women wearing PIP implants have them removed. And tomorrow, some 200 Venezuelan women say they will join a French lawsuit against the company.
Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Honda is also having some growing pains with its Civic Hybrid. In its commercials, Honda has appealed to environmentalists and the thrifty.
(SOUNDBITE OF HONDA AD)
BLOCK: That was Honda's sales pitch for the 2006 model at least, back when Heather Peters of Los Angeles was in the market for a car. She bought a Civic Hybrid only to find, she says, that it got closer to 41 or 42 miles per gallon on its best day. And that dipped to 30 miles per gallon after a system upgrade. She's now suing Honda in an intriguing venue: a California small claims court. She wants the maximum award she can get there, $10,000.
Andrea Chang of the Los Angeles Times was in court to hear the arguments. Andrea Chang, welcome to the program.
Thanks for having me.
And Heather Peters is not the only owner of a Civic Hybrid to take issue with that promise of 50 miles per gallon. There's, in fact, a class-action lawsuit that's been working its way through the courts for years now. Why didn't Ms. Peters just join that suit?
ANDREA CHANG: Well, she was pretty upset after learning that the proposed class-action lawsuit settlement was only going to give her what she called pennies on the dollar. She said she was upset that trial lawyers would get about $8.5 million while Civic Hybrid owners would get as little as $100 and rebate coupons for the purchase of a new car. So pretty disappointed with that outcome, she decided to file her own lawsuit in small claims court in Torrance, which she called the Judge Judy route.
BLOCK: Uh-huh. Now, Heather Peters is a former lawyer herself. So she files this lawsuit in small claims court and claims that, look, she - false advertising, I didn't get my 50 miles per gallon. How does Honda respond to that?
Well, Honda brought one of its technical specialists to small claims court in Torrance on Tuesday. And what they said was, look, first of all, when Honda advertises 50 miles per gallon, those aren't the numbers that Honda itself is putting out, that those are independent testing that comes from the EPA. And Honda, he said, is required to use those numbers. There are no other numbers that Honda can use.
CHANG: And other than that, you know, they're not promising 50 miles per gallon. Obviously, that depends on how you drive. And then the specialist went on to call Ms. Peters' $10,000 claim ridiculous. And he mentioned that, you know, even if you do the math and look at how much extra money she spent on fuel since she bought that car in 2006, it really doesn't add up to more than $1,000. And that was his main claim: She was asking for way more than what she really deserved from having this problematic car.
BLOCK: Although her point is, I gather, that if she had known she was going to get 30 miles per gallon, she wouldn't have paid more to buy a hybrid. She just would've bought a regular Civic.
CHANG: That's right.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CHANG: Exactly. She said she would've spent - I think it was 15 or $16,000 to get a regular Civic, to not spend - I think she ended up spending about $25,000 to get that hybrid model. And the judge at that point mentioned, well, you know, if I give you $10,000, you're still going to keep the car, right? To which she said yes.
BLOCK: It's interesting because Heather Peters is also encouraging other owners of Civic Hybrids to take their cases to small claims court as she has done. She has a domain name: dontsettlewithhonda.org. What are you hearing from experts about how much of a shot her case has in small claims court?
I think experts feel that she's someone who's very savvy. She understands how to navigate the court system. And she's obviously really fired up about this. She's upset about what has happened to her, and she's done a lot to rally other Civic owners to support her and join her. And, in fact, at the courthouse on Tuesday, a number of other hybrid owners showed up just to see how it was going to go. And they told me, if she's successful, that that would really help encourage them to do the same.
CHANG: But I think the thing that is worth noting is lawyers have mentioned that even if Heather Peters is successful, Honda at that point could appeal to Los Angeles Superior Court. And when they do so, they will be allowed to have their lawyers then. So under that situation, they're kind of right back where they started. And now, Heather Peters is at a huge disadvantage.
BLOCK: And what's the time frame here, both for a ruling in this case before small claims court and what's going on with the class-action settlement that was proposed?
CHANG: Well, in the Heather Peters case, the estimates vary. I mean, it could be as early as this week, maybe next week. I wouldn't expect it to go much longer than that. And then separately, in the class-action lawsuit that's pending, claimants have until February 11th to decide if they also want to follow Ms. Peters and opt out. Or if not, then a judge in San Diego is expected to make a ruling on whether or not to accept the proposed settlement on March 16th.
BLOCK: Andrea Chang is a business reporter with the Los Angeles times. Andrea, thanks so much.
Thank you.
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And I'm Robert Siegel. President Obama made a rare visit to the Pentagon today, to outline his new military strategy. The plan lays out the roles and missions of the armed forces at a time when defense budgets are being trimmed. It calls for a smaller military, cutting the Army and the Marine Corps. It also calls for a new focus on the Far East, shifting U.S. troops, planes and aircraft. Here's the president speaking earlier today.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We will be strengthening our presence in the Asia Pacific and budget reductions will not come at the expense of that critical region.
SIEGEL: As NPR's Tom Bowman reports, Pentagon officials now have to figure out how to cut half a trillion dollars while making sure the military can still meet any threat.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the nation is at what he called a strategic turning point. The Iraq war is over. The Afghan war is winding down. So now, the U.S. military will be smaller and leaner.
LEON PANETTA: But its great strength will be that it will be more agile, more flexible, ready to deploy quickly, innovative and technologically advanced.
BOWMAN: Still, Panetta insisted that this leaner military will still be able to do pretty much all it does now.
PANETTA: United States military - let me be very clear about this - the United States Military will remain capable across the spectrum. We will continue to conduct a complex set of missions ranging from counterterrorism, ranging from countering weapons of mass destruction to maintaining a safe, secure and effective nuclear deterrent. We will be fully prepared to protect our interests, defend our homeland and support civil authorities.
BOWMAN: All that will have to be done by a smaller force. Officials say the army could drop by some 70,000 troops, down from more than half a million troops. The strategy states is pretty much just one thing that the U.S. military will not do in the future. It says U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale contingency operations. That means no more nation-building in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
This week, there was speculation that the military cutbacks mean the U.S. would abandon its ability to fight two wars simultaneously. That's been a Pentagon mainstay for two decades. An early draft of the strategy said the military could win one war and spoil an adversary's efforts in a second war. General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, addressed that today.
GENERAL MARTIN DEMPSEY: Now, there's been much made, I'm sure will be made, about whether this strategy moves away from a force structure explicitly designed to fight and win two wars simultaneously. Fundamentally, our strategy has always been about our ability to respond to global contingencies wherever and whenever they occur. This won't change.
BOWMAN: Panetta was even more pointed.
PANETTA: We will have the capability to confront and defeat more than one adversary at a time.
BOWMAN: While the army will shrink, other parts of the military will get more money. That includes special operations commandos like the Navy SEALS who killed Osama bin Laden and the unmanned drone aircraft that bombed al-Qaida hideouts in Pakistan.
PANETTA: We will protect and, in some cases, increase our investments in special operations forces, in new technologies and unmanned systems, in space and, in particular, in cyberspace capabilities.
BOWMAN: Cyber war, the ability to attack an enemy's computer's satellites is becoming a growing part of China's arsenal. That's a big reason why the strategy places a focus on the Pacific, to keep an eye on China. The strategy says China's growing military power could create what it calls friction in the region and effect not only U.S. security but the economy as well. Tom Bowman, NPR News, Washington.
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And I'm Melissa Block.
The European Union is expected to ban Iranian oil imports later this month. The effort is meant to dissuade Tehran from pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
But Joanna Kakissis reports that the sanctions could also hurt Europe and especially Greece, which is worried about fuel shortages.
JOANNA KAKISSIS, BYLINE: Analysts say that the ban could deepen Europe's recession by causing oil prices to rise. But the intent of the sanctions is to make things tougher for the Iranian government. Iran now sells about 20 percent of its oil to Europe, with Italy, Spain and Greece its top customers. Greece imports about a third of its crude from Iran. The two countries have had strong ties for years.
Evangelos Venetis, an Iran scholar in Athens, explains.
DR. EVANGELOS VENETIS: Greece has been one of the most friendly countries towards Iran in the 20th century and - both prior and after the Islamic Revolution. Both countries share a mutual respect, and these have an impact on political and economic relation.
KAKISSIS: And economic relations are very important to Greece right now. It's weathering its worst debt crisis in recent memory. This has put Greeks in a bind, says Robin Mills, an energy consultant in Dubai.
ROBIN MILLS: One reason why Greece is so dependent on Iranian oil right now is because of the credit terms, and Iran has been prepared to offer very easy credit. And I don't think any other supplier - whether Russia or somebody else - would be so keen to offer easy credit. There'd be no real reason for them to do so.
KAKISSIS: Mills says he expects the E.U. to help Greece find other suppliers.
MILLS: So what would be expected, I think, if the E.U. were to put sanctions on Iranian oil is that probably, it would do what it did with Syria earlier in 2011, when they put sanctions on Syrian oil. They gave several-month period of - a grace period for the refineries and the oil customers to find other suppliers, before their sanctions came fully into force.
KAKISSIS: Greece also has other options to alleviate fuel shortages. Energy journalist Kostis Geropoulos believes Russia and Kazakhstan would sell oil at a discount. And Geropoulos says...
KOSTIS GEROPOULOS: There could be more natural gas. I mean, Greece is already importing natural gas. They could use more coal. And there could be a lot more conservation going on.
KAKISSIS: And in this economy, Greeks are already conserving fuel. They took about 250,000 cars off the road last year to save money.
For NPR News, I'm Joanna Kakissis in Athens.
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And I'm Robert Siegel.
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich campaigned in northern New Hampshire today. Under a light snow, the former House speaker stopped in a number of picturesque towns. His message - that he is the only Republican who can beat President Obama. Gingrich called former Governor Mitt Romney a Massachusetts moderate, but saved his harshest rhetoric for the president.
NPR's Brian Naylor reports from Littleton, New Hampshire.
BRIAN NAYLOR, BYLINE: Former Speaker Gingrich's first stop was a former railroad station turned senior center in Plymouth. As an audience of a few dozen townspeople listened politely, and for the most part silently, Gingrich blasted President Obama.
Yesterday, the president named Richard Cordray to the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as well as appointing three members to the National Labor Relations Board. They were recess appointments, though Congress technically isn't in recess.
The former speaker called the move a politically motivated violation of the balance of powers.
NEWT GINGRICH: This president has proven a total willingness to violate the law and to impose an imperial presidency in trying to reshape the country. And he's done it for a clear reason. He's paying off his union allies. I mean, it has nothing to do with good government and everything to do with trying to buy his re-election.
NAYLOR: Taking on Mr. Obama is a no-risk move for Gingrich. But he continued his criticism of the man who polls show with a commanding lead among New Hampshire primary voters, Mitt Romney. He said Romney governed Massachusetts as a moderate; appointing liberal judges, and pushing the statewide health insurance plan known as RomneyCare. By contrast, Gingrich referred to himself as a Reagan conservative.
GINGRICH: There's a very big difference in our two sets of values. I don't believe a Massachusetts moderate is in a very good position to debate Barack Obama. And I think it would be very hard for him to win the general election, because I think it just blurs everything.
NAYLOR: Gingrich said he was not engaging in negative campaigning, but was simply contrasting his and Romney's records. But his campaign also introduced a new TV ad to run in the state, in which Gingrich calls Romney's economic plan quote, "virtually identical to Obama's failed policy," adding, quote, "timid won't create jobs."
Gingrich also was dismissive, if a bit gentler, on former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who finished just eight votes behind Romney in Tuesday's Iowa caucuses.
GINGRICH: If you think of us as partners, he would clearly - in historical experience - have been the junior partner. And he's not a bad person. I want to be clear about this.
NAYLOR: After listening to his speech, Littleton resident Marilyn Ryback says she supports Gingrich but is realistic about his prospects here.
MARILYN RYBACK: I don't give him much hope in New Hampshire, unfortunately. But it doesn't mean I don't think he'll win eventually. But New Hampshire is kind of hard because of Mitt Romney and, you know, being his home town and everything.
NAYLOR: John Patton, who has a software company in Hanover, says he doesn't go along with the prevailing sentiment that Romney is more electable.
JOHN PATTON: I do not agree. In fact, I think Romney will have a tough time contrasting himself with Obama. He seems like Obama-light. So I don't - although I will vote for him if he's the nominee.
NAYLOR: Gingrich, who finished fourth in Iowa, is keeping expectations about his chances in New Hampshire low, calling this one of Romney's three best states. He predicted, though, Romney's support will melt rapidly when the campaign heads south later this month, into states Gingrich expects to be his strongest.
Brian Naylor, NPR News, Littleton, New Hampshire.
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And I'm Melissa Block. Now, to a story about lace, spandex and women in Saudi Arabia. We're talking about a law that takes effect today. It's a royal decree requiring that only women be allowed to work in lingerie shops. Until now, the stores were staffed exclusively by men, which led to complaints by women and even a Facebook campaign called Enough Embarrassment.
Well, Saudi writer and women's rights advocate, Reem Asaad, launched a campaign to boycott lingerie shops staffed by men. Speaking from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, she explained why.
REEM ASAAD: Traditionally, in Saudi Arabia, men sold everything from children toys to makeup to tires and cars, but the things have been changing and this could open, you know, doors for more women to join the industry and for better working opportunities for women themselves.
BLOCK: How many jobs do you think that this might create to allow women now to work in lingerie shops?
ASAAD: Unfortunately, we're not blessed with a very good statistical (unintelligible), but I'm assuming no less than 20,000 jobs.
BLOCK: Wow. That's a lot of lingerie shops.
ASAAD: Not just lingerie. If you notice, the decree and the law stated that women are to be employed in stores that sell everything that is related to women, from lingerie to makeup to cosmetics to clothing and so on.
BLOCK: I want to ask you about a critique that I read in The Guardian newspaper, which says that now, by having women only as selling in lingerie shops, it creates sort of more of the same separatism, segregation of the sexes and that that's a bad thing, that if anything, there should be more interplay, more contact. What do you think?
ASAAD: Well, I really don't think so. If you just think about a scenario of one lady going to work in the morning, naturally speaking, she will be walking into a shopping mall, so she'll be meeting more people all around, both men and women, from security guards to other cashiers and store owners and so on. So there will be a lot of interaction, whether she likes it or doesn't.
BLOCK: I've read that the law was strongly opposed by clerics. They say that employing women is a crime and prohibited by Islamic Sharia law and I gather, also, there was at least one store in Mecca that was raided by religious police. Are you concerned about a backlash here?
ASAAD: Well, I was just discussing this with a couple of informed women, as well, this evening and we were not worried because we knew there will be people who don't like it very much, but what matters here is the government strategy and the government will. The policymakers decided to go forward and that's what matters at this point in time.
BLOCK: Have you gone into lingerie shops since the law has gone into effect? Does it seem like a different venture now?
ASAAD: I've seen so many good things. I've seen happy women. I've seen women busy at work, productivity, people feeling more connected. Those women are empowered; therefore, these women have better spending power themselves. They will probably lead happier lives than their ancestors.
BLOCK: That's Reem Asaad, talking with me from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia about the new law that says only women can work in lingerie shops. Reem Asaad, thanks very much.
ASAAD: Thank you very much.
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And the president is facing criticism for that appointment from Republican presidential candidates. One of them, Mitt Romney, jetted today from New Hampshire down to sunny South Carolina, that, even though the New Hampshire primary is less than a week away. Romney spoke this afternoon in Charleston to an audience outdoors at a historical park. He took issue with one of President Obama's jobs initiatives.
MITT ROMNEY: You know, the president said that he wants to favor green jobs. I think we misunderstood. What he wants to do is give jobs to people who give him the green. The...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: NPR's Ari Shapiro joins us from the site of that rally. And, Ari, it sounds like Mitt Romney is already thinking ahead to the primary after New Hampshire's, the one in South Carolina.
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: Absolutely. It's a sign of his confidence in New Hampshire that he came down here less than a week before the New Hampshire primary. He's been leading consistently in polls in New Hampshire. He spent so much time there that his campaign feels confident that he has that state in the bag. But South Carolina is a very different story because voters here tend to be more religious. They tend to be more conservative. They tend to be skeptical of a Massachusetts governor, let alone somebody who is Mormon.
And so there is some sign that Romney may be able to pull it out here, the way he pulled it out in Iowa, and that accounts for his spending some of the time here. He's doing this event tonight and then another one tomorrow morning before he returns to New Hampshire.
BLOCK: What about the other candidates, Ari? We've been seeing a trend of sharpened attacks on Mitt Romney. Is that continuing today?
SHAPIRO: Yeah. Absolutely. Let me give you a quick rundown of what we heard today. So from Newt Gingrich, he said Romney will not come anywhere near enough voters per state to become the nominee. Rick Santorum, who is now Romney's chief rival, urged people not to settle for less than America needs. You've got Jon Huntsman who is trying to make New Hampshire his stronghold. He said we cannot afford to have a coronation for president. But for Romney's part, as you heard in that cut in the intro, he kept his focus on President Obama.
He called the president, today, a crony capitalist, and his campaign just released an ad in South Carolina that attacks President Obama. The one exception to that is one of the guys that Romney brought with him down here to Charleston. Senator John McCain of Arizona attacked Rick Santorum, letting Romney keep his focus on the president, while the surrogates do the work with Republican primary rivals.
BLOCK: And South Carolina, also a strong military state, where presumably John McCain would bring in some votes for Mitt Romney. You mentioned that it's a very obviously different state than New Hampshire where he's polling very well. What's his strategy for trying to get a win in South Carolina?
SHAPIRO: Well, some of it does have to do with those surrogates. As you mentioned, John McCain, he's very helpful with the military voters. This is a strong military state. Mitt Romney also brought South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who introduced herself very definitively as a strong conservative, trying to address the concerns that Mitt Romney may not be a strong conservative. Romney talked about his foreign policy today, appealing to those military voters, talked about his belief in a strong defense.
Of course, this comes just as President Obama is rolling out his plans to cut the Pentagon's budget. And then, you know, Nikki Haley was also a Tea Party favorite, the governor of South Carolina, and so she's trying to give him some credibility on that front.
BLOCK: And any sense of how Mitt Romney is doing at winning over those more skeptical conservative voters in South Carolina?
SHAPIRO: I think he's got some distance to go. A lot of the voters that I talked to here said they were not here because they were Romney supporters. They were here because they wanted to hear the guy. They wanted to give him a fair shake. They wanted to give him a chance. Totally different from what you hear when you talk to voters in New Hampshire who say they know the guy, they love the guy, they feel like the guy is neighbor. He's been in Massachusetts forever.
You know, there have been so many accusations, not only from Democrats, but also from Republicans, now intensifying from Republicans, about flip-flopping, about the moderate record in Massachusetts, about the health care bill that Mitt Romney passed that's so similar to President Obama's federal health care bill.
All of those attacks have done some damage. Perhaps it's not enough to derail Romney's getting the nomination in the end, but it does seem to have been enough to put some serious questions in the minds of the voters here in South Carolina.
BLOCK: OK. NPR's Ari Shapiro in Charleston, traveling with the Romney campaign. Ari, thanks very much.
SHAPIRO: Good to talk to you, Melissa.
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Now, to the issue of education funding. In New York state, the commissioner of education has suspended $100 million in federal grants. The money was supposed to go to struggling schools in 10 districts, but the districts were required to come up with new teacher evaluation systems, and they missed their deadline.
As NPR's Larry Abramson reports, the cuts could stall the effort to turn around New York state's lowest-performing schools.
LARRY ABRAMSON, BYLINE: Yonkers Public Schools, just north of New York City, is home to 26,000 students and two chronically failing schools. The Department of Education in Washington, D.C., gave New York state around $4 million to help Yonkers turn those schools around. But because of a dispute, Yonkers Superintendent Bernard Pierorazio says he may have to pull the plug on those projects.
BERNARD PIERORAZIO: We have 19 staff members attached to this grant, you know, as well as contracts with national consulting groups that are coming in and working with our staff.
ABRAMSON: The reason for the holdup? Yonkers and nine other districts have not come to a final agreement with the unions on new evaluation systems for teachers and principals. Those evaluation systems were mandated by state law over a year ago, and they have to link teacher assessment to students' performance.
But negotiations are complicated. Pat Puleo, of the Yonkers Federation of Teachers, says it's hard to figure out how to evaluate teachers in subjects that are not tested.
PAT PULEO: Guidance counselors, art teachers, music teachers - there are not state tests that the children take, so we have to come up with a rainbow of evaluation systems for everyone.
ABRAMSON: Puleo says the state knew these talks would take time. But then, over the holidays, New York Education Commissioner John King announced districts must finish negotiations or risk losing millions of dollars. King says one of the reasons these schools are failing is the lack of effective evaluations.
JOHN KING: The evaluations are really about a vehicle for improving student achievement and obviously, that's particularly urgent in these schools who've performed so poorly for so long.
ABRAMSON: Some districts are further along than others. They all can appeal the commissioner's decisions to suspend those grants. But in the meantime, they have to figure out whether to lay off people hired with that money, and then possibly hire them back.
The dispute also threatens millions in federal aid under Race to the Top, another big federal effort that depends heavily on new evaluation systems for teachers and school leaders.
Larry Abramson, NPR News.
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It's time now for your letters and, first, one correction. Yesterday, Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann dropped out of the Republican presidential nominating contest, and in our story about her failed bid for the White House, some of you heard our reporter call political analyst Lawrence Jacobs, Lawrence Jacobson. It's our mistake and we apologize to Mr. Jacobs.
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On the subject of Iowa, several listeners complained about our coverage of Tuesday's caucuses. Not about what we covered, but how much we covered it. Barbara Pritsgat(ph) of Redondo Beach, California, writes this: Never has one story been so over-covered, overdone, repetitious, boring, unimportant and maddening.
BLOCK: And David Tomane(ph) of Archbald, Pennsylvania, adds: Media coverage of the Iowa caucus, including NPR's, does all other American voters a disservice. Because of the absurdly intense coverage, the votes of Iowans are worth far more than those of the rest of us. He continues, the coverage of every gas and donut stop gives the Iowa caucus an overstated importance and effect on the national election. Stay home, NPR. Let's leave Iowa to the Iowans.
SIEGEL: Finally, and sadly, we have a death in the NPR family to report this week. From 1984 until 1987, Charles W. Bailey, II was our Washington editor. For Chuck, it was a brief coda to a long and illustrious career in newspapering at the Minneapolis Tribune, later the Star Tribune.
He joined the paper in 1950 and covered Washington for it for almost 20 years. He wrote political novels, some of them with former federal reporter Fletcher Knebel. "Seven Days in May" about an attempted military coup in Washington was a huge bestseller and was made into a movie with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas.
Chuck Bailey rose to edit the Minneapolis Star Tribune, but he quit, protesting staff cuts at the paper. He thought they would undermine its quality. He came back to Washington and the twin city's loss was NPR's gain. I was Chuck's boss in those days, but he was my senior in a great many respects. He brought a lifetime of experience and good judgment and a steady hand at a peculiarly unsteady time here. He was good company and some of the best of our reporters recall him as the best of their editors.
Chuck Bailey suffered from Parkinson's in his last years. He died Monday at age 82.
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And I'm Robert Siegel. General Motors is recalling the Chevy Volt - sort of. The company is asking Volt owners to bring in their hybrid electric cars for what it calls enhancements. The problem involves crash tests and fire.
NPR's Sonari Glinton explains.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Several months ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was conducting crash tests with the Chevy Volt. Now, first, the agency crashed the car and then...
BILL VISNIC: And then put it through subsequent tests that simulated the vehicle rolling over, and held it in that position for a certain period of time.
GLINTON: I'm going to let Bill Visnic help with the story. He's with edmunds.com. So they crashed the car, simulated a rollover, and then some of the coolant leaked out.
VISNIC: There had been evaporation, and other things that happened to this coolant, that made it so that it effectively shorted out the battery; started to cause it to smolder. And because these batteries do contain a large amount of electricity, this smoldering went on for quite some time. And then it eventually got hot enough to create a fire.
GLINTON: There was a span of weeks between crash and fire. The Transportation Department has launched an investigation into the fires. Today, GM announced that it had come up with a fix for the problem, and it's inviting consumers to bring their cars to dealers in the next couple of months. GM and the government both stress there's no immediate danger to Volt drivers.
Now, there's about 8,000 cars in consumer hands, and 4,400 on dealer lots. As recalls go, this is a pretty small one. Howeverâ¦
JACK NERAD: Any question about Chevy Volt is bad news for GM.
GLINTON: Jack Nerad is with Kelley Blue Book. He says the Chevy Volt is what they call in the car business a halo car. It's an emblem of everything General Motors is and wants to be.
NERAD: Even if this a rather minor problem, or a problem that is very, very unlikely to happen to a consumer, it's still not good news for them.
GLINTON: Nerad says the Chevy Volt is where GM has staked its reputation and its ad dollars.
(SOUNDBITE OF GM AD)
GLINTON: Bill Visnic, with edmunds.com, says that ad sums up the real problem with the Volt, which has failed to meet its modest sales goal of 10,000 cars.
VISNIC: I do think that there's this - sort of an intrinsic distrust here, I guess, if you will, of the technology because a lot of people don't understand it.
GLINTON: GM is fixing the cars under a customer service campaign. That's kind of like a recall, but it comes without the bad publicity or the federal scrutiny of a general safety recall.
Michael Robinet is an analyst with IHS Automotive. He says GM is making a smart move by getting ahead of the game.
MICHAEL ROBINET: They take it very seriously, that they want to make sure that they're putting the very best vehicle out.
GLINTON: But it has a PR impact, doesn't it?
ROBINET: Yeah, but so do other recalls. I mean, there's recalls that, you know, involve tens of hundreds of more vehicles than this does, and - but interestingly, you don't get phone calls about those.
GLINTON: Robinet says if the auto industry is going to adopt new technologies, consumers are going to have to get used to growing pains, and making more trips to their local dealer. Sonari Glinton, NPR News.
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Tunisia, Egypt and Libya are all forming new governments, that's after Arab Spring revolutions toppled the dictators who ruled there for decades. Among the challenges these governments face is recovering the money their predecessors looted from the national treasuries, and that won't be easy.
NPR's Susannah George spoke with some of the people who are trying to track that money down.
SUSANNAH GEORGE, BYLINE: The estimates of how much money was stolen are staggering. Between Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, the figure is in the billions. Jeffrey Robinson has been writing about money laundering since the '80s.
JEFFREY ROBINSON: The very first lesson in dictator school is that cash is king. Now, you need cash because the generals who support you in your country and the corrupt politicians whom you put in place to do your bidding and the mercenaries you hire to protect you don't accept Visa, and they don't take checks. So you need to have a lot of cash.
GEORGE: Robinson says that dictators, like drug dealers, amass wealth as a kind of insurance policy. Money is protection.
ROBINSON: What you need to do is plan for the future, and so you take out an insurance policy which is called some place to go when they overthrow you. And you feather that nest with gold, with investments that you can call on, and at some point also with secret bank accounts, where you can use it to invest and create an income for yourself.
GEORGE: Thousands of miles away from North Africa, in a Washington, D.C. office, Robert Palmer is working to try and find that money. He works for the international watchdog group Global Witness. He says the process is difficult, painful and slow.
ROBERT PALMER: Countries that have had assets stolen by corrupt politicians find it very difficult to get information out of other countries. And that's not just the tax havens we're talking about. Some of the kind of major developed countries can be very slow at helping countries whose politicians have stolen money.
GEORGE: And do they ever get it back?
PALMER: Sometimes.
GEORGE: But he acknowledges the recovery rate is low, very low.
PALMER: Five.
GEORGE: Five percent?
PALMER: Five percent is a high estimate.
GEORGE: The U.N. estimates that of all the money laundered around the world - a number they say is in the neighborhood of $1.6 trillion - only 1 percent is recovered. And it's not just corrupt dictators' fortunes that make up that 1.6 trillion.
PALMER: All money launderers use the same systems and methods, whether you're a drug dealer, a corrupt politician, a terrorist, someone trying to get money for nuclear proliferation. It's not just about dry numbers and dry laws and obligations and regulations. This is about allowing people to systematically loot their country.
GEORGE: Once money makes its way into the international banking system, it's as good as gone. Jeffrey Robinson says it's almost impossible to know where the money ends up. Gadhafi's money could be anywhere from Venezuela to Zimbabwe.
ROBINSON: The problem is that you need to follow money trails. And if they've done it properly, there is no money trail. Mr. Chavez, I'm sure, is sitting on a lot of Mr. Gadhafi's money and has no intention of returning it. Mr. Mugabe in Zimbabwe is sitting on a lot of Mr. Gadhafi's money.
GEORGE: And Robert Palmer agrees.
PALMER: I suspect there's a lot of money in places such as Dubai, Singapore and, you know, reportedly, he had gold bars buried in the desert somewhere, so who knows?
GEORGE: Susannah George, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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ALL THINGS CONSIDERED continues right after this.
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We're going to shift our focus now to one of those candidates we heard Newt Gingrich criticize just now, Rick Santorum. The former Pennsylvania senator's virtual tie with Mitt Romney in Iowa gives him a new stature in the race for the Republican nomination. Santorum presents himself as the real conservative in the race, especially when it comes to social issues.
NPR's Andrea Seabrook looks back at his years in the U.S. capitol.
ANDREA SEABROOK, BYLINE: Santorum has been upsetting elections from the beginning. He was only 32 years old when he toppled a 7-term incumbent in a majority Democratic district in western Pennsylvania. Just four years later, Santorum rode the Republican wave of 1994 into the Senate.
And from the beginning, Santorum has stood for unwavering social conservatism.
RICK SANTORUM: Why would you kill your child: because your child's sick, because your child might not live long, why kill your child?
SEABROOK: This is Santorum on the floor of the Senate in 1997. It was among the first of many times he would lead the charge against a specific type of late abortion, called intact dilation and extraction. Opponents call it partial birth abortion.
SANTORUM: This unwarranted, unnecessary, unhealthful, dangerous, brutal, stabbing and killing of a baby who's this far away, three inches away from its first breath.
SEABROOK: Santorum's sharp, graphic language was often criticized by Democrats, who argued that the extremely rare procedure was sometimes necessary. The fight took years, with Santorum at the forefront. It wasn't until 2003, after the election of Republican President George W. Bush, that Santorum's Partial Birth Abortion Ban was signed into law.
It was upheld by the Supreme Court the following year. It is perhaps the single biggest accomplishment Santorum points to when he talks about his career in public service.
He also makes the case that he is fiscal conservative. During his Senate career, Santorum did speak out for balanced budgets, lower taxes and privatizing Social Security. But he was much more ardent when it came to defending increased funding, even as government was running up massive budget deficits.
SANTORUM: If the economy is strong, deficits go away.
SEABROOK: This is Santorum in the capitol in early 2003. He strongly supported President Bush's request for tens of billions of dollars to continue fighting the war in Afghanistan, and anywhere else Mr. Bush saw as necessary.
SANTORUM: I think the president believes, first and foremost, we need a strong economy. And we need to fight the war on terrorism and potentially that there may be other conflicts that we're going to engage in, and deficits have to take a backseat to that.
SEABROOK: Today, this idea that deficits have to take a backseat is anathema to the very definition of fiscal conservatism. It may be where Santorum is most vulnerable in the coming Republican primaries.
Time and again, Santorum supported Bush administration policies that ballooned the deficit. He voted for the Medicare prescription drug program, the No Child Left Behind education bill. He supported foreign aid. And every time President Bush came back to Congress asking for more money to fight and build infrastructure in Iraq, Santorum supported him.
SANTORUM: This is money that is absolutely necessary to fund our military effort, as well as to get this country up and going again.
SEABROOK: Still, it wasn't on the fiscal issues but on the social battles that Santorum made his name. When Democrats and Republicans worked together on the No Child Left Behind Act, Santorum fought for language challenging evolution and supporting the religious doctrine of intelligent design.
When the Massachusetts Supreme Court upheld the right of gay people to marry, Santorum led the charge for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. On the Senate floor, in the summer of 2004, Santorum said gay marriage is bad for children.
SANTORUM: Society should be all about creating the best possible chance for children to have a mother and to have a father. And unless the state endorses that, and unless our laws enforce that, then I think it's fairly obvious that our culture will not.
SEABROOK: And this is another place where Santorum may differ with more libertarian conservatives. Listen to how he describes them in this 2005 interview with NPR.
SANTORUM: They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do. We shouldn't get involved in bedroom. We shouldn't get involved in cultural issues. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world. And I think most conservatives understand that individuals can't go it alone, that there is no such society that I am aware of where we've had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.
SEABROOK: Throughout his time in the Senate, Santorum argued instead that government has an important part to play in shepherding the American culture toward what he called a strong moral purpose.
Andrea Seabrook, NPR News, Washington.
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And I'm Robert Siegel. Now, a talk with Richard Cordray, whom President Obama named yesterday to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The bureau was created by the Dodd-Frank Act that overhauled federal regulation of financial services. And while the bureau extends federal regulation to many non-bank lenders, it hasn't been able to do much of anything without a director.
BLOCK: The manner of Mr. Cordray's appointment is controversial. Senate Republicans, who say they want more oversight of the bureau, blocked it. So President Obama sidestepped the Senate by declaring a recess appointment. Republican senators say they're not in recess. They're technically in session, even though very few of them are here in Washington, too few to conduct any legislative business. The White House sees that as a recess in all but name, and a challenge in uncharted legal waters is likely.
SIEGEL: Richard Cordray is a former attorney general of Ohio, and indecently back in 1987, he was a five-game winner on "Jeopardy" as well. He joins us now from the Commerce Department. Welcome to the program.
RICHARD CORDRAY: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Whatever you do at the bureau, it's likely that some lender whose wings you might clip will sue and claim that your agency has no authority to do it because you weren't legally confirmed. Will that color your actions, and do you welcome that challenge to your authority?
CORDRAY: No, it won't affect our actions, and I don't say that in any sort of militant or challenging way. But the important thing here is that the bureau now has a director. That means that we can level the playing field between banks and non-banks. Many non-banks were not supervised at all before the financial crisis. Some of the mortgage brokers engaged in unscrupulous activities that undermined the markets and helped lead to the financial meltdown that hurt millions of Americans. Part of what we will do is make these markets work better for consumers, and that will also strengthen the economy as well.
SIEGEL: I want to ask you about another class of non-bank lender. That's payday lenders...
CORDRAY: Yes.
SIEGEL: ...who would be regulated by the bureau. Would the outcome of effective regulation be that loans would be available from payday lenders at lower interest rates to borrowers with no credit? Or would it likely be that there would be no loans for those people?
CORDRAY: Well, the key for us is that part of our job is to make prices and risks clear for consumers so that they can make good, better informed judgments for themselves. That doesn't mean that we're prejudging any particular product. We will be regulating payday lenders, mortgage brokers, private student lenders, and that's a very important step forward for us.
SIEGEL: But one thing that a bureau could do is, say, if the monthly mortgage payment you're looking at from the mortgage broker is going to be 60 percent of your monthly income, some amount you're very unlikely to be able to afford, you could be told that and shown the numbers, or you could be denied that loan because that's simply an irresponsible loan for someone to make. You don't have that authority, do you?
CORDRAY: No. We're not going to be dictators in the markets. We won't be making people's judgments for them. But if consumers aren't clear on what the options are, then the markets don't work very well. And we saw that in so many ways, and we all have stories about people who have lost their homes, who are drowning in debt. And sometimes, it was because they made bad choices, and sometimes, it was because they didn't understand the choices they were making because this marketplace had grown too complex, too confusing.
SIEGEL: There are many Republicans in Congress who say that your bureau is remarkably free of congressional oversight. Why shouldn't Congress oversee the spending of taxpayer dollars?
CORDRAY: Yeah. I don't agree that the bureau lacks oversight. We have to both make reports to Congress regularly. We have a veto over our rules by the other agencies that doesn't exist for any other bureau or agency. So there's plenty of oversight here. In addition, I've talked to the congressional leaders, and I will make sure that they have the input they need to understand how we're working to help protect their constituents.
SIEGEL: How do you answer the argument, though, that while payday lenders say may be predatory lenders and while mortgage brokers may have originated a lot of unscrupulous deals, the real big money in the financial crisis was through subprime loans or alt-A loans that were bundled into high-risk securities by very big banks that did have regulators. The regulators, they existed, they just didn't do a very job of it.
CORDRAY: You know, I saw that, Robert, firsthand in local communities in Ohio. There was a ton of fraud in the mortgage market around that time. None of it was supervised. A lot of it was not banks. It was non-banks. And because those folks were totally unregulated, they were pushing aside our good community banks and credit unions who were losing market share and it ultimately led to the collapse of the economy.
SIEGEL: The Los Angeles Times recently did some very good reporting on buy-here-pay-here used car dealerships, which are really much more in the business of making high interest car loans, it seems, than just selling cars. I gather they've been carved out. You have no jurisdiction over those dealerships. Is that correct?
CORDRAY: No. It's actually a little more complex than that, but we've been hearing a lot from service members who are abused at times by the buy-here-pay-here auto dealers. Our job is to examine the problems, to think carefully about how they're affecting people. We're hearing from people right now on our consumerfinance.gov website, and that helps us understand what are the serious problems we should address, and there are many of them.
SIEGEL: Well, Mr. Cordray, we thank you very much for talking with us.
CORDRAY: I appreciate it.
SIEGEL: Richard Cordray, who was named yesterday by President Obama as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
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2011 was a very good year for the German automaker Volkswagen. 2012 could be even better. Last year, sales for Volkswagen's brands, including Audi, Bentley and Lamborghini, increased by 20 percent in the U.S. If things continue to go Volkswagen's way, it could become the number one carmaker in the world.
Here's NPR's Sonari Glinton.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: I love to look at car commercials not because they're good, which they're usually not, but because they offer a glimpse into the corporate mind of an automaker. Here's a Volkswagen commercial you might remember from 1990.
(SOUNDBITE OF VOLKSWAGEN AD)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: There's a word for this driving experience: Fahrvergnugen. Fahrvergnugen is what makes a car a Volkswagen.
GLINTON: Let's just pause for a moment to soak that in. Fahrvergnugen, really?
Rebecca Lindland is director of research with IHS automotive. She says for a very long time, Volkswagen took a very German approach to making American cars.
REBECCA LINDLAND: They - yeah, they always kind of look askance at just the sheer sizes of our vehicles, let alone our demand for cupholders.
GLINTON: Lindland says Volkswagen wasn't providing American consumers with the kind of cars the vast majority of Americans wanted or, for that matter, needed.
LINDLAND: The way that we drive is so different here that, you know, we drive - I mean, we cover long distances. We have really bad commutes. We have larger families, and we are bigger people, whether we want to be or not.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
LINDLAND: We just are.
GLINTON: So Volkswagen, which is a dominant player in Europe and Asia, is not even in the top five in the U.S. market. Volkswagen began to realize that it wasn't going to grow in the U.S. market.
LINDLAND: Unless they give in to some of these realities of our market, that it is different. You cannot put the same car in Germany and in the States and expect the same level of demand.
GLINTON: So Volkswagen has refocused its attention on the American market. They reintroduced a new version of their iconic car, the Beetle. And the company also introduced bigger, less quirky cars to the American market.
(SOUNDBITE OF THEME MUSIC, "THE IMPERIAL MARCH")
GLINTON: That is "The Imperial March" or Darth Vader's theme music. It's from "Star Wars" and VW's Super Bowl commercial for its new Passat.
(SOUNDBITE OF THEME MUSIC, "THE IMPERIAL MARCH")
GLINTON: That commercial with the kid pretending to be Darth Vader helped catapult sales of the Passat. And in the U.S., Volkswagen car sales have risen more than 20 percent. The company has made it clear that it wants to grow sales not just in the U.S. It wants to be the number one car company in the world.
Jonathan Browning is president and CEO of Volkswagen of America.
JONATHAN BROWNING: We were not fixated on the number. We're focused on putting the infrastructure, the foundations in place that will allow this growth to be sustained over time. It's not just about saying we've won the battle one month or one quarter. It's building this in a sustainable way over time.
GLINTON: Part of that infrastructure means, for instance, a plant here in the U.S., in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Workers at VW's plant are among the lowest paid in the American auto industry. It's expected that VW in the U.S. will be targeted for unionization by the United Auto Workers.
Again, CEO Jonathan Browning
BROWNING: At the end of the day, it will be our employees that make any specific decision in terms of unionization. But our focus is very much in terms of getting the plant up and running. Right now, all the signs are good in terms of success in the plant.
GLINTON: Right now, Volkswagen is in a race with Toyota for the number two spot in the world. To pass General Motors, to get to number one, the company needs to move up a few notches in the U.S.
Sonari Glinton, NPR News.
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And I'm Melissa Block. How did the economic collapse of 2008 and 2009 give birth to the conservative populist revolt of the Tea Party and their triumphs in the 2010 elections? Writer Thomas Frank calls that revival of the right extraordinary. He says, as extraordinary as if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear power plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster.
Thomas Frank's new book is titled "Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right." It's a sharp-tongued liberal polemic from the writer who asked, "What's the Matter With Kansas?" in an earlier book as he tried to account for the shift toward populist conservatism in his home state.
Thomas Frank joins me here in the studio. Thanks for coming in.
THOMAS FRANK: My pleasure, Melissa.
BLOCK: And Thomas, what's the hard times swindle that you're referring to there in your title? Who do you think is being swindled and who's doing the swindling?
FRANK: I think all of us are being swindled. I wouldn't put a single name on who's doing the swindling, but I wouldn't say it's organic, either. It's not an organic, naturally occurring swindle. I mean, it's something that we have been slowly talking ourselves into for many, many, many years, but of course, the main culprits are the sort of stars of the conservative movement.
BLOCK: The conservative revival that you're talking about is in part of this swindle. You say this is unique and confounding and I want you to describe what you're seeing as the paradox. You write about this on page three of your book. And why don't you read that section for us?
FRANK: You got it. Before the present economic slump, I had never heard of a recession's victims developing a wholesale taste for neoclassical economics or a spontaneous hostility to the works of Franklin Roosevelt. Before this recession, people who had been cheated by bankers almost never took that occasion to demand that bankers be freed from red tape and the scrutiny of the law. Before 2009, the man in the bread line did not ordinarily weep for the man lounging on his yacht.
BLOCK: Let me ask you about that, Thomas Frank, because do you think the Tea Party was really weeping for the man on his yacht? I mean, one of the main points of outrage for the Tea Party was they were opposed to the bailout. They were opposed to the government going in and helping the big fat cats and the banks.
FRANK: Right. That's right. But they're also very much in favor of this kind of utopian free market world that they think we need to push towards.
Let me take a step back here. The central paradox of our time is that we've just come through this extraordinary financial collapse. We know that this was almost directly the result of 30 years of bank deregulation and of all the sort of financial experimentation that our government encouraged. This disaster was caused by this ideology.
And what the Tea Party movement and what the conservative revival generally is telling us to do is, instead of reversing course, instead of going back and saying, OK, maybe we should have a well funded Securities Exchange Commission. Maybe we should go back and break up the too-big-to-fail banks.
What they're saying is, no, no. Get government out of the picture altogether. We need not to reverse course. We need to double down on that ideology that we've been following all these years. Only when we get to that sort of pure state of complete free markets, then our problems will be solved. And until that day, none of this stuff matters.
BLOCK: And in a sense, isn't one of the messages from the Tea Party, look, the government failed us in a calamitous way here and the last thing we need is more government. What we need is...
FRANK: Right.
BLOCK: ...is less. Get them off our backs.
FRANK: You know, and that's a very appealing line. On the surface, the Tea Party line and the new revived radicalized conservatism sounds pretty good. They're asking questions that need to be answered. Why did the regulators fail? I mean, that's a really good question. Their theory is that, you know, it's government. Government always fails. Right?
The important thing is what's the answer coming from the other side? What is, say, the administration of Barack Obama? What's their answer to the question? You know what it is? Nothing. They don't ever talk about it.
BLOCK: Well, I wanted to ask you about that because you do make that point in your book that, as contemptible as you find the economic message of the conservatives or the right, it's better than nothing. And by nothing, you're talking about Democrats and, in particular, the Obama administration.
FRANK: That's exactly what...
BLOCK: Explain what you mean.
FRANK: I call that chapter "The Silence of the Technocrats" because the tendency among the Democratic Party - their great idea is that the Democratic Party is becoming the party of the professional class, who were a big Republican constituencies, say, 50 years ago. But now, they're becoming Democrats and the theme that just runs throughout everything that they do in the Obama administration and going back many, many years, is to respect expertise. Experts will solve things for us.
Take, for example, the stimulus package. Massive deficit spending. Now, how do they go about justifying it? They're saying, well, the experts tell us to do it. You know, the Tea Party is saying, what the hell happened with the bank regulators? How did they happen to be asleep at the switch? Why do we have failure after failure after failure? From the liberal side, you hear nothing.
BLOCK: Your point, as you described in the book, is that the Democrats have been co-opted by the power of the market and, specifically, the power of Wall Street.
FRANK: Well, I'm not trying to be that blunt about it. I don't think that's exactly right. I think what it is with the Democrats is that their failure is that they trust expertise and you look at who Obama, you know, appointed on his economics team. Some of them are very good, by the way, but the ones that really mattered are all from this sort of consensus economics school and they regard markets not with exactly the same reverence, not with the same kind of utopian idealism that you find on the right. But they regard markets pretty highly and they also regard Wall Street pretty highly and a lot of them - look, a lot of them came from Wall Street. I mean, the bluntest critique is also very true.
BLOCK: When you think about the fact that white blue collar workers have abandoned the Democratic Party in droves and overwhelmingly vote Republican. What does that say to you?
FRANK: Two things. First of all, the conservative movement talks an extremely good populist game. They were out there less than a month after Barack Obama was sworn into office, waving signs in Lafayette Park out in front of the White House with bullhorns, screaming, let the failures fail. It was really appealing.
One of their favorite books of 2010 was called "The Ruling Class." It's this fire-breathing denunciation of the class of people that's supposed to be secretly - semi-secretly running this country. These people are waging a really terrific class war against what they believe to be the ruling class and it is no surprise to me at all that it appeals to working class voters.
The other side of the coin is why have Democrats, you know, this is traditionally the party of working class people. Working class people elected Franklin Roosevelt president four times. How have they dropped the ball so dramatically? That was the great mystery of our times and that's the other mystery that I've always sort of tried to explain. The Democrats have real problems speaking that populist language.
BLOCK: Thomas Frank. His new book is "Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right." Thomas Frank, thanks for coming in.
FRANK: It was my pleasure, Melissa.
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Morocco has been called one of the winners of the Arab Spring because it avoided the bloodshed that wracked Libya, Syria and elsewhere. Morocco's young king, Mohammed VI, offered a new constitution and early elections. That took the steam out of protests there, known as the February 20th movement. But human rights groups say the arrest and trial of a provocative Moroccan rap artist suggests the reforms have a long way to go.
NPR's Deborah Amos reports from Casablanca.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG)
MOUAD BELRHOUATE: (Rapping in foreign language)
DEBORAH AMOS, BYLINE: The rap songs of 24-year-old Mouad Belrhouate are popular here, even more so after his four months in jail. He's better known as El Haqed, the defiant one, which describes lyrics explicitly critical of Morocco's social ills and the country's revered monarch. It's an attitude that also describes the young protestors of the February 20th movement. His supporters charge this trial is an attempt to silence him and them.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG)
BELRHOUATE: (Rapping in foreign language)
AMOS: Even his youngest fans come to the courthouse here to support him.
RIHAB ALAME: (Rapping in foreign language)
AMOS: Rihab Alame, an 11-year-old, knows the words to all his protest songs. She shows up for every court appearance, despite four postponements of this trial.
ALAME: (Foreign language spoken)
AMOS: He was arrested in an unjust way. He did nothing, but they took him to prison, she says. The activists of the February 20th movement gather at the courthouse, too. Abdullah Abaakil says the arrest sends a political message.
ABDULLAH ABAAKIL: He writes protest songs, but I don't think that he was arrested for that.
AMOS: In fact, officially, the rapper's songs have nothing to do with his arrest. He was jailed on an assault charge after a brawl outside his house. Supporters say it was a setup. They add it's unusual that the attorney general of Casablanca is heading up the prosecution team for a simple assault charge. He's in jail because he's an activist, says Abaakil.
ABAAKIL: He's very popular in his neighborhood and the regime don't want to see us, as a movement, win people's hearts in the poor suburbs of Casablanca.
AMOS: The local media hasn't covered the trial, but word has spread. And with each postponement, the crowd of supporters grows larger. Sophie Hilali wears a badge with a picture of the rapper.
SOPHIE HILALI: When people went to the street for the movement of the 20th February, they used his songs. He's the image of this movement.
AMOS: The courtroom is packed when Mouad Belrhouate is finally brought before the judge, a slight young man surrounded by human rights lawyers who volunteered to defend him. Judges in Morocco are appointed by the king and often base rulings on instructions from the regime. It's why there's so much interest in this case, says Karim Tazi, a businessman and political activist.
KARIM TAZI: This case is a high profile case, it's a symbolic case because he's only an artist and they want to silence him.
AMOS: In a way, this trial is also a test of the power of a protest movement that won concessions from the king after mass demonstrations last year. Morocco has a new constitution. Elections in November made moderate Islamists the leading party in the government. That party has promised to reform Morocco's justice system and human rights groups urge the new ministers to investigate the charges against a political rap star.
Karim Tazi says that it's a loss for the regime either way.
TAZI: Because if they free him, he's going to come back and sing again. If they keep him in jail, they're adding fuel to the anger of the movement and bringing the movement back to life. They're losing, anyway.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
AMOS: After another postponement this week, Mouad Belrhouate is still in jail, but his songs sell better than ever. With his arrest, the regime has helped create a superstar.
Deborah Amos, NPR News, Casablanca.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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And we begin this hour in New Hampshire, where Republican presidential candidates are playing to a different crowd that they did in Iowa. In New Hampshire, you don't have to be affiliated with a party to vote in the primary. And so-called undeclared voters outnumber both Republicans and Democrats. As NPR's Greg Allen reports from Manchester, the New Hampshire independent vote is an elusive target.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: People who vote in the Republican primary in New Hampshire aren't like those who take part in the Iowa caucuses. For one thing, fewer of those who will be voting next Tuesday are officially Republicans. That's one reason why former Utah governor Jon Huntsman bypassed Iowa to focus his energies here in New Hampshire. Huntsman has a more moderate stance on social issues. He's defended evolution and says he believes the science behind global warming. And he's tried to reach out to independent voters.
JON HUNTSMAN: Ladies and gentlemen, I want your vote. I know we've got people from all different political persuasions around this table. But if I don't ask for your vote, I'm not going to get it.
ALLEN: At a gathering of business leaders in Portsmouth this week, Huntsman made his pitch for reforming the tax code, cutting the deficit and restoring trust in government. It's a campaign that helped him win an endorsement from the region's biggest newspaper, The Boston Globe. That approval reflects Huntsman's appeal to independents, people like Duncan Wood.
DUNCAN WOOD: Among the Republicans, he's, to me, the best choice this year. And I think it's refreshing to hear. I thought it was a very open and genuine talk.
ALLEN: Wood attended a Huntsman town hall last night Newport. Harking back to a political figure from a bygone era, he calls himself a Rockefeller Republican: fiscally conservative but liberal on social issues.
By maintaining an undeclared status, Wood says he's able to engage with candidates from both parties and cast his vote where it matters most.
WOOD: My wife and I, we voted in the Democratic primary last time because there wasn't really a contest we thought on the Republican side that was as interesting. And this time, we'll vote in the Republican Party. And, you know, we like living in New Hampshire because you get to see the candidates within a hundred feet.
ALLEN: But how many voters like Duncan Wood are there really? More than four in 10 voters in New Hampshire are listed as undeclared.
But don't read too much into that, says Andrew Smith. He's a political scientist who directs the survey center at the University of New Hampshire. Smith says, in New Hampshire, an undeclared voter is not the same as an independent voter. His research shows most undeclared voters connect with one of the major parties.
ANDREW SMITH: About 35 to 40 percent of these undeclared voters are really Democrats. They act like Democrats. They behave like Democrats. They vote like Democrats. About 30 percent to 35 percent are really Republicans, and about 30 percent are truly independents.
ALLEN: Smith says his surveys show Huntsman does appeal to true independents, but so does Texas Congressman Ron Paul. And because true independents have a lower turnout rate, Smith says the payoff may be disappointing.
SMITH: Huntsman is appealing to a very specific group: independent and Democrats who are going to vote in the Republican primary. But again, that's a small percentage of the overall Republican primary vote. He's appealing to the 20 percent of the voters who aren't really Republicans.
ALLEN: Because the registration rules have been eased in recent years, Smith says the number of undeclared voters has been growing. There are advantages to not being on a party list. You get fewer dinnertime phone calls, fewer fundraising appeals.
Many, like Loree Sullivan of Portsmouth, like the flexibility it gives them. Four years ago, she voted for Barack Obama. He's on the ballot next Tuesday - yes, there is a Democratic primary. But this time, however, Sullivan will vote for a Republican candidate. She's just not sure which one.
LOREE SULLIVAN: I'd like to know really specifics that are going to be done in the next four years. And, by going independent, I can wait up until that primary to make that decision - and who I think is the best candidate, not the best one from a particular party.
ALLEN: Sullivan's son Ryan is also an undeclared, independent voter. He's 23, and this will be the first presidential primary he's voted in. He's considering Huntsman, he says, but also Ron Paul. Greg Allen, NPR News, Manchester, New Hampshire.
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Today, new evidence that the pace of job growth is picking up. The government's employment report for December showed 200,000 jobs added to payrolls. The unemployment rate continued its downward trend falling to 8.5 percent.
And while that may be welcome news, as NPR's John Ydstie explains, the December report could be overstating job growth.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: Prior to the release of today's report, economists surveyed by news organizations expected an increase of only about 150,000 jobs. So the news of 200,000 new jobs was a pleasant surprise. Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics says it's a signal of an uptick in economic growth.
MARK ZANDI: And we're going into 2012 with some momentum. So, it feels really good to get some solid job numbers.
YDSTIE: But some economists pointed to a big jump in the number of couriers and messengers in the December report. An increase of 42,000 in a job category that normally adds or subtracts no more than 1,000 jobs a month. Their view is that the 42,000 increase represents a seasonal boom in businesses like UPS and FedEx delivering holiday packages from Internet retailers.
Nariman Behravesh and his colleagues at IHS Global Insight believe it's likely December's big increase in those jobs will be followed by an offsetting decrease in January. That's what happened last year in this sector. Behravesh says despite the headline number in the December report, the trend in job growth really hasn't moved up to the 200,000 a month level.
NARIMAN BEHRAVESH: Our view right now is that the underlying number is around 150,000, and that's what we can probably expect in the coming months.
YDSTIE: However, an analyst at the Labor Department says its seasonal adjustments, which are updated regularly, should have smoothed out any seasonal hiring distortion. Mark Zandi of Moody's says he was actually more surprised by the drop in the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent than the bigger-than-expected jobs increase. Economists had thought that after a big decline in November, the unemployment rate might actually kick up again in December.
ZANDI: Very surprising. It's in part due to better job growth.
YDSTIE: But while that may be true, there are other factors that have pushed the unemployment rate down rapidly over the past four months. Most importantly, a decline in the size of the labor force. That's been caused partly by discouraged workers who've given up looking for jobs, but Zandi says it's also due to demographic changes, a smaller stream of immigrants coming into the U.S. looking for work and an aging population retiring.
ZANDI: Most recently, in the last few months and last year, most of the decline in labor force participation is among females and it's among college-educated white females.
YDSTIE: Zandi says, at the same time, the number of men in the workforce is growing.
ZANDI: Lots of different things going on here, I don't think there is a solid answer, at least I don't have one. Not yet.
YDSTIE: At an appearance today in Washington, President Obama wasn't asking why, he was just touting the job growth numbers over the past year.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: More private-sector jobs were created in 2011 than any year since 2005. There are a lot of people that are still...
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
YDSTIE: And now, many economists are suggesting the unemployment rate could be at 8 percent by election day. Nariman Behravesh says that still may not be enough to win a second term for Mr. Obama.
BEHRAVESH: I would say right now, the president has something of an uphill battle on the economy even if we see further progress on the unemployment rate.
YDSTIE: Behravesh bases his view on a model that measures the effect of unemployment rates on elections historically. It suggests unemployment would have to go well below 8 percent to not be a drag on the president's chances for a second term.
John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
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Mitt Romney, today, jumped on those jobs numbers. Good news, of course, he said, but no cause for celebration with the unemployment rate above 8 percent for 35 consecutive months. We'll start our weekly conversation with columnists E.J. Dionne and David Brooks talking about the latest economic news. David Brooks back from Iowa, here in the studio with me, welcome back.
DAVID BROOKS: Good to be here.
BLOCK: And E.J., up in New Hampshire. Welcome to you, E.J.
E.J. DIONNE: Thank you. Good to be with you.
BLOCK: And first question to both of you, Mitt Romney is saying that President Obama's policies have slowed the recovery and created misery for millions of Americans who are out of work. If the downward trend continues, if the unemployment rate, David, continues to drop, does that Republican argument lose its potency?
BROOKS: It loses some of its potency. Clearly, if we have a year of declining unemployment rates or good jobs numbers like today, obviously, the sense of crisis goes away. I don't think it really erases it, though. The problems with the economy are not so much cyclical now, they're structural. They have to do with wave stagnation, inequality, a sense the country's in long term decline. I don't think we're going to be in a period of 400,000 or 400 jobs a month growth where people will feel, oh, yeah, it's morning in America. We're not going to see that. So, it's still going to be fundamentally jobs, economy, election.
BLOCK: E.J.?
DIONNE: Well, it's hard ever to say with confidence: Ah, this economic mess is over. But these numbers actually are good news for Obama for a particular reason. The political scientists tell us that voters tend to form their opinions of the economy early in the election year. If they feel badly early, it's very hard to shake them out of that - out of their view and that hurt President George H.W. Bush in 1992, who was presiding over a much better economy, it turned out, than the voters thought.
So, starting out strong is certainly helpful, if not decisive, for President Obama. But he needs more months like this. And I think the Republicans will still keep saying what they're saying because unemployment is still going to be way higher than it usually is.
BLOCK: I want to ask you both about a new CNN-TIME magazine poll of likely voters in South Carolina, which votes after New Hampshire. The Newt Gingrich lead that we saw a month ago, 43 percent there, now down to 18 percent and Mitt Romney has risen sharply, up to 37 percent. Rick Santorum as well, but Mitt Romney out ahead. If those numbers hold, if Mitt Romney can pull out a win, not just in New Hampshire but also in socially conservative South Carolina, is the primary fight effectively over there, David?
BROOKS: Yeah, it would move from 85 percent likely Romney to 95 percent Romney and it would sign that he can get above 25 percent. South Carolina has a lot of social conservatives, has a lot of establishment mainstream conservatives, too. Though, I would say, what we're going to see over the next couple weeks, and especially in South Carolina, is an explosion of ill temper, especially in the debates starting this weekend. South Carolina, traditionally, has been the nastiest of the primaries.
Gingrich is like this unexploded missile that seems to be going off in all directions at once. He's going to - I think the Gingrich we've seen so far is going to like Kelly Ripa compared to the last couple weeks.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BROOKS: So, I think we're in for quite a volatile period or at least the nasty period. It might be like - you know, I assume Romney will still get it. But this will be volatile.
BLOCK: I'm trying to imagine that Newt Gingrich-Kelly Ripa match-up. E.J., you're in New Hampshire. Are you sensing this explosion of ill temper that David Brooks is talking about there?
DIONNE: Well, I'm looking forward to its possibility and we're going to see that - I think we might see it in the debates this weekend. Here's what I'm struck by. I'm struck by the fact that Rick Santorum has an enormous opportunity up here, which he has not fully seized yet.
I went to a Santorum event last night in Windham, New Hampshire. And what struck me is that he was running to be an excellent teacher at a Jesuit high school rather than running for president. He gave these long, sometimes Socratic answers. They were actually very interesting. And, in some cases, I gave him credit for not pandering to his audience. But he had a real opportunity here and he still got a little opening to do it. There was some energy coming in, and you don't feel that he's built on that energy.
Having said that, I think these numbers in South Carolina suggest - even though I agree with David - it's hard to see any of these other candidates stopping Romney right now. Santorum's now second. Perry is doing very badly. So the fracturing of the non-Romney vote may end by default and that's got to give Santorum an opportunity, especially if Gingrich ever comes to his support and still does the thing that David suggests he's going to do.
BLOCK: Finally, I want to ask you both about the president's decision this week to do an end run around Republican opposition in Congress. He made recess appointments to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, also appointed three members to the National Labor Relations Board. And there are lots of questions about whether the Senate actually was in recess when he did this, whether these appointments are constitutional. Republicans are outraged.E.J., what are your thoughts?
DIONNE: Well, I say thank God he did this. I mean, what the Republicans have done on Richard Cordray is really irresponsible and I think unprecedented. They are not against him as the head of the Financial Consumer Protection Agency. They want to change a law that's already passed. Well, you don't do that by blocking a presidential appointee. You do that by trying to change the law. And, yes, we're going to have these fights about whether this will work or not legally. I suspect it will.
But the president really made a point of how awful the whole confirmation process has become, and how much it's been abused by the Republican minority in the Senate.
BLOCK: David, there have been lots of presidents made recess appointments before? Why is this any different?
BROOKS: Well, usually they were - the Senate was actually in recess when they made the recess appointments. You know, to me, this is an example of sort of the perfect hypocrisy. Barack Obama was outraged by recess appointments when President Bush was in office. Now that he's the president, he thinks the obstructionism is bad.
I'm more on the side of the president in general. I think they should get to appoint the people they want. But I am really struck by the presidential strategy of picking fights with Congress. Out in the country, people are really concerned about big issues - national decline. To get in one little intra-Washington fight after another, strikes me as out of scope with what the country wants right now.
BLOCK: OK. David Brooks of The New York Times here in Washington, E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post up in Manchester, New Hampshire, thanks to you both.
BROOKS: Thank you.
DIONNE: Thank you.
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Syrian officials are vowing to respond with an iron fist to a suicide bombing in Damascus today, 25 people were killed. It was the second deadly bomb attack in the Syrian capital in recent weeks. The government and opposition activists traded accusations as to who was responsible. And the bombing raised fears of escalating violence, as the Arab League presses Syria to implement a peace plan.
NPR's Peter Kenyon is monitoring developments in Syria from Istanbul.
(SOUNDBITE OF SIRENS)
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: Syrian state television showed footage of the aftermath of the bombing in a central neighborhood of Damascus. Syria's interior minister issued a statement saying it appeared the suicide bomber detonated his device at a busy intersection in hopes of causing maximum damage and loss of life. The attack comes just two weeks after a pair of explosions in Damascus killed some 44 people.
Government officials blame unnamed terrorists possibly with links to al-Qaida. Opposition activists, meanwhile, suggested that the regime itself might have been behind the bombings. Activists say they're anxious to see the anti-regime demonstrations remain peaceful. But with renegade soldiers forming loose units inside Syria, instances of armed resistance to the government crackdowns are on the rise.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
KENYON: As night fell, opposition videos showed large demonstrations in many cities. This one said to be from the southern Daraa province. Opposition estimates of demonstrators killed by security forces today rose into the dozens.
Arab League head, Nabil el-Araby, told reporters that he'd passed a message to the Syrian regime by a Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, who's based in Damascus, calling for an end to the violence.
Meanwhile, the Qatari prime minister, who met with U.N. officials this week, has said the league's observer mission had made mistakes and needs help. The league is due to meet Sunday in Cairo to discuss the mission.
Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Istanbul.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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One of the most famous companies in the world could be headed into bankruptcy soon. Kodak, based in Rochester, New York, is the famous maker of film and it's seen its profits plunged, largely because of the popularity of digital cameras. Kodak is trying to move into new product lines.
In the meantime, it's trying to raise cash by selling off a wealth of patents, as NPR's Jim Zarroli reports.
JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: During its heyday, Kodak had one of the most innovative research departments in the world. And in 1975, it developed the digital camera, a product that would eventually be its undoing.
Willy Shih is a former Kodak executive who now teaches at Harvard Business School.
WILLY SHIH: That first digital camera was actually 13 pounds and recorded images on a tape drive. So, it wasn't exactly very portable.
ZARROLI: Over the years, Kodak has tried to jump on the digital bandwagon, making and selling digital cameras and other products of its own.
(SOUNDBITE OF KODAK AD)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Introducing the new Kodak EasyShare digital camera and printer dock, just press a button to get real Kodak photos at home without a PC.
ZARROLI: But Kodak was never really able to capitalize on the product it had invented, and its digital strategy was something of a bust, says Rob Sethre of the consulting firm Photizo.
ROB SETHRE: A lot of it is depending on execution, and it just was not that well-executed. And the results are that they're very close to bankruptcy now.
ZARROLI: In the meantime, the profits it earned from selling film have dried up. Over the past decade, Kodak has lost money almost every year and the 123-year-old company has had to lay off most of its workforce. But Kodak does have one big thing going for it: It still owns about a thousand patents for the technology behind digital photography.
Again, Willy Shih.
SHIH: If you're the first in a field, that is one of those wonderful times, from a patent standpoint, when you get what is known as a frontier portfolio. In other words, a lot of the fundamental innovations happen early on and Kodak was in that position. So, it filed a lot of fundamental patents.
ZARROLI: Over the years, as digital photography has taken off, the innovations developed by Kodak have been widely used in smartphones, notebooks and tablets. And Kodak was able to earn a nice profit by licensing its patents to the companies that made them.
Now with its cash stream from film sales pretty much evaporated, Kodak has gone even further. It's tried to sell some of the patents outright. Rob Sethre says the company probably doesn't have much choice.
SETHRE: It's a little bit desperate. Although if you have only limited possibilities, it's actually, you know, a good and legitimate way to use your corporate assets.
ZARROLI: So far, Kodak hasn't found a buyer at a price it will accept. Kodak declines to talk about the bankruptcy rumors. The company has been trying to move into new product lines like inkjet printers, but it remains a small presence in a competitive field.
Mark Zupan, dean of the business school at the University of Rochester, says selling patents is an effort to raise the cash it needs to keep going. But Zupan says the company doesn't have a lot of time left.
MARK ZUPAN: It'll give them a year or two. The fundamental thing though is creating product lines that generate sustainable economic growth. And so far, they haven't been able to do that at a rate that compensates for how quickly the traditional film business has been declining.
ZARROLI: If Kodak does go bankrupt, its portfolio of patents could be auctioned off to pay its bills. And for now, investors are pretty skeptical the company can survive.
Kodak was once so important it was among the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. This week, its stock price fell well below a dollar a share, and it could be delisted from the stock exchange altogether.
Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.
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Now, a story with this you-can't-make-it-up headline: Americans Rescue Iranian's From Pirates. According to the U.S. Navy, yesterday in the North Arabian Sea, a Navy battle group came across a fishing vessel in distress. The crew was Iranian and they'd been held hostage for weeks by pirates. And here's the irony: The American battle group included the same aircraft carrier that Iran's government threatened earlier this week.
NPR's Tom Bowman has been following the story, and he joins us now from the Pentagon. And, Tom, walk us through what happened here.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Well, Robert, this all started yesterday shortly after noon off Oman, and not far from the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Now, a U.S. Navy ship got a distress call from a different ship; this large vessel. And that distress call said they were about to be boarded by pirates carrying rocket-propelled grenades.
The Navy ship sent out a helicopter which hovered above the suspected pirates. Then the Navy followed them back to an Iranian fishing boat, which the supposed pirates were using as a mother ship. Now, aboard that fishing boat they found 13 Iranians who said they were held by pirates for at least two months.
The Navy crew gave them food and water and clothing, and sent them on their way and took what they say are 15 Somali pirates aboard the USS John Stennis, an aircraft carrier. And through it all, not a shot was fired.
SIEGEL: And these U.S. Navy ships, these were the same - from the same carrier battle group that had just left the Persian Gulf, and Iran threatened them if they returned?
BOWMAN: That's right, Robert. The two American ships involved here, the cruiser Mobile Bay and the destroyer USS Kidd, were from that same carrier group. And the carrier, John Stennis now holding the alleged pirates, is the same ship the Iranian government warned not to come back to the Persian Gulf.
And a lot of this tough talk, of course, revolves around the prospect of more sanctions aimed at the Iranian government over their nuclear program. And the thing is this saber rattling really isn't all that new. Four years ago, Iranian naval vessels threatened to shoot U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf and then withdrew.
SIEGEL: But back to today's rescue of the Iranians who'd been held by the pirates. In the movies, this would lead to a sudden warming of relations with Tehran and everything would be happy. Not today, huh?
BOWMAN: Oh, no warm relations yet and actually no word at all from the Iranian government about what happened here. The Navy does say the Iranian fishing boat captain, however, was very thankful. And that some of the clothing the Iranians got, there's some talk that includes U.S. Navy t-shirts. But no firm word on whether than happened or not.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: OK. Thank you, Tom.
BOWMAN: You're welcome, Robert.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's Tom Bowman speaking to us from the Pentagon.
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From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
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And I'm Melissa Block.
Life certainly changed for Rick Santorum this week with his near win in the Iowa caucuses. But the former Pennsylvania senator is now campaigning in a different political climate, New Hampshire. Social conservatism doesn't always fly there, even among Republicans.
We hear more now from New Hampshire Public Radio's Josh Rogers.
JOSH ROGERS, BYLINE: When he took the stage at a packed high school auditorium last night in Windham, Rick Santorum didn't take long to face facts.
RICK SANTORUM: I love the Iowa town hall meetings and all those little, small farming towns. But here in New Hampshire, it's a very different atmosphere.
ROGERS: And it's not a religious one. Only about 20 percent of Republican primary voters here self-identify as evangelical Christians. In Iowa, that group made up more than 60 percent of caucusgoers. To do well here, Santorum will need to attract more than just people who like his reputation as a culture warrior.
Ken Dupont, a plumber, was in the crowd in Windham. If he's anything to go by, Santorum's hard-line stances on divisive social issues aren't necessarily a deal breaker.
KEN DUPONT: I am for abortion. I am for gay marriage. But I don't care if he's in favor of life, pro-life, that's OK. And if he's against gay marriage, that's his right too.
ROGERS: Dupont says fiscal and foreign policy will ultimately decide his vote. Both are themes Santorum has been stressing at length.
SANTORUM: Let's talk about Iran. Let's talk about Syria. Let's talk about Egypt. Let's even talk about Libya. Let's talk about Poland. Poland? Let's talk about Honduras. Honduras? Yeah. And there are many more, but I'm just talking about a few.
ROGERS: Santorum didn't discuss every country during this town hall meeting, but a large audience stayed quiet as he laid out his views on some fairly dry material - the mechanics of Social Security and the congressional budget process known as reconciliation.
Elsie Shude of Meredith says when she arrived she was leaning towards Mitt Romney, but now isn't so sure.
ELSIE SHUDE: I am very impressed with Rick. I really enjoyed listening to him. So, we'll go home and talk it over and see what happens.
ROGERS: Like many people at his recent events, Shude says Santorum's near win in Iowa prompted her to give him a closer look. With the fresh attention, though, New Hampshire voters will also get inevitable reminders of Santorum's arch-conservative social views. Same-sex marriage is legal in here. As a senator, Santorum once compared it to bestiality and pedophilia. Yesterday, Santorum argued with college students after he likened gay marriage to polygamy.
SANTORUM: Well, what about three men?
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD)
SANTORUM: Stop. OK, I'm going to give people one more chance and then we're going to move on. So...
ROGERS: The clash isn't the sort of thing that will likely endear Santorum to the independent voters who play a big role here, but it also doesn't hurt him with his core of support - social conservatives.
Jerry Thibodeau of Rumney, New Hampshire says Santorum's bluntness shows he can be trusted.
JERRY THIBODEAU: He doesn't leave you guessing where he stands on a topic. Obviously not everybody agrees with it. But you can't disagree with the way he's presenting himself. He's presenting himself honestly and truthfully, which is more than you can say some of these politicians.
ROGERS: Santorum's standing Tuesday may hinge on New Hampshire willingness to trust him. Recent polls show him just barely out of single digits. For that to change dramatically, voters here will have to take to heart Santorum's plea that they, quote, "Lead and be bold."
For NPR News, I'm Josh Rogers in Concord, New Hampshire.
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This is prime season for the presidential superPACs. They flooded Iowa with attack ads, now they're looking ahead to primaries in South Carolina and Florida. SuperPACs can solicit big, corporate contributions which the candidates cannot. And according to the law, the superPACs are barred from coordinating their ads with candidates.
But as NPR's Peter Overby reports, reality is not that simple.
PETER OVERBY, BYLINE: The superPAC Restore Our Future blanketed Iowa for a month before the Republican presidential caucuses, with ads tearing down former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. In the whole barrage of ads, there was only one small hint of the candidate these ads were for. It's in this spot ridiculing Gingrich, but you've got to listen carefully.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Immigration, Medicare, health care, Iraq, attacking Mitt Romney and more.
NEWT GINGRICH: I made a big mistake in the spring.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Haven't we had enough mistakes? Restore Our Future is responsible for the content of this message. Oops.
OVERBY: Restore Our Future is the superPAC for former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. And it was doing what superPACs do best - trashing the opposition while letting the candidate keep his distance.
The consultants who run Restore Our Future declined to comment today. But Gingrich has been railing at Romney to stop the attacks. Here's Gingrich on CBS last week.
GINGRICH: This is a man whose staff created the PAC, his millionaire friends fund the PAC, he pretends he has nothing to do with the PAC. It's baloney. He's not telling the American people the truth.
OVERBY: Right here, Gingrich is suggesting that the Romney campaign and superPAC violated federal regulations against illegal coordination. The point of the regs is that candidates run their campaigns on capped and disclosed contributions. And they shouldn't be able to run a back-door operation with big, unregulated money.
The coordination ban dates back to the 1990s, long before the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United decision in 2010 and paved the way for presidential superPACs. There's a never-ending debate over whether the ban has teeth, and whether the FEC really enforces it.
Cleta Mitchell is a long-time campaign finance lawyer for conservative causes and candidates.
CLETA MITCHELL: There's this myth that somehow there's a wink-wink, nod-nod between the campaigns and the PACs. And I just haven't seen it.
OVERBY: Mitchell's current clients include one of the superPACs supporting Texas Governor Rick Perry.
Romney says he can't tell Restore Our Future to stop the ads even if he wants to. He explained on MSNBC last month.
MITT ROMNEY: If we coordinate, in any way whatsoever, we go to the big house.
OVERBY: Again, Cleta Mitchell.
MITCHELL: If I were advising a candidate or a campaign, I would say to them, don't you ever comment publicly about anything the superPAC is saying. Don't ever say a word about it.
OVERBY: But not everyone agrees. Larry Noble is a former FEC general counsel, now in private practice.
LARRY NOBLE: I think a candidate is safe in making a public comment that they disavow a superPAC's ads, and they wish the superPAC would not do those ads.
OVERBY: Now, there's also a superPAC for Gingrich. It's called Winning Our Future. That's as opposed to the Romney PAC, Restore Our Future. Political strategists nowadays say superPACs are a basic element in a presidential campaign.
The senior adviser to Winning Our Future is Rick Tyler, a former aide to Gingrich. Tyler says the PAC takes its lead from Gingrich but not in secret. So, it's not coordination.
RICK TYLER: What we can do is listen to the campaign and listen to the candidate through the media and determine what the campaign is doing, what the strategy is and echo that strategy, thus expanding the campaign.
MITCHELL: If it's in the public domain, it's fair game for the superPAC.
OVERBY: But Mitchell says she also tells her clients this.
MITCHELL: However, if you're going to be politically astute, what you probably should do is not try to mirror the campaign, but do your own research, your own poll and be able to say: Look, we made our decision based on our own independent determination.
OVERBY: The coordination issue is such a mess, Noble says candidates and superPACs get a mixed message.
NOBLE: They need to be worried about coordination. The question is, what definition of coordination do they need to be worried about.
OVERBY: And the reality is, it's hard to prove coordination. So, Mitt Romney probably wouldn't have to worry about a trip to the big house. In fact, it's a long reach back in time, years actually, to the last case of coordination in which the FEC assessed a penalty.
Peter Overby, NPR News, Washington.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block.
One of the last remaining Navajo code talkers has died. During World War II, Keith Little served as a Marine sending messages encrypted in his native tongue. In recent years, he led the Navajo Code Talkers' Association. He was working to get a museum established. Keith Little died Tuesday at age 87 in Fort Defiance, Arizona.
Reporter Ashley Gross has this remembrance.
ASHLEY GROSS, BYLINE: Keith Little entered a federal boarding school at age 12. He spoke only Navajo. If he or his peers were caught speaking it, teachers would force them to write two sentences over and over again.
KEITH LITTLE: I will talk English. I will not talk Navajo. It didn't feel good to be punished, you know, in front of everybody.
GROSS: But then came the attack on Pearl Harbor and all of a sudden the complicated Navajo language was especially useful. Little joined the Marines and was soon pulled aside to learn the top secret Navajo code. Little remembered how an instructor would drill them for hours on the Navajo words that replaced military terms.
LITTLE: Eggs is bomb. So when he says eggs, he put down bombs. Or when he might say - he might yell out, turtle. Tank.
GROSS: Little fought in the Marshall Islands, Saipan and Iwo Jima. That's where he watched one of his friends get blown up.
LITTLE: All kind of thoughts come to you. I wonder how his parents are going to take it. I wonder if he would have become a good father and a grandpa and things like this, you know.
GROSS: Michael Smith is court clerk of the Navajo Nation Supreme Court and son of another code talker, Jesse Smith. He says Little dedicated his life after the war to helping young Navajos embrace their culture.
MICHAEL SMITH: He always wanted to try to do things for the children and for the language to preserve the language. He's an amazing man.
GROSS: Little said he was always asked why he fought for the U.S. when his people had been treated so badly.
LITTLE: The only proper answer to give is that this is our land.
GROSS: He came back to that land surrounded by scrubby desert and pinon trees and settled down with his wife Nellie.
For NPR News, I'm Ashley Gross.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
OK. It's not the great American novel, but it is almost certainly the best novel ever written about a forensic plumber and a pet store owner who, together, managed to destroy and then repair much of the known world. It is called "Lunatics." And here to explain how this new book came about are its two authors, Dave Barry, who wrote columns for many years for the Miami Herald and who can claim responsibility for the widespread popularity of Talk Like a Pirate Day, and Alan Zweibel, who was, among other things, an original writer on "Saturday Night Live" and who can claim responsibility for the trenchant commentaries of Roseanne Roseannadanna. Dave Barry, welcome to you.
DAVE BARRY: Thank you.
SIEGEL: And Alan Zweibel, welcome to the program.
ALAN ZWEIBEL: Thank you.
SIEGEL: First question. Dave Barry, why did "Lunatics," the novel, require two authors?
BARRY: Because we have two main voices in the book. One of them is Alan's voice, which is this really nice guy, sweet man. And then there's this complete and utter jerk who's the other main character and that's my voice in the book. Not that I'm a jerk in real life, but we kind of played the two voices against each other.
SIEGEL: And this was improvisational, Alan? You'd get a chapter from Dave and just make up what happened next?
ZWEIBEL: It was incredibly improvisational. My character spoke first. I wrote a two- or three-page first chapter. I sent it to Dave, not knowing what he was going to send back to me. It was like having a - oh, God - like a deranged pen pal. OK? It was like I was writing this book with Ted Kaczynski because I would see, you know, a chapter in my inbox and I knew that it would funny, but I had no idea what Dave was going to do with it and where he was going to then take it.
SIEGEL: And your attitude is you were handing off to the other man. Dave Barry, were you trying to make life easy for Alan Zweibel or were there puzzles that you planted in your chapters?
BARRY: No. I made it as hard as humanly possible. I think we both kind of did that. We were thinking like, all right: Mr. Funny Guy, deal with this development.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BARRY: You know, the problem there became, after a while, after - you know, I don't know - 20, 30,000 words into the book, we realized that - and if you - I know you're an astute guy, Robert. You probably read a lot of books in your life. A lot of them have - and this is a technical term I'm going to use - a plot.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: Ah, yes. I've heard of that. I've heard of that.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BARRY: Well, that became our problem with this insane back and forth we were involved with.
SIEGEL: I wasn't going to bring it up right away, but there is a certain randomness to the events as they flow from one to the next.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
ZWEIBEL: Well, he brought up this word plot, I remember, over dinner one night. And being the Jewish person I am, I immediately thought he was talking about cemeteries. OK? And so...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: You thought you were being offered a deal? Is that what you...
ZWEIBEL: Yeah. I said, get me one by a tree. It'll be nice. OK?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
ZWEIBEL: So when the people come - so we only actually communicated twice. You know, it was all emails back and forth, you know, in terms of where we were and what we might want to do or Dave would correct me. He'd call himself the plot Nazi only because things like - my character has two children and, at one point, they had five names. So he insisted...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BARRY: Very briefly, Alan's character became an elderly Belgian woman and he wasn't good at continuity is what I'm saying.
ZWEIBEL: Yeah. No. I went afield and he'd reign me in. But the two times we did get together, we said: OK, we have to have dinner or just speak about where this is going and we would have this terrific dinner and we'd speak about the Miami Heat and whatever. And somewhere during coffee, he would go, what about this plot? I'd go, yeah, I think it's going to be fine. And that would be our plot session.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: That was your rigorous - and since this story takes the characters everywhere - to Cuba and the Horn of Africa and China - did hours of research go into this or reading one copy of National Geographic? How would you describe how you prepared for writing all these scenes?
BARRY: I have one word and it's - I think the same, you know, when you're talking about research, the same word that Bob Woodward would use, Wikipedia.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BARRY: I found that, in five minutes of Wikipedia, I could be an expert on pretty much any world problem or area.
SIEGEL: Well, is this going to be the one novel the entire (unintelligible) of Alan Zweibel and Dave Barry or are you actually at this again right now?
ZWEIBEL: Well, you know something? We haven't spoken specifics, but this was so much fun that, yeah. I suspect, when we go on our book tour, we'll be spending - oh, God - an inordinate amount of time together and we would have to fill it with something. I think that we'll be talking about: OK, what could the next set of characters be and figuring how we don't repeat ourselves, you know. But, yeah, I would do this again in a heartbeat.
BARRY: Not me. Not me. I would never do it again.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
ZWEIBEL: Yeah. So my part of the book called, you're looking for another partner, a lot of it.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: Well, Alan Zweibel and Dave Barry, thank you very much, both of you, for talking with us about the book you've written together, "Lunatics."
BARRY: It was our pleasure.
ZWEIBEL: Thank you for having us.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Four years ago, in the run-up to the primary, I spent quite a bit of time reporting from the southern New Hampshire town of Milford. I got to know some of the voters there. And today, we're joined, again, by two of them. First, Noreen O'Connell. And, Noreen, back in 2008, you were chair of the Milford Board of Selectmen. I gather, now, you are not doing that anymore. You're fully devoted to life on your farm.
NOREEN O'CONNELL: Yes and enjoying every minute.
BLOCK: Enjoying every minute of it, great. And it's good to talk to you again. Steve O'Keefe, what about you? You work across the border in Massachusetts, a financial planner for Fidelity and a registered Republican.
STEVE O'KEEFE: That's correct.
BLOCK: OK. I will play a little bit of tape from January 2008, right before the New Hampshire primary.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
O'KEEFE: You know, somebody can just really impress me over the next day, and you know, maybe John McCain is going to knock on my door. That, obviously, could stray me one way. But, you know, to be honest with you right now, it's definitely for Mitt.
BLOCK: You never know, it's New Hampshire.
O'KEEFE: You absolutely are correct. You never know.
BLOCK: You never know. And, Steve, you have flirted actually with Mike Huckabee for a while there, too.
O'KEEFE: I actually did.
BLOCK: And how did you end up voting in 2008 in the primary?
O'KEEFE: Ended up voting for Mitt Romney, believe it or not. You know, this time, you know, I'm still on the fence. Some things haven't changed over four years.
BLOCK: Really? Well, what are you thinking as you look at the field?
O'KEEFE: Well, two people impress me. I'm really impressed by Jon Huntsman. I've actually met the gentleman twice. He has been sort of the underdog in this particular race, not really seen across the country as we've seen him in New Hampshire. Mitt Romney, of course, you know, I definitely really truly believe that he's got a great economic plan, and I think that's what this country really needs.
BLOCK: Let me turn back to Noreen O'Connell. Noreen, when we talked in 2008, you described yourself as painfully independent...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: ...and don't actually always vote GOP in the primary. You sometimes vote for a Democrat. What about this time around?
O'CONNELL: I'm still undeclared, and I had leanings towards Huntsman until he came out with his pro-life statement, and I'm just finding most of their comments extremely hypocritical.
BLOCK: Mm-hmm. And what do you think you're going to do on primary day?
O'CONNELL: I haven't decided. I'm working at the polls, so I'll certainly have time to vote. But I'm in a quandary. I really am. I'm finding it very hypocritical that they want to stay out of our lives, our plans, our pocketbooks, and then, they turn around and jump with both feet into our personal lives.
BLOCK: Noreen, how did you end up voting in 2008, both in the primary and then in the general election in November?
O'CONNELL: General election, I voted for Obama. In the primary, I voted for Romney.
BLOCK: You know, I'm curious. For both of you, as you drive around Milford and around New Hampshire, if you're looking for any indication through lawn signs or the conversations at the coffee shops, what are you hearing? Do you get a sense of who's really generating excitement? Steve, what about you?
O'KEEFE: You know, I think Mitt Romney, of course, because of the connection to Massachusetts being right over the border, within, you know, 10 miles. The other people that are mentioned are - I don't want to call them fly-by-night candidates, but people that have come to the forefront and then have quickly fallen back, like Newt Gingrich for a perfect example.
BLOCK: And, Noreen, what are you hearing from your friends and around town?
O'CONNELL: Well, it's actually kind of boring. If you drive around town, there are almost no signs out there...
BLOCK: Really?
O'CONNELL: ...which is unheard of.
BLOCK: There's a whole lot of campaign fatigue after the Iowa caucuses out there. Are you feeling much the same, inundated by literature and phone calls and just will be happy to have the whole thing over with?
O'KEEFE: You know, I think Ms. O'Connell hit the nail on the head. I don't think this particular campaign is as exciting as 2008. I believe the Republican Party really needs to come up with a strategy to create some excitement out there about their frontrunners. And right now, that's just not happening.
BLOCK: Steve, you mentioned you had met Jon Huntsman a couple of times, been to a couple of his events. Noreen, what about you? Have you seen any of the candidates up close and personal?
O'CONNELL: No. I've spoken to a number of people on the phone, but I'm really backing off on this election.
BLOCK: Noreen, can you remember another time when you felt as disengaged from politics as you seem to feel right now?
O'CONNELL: No. No. I've always been very engaged, obviously, in politics. But I just find, right now, especially in New Hampshire, the Republican Party very mean-spirited, and it's really turning me off.
BLOCK: Milford is a pretty small town. Steve and Noreen, do you know each other independent of these pieces on NPR?
STEVE O'KEEFE: We do. Mr. O'Connell was a science teacher of mine in high school and Mrs. O'Connell was a dental hygienist at my dentist and my father actually has used them as a source of expertise with his flower garden.
BLOCK: And I gather, Noreen, even though you may not be voting on Tuesday, you are going to be working at the polls. Chances are you might be seeing Steve O'Keefe coming in to cast his vote.
NOREEN O'CONNELL: I'll keep my eye out.
BLOCK: Well, Noreen O'Connell and Steve O'Keefe from Milford, New Hampshire, thanks to you both and enjoy the run up the primary.
O'CONNELL: Bye, now.
O'KEEFE: Great. Thank you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
For the first time in more than 80 years, the Justice Department has expanded the definition of rape that's used for nationwide crime reports. The new definition includes men and boys who are victims of sexual violence. Also, people who can't give consent because they're incapacitated by drugs or alcohol.
NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson explains.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: The last time the FBI came up with a definition of rape for its report card on serious crime, America was leaving the roaring '20s and about to enter the Great Depression.
Here's how the country thought of rape in those days.
SUSAN CARBON: As, as this is a very narrow definition, the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.
JOHNSON: That's current day Justice Department official Susan Carbon. She points out that old definition limited rape to actions against women by men. It didn't consider whether victims had been rendered defenseless with liquor or date rape drugs and it required women to fight back for the assault to be called rape.
Pretty much everybody in law enforcement agreed that definition was a real problem a long time ago, but inertia exerted a powerful force until senior figures in the Obama administration led by Vice President Joseph Biden decided the time had finally arrived for an updated.
Valerie Jarrett is senior advisor to President Obama.
VALERIE JARRETT: This major policy change will lead to more accurate reporting and far more comprehensive understanding of this devastating crime.
JOHNSON: People in the White House pushed the FBI to follow the lead of many states that already use an expanded definition of rape. Scott Berkowitz runs a nonprofit group that helps survivors of sexual violence.
SCOTT BERKOWITZ: The FBI's new definition of rape comes much closer to reflecting the reality of the crime. It happens to men and women, young and old, but in every case, it's an incredibly violent crime and we owe it to victims to acknowledge and count every one, as the FBI is now going to do.
JOHNSON: Under the old definition, the FBI says, states and local police reported almost 85,000 rapes in 2010, but those are vast underestimates, says White House advisor Lynn Rosenthal.
LYNN ROSENTHAL: When victims are suffering so greatly, but they're invisible in our national crime data, it limits our ability to fully understand the extent of the problem.
JOHNSON: Or, Rosenthal says, to send federal grant money and counseling resources to the places in the U.S. that need them most.
It could take a while for all of the new figures to appear in the FBI's report card, says the FBI's David Cuthbertson.
DAVID CUTHBERTSON: If you can imagine 18,000 law enforcement agencies have 18,000 different ways that they manage their records and their data.
JOHNSON: He says the FBI will work with local police to make sure the changes show up over the next couple of years.
Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
To be number one in the National Football League, you have to make it through the playoffs. And they kick off this weekend full of fresh faces. To begin with, Detroit is back in the mix for the first time this century. They play New Orleans tomorrow. And another game tomorrow features two rookie quarterbacks: Andy Dalton of the Cincinnati Bengals faces T.J. Yates of the Houston Texans. And, by the way, it is the Texans first appearance in the playoffs.
Sportswriter Stefan Fatsis joins us now as he does most Fridays. Stefan, how you doing?
STEFAN FATSIS: Hey, Robert.
SIEGEL: And these are wild card games this weekend: two tomorrow, two Sunday. Let's start with the Saints hosting the Detroit Lions.
FATSIS: This is going to be first game ever matching two quarterbacks who threw for more than 5,000 yards in the regular season: Drew Brees of the Saints, Matthew Stafford of Lions. It's also the first time that more than one quarterback ever did it in a season. Dan Marino had done that in 1984, Brees did it in 2008. This year, Brees, Stafford and Tom Brady of New England did it. Brees set the record with 5,476 yards passing. Green Bay's Aaron Rodgers would have done it, but he took the last week of the season off. So his backup, Matt Flynn, went out and threw for 480 yards. And together they broke 5,000.
Lions, zero and 16 just a few seasons ago, haven't been in the playoffs since 1999, so their fans are happy. This will be a shootout, but the Saints averaged 41 points when they won all of their games at the very loud Superdome this season.
SIEGEL: Also tomorrow, the Houston Texans host the Cincinnati Bengals.
FATSIS: As you mentioned, first playoff appearance for the Texans since they joined the NFL as an expansion team in 2002. Cincinnati hasn't won a playoff game since 1990, but both teams limped into the playoffs. You've got the rookie quarterbacks - first time two rookies are facing each other in the playoffs. T.J. Yates, third-string quarterback, after injuries to the one and two. The Texans are favored because of - they've got a fantastic defense. But whoever wins this game is not likely to advance much further. They're going to have to play either New England or the Baltimore Ravens next week.
SIEGEL: Now, let's move on to Sunday's games. First, the New York Giants hosting the Atlanta Falcons and the Pittsburgh Steelers visiting the Denver Broncos.
FATSIS: Yeah, that first game should be really competitive. Two excellent quarterbacks - Eli Manning for New York, Matt Ryan for Atlanta - two defenses that are suspect against the pass so that should be interesting to see how they do. The Pittsburgh-Denver game is the one that's going to get all the attention. Denver lost as many games as it won, but it's hosting the 12-and-4 Steelers, who had the same record as Baltimore but finished second in their division on tiebreakers.
The attention, of course, is going to be there because of Denver quarterback Tim Tebow. He engineered a bunch of comebacks earlier in season, but his myriad deficiencies were exposed in three straight losses to end the year. His counterpart on Pittsburgh, Ben Roethlisberger, has a bad ankle. This is going to be a low-scoring game.
SIEGEL: Now, four teams have the week off. Is the Super Bowl champion likely among those four?
FATSIS: You know, history says yes. So it should be either the Patriots, Ravens, Packers or San Francisco 49ers. Since 2000, a number one or a number two seed from one of the conferences has won the Super Bowl six out of 11 times.
SIEGEL: Now, the Super Bowl always attracts a huge television audience. But the other kind of football will also be on network TV during some of the upcoming playoff weekends. Tell us about soccer.
FATSIS: Yeah, for the first time, Fox is going to air an English Premier League game live. And this is the main network, not on its soccer cable channel. Fox have planned to do that on Super Bowl Sunday. It's not airing the Super Bowl this year, NBC is. But its tape-delayed games on the network that it had shown in the fall did so well - audience of close to 2 million for a couple of the games - that it moved the plan up. So Fox is going to show Arsenal-Manchester United live on the morning of Sunday, January 22nd. That's before it airs the NFC championship game later in the day. And on Super Bowl Sunday, February 5th, Fox is going to show Chelsea against Man U.
The live games are a sign of growth for soccer in the U.S. Of course, though, long way to go to match that Super Bowl audience, 111 million last year.
SIEGEL: Thank you, Stefan.
FATSIS: Thanks, Robert.
SIEGEL: Stefan Fatsis joins us most Fridays to talk about sports and the business of sports. You can hear more of him on Slate magazine's sports podcast, Hang Up and Listen.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
You are listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
Rick Santorum is working hard this week to capitalize on his strong showing in the Iowa caucuses. He's stumping at rallies and the Rotary Club in New Hampshire, trying to convince voters that he is presidential material. One thing he's not encouraging possible supporters to do is Google him.
NPR's Laura Sydell reports that if they do, one of the top results is so scatological and sexual, we can't describe it on the radio.
LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE: One of the top search results for Santorum on Google is a site called spreadingsantorum.com, and it's got a big brown blotch on it. And we can't say more than that. It's a political stunt staged by columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage. Savage says he was outraged by an interview Santorum did in 2003, when he was still a U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania.
DAN SAVAGE: He argued that birth control should be illegal and that states should have the right to arrest, prosecute and imprison people for their private, consensual sexual conduct.
SYDELL: Savage was angry when Santorum went on to say that states have the same right to regulate homosexuality that they have to regulate pedophilia and bestiality. One of the readers of his column suggested that they hold a contest to redefine Santorum's last name.
SAVAGE: And I thought that was a good idea, tossed it in the column. People sent in suggested new definitions. I ran a bunch of them, and I let my readers vote. And they chose that one.
SYDELL: Savage created the website and blog where people can put updates about Santorum's political career, which faltered after he lost his re-election bid in 2007. But with his strong showing in Iowa, people are looking for information about Santorum. When they search his last name, the Savage blog comes right up. Gabriel Stricker, head of Google's global communications, says no one at Google is making an editorial statement. He says their algorithms choose top search results based on objective criteria.
GABRIEL STRICKER: There definitely were - are people who are finding this to be the best answer to their question, and they are indicating this by either clicking on this result or linking to this result as the best answer to that question.
SYDELL: A lot of people click on the spreadingsantorum link every day to make sure it stays on top of the search results. Stricker says Google often gets requests from celebrities and political figures to take down sites or remove links from the first page, but Google sticks to its algorithms unless the site incites violence or breaks the law. The Santorum campaign did not respond to NPR's requests for comment. However, in the past, Santorum has referred to his, quote, "Google problem." But Santorum can do something even if Google won't change the search results. A whole industry has grown up to help companies and public figures who also have Google problems.
DORIE CLARK: Because if you're not taking control of it, someone else will.
SYDELL: That is Dorie Clark, CEO of Clark Strategic Communications, a company that helps people with their digital marketing. Clark says the reality is that nothing on the Internet ever goes away. But Santorum could make Savage's site less noticeable.
CLARK: He should be having an army of volunteers blogging, recording podcasts, recording videocasts because video especially is prioritized in search engine rankings and creating so much new information about Rick Santorum that the search engines essentially forget about Dan Savages' site.
SYDELL: Clark says its now up to Santorum's campaign to give the public a lot more stuff to click on than an online prank. Laura Sydell, NPR News.
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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel. Benjamin Franklin once wrote: Lost time is never found again. But while days and decades may slip away for good, sometimes the things we lose have a funny habit of finding their way back.
BLOCK: Take this example from the Orlando Sentinel. A 38-year-old switch technician at AT&T named Reed Banjanin was scuba diving last summer outside Orlando. He was combing the sandy bottom of a natural spring with a metal detector when he came across a gold class ring.
REED BANJANIN: I was just amazed. I kept staring at it. I was like, this can't be real. I mean, it's in absolutely perfect condition.
BLOCK: The ring - from Mississippi Women's College - bore the date 1923 and an inscription. The name: Louise Hearst.
SIEGEL: After 20 years of diving, Banjanin said this is, by far, his best find, and he decided to try to find Ms. Hearst. So he set out to do some serious sleuthing.
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SIEGEL: He hit the Internet. He searched Louise Hearst, and he put the word out on Facebook.
BLOCK: Banjanin quickly learned that Ms. Hearst was born in 1903 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, but it took months before he came across a marriage record and the clue he needed: her married name.
SIEGEL: Louise Hearst had married Robert S. Entzminger two years after her college graduation. He learned that Louise Entzminger died in 1975, but Banjanin didn't let it go at that.
BLOCK: He tracked down another member of the Entzminger family in Oakton, Virginia: Louise's grandson, John.
JOHN ENTZMINGER: The first call I got was: Do you know anybody by the name of John Entzminger? And sure enough, she is my grandmother.
BANJANIN: So I called him and told him about it. He was just astounded.
ENTZMINGER: Well, it was quite a pretty - I said what? You found what?
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BANJANIN: And so, a few days after that, I sent the ring to him, and he received it, I think, on Christmas Eve.
ENTZMINGER: Yeah. U.S. postal, special delivery.
SIEGEL: Lost but found again.
BANJANIN: I think she knows that I found it.
ENTZMINGER: Oh, yes, she would just be laughing and rejoicing about the finding it again.
BANJANIN: I'm just happy it's back in the hands of a relative, back where it belongs.
ENTZMINGER: She'll just say this is a miracle.
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BLOCK: That's John Entzminger and Reed Banjanin. Banjanin returned Entzminger's grandmother's class ring. They figure it's nearly 40 years since she had lost it in that natural spring outside Orlando.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Well, diving a little deeper now for this next story. It's not every week that we have novel life forms to report in an extreme, previously unexplored environment. But this week, an Antarctic research cruise shared images taken 2 miles under the sea, near hydrothermal vents. These are basically underwater geysers, hot springs. The water - heated beneath the Earth's crust - is over 750 degrees Fahrenheit, and it's so deep, under so much pressure, the water does not boil.
In fact, it supports such creatures as the hairy-chested yeti crab, a seven-armed sea star, not to mention fields of stalked barnacles. Biologist Alex Rogers of the University of Oxford led this expedition and joins us now from Oxford. And, Professor Rogers, first, the images that you have brought back from the Scotia Ridge, deep beneath the Southern Ocean, are astonishingly vivid. How did you take them?
ALEX ROGERS: We used a tethered robot, which was deployed from the Royal Research Ship James Cook. This is a vehicle which is about the size of a four-wheel-drive truck. It has very mobile manipulators on the front and an array of high-definition video cameras and stills cameras on the front as well.
SIEGEL: Tell me your reaction when you first saw the images, which now we've all seen, of, say, the yeti crabs.
ROGERS: Well, I think people should bear in mind that we were the first humans ever to see these particular vents, and they really were an astonishing sight. The yeti crabs were literally in heaps around the hydrothermal vents, in densities of up to 600 per square meter, and all jostling and riding around to get the best position in the hydrothermal fluid flow. So it really was an incredible sight.
SIEGEL: And this particular crab is novel, is unlike crabs seen elsewhere?
ROGERS: It's a new species of yeti crab, and they're called yeti crabs because they're very hairy. The ones in the South Pacific have very hairy limbs and hairy claws. Our yeti crab has a very hairy chest.
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SIEGEL: You said they're hairy, and the reason they're called yeti is in honor of the Abominable Snowman. That's a name for that creature, yes.
ROGERS: Yes. Yes.
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SIEGEL: There's also some stunning video of what looks like a white octopus.
ROGERS: That's right. We're not entirely sure what it is because we didn't manage to capture any, but we believe it's probably a Vulcanoctopus, and these are octopuses which only occur around hydrothermal vents. And we saw these animals roving around the vent fields, and we think they may have actually been preying on the yeti crabs.
SIEGEL: Well, before you go, you have to tell us about the nickname that was given to the yeti - the hairy chested yeti crabs.
ROGERS: Yes...
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ROGERS: ...indeed. One of my PhD students, a chap called Nicolai Roterman, first coined the phrase on the ship of the Hoff or the Hoff crab because of the very hairy chest of these particular yeti crabs.
SIEGEL: After David Hasselhoff, who was the start of "Baywatch."
ROGERS: Yes. You know, scientists like a bit of a lighthearted humor when they've been out at sea for two months and...
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SIEGEL: Well, if it's a new species, can Hasselhoffia(ph) somehow make it into the name?
ROGERS: Well, we'll have to see and the - we're in the process of describing this new species, and I'll have to talk to my colleagues about what name it eventually ends up with. But, of course, it's just one amongst probably two dozen new species of large animal which we found around these hydrothermal vents.
SIEGEL: As you were viewing these images from under the sea, was there one particular holy cow moment that was louder and more dramatic than the others, or was it just nonstop holy cow eureka?
ROGERS: Well, I must say that the cruise that I led with the remotely operated vehicle Isis was one discovery after another. And if you can imagine the scene, we're all standing in a dark control van for the remotely operated vehicle with a bank of screens in front of us beaming up pictures from the seabed, and you can hear the scientists catching their breath as they think they may have seen something on the cameras and then cheering almost as though we were at a football match when some of these sights reached us.
I mean, the - as I said, the sights of these enormous heaps of yeti crabs around the vents was particularly striking. And sometimes, we observed the yeti crabs crawling up the vent chimneys and even fighting with each other for the best position around the fluid flow, really stunning images that will remain with all of us for the rest of our lives, I guess.
SIEGEL: Well, professor Rogers, thank you - congratulations on your discoveries...
ROGERS: And thanks very much.
SIEGEL: ...and thank you very much for talking with us.
ROGERS: Yeah. Lovely to talk to you.
SIEGEL: That is biologist Alex Rogers of the University of Oxford speaking to us from Oxford.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. For eight years, Tim Goeglein worked as President George W. Bush's liaison to the evangelical community. But everything changed for Goeglein in 2008 when he received an email that would end his career in the White House.
TIM GOEGLEIN: (Reading) I open the email, read it once, felt the blood drain from my head, got down on my knees next to my desk and was overcome with a fear and trepidation as never before. My only prayer, which I repeated again and again, was God help me, God help me. I knew instantly this would be the most impossible day of my life and my heart was pounding as if to burst from my chest.
RAZ: What happened after that is chronicled in Goeglein's new book. It's called "The Man in the Middle." And he joins me now here in the studio. Tim Goeglein, welcome.
GOEGLEIN: Thank you. It's great to be here.
RAZ: So this email that you open up, who is it from? What does it say?
GOEGLEIN: It's a reporter who says to me: I've learned about the plagiarism. Is it true?
RAZ: That you've plagiarized something.
GOEGLEIN: That's correct. And..
RAZ: But what was it?
GOEGLEIN: I was doing a column for my hometown newspapers, and it was absolutely true that I had been plagiarizing some of those columns.
RAZ: Why were you doing it? I mean, why were you plagiarizing?
GOEGLEIN: It's been my experience that pride takes a lot of avenues. For some people, the expression of the pride is sex. For some people, it's power. Some people, it's money. In my instance, it was wanting to be the clever one, the one who said it better than anybody else, the one who wrote it better. And it would be very easy to come to a microphone like this and to say, well, this was the extenuating circumstance, this was the form of pressure, this...
RAZ: I mean, but was there pressure?
GOEGLEIN: There was no pressure, there was no stress, there were no extenuating circumstances. There was no one to blame but yours truly. And I knew exactly and expressly what I was doing, and I did it anyway.
RAZ: You decided right there on the spot that you were going to resign.
GOEGLEIN: Yes.
RAZ: How did President Bush react?
GOEGLEIN: I went into the Oval Office, and I shut the door, and it was just George W. Bush and me. And I turned to the president to apologize. And I barely got a few words out, and he looked me in the eyes, and he said: You're forgiven. And I was speechless. And I regained my composure, and I looked at the president again, eyeball to eyeball, and started to apologize. And before I could get barely a few words out, he looked at me and he said: Tim, grace and mercy are real. I have known grace and mercy in my life, and I'm extending it to you. You're forgiven.
And I tried a third time, and this time, I apologized. I said to him, he should have taken me by the lapels and thrown me onto Pennsylvania Avenue for what I had done. And he said: Again, you're forgiven. Grace and mercy are real. Now, we can spend the next few minutes talking about all of this, or we can talk about the last eight years. We prayed together briefly, and I looked around the Oval Office, and I thought that would be my last time there and my last time to see the president.
And as I was departing, he said: By the way, I would like you to bring your wife and children here so that I can tell them what a great husband and father you have been. And at that point, it was - I think it's fair to say - the most surreal moment in my life. This is not what the leader of the free world typically does.
RAZ: I'm speaking with Tim Goeglein about his new book, "The Man in the Middle," about his eight years working for President George W. Bush in the White House. Tim, President Bush, of course, was earnest in his convictions and his beliefs. But he also believed that he was chosen by God to carry out certain things at a certain time in history, particularly after 9/11. And some have argued, as you know, that some of the decisions that he took - for example, the invasion of Iraq - if indeed it was guided by this divine notion, that maybe it would have been better had he been a bit more dispassionate or sort of separated himself from his faith at times. What do you think about that?
GOEGLEIN: I believe that in the great history of this remarkable country that faith and politics go together. This is not Western Europe. It's not Eastern Europe or Central Europe. It's America. In the founding discussions and debates, men as elementally different as Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson - I mean, these people didn't agree on whether we ought to have a national bank, a national currency, and as one removed, whether we ought to have a constitution. But they all agreed categorically that freedom and liberty came from God, not from government.
RAZ: But there, of course, their notion of God were somewhat different than yours. I mean, many of these men were theists.
GOEGLEIN: Absolutely, yes. There were Orthodox Christians there. There were theists and perhaps none of the above. But they were all preoccupied with one thing, which was what they called the other side of liberty, the other side of freedom, which was virtue. And they said that in the American experience, virtue, which was moral excellence, came from the Judeo-Christian tradition, from the holy scriptures. They were not uncomfortable with government and religion being of one piece.
RAZ: Tim, I'm curious about your time in the White House because, obviously, our listeners can't see you, but you're a very, very earnest man. You're very friendly, kind of soft-spoken, and you worked in a White House that was characterized as a cutthroat place under Karl Rove. I know you know him - knew him well. You know the sort of the political intrigue and the strategizing. And I wonder how did you survive in that atmosphere?
GOEGLEIN: When I came to the White House in 2001, right at the beginning after the inauguration, I had several people in Washington and far beyond Washington who had worked in many White Houses of both parties tell me be careful, that you'll know this right away whether the Republicans are there or the Democrats.
RAZ: It's ugly.
GOEGLEIN: That's right. I was warned over and over. But the Bush administration, the Bush White House, was different.
RAZ: William F. Buckley was somebody you knew and admired and influenced you. His style, his approach from today's vantage point, seems almost quaint. He was polite, he was civil, he was charming. I wonder whether you think that kind of conservative leadership is around in the public sphere.
GOEGLEIN: It is out there.
RAZ: Is it influential?
GOEGLEIN: I believe so. In fact, I would say this: I believe that the conservative movement is stronger and more effective than the Republican Party. And I think so often, the Republican Party is conflated with the conservative movement. Conservatism is not a political program. It has a political element. But I learned from my friends, both Russell Kirk and Bill Buckley, that we make a mistake if we elevate ideology.
RAZ: I know that, of course, you're a conservative, but, as you know, there's been a growing number of liberal evangelicals who've been involved with the Democratic Party. Do you see that as an encouraging thing for evangelical Christianity at large?
GOEGLEIN: I believe very strongly that American evangelical Christianity has grown up. And as any sect in this regard grows up, it also grows outward. And I believe that, yes, it's a good thing that there is a strong Christian influence in both parties. Elementally, I think that that's a good thing. But I believe that in both the short and the medium term, by and large, that most self-identified conservative Christians will continue to find the Republican Party as its natural home.
RAZ: That's Tim Goeglein. He is the vice president of external relations for Focus on the Family. He served as deputy director of the White House Office of Public Liaison under President George W. Bush for nearly eight years. His new book about that time is called "The Man in the Middle: An Inside Account of Faith and Politics in the George W. Bush Era." Tim Goeglein, thank you so much for coming in.
GOEGLEIN: It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Killer whales in Puget Sound aren't doing very well. They've been on the endangered species list since 2005, and there are several theories as to why they're not recovering. It could be a lack of food, increased boat traffic or pollution. So in order to get a better idea, a team of researchers is relying on a secret weapon with a killer nose, to get to the bottom of the mystery.
From the public media collaboration EarthFix, Ashley Ahearn reports.
ASHLEY AHEARN, BYLINE: Sam Wasser likes to talk about poop. And he's especially excited about killer-whale poop.
SAM WASSER: It looks kind of like a combination of algae and snot. It varies in color, but it's very mucusy.
AHEARN: Wasser is the director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington. He and his team conduct research on killer whales out of Snug Harbor, on San Juan Island. But they've developed techniques to analyze feces from all over the world. Wasser says it's not gross; it's scientific gold.
WASSER: We can measure the diet of the animal. We can get toxins from the feces; DNA so we can cull the individual's identity, its species, its sex - and all of this is in feces. So it's literally, a treasure trove of information.
AHEARN: With that information, Wasser has been able to help prosecute ivory poachers in Africa, track wolverines in the Rockies, and better understand interactions between wolves and caribou in Canada. But finding wild animal poop, especially whale poop, isn't easy. So Wasser has taken a creative approach to staffing his organization.
WASSER: This is Tucker, our scat-detection dog. Say hi, Tucker.
AHEARN: Tucker is an 8-year-old black Lab mix. He's what those in the dog world call ball obsessed. He'll do anything for a game of fetch - even if that means sniffing out floating whale scat from a mile away because he knows that when he finds the scat, he gets to play with his ball.
(SOUNDBITE OF KISS)
WASSER: Such a good boy.
AHEARN: Killer whales have been found to have the highest concentrations of toxic substances, like pesticides and flame retardants, of any creature on the planet. If scientists can understand more about the contaminants in these animals, they may be able to explain why they're not recovering.
WASSER: OK.
AHEARN: Tucker and the team are heading out of the harbor when another researcher radios in with the identification numbers of a pod of killer whales spotted nearby.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: OK. You ready?
LIZ SEALY: Yep.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: OK, it's P10, P10B, P10C, P26 and P26A.
AHEARN: White caps slap at the bow of the research boat as we head out into some pretty rough water. And then off to our left, black dorsal fins emerge.
SEALY: There they are. They're at 11.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Yeah. Looks like they're making a beeline for the...
AHEARN: Liz Sealy is Tucker's trainer. She has him on a leash in the bow of the boat as we crisscross the waters where the whales just surfaced.
SEALY: What he'll do if he doesn't have anything is, he'll come back and settle down and sit right next to me. When he gets excited, he'll start standing up on the bow, wagging his tail, getting really animated. So for now, he's just checking the scene.
AHEARN: The team spends about 20 minutes bobbing along after the whales but alas, Tucker comes up empty-snouted. The winds are too strong, and the water's too rough, for him to lock onto a scent.
No poop?
SEALY: No poop.
AHEARN: Despite this unlucky mission, the team's quest for whale feces is a worthy one. In the past, they've been able to show that during periods of high vessel traffic - say, Fourth of July weekend, for example - the whales have higher levels of stress hormones in their feces. They can also tell when the whales are undernourished, and connect that to lower fertility rates. With orca populations in Puget Sound still disturbingly low, researchers believe the answers may lie in these floating globules of data. After all, a sample of whale poop is kind of like a snapshot of pollution levels in coastal waters. And that's a photograph worth looking at.
For NPR News, I'm Ashley Ahearn in Seattle.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Here's another story about detective work, though this one doesn't include dogs or whales, but rather, Peter Frampton's guitar. Actually, the guitar he played on his mega-selling record, "Frampton Comes Alive."
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RAZ: In 1980, the guitar was lost in a plane crash in Venezuela, or so Peter Frampton thought. But before we get to that part of the story, a little background on the guitar in question. It was 1970. Frampton was playing with a band called Humble Pie at the Fillmore West in San Francisco. He wasn't playing well, so another musician lent Frampton his spare 1954 customized Gibson Les Paul.
PETER FRAMPTON: I said, well, I've never really had much luck with Les Pauls, but you know what? At this point, I'll try anything. I used it that night for both sets. I don't think my feet touched the ground the whole night.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BABY, I LOVE YOUR WAY")
FRAMPTON: (Singing) Ooh, baby, I love your way every day...
RAZ: This becomes your guitar.
FRAMPTON: Yeah.
RAZ: This is the guitar on the famous cover of "Frampton Comes Alive." This is the guitar that you used to play all these great songs, including one of my personal favorites, Peter, "Show Me the Way."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHOW ME THE WAY")
FRAMPTON: (Singing) Oh, won't you show me the way, every day...
RAZ: Peter, could you have played this song the way you did with any other guitar?
FRAMPTON: Well, unfortunately, that's the only song - and I have to be truthful - that's the only song that is another guitar that was lost. It was a '55 Stratocaster on that. That's the only number I played it for. You couldn't have picked the one other?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
RAZ: Well, still a great song, Peter.
FRAMPTON: Yeah. Hey, I'm not complaining.
RAZ: So 1980, you're on tour, you're about to - you're in South America. The guitar is put on a cargo plane in Venezuela en route to Panama, but it crashes just right after it takes off. You just assume that it was gone, as one would. It was a fiery plane crash.
FRAMPTON: Yes. For 30 years, I believed that because we sent my guitar technician down a week after the crash. Basically, there were a couple of speaker cabinets and a melted Fender Rhodes piano and that was about it.
RAZ: It turned out the guitar ended up on the island of Curacao, which is off the Venezuelan coast. Somebody basically picked it up from the wreckage, and it made its way there to a local musician. How did somebody else on that island figure out or make the connection that that could have been Peter Frampton's guitar?
FRAMPTON: Apparently, it was played around Caracas, and whoever had it got a little hot for them because people knew it was mine.
RAZ: And eventually, a local customs agent on the island named Donald comes across the guitar, recognizes it as the Peter Frampton guitar, right?
FRAMPTON: Yes. Because the owner of the guitar had taken it to him because Donald is known on the island for if you want a guitar to be fixed, take it to Donald. And a year and a half, two years ago, I got an email to my website containing pictures of the guitar.
RAZ: And you are sure that this is your guitar after having seen it?
FRAMPTON: Oh, yes. I knew that guitar inside and out. There is not a Les Paul that I have played that is as light. It's a very dry Honduras mahogany like no other guitar. So it had a lot of unique parts to it.
RAZ: What kind of condition is it in?
FRAMPTON: It's sort of a matte black now.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FRAMPTON: It's not shiny too much anymore. I am not refurbishing it at all. Whatever needs to be replaced on it to make it just playable, but it must retain its battle scars.
RAZ: But, Peter, you know your fans are going to demand that you take that guitar and perform "Frampton Comes Alive" with that guitar.
FRAMPTON: Yes.
RAZ: And what do you think?
FRAMPTON: Rumor has it that it'll be ready to play the show in New York City on February 18th, so I'm going to unveil it for "Do You Feel," I think, that night.
RAZ: Oh, wow. That is going to be an amazing, amazing night. That's the musician Peter Frampton. After 30 years, his long-lost guitar was recovered on the island of Curacao. Peter Frampton, thanks so much for that story, amazing story.
FRAMPTON: Thank you so much.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DO YOU FEEL LIKE WE DO")
FRAMPTON: (Singing) Do you, do you feel like I do? How'd ya feel?
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Of course, when it comes to politics, all eyes are focused now on New Hampshire. We'll be taking a closer look at the upcoming primary in New Hampshire on the program tomorrow. For now, a lot of people outside the state wonder how a place that ranks 42nd on the list of the most populous states wields so much power in election years. Part of the reason: the people, they vote and they care.
New Hampshire Public Radio's Dan Gorenstein has this profile of the Granite State.
DAN GORENSTEIN, BYLINE: It's pretty easy to identify the classic stereotypes most people associate with New Hampshire. Just ask longtime resident Earl Wingate III.
EARL WINGATE III: Wood smoke, wood smoke, maple syrup, plaid flannel jacket, crotchety, frugal.
GORENSTEIN: The old Robert Frost/Norman Rockwell caricature has been updated by the band called Super Secret Project in their song "Granite State of Mind."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GRANITE STATE OF MIND")
SUPER SECRET PROJECT: (Rapping) Yeah. Yeah, I'm at the Conway. Now I'm down in Manchester. Next to Adam Sandler. But I'll be woods forever. With the 603, where it's a fact, I don't know any Hispanics and just one black guy.
GORENSTEIN: The song jokes, people like tipping cows, DSL service is brand new, you might see a moose. Get it? New Hampshire equals boring backwater. Let's be honest, there's a little truth to New Hampshire's reputation. The maple syrup is great. New Hampshire is not known for its nightlife. And like that line we just heard, it is one of the whitest states in America, actually tied for third with West Virginia.
So when I asked longtime politician Ray Burton to describe the state in one word, let's just say I was surprised.
RAY BURTON: It's diversity, I believe. Variety and diversity.
GORENSTEIN: Yes, the state that is 93.9 percent white was just described as diverse. But the 72-year-old Burton doesn't mean race or ethnicity.
BURTON: In the district that I've represented now for 34 years, out of the 263,000 people, about a third are Democrats, a third Republicans, and the other third are independents.
GORENSTEIN: The diversity of political thought in New Hampshire is where outsiders can begin to get a sense of what people here value. In a state where more voters are registered undeclared than Republican or Democrat, you get plenty of people who can see both sides of an issue and don't mind splitting their tickets on Election Day. There's that independent streak label that seems stuck on the state.
Look, in New Hampshire, you're expected to think for yourself, live up to the state's motto: Live Free or Die. But there's this wrinkle to it all. Despite the Libertarian-like trappings, people are also expected to look out for each other. Like the time high school senior Brian Wagner walked into a McDonald's and saw this homeless guy.
BRIAN WAGNER: I saw him shaving in the bathroom, you know? You know, he didn't have anything, anywhere to go. And I had 10 bucks in my pocket. I had enough to eat. So I figured, what the hell am I going do with this money? And I just gave it up to him. And I wrote a note saying, you know, use it well and, you know, have a good life.
GORENSTEIN: This side, this soft underbelly that pretty much cuts against every assumption and stereotype of the Granite State is pretty hard to see from the outside. Instead, what these presidential candidates get is that hard shell.
Linda Bissonnette, who traces her roots back to the Mayflower, thinks maybe that flinty exterior is actually an asset come primary time.
LINDA BISSONNETTE: People that are running for office have to come here and they have to break down the barriers, break down the walls and talk. And the more they talk, the more we learn. And the more we learn, the better we can decide are they really the character that we want in the White House.
GORENSTEIN: What does this all mean in terms of the kind of candidate people here gravitate to? That's hard to say. But people do care about voting, consistently ranking among the top states in voter turnout. And they embody and find comfort in that infamous motto.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GRANITE STATE OF MIND")
PROJECT: (Singing) Everybody pump your fist and yell, live free or die.
GORENSTEIN: For NPR News, I'm Dan Gorenstein in Concord, New Hampshire.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GRANITE STATE OF MIND")
PROJECT: (Singing) New Hampshire...
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Time now for music. And our guest today made some news this past week when she seemed to endorse Ron Paul for president. Pop singer Kelly Clarkson saw her record sales jump 422 percent in a day as a result.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STRONGER")
KELLY CLARKSON: (Singing) What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Stand a little taller, doesn't mean I'm lonely when I'm alone...
RAZ: This is a track off Clarkson's latest record, "Stronger." She burst onto the scene in 2002 when she became the first winner of "American Idol." She'd go on to win Grammys, break records on the charts and earn the affection of critics. One called her voice the best in pop music history. But unlike many of her contemporaries, Kelly Clarkson has managed to retain her authenticity, and you can trace that back to early 2000 when, on the strength of her voice, Kelly Clarkson was offered a record deal. She was unknown at the time, just 18 years old. She moved to L.A. from Texas to pursue her dream, and yet when that deal came around, she turned it down.
CLARKSON: The one contract that I was offered - this was my favorite thing 'cause I deal with it on the daily now - I literally weighed 124. They told me if I lost 20 pounds that they'd sign me. And I was like, wow.
RAZ: Wow.
CLARKSON: And I had, like, an eating disorder in high school for a bit, so it's like, I think God kind of put me through that to, you know, make me stronger for when situations like that kind of come up and still come up, obviously.
RAZ: You - that time in L.A. after high school, those four or five months you lived there, they were kind of a disaster, right?
CLARKSON: Oh, my God. I lived, like, on a mattress, like, with this crazy girl. We lived in, like, a room with, like, these people's house and, like, they didn't allow us to use their kitchen. So we had, like, a little refrigerator. Like, it was really funny. But I mean, at the time...
RAZ: You were waiting tables and things like that?
CLARKSON: Oh, I had, like, four jobs. I worked for like, coffee shops, waitressing. I did extra jobs. After that four or five months of living out there, we saved money to move into this apartment. And literally, the day that the crazy girl and I moved into the apartment, it burned down.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CLARKSON: So, I mean, I had to move home because I, like, didn't have anywhere to go. So, yeah, I drove home, and then I ended up trying out for "Idol" right when I got home.
RAZ: Simon Cowell, he has called you, hands down, the most talented "Idol" winner ever. Here's what he said about you.
SIMON COWELL: Oh, the best, by and large, is Kelly Clarkson. We got so lucky with Kelly Clarkson, season one, because she's not just a great "American Idol" winner, she's up there now with some of the greatest singers in the world. I mean, I think she's as good as someone like Celine Dion.
RAZ: That's pretty high praise from a guy with a reputation for being a complete jerk.
CLARKSON: I actually never heard that before. I don't even know what to say that. That was really cool. I have never heard that before.
RAZ: I mean, he's comparing you to one of the greatest living singers in the world. And even critics who don't necessarily like the style of your music, they admit you have this incredible range.
CLARKSON: Honestly, I just think we all have special gifts, everyone. You know, obviously, some are more noticeable than others and that's why there's the limelight. Everybody's in it. But since I was younger, people had said: This is, like, your gift. This is what you're supposed to do. And I had felt that every time I'm on stage. And so there was no other option.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MR. KNOW IT ALL")
CLARKSON: (Singing) Mr. know it all, well, you think you know it all, but you don't know a thing at all. Ain't, ain't it something, y'all...
RAZ: In the video for the first single off this album, "Mr. Know It All," you stand in front of this wall of newspaper clippings and talk about...
CLARKSON: Yeah, a wall of doubt.
RAZ: ...talk about your relationship status, your weight, your sexuality. Do you feel at times that the press coverage of you has been unfair, or is it part of the territory that comes with celebrity?
CLARKSON: Oh, I think both. I think it's supply and demand. I think people want to hear bashing things. Sometimes I think that's what saddens me more than anything, because I have a really tough skin.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MR. KNOW IT ALL")
CLARKSON: (Singing) Oh, you think that you know me, know me. That's why I'm leaving you lonely, lonely, 'cause baby you don't know a thing about me. You don't know a thing about me...
RAZ: I want to ask you about control, Kelly, because...
CLARKSON: Words, yeah.
RAZ: ...well, in a good way. I mean, you've been pretty stubborn. You've been...
CLARKSON: Yeah.
RAZ: ...you're known for being pretty stubborn...
CLARKSON: (Unintelligible).
RAZ: ...all right, about maintaining control over your image, over your songs. Is that a difficult thing to do in your life?
CLARKSON: Oh, my gosh, yes. And if anybody says otherwise, they're lying.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CLARKSON: The question I love to get asked is: What's the hardest part of your job? And literally, the answer is probably real sad, but it's to just to be me. Like, it's really hard, because I think people, you know, have a set idea of what a pop star should be. And my whole point is like, well, if I'm the pop star, then it should be whatever I am. There's, you know, room for Katy Perrys and Adeles and Rihannas and Lady Gagas and Ke$has and me and Pinks. I think what's great about all of us is that we represent something different.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DARK SIDE")
CLARKSON: (Singing) Nobody's a picture perfect, but we're worth it, you know that we're worth it. Will you love me even with my dark side. Like a diamond...
RAZ: My guest is Kelly Clarkson. Her new record is called "Stronger." I want to ask you about the song, "The War is Over."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE WAR IS OVER")
CLARKSON: (Singing) I watched the days rush by me like a river, I shouldn't wait but I'm scared to touch the water.
RAZ: That song seems to have struck a chord with a lot of your fans. What is it about?
CLARKSON: It's actually one, I didn't write, but it's actually the first song we recorded for this record because everybody loved it. It tells a beautiful story that everybody relates to. Fans will come up to me and they'll be like, oh, I relate that my family or I relate that to an ex or I relate that to my sister in our relationship. Like, that song for me personally has a lot to do with the industry. I'm just going drown myself with people who have the same vision and the same goals as myself. I'm not going to recognize the bashing. I'm not going to recognize the negativity.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE WAR IS OVER")
CLARKSON: (Singing) I won't let you pull me in 'cause I know you're gonna win.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing) The war is over.
CLARKSON: (Singing) But the war is over. 'Cause I won't fight you anymore, I've never been so sure.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing) The war is over.
CLARKSON: (Singing) ) 'Cause the war is over...
RAZ: Let me ask you some true or false questions.
CLARKSON: OK.
RAZ: You have 12 tattoos, including one behind each ear.
CLARKSON: I have 13 now.
RAZ: Sorry, that's 13.
CLARKSON: No, it's a new one, so...
RAZ: OK, fine. You own nine guns, I read.
CLARKSON: I do, nine.
RAZ: And you sleep with a Colt 45.
CLARKSON: Yes.
RAZ: That's true?
CLARKSON: Yes. Well, I live alone.
RAZ: I got it. Fair enough, OK.
CLARKSON: So, yeah, I live alone, so I'm not going out like that. I got no chance if some man breaks into my house.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CLARKSON: So, yeah, I have a gun.
RAZ: Sometimes you drink Chivas and sing karaoke to Guns 'N Roses.
CLARKSON: Yeah. But sometimes I drink vodka and do that as well.
RAZ: But if you show up and do karaoke, I mean, does it quickly fill up with people saying, oh, my God. Kelly Clarkson's in there doing karaoke.
CLARKSON: Oh, yeah. And by that time, I'm so drunk, I'm like, yeah, let's duet. Like, I'm like dueting with people, so.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
RAZ: Kelly, this past week you made some news, of course...
CLARKSON: Oh, Ron Paul. Yeah.
RAZ: ...in Iowa. Ron Paul...
CLARKSON: Who knew? Wow.
RAZ: You endorsed him on the Internet. You said you really liked him, and your sales - your record sales actually rose, I read, 442 percent. Talk a little bit about him. What do you like about him?
CLARKSON: Well, first of all, I love that, like, something I tweet makes CNN. That says something about our world right there. But, you know, first of all, it was just funny. I was, like, sitting at home with my brother watching Leno. And, you know, he was on Leno, and I was like, man, I was like, I like this dude. I liked him the last time around. I like a lot, you know, he believes in states having their rights, and I think that that's very important.
And I've always been about less government, and so I like him. And that's - it's as simple as that, man. That's all I said. I was like, oh, man, I like Ron Paul. Too bad he's probably not going to get the nomination, but I, you know, I like him. And then the whole freakin' world, like, it went into a frenzy.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CLARKSON: And everybody started tweeting me, and it was just crazy. But I do enjoy, like, being able to go back and forth with people and find out stuff, you know, about not even Ron Paul but maybe stuff I didn't know about Obama or Mitt Romney or whoever. But like, I think it really got blown out of proportion, so.
RAZ: And you - I mean, Ron Paul...
CLARKSON: I did enjoy the sales, I'll tell you that.
RAZ: Oh, that, I'm sure. And maybe Ron Paul will get the Clarkson bump.
CLARKSON: I know. I know. I was like, hell, I'm going to start endorsing everybody.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CLARKSON: I was like I'm just going to start saying names about stuff to get people to buy my album.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STRONGER")
CLARKSON: (Singing) Think you got the best of me, you think you got the last laugh. I bet you think that everything good is gone...
RAZ: That's Kelly Clarkson. Her new record is called "Stronger." Kelly Clarkson, thank you so much for joining us.
CLARKSON: Oh, thank you very much.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STRONGER")
CLARKSON: (Singing) What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, stand a little taller, doesn't mean I'm lonely when I'm alone. What doesn't kill you makes a fighter, footsteps even lighter, doesn't mean I'm over 'cause you're gone. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, stronger, just me, myself and I.
RAZ: And for Saturday, that's WEEKEND on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. Check out our weekly podcast, the Best of WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. You can find it at iTunes or npr.org/weekendatc. We post a new episode every Sunday night. For audio outtakes from interviews and previews of what's coming up, you can follow me on Twitter @nprguyraz. Tomorrow, we'll look ahead to the New Hampshire primary and take a look back with previous winners Pat Buchanan and Gary Hart, plus self-publishing phenomenon Amanda Hocking. Until then, thanks for listening and have a great night.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
All this weekend, we'll be taking a look at the race for the GOP presidential nomination. Tomorrow, Pat Buchanan and Gary Hart on going the distance in New Hampshire. Our cover story today: conservatism at the crossroads. Every candidate claims to be the true conservative, but which one is? And what does that mean anyway? In a moment, three conservatives and three perspectives. But first to NPR's Andrea Seabrook.
ANDREA SEABROOK, BYLINE: Think you know what conservative is? Well, these guys do.
NEWT GINGRICH: When people say I'm not conservative, you almost have to wonder what planet they've been on.
MITT ROMNEY: You know, I'm a conservative Republican.
REPRESENTATIVE MICHELE BACHMANN: Michele Bachmann is the proven conservative.
GOVERNOR RICK PERRY: And they're finding that I am a consistent conservative.
GINGRICH: Consistent conservative.
ROMNEY: Reagan conservative.
GINGRICH: A moral conservative...
ROMNEY: John Adams conservative.
GINGRICH: Foreign policy conservative.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Tested conservative.
PERRY: Fiscal conservative.
ROMNEY: I'm more conservative than I was 10 years ago.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: There are folks that are talking conservative, but their records don't reflect conservatism.
SEABROOK: The Republican presidential contenders, including Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Perry, and Michele Bachmann. Pawlenty and Bachmann have already dropped out of the race. But the rest are in a cut-throat, do-or-die battle to be the most conservative, the real conservative in the bunch.
What does that mean? Well, it depends on who you ask. Texas Congressman Ron Paul often identifies himself as a conservative first and a Republican second.
REPRESENTATIVE RON PAUL: The big difference is that if you're going to be conservative, you're supposed to follow the Constitution and always limit the power and the scope of the federal government.
SEABROOK: This libertarian strain is very different from how former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum sees it.
RICK SANTORUM: That is not how traditional conservatives view the world. And I think most conservatives understand that individuals can't go it alone. That there is no such society that I'm aware of where we've had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.
SEABROOK: Santorum is more of a social conservative. He believes the government has an important role to play in steering culture toward moral ends. That's practically the opposite of Ron Paul's conservatism. A clue to this fault line is in the actual definition of the word. The Oxford English Dictionary says conservative includes both the, quote, "tendency to resist great or sudden change," sounds like Ron Paul. And, quote, "the adherence to traditional values and ideas." That would be Santorum.
One thing both candidates do have: a lot of doubt about the conservative credentials of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.
ROMNEY: What I say is I'm a conservative businessman.
SEABROOK: Romney avoids the finer points of the argument, and says he's all kinds of conservative wrapped in one.
ROMNEY: Social conservatism, economic conservative, and foreign policy conservatism. I still have those same views today...
SEABROOK: This race to the right will likely resolve when Republicans settle on a nominee. At that point, the candidate can stop fighting for segments of the conservative base. And the working definition of conservatism will become: not Barack Obama.
Andrea Seabrook, NPR News, Washington.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Joining me now here in the studio is Dan McCarthy. He's the editor of The American Conservative magazine. Dan McCarthy, welcome.
DAN MCCARTHY: Thank you.
RAZ: Also, Matthew Franck is with us. He's the director of the Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, where he joins me now. Welcome.
MATTHEW FRANCK: Thanks. Good to be here.
RAZ: And Yaron Brook, who is the president of the Ayn Rand Institute. And he's with me from his home in Trabuco Canyon, California. Yaron Brook, welcome.
YARON BROOK: Thank you.
RAZ: Let me begin with you, Dan McCarthy, here in the studio. What is your definition of a conservative?
MCCARTHY: Well, conservatism has been in a rather difficult position over the last 20 years or so because it's become a kind of anti-liberalism as opposed to something that has roots in a philosophy derived from Edmund Burke or David Hume or someone like Michael Oakeshott.
Conservatism is a defense of ordinary life against the sort of vast forces that would attempt to transform it, whether those are ideological or whether they are economic or political in the case of big government.
RAZ: Matthew Franck, looking at the current crop of Republican candidates running for president, who do you think best defines what it means to be a conservative?
FRANCK: Oh, that's a good question. You know, like many interested observers of the election, I'm disinclined to single out a particular candidate. But I think that as things are developing in the race, we're seeing very strong set of alternatives in Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. And Santorum in particular is coming on strong, I think, as everyone knows, because of the evangelical vote in Iowa. He is a Catholic, of course, but Catholics and evangelicals are very much in sync on many of the issues that face us in our public square today.
RAZ: Yaron Brook, when you look at this crop of candidates, Republican candidates, who do you think best embodies the principles of Ayn Rand and libertarianism?
BROOK: I don't think any of them do. I mean, I think there's a certain sense in which Ron Paul represents a certain aspect of objectivism of Ayn Rand's ideas, certain aspects of the economic policies, his defense of free markets, his strong advocacy for reducing the size of government.
But then I think, you know, he kind of goes off the wall in his foreign policy. And I don't consider his foreign policy a legitimate one or one that is consistent with Ayn Rand's, I suppose. And he still, you know, holds on strongly to his religiosity. It's a part of his political agenda, which I think, you know, again, Rand would reject completely if you would advocate strongly the separation between religion, between church and state. So while there seems to be a semblance between his ideas and (unintelligible), I think it's more superficial than deep.
RAZ: Dan McCarthy, from The American Conservative magazine, which candidate do you think best represents conservative views?
MCCARTHY: Well, it's very interesting. We saw in the Iowa exit polls that voters who said they were most interested in a true conservative actually supported Ron Paul. And now, it's kind of surprising, because as this discussion has mentioned, religiosity seems to be one of the defining qualities of conservatism today. And Ron Paul certainly is religious, but he doesn't make it as much a part of his program politically as someone like Rick Santorum does.
But I think what you see here is a shifting of terms. That, in fact, Ron Paul harkens back with older kind of conservatism that was once sort of identified with people like Robert A. Taft in the 1950s. So, in fact, there's a very good case to be made.
RAZ: Kind of isolationism.
MCCARTHY: Well, isolationism isn't the right word, because, you know, Ron Paul believes in trade as indeed, you know, people like - what Thomas Jefferson did. But they didn't believe in sort of actively, you know, engaging with military forces, you know, trying to transform the world by force.
RAZ: Having a large U.S. presence overseas, for example.
MCCARTHY: Or, indeed, having a large, you know, such a large military that it becomes a crushing economic burden. So there's actually a very strong case for a kind of conservatism that Ron Paul has, not just a libertarianism, but actually an older sort of 1950s and before kind of conservatism.
RAZ: Yaron Brook from the Ayn Rand Institute, I should point out that you do not consider yourself necessarily a conservative. And Ayn Rand certainly wasn't considered a conservative by the movement when she was alive. But John Boehner, the House speaker, Paul Ryan, obviously Rand and Ron Paul and several other congressional Republicans often quote Ayn Rand, consider her an important influence. Are you surprised at how many conservatives and Republicans are drawing from Ayn Rand today?
BROOK: Well, not really. You know, she did not consider herself a conservative, certainly not. William F. Buckley was quite clear that he did not want Ayn Rand and Randians part of the movement, primarily because of the issue of religion. But I'm not surprised. I think they're looking for new arguments. They're looking for intellectual inspiration. They're looking for something new that can really defend their position.
With regards to limited government, I think the reliance on tradition, the reliance on religious arguments, the reliance on kind of traditional mall arguments has been a failure. And I think many of them know it.
RAZ: Dan McCarthy, why does Romney have such a difficult time convincing conservatives that he is a true conservative?
MCCARTHY: Well, I think during the primary season, you'll always see that people have - their first priorities, which are, you know, especially among the more philosophically committed elements of the party, are not typically going to be the most electable candidates. But eventually, you do tend to find the party coalescing behind someone who is pretty far from being perfect by any kind of conservative philosophical measure, whether it's as a religious conservative or a libertarian conservative or what the case might be.
George W. Bush, for example, was not really, even in 2000, someone who was another Ronald Reagan, for example. Certainly, he was not another Barry Goldwater. Similarly in 2008 with John McCain. This was someone that a great number of conservatives had problems with, but they eventually were willing to support him because they thought Barack Obama would be a disaster.
And again, I think this illustrates that conservatism has sort of reduced itself to being a mere anti-liberalism. And so as long as there's a demon figure or an enemy out there against whom you can organize, even these characters who are not at all Goldwaterite or Reaganite or Taftian conservatives, are able to get the party behind them simply because of what they're opposing.
RAZ: But it sounds like - I'm going to throw this question out to all of you - that when you look at the current crop of Republican presidential candidates, there is not a single one, maybe for the moment, who can sort of unite all of these wings of the party, or is there?
FRANCK: There are some people who bowed out who might have been very interesting contenders. Tim Pawlenty is probably kicking himself for having gotten out so early and not stuck around to see if he got a second look. Chris Christie didn't get in. Mitch Daniels didn't get in. Paul Ryan begged off, Bobby Jindal, Haley Barbour, Jeb Bush, not all of these would have been fabulous candidates for one reason or another. But they certainly would have presented us with a richer array of choices.
MCCARTHY: Well, that only looks to be the case, though, in retrospect. If someone like Jon Huntsman, for example, had not got in the race and you'd look at his resume, you would have said, this guy would be a real contender. This guy would be one of the top tier.
FRANCK: Sure.
MCCARTHY: So, in fact, I think you actually have a very broad selection of candidates on offer here. And the problems, whatever they may be, it's not the fact that we don't have enough candidates or don't have candidates who represent a broad enough spectrum of philosophies. There's something more fundamental that's going wrong here, and maybe Barack Obama just is fortunate that not just this particular slate of candidates, but the Republican Party as a whole doesn't have any kind of focused mission or any clear idea what its identity is.
BROOK: That's right. I think the real issue is a much more fundamental issue, and that is that the Republican Party and the conservative movement don't know what they really stand for. And you could see this in the Tea Party. The Tea Party was a movement that was clear about what it was against that had no real idea about what it was for other than some slogans about limited government. They had no idea how to get there, why they should get there, what it looked like when they got there.
And I think, generally, it goes back to this notion that I think you mentioned earlier about conservatism being primarily anti-liberal rather than having a clear positive agenda. And as long as it's just anti, I think it's going to struggle to have a real candidate and have a real agenda for the future.
RAZ: That's Yaron Brook. He is the president of the Ayn Rand Institute, speaking to us from his home in Southern California. We also heard from Dan McCarthy, the editor of The American Conservative, and Matthew Franck. He is the director of the Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. Gentlemen, thank you so much.
FRANCK: Thanks.
MCCARTHY: Thank you.
BROOK: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We just learned that our economy added 212,000 private sector jobs in December. After losing more than eight million jobs in the recession, we've added more than three million private sector jobs over the past 22 months.
RAZ: That's President Obama from his weekly address this morning, hoping that the latest jobs numbers could be a sign of better things to come. James Fallows of The Atlantic is with me now, as he is most Saturdays, for a look behind the headlines. Jim, happy New Year to you.
JAMES FALLOWS: Thank you, Guy.
RAZ: Let's parse these numbers, jobs numbers, for a moment. What do they tell us?
FALLOWS: There's something good, something bad or sobering and something striking, at least to me. The good part is, of course, the trend. For now, a little more than two years, the unemployment rate has been going down, the number of new jobs created has been going up. And so the administration will work on this on political terms and, of course, on real terms for the economy as well.
The bad aspect is how slow this recovery has been. The entire U.S. economy still has about six million fewer jobs at its peaked a little more than four years ago. At current rates of job creation, it would take perhaps a decade to return to those levels. The surprising aspect of this last report for me is where the job lost was over the past year, which was mainly in government in all its forms.
The interesting phenomenon here is that in the debates about whether unemployment or the deficit was the bigger problem over the past year, the efforts to reduce government deficits have had an effect on hurting the economy, too, and we see in the fall in government payrolls.
RAZ: Jim, this week, the president installed four officials into jobs while the Senate was in recess, jobs that normally require Senate confirmation. This is a tactic he has generally avoided for fear of angering Congress. But this time, did he feel like he had no choice?
FALLOWS: That certainly is the White House's argument. And it's worth focusing on the specifics of the four appointments he made and then the larger battle that's been going on for quite a long time. President Obama made recess appointments of the director for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That's essentially the Elizabeth Warren agency we discussed over the past year, then three members of the board of a National Labor Relations Board.
And the argument he made in doing that was that in filibustering the possibility of a vote in those nominations, the Republican minority in the Senate was not simply blocking people for those jobs, but preventing those agencies in their entirety from functioning at all. The law setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Board said that until a director was in place, a number of its powers would not begin to take effect. And the National Labor Relations Board needs a quorum of at least three people on its board to do any of its functions.
The larger issue here, which we discussed over the months and years involves the evolution and even devolution of the modern Senate in its role in doing public business. President Obama disagrees with the Republicans in the Senate about whether the ruse of so-called pro forma sessions where the Senate will convene every three days for a period of just a couple of minutes and then dismiss itself until three days later, whether that constitutes an impediment to a president's constitutional ability to make recess appointments...
RAZ: In other words, if they meet for a few minutes, the Senate can say, well, we met so you can't make recess appointment because we weren't in recess?
FALLOWS: Exactly. And he argues that to do the business of government, he needs to move ahead and make this recess appointment.
RAZ: Does it signal a more aggressive posture from President Obama going into this election year? I mean, as I mentioned, he didn't want to do this before. He clearly doesn't really mind if he angers congressional Republicans.
FALLOWS: That certainly seems to be the case. And the tone in these recess appointments seems to me a continuation from the stand the White House took a month ago in the showdown over letting the payroll tax cut expire.
In his first two years in office, the president seemed careful not to overuse any of the tools of the executive in this ongoing procedural battle with the Senate. It may not be that as he comes in the election year, he's more willing both to fight the procedural questions and to say the reason I'm doing it is for the regulatory and economic goals that are represented by bodies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
RAZ: That's James Fallows. He's national correspondent for The Atlantic. You can read his blog at jamesfallows.theatlantic.com. Jim, thanks so much.
FALLOWS: My pleasure, Guy.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Time now for music.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: Famous last words, even when they're not particularly profound, often sound poetic anyway. Oscar Wilde hated the wallpaper in the room where he died. As his body wore out, he looked at that wallpaper, and he muttered: One of us has to go.
Salvador Dali whispered: Where is my clock? Steve Jobs: Oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow. Writer and composer Jan Swafford was thinking about these and other last words recently, and he began to think about the last works of famous classical composers, and he wrote about it in Slate magazine. Now, like last words, he says a final composition can be desperate, manic, indulgent and reverent, sometimes all at once.
And it often reveals something new about the life of its composer. Take, perhaps, the most widely known last work...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "REQUIEM")
RAZ: ...Mozart's "Requiem."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "REQUIEM")
JAN SWAFFORD: One of the things that's interesting is that composers of his era, Haydn and Mozart in particular, were really more into lighthearted things than tragic things. Mozart's operas, which are basically sex comedies, are generally more popular and more highly regarded than his religious music. And tragedy wasn't really his style, except when he happened to be dying at the time, he wrote one of the great tragic pieces of all time.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "REQUIEM")
SWAFFORD: "Requiem," in that opening, which is the most famous part of it, I've always said, is like music of a man staring at his own grave.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "REQUIEM")
RAZ: You also write about Beethoven.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: You say that he felt death at his shoulder, which means what?
SWAFFORD: I think for years he was very, very ill a great deal of the time, and he had several near bouts with death from illness starting in middle age.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PIANO SONATA 110")
RAZ: So what we're hearing here is the first movement of Beethoven's "Piano Sonata 110," which, Jan, it sounds almost childlike, sort of tender.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PIANO SONATA 110")
SWAFFORD: Well, Beethoven, in his last music, got more simple and more complex, more crazy and more ethereal...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PIANO SONATA 110")
SWAFFORD: ...more everything. He pushed every envelope in every direction.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PIANO SONATA 110")
SWAFFORD: It seems so simple but nobody else ever did anything like this.
RAZ: And it sounds so completely unlike another late piece of his, which was the "Grosse Fuge." Let's hear some of that.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GROSSE FUGE")
SWAFFORD: The "Grosse Fuge," it was the original finale of the opus 130 string quartet, which to me is partly intended to be a study in dissociation.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GROSSE FUGE")
SWAFFORD: I've had a couple of students giving presentations on that piece...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GROSSE FUGE")
SWAFFORD: ...and both of them seem to almost be having a nervous breakdown when they were trying to talk about it...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GROSSE FUGE")
SWAFFORD: ...just one of the wildest, most obsessive and relentless pieces ever written.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GROSSE FUGE")
RAZ: Critics called it indecipherable, like listening to Chinese.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SWAFFORD: And, of course, it was his favorite movement. He actually, because he was deaf, didn't go to the premier. He waited in a bar for friends to let him know.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SWAFFORD: So they came in and he asked, first of all, how did the Fuge go? And they said: It didn't go that well, and he exploded: asses, cattle.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, BEETHOVEN, "GROSSE FUGE")
SWAFFORD: The last thing Beethoven said, as far as we know, is: Applaud, friends. The comedy is over, which is an old tag from Roman comedy. The last thing he did after he'd been in a coma for a couple of days, there was a crack of thunder outside and he raised up, shaking his fist at the sky and fell back dead, which is - if it's true, perfectly Beethovenian.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GROSSE FUGE")
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PIANO SONATA IN B-FLAT")
RAZ: Jan, you also write about Franz Schubert who was a torch bearer at Beethoven's funeral. He died just a year after Beethoven died in 1827.
SWAFFORD: Yes.
RAZ: Describe Schubert's last days.
SWAFFORD: Schubert, I think of all the composers, really saw it coming because he had syphilis. You know, his hair had fallen out and the whole second stage. It was not actually syphilis that killed him at age 32. He died of typhus, but he'd probably been weakened. He knew he was doomed to a very unpleasant death.
RAZ: And you hear that, that kind of forlorn joy in this piano sonata. This is in B-flat. When did he write this?
SWAFFORD: He wrote it in the last year of his life when he wrote some of his most remarkable pieces. And you're about to hear this little trill in the bass...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PIANO SONATA IN B-FLAT")
SWAFFORD: ...followed by this melody resuming as if nothing had happened, this beautiful (unintelligible) melody. And I feel that for Schubert, at the end of his life, that music itself became a symbol of life, and it's as if he's looking at music from outside life, like a person who loves parties but can't go to parties anymore and can only look at them from outside the window.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PIANO SONATA IN B-FLAT")
RAZ: My guest is composer and writer Jan Swafford who's written about the late or final works of some of the famous classical composers. Of all the composers you write about, the one who seemed to be most at peace with his death was Bach, even though he was in great pain, right?
SWAFFORD: Yeah. He was in bed, blind. He'd been devastated with cramps in his hands. He had a bad eye operation. He was in bad shape, though he'd been healthy most of his life. So he had a friend of his play a chorale prelude for him that he'd written earlier, a very serene piece.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BEFORE THY THRONE I STAND")
SWAFFORD: And it was called at the time "When We Are in Greatest Distress," but he renamed it "Before Thy Throne I Stand" and made some revisions in it. Bach was a lifelong perfectionist. Even on his deathbed, blind and in pain, he couldn't help making some changes and some improvements in the piece. And he renamed it "Before Thy Throne I Stand" because I think it was his calling card to God.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BEFORE THY THRONE I STAND")
RAZ: Absolutely breathtaking.
SWAFFORD: It is.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
RAZ: I mean, it's as if Bach's eyes are closing right in front of us, those last chords.
SWAFFORD: Yeah. Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BEFORE THY THRONE I STAND")
SWAFFORD: I'm sure the Lord appreciated it.
RAZ: He really knew.
SWAFFORD: Yeah. Yeah. And he was not afraid. He was very much a believer and felt that he had done his gig well, and he was ready to go.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THIRD PIANO CONCERTO")
RAZ: Let me ask you about Bela Bartok. He was a European refugee. He died in Manhattan in 1945 where he lived as a poor man for many years.
SWAFFORD: In the U.S., he did. He was - he had fled the Nazis from his native Hungary. He was quite sick. He had leukemia. Bartok was trying to finish the third piano concerto as a legacy for his wife who was a concert pianist. It's one of the most beautiful, delightful, popularistic pieces he ever wrote.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THIRD PIANO CONCERTO")
SWAFFORD: He was almost to the end of it when the ambulance arrived, and they almost had to drag him away from his desk under protest. And he never quite finished the last - scoring the last 17 bars of the piece.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THIRD PIANO CONCERTO")
RAZ: What do you think, Jan, about your own work when you hear these final pieces?
SWAFFORD: I wish it were as good as that. You know, there's the whole question of: why do this? If you're suffering and you're on deathbed, why write? And I think the answer is - and I say this as a composer - there's nothing better to do with your time while you're dying. And if it's a farewell to life, that's one thing. But it is also you go out doing what you do.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THIRD PIANO CONCERTO")
RAZ: That's Jan Swafford. He's a writer, composer and teacher at the Boston Conservatory. He's also a contributor for Slate magazine where he wrote about classical composers' final works. Jan Swafford, thank you so much.
SWAFFORD: Guy, thanks. It's great.
RAZ: And for Sunday, that's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. Check out our weekly podcast, the Best of WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. You can find it at iTunes or at npr.org/weekendatc. We post a new episode every Sunday night. We're back with more news, stories, books and music next weekend. Until then, thanks for listening and have a great week.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GUY RAZ, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. Books and music normally round out the program and today, the story is of an author - to be precise, a 27-year-old novelist named Amanda Hocking. She grew up in the small town of Austin, Minnesota.
AMANDA HOCKING: Which is known for Spam.
RAZ: Spam as in the food, not in the email spam.
HOCKING: No, no. We invented Spam.
RAZ: The original Spam.
HOCKING: Yeah, the meat.
RAZ: Her dad was a truck driver; her mom, a waitress. Now, even as a very young child, Amanda Hocking had always been the kind of natural storyteller, especially when it came to fantasy stories - stories about dragons and unicorns and pirates and...
HOCKING: There's like a - my mom has a tape from when I was like, 2 years old, talking with my grandma, telling her a story that's really elaborate - about like, werewolves or wolves and - I don't know, something.
RAZ: Now, Hocking has no formal training as a writer, which is what makes her story, as you'll hear, even more incredible. She's done two semesters at the local community college and in her early 20s, she started to write novels at night. And in the daytime, she worked at a group home for disabled people.
HOCKING: I loved my job, but I really wasn't making very much money doing it. I'd always written; I always wanted to be published but I think at that point, I was like, I need to really focus in it and do this; I want to make this happen.
RAZ: So she quit to pursue her dream. Now, this was back in 2008, and Hocking had almost a dozen novels on her computer. So she sent manuscripts to more than 50 literary agents.
HOCKING: I was getting a lot of just - kind of form rejections, like sorry...
RAZ: One after another.
HOCKING: Sorry, it's-not-right-for-us kind of thing.
RAZ: She started to wonder whether the problem was the kind of fiction she was writing. Maybe, she thought, it was too dark, too intense.
HOCKING: I kind of re-evaluated myself. And I re-evaluated what was popular, and kind of looked at what I really felt were my strengths. I went to Wal-Mart, and I was looking at all the best-selling titles they had, and I knew I'm not kind of a James Patterson-type writer. I knew I couldn't write thrillers and...
RAZ: But there was another genre she thought she could handle: paranormal romance.
HOCKING: Paranormal romance is any kind of fantasy element - like witches, vampires - just combined with a love story. This genre really stuck out to me. And I read the books, and I really enjoyed them, and I thought it was something that I should try.
RAZ: Amanda went home and began to write her first paranormal romance. In 15 days, she wrote and rewrote, edited and re-edited. But still, no one was interested in publishing the book. So on a whim, she decided to self-publish a few of her books online for anyone to download, and she waited.
HOCKING: They actually started selling, I think, relatively well - like two or three books a day. And it went that way for a while. Then it was about June that it really kind of exploded. I had started talking to bloggers and book reviewers, and I had started getting some reviews on Amazon. And I think I sold like 6,000 books that month or something. It was like, a pretty dramatic jump.
RAZ: By August, you were making $9,000 a month. I read that in the previous year, you had made about $18,000 in the whole year.
HOCKING: Yeah. I think I had actually made like, a little less than that. So it was a big leap from what I was used to.
RAZ: Last fall, Amanda Hocking joined an elite literary club alongside 11 other authors - including James Patterson, Steig Larsson and Nora Roberts - when she sold her 1 millionth book for the Amazon Kindle.
She's made $2 million this way. Movie rights for her works have been optioned and eventually, those publishing companies came around, tail between their legs. She signed a multimillion-dollar deal with St. Martin's Press and her first printed book, called "Switched," is out now.
HOCKING: It's still totally unreal when I think about it. It feels so weird to be able to just kind of buy things when I want them or need them.
RAZ: What's the most outrageous thing you bought?
HOCKING: I bought a replica of Han Solo in carbonite - from "Star Wars."
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
RAZ: How much was it?
HOCKING: It was almost $7,000.
RAZ: So wait; where is that? That's in your house?
HOCKING: Yeah. I've got a room in my basement that I call a movie room, but it's just a living room in the basement. He just kind of stands there. And I admire him, so.
RAZ: Yeah. Fair enough; you deserve it. You worked hard for it, right?
HOCKING: Yeah.
RAZ: Let's talk about "Switched." This is your first published book. Tell me what the story is about.
HOCKING: It's young adult, paranormal romance, and it's about a teenage girl who, when she was 6, her mother tried to kill her because she was convinced that she was a monster. And when she grows up, she comes to discover that she was traded out, switched out for a human baby. And she's actually a troll.
RAZ: And she's a good troll or a bad one?
HOCKING: Well, I think she's a good troll. The term that I used in the book is trill, which is based on Scandinavian folklore. They have folklore there saying that trolls are really beautiful but they're cunning and manipulative. I'm also from southern Minnesota, where there's a lot of Scandinavian heritage there, too, so it all kind of ties in together.
RAZ: I read that it takes you, on average, about two to four weeks to actually write a novel - which sounds remarkably fast.
HOCKING: Yeah. Before I sit down to write, I've thought about it for a long time, and I've outlined it. So then when I sit down to write, it's like eight to 12 hours a day I spend writing. And then I finish the book.
RAZ: Here's a question - I mean, you turned this industry upside down by going the e-books route. You made a lot of money. Why even bother putting it into a paper form?
HOCKING: There are a couple of reasons. E-books are taking up more of the market, but it's still somewhere between, like, 10 and 30 percent of the market. But also, I was kind of overwhelmed with the amount of work that I had to do that wasn't writing a book. I was writing more when I worked a day job than when I was writing full time because of how much time I devote to the whole publishing part.
RAZ: You are in New York now...
HOCKING: Yes.
RAZ: ...for a rash of interviews and appearances, a lot of publicity.
HOCKING: Mm-hmm.
RAZ: Has it been difficult? Is it getting easier?
HOCKING: I think it gets easier the more you kind of do it. You just kind of - it gets easier to do. I try not to think about it too much, really. If they say, like, you're going to do an interview with somebody, or you're going to do this, I just go, OK, that's what I do now - and just kind of accept it and not think about how bizarre it is that I'm in New York, doing a bunch of interviews.
RAZ: What's the best advice you've received from people?
HOCKING: I don't know. The best advice I got was - before I started publishing, I saw a video of Mark Hoppus, from Blink-182, talking. And he said that it's not enough to have a passion. You have to have a work ethic. Because I had a passion for writing, and I know a lot of other people do, too, but it's not enough to just want something. You have to be able to work for it, too, and put in the hours and the time. And I think that's really changed the way that I view my life and the way I treat the things that I want.
RAZ: That's Amanda Hocking. Her first printed book is called "Switched." It's in bookstores and online right now. Amanda Hocking, thank you. And congratulations on your success. What an amazing story.
HOCKING: Thank you.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Now, many Republicans blamed Patrick Buchanan for dividing the party in 1996. That year, Bob Dole was the establishment candidate, and yet Pat Buchanan mounted an insurgent campaign in New Hampshire and he won. This past week, he told us the story of how he did it.
Describe for us the moment that you found out you had actually won the New Hampshire primary in 1996.
PAT BUCHANAN: I was up in a room at the Manchester, that hotel - I guess it's the Radisson now - with many members of my family, and I saw CNN announced Pat Buchanan the winner of the New Hampshire primary.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Ladies and gentlemen, the next president of the United States, Pat Buchanan.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
RAZ: In terms of money, in terms of establishment backing, you should not have won that election.
BUCHANAN: Well, it was a very good victory. We had a lot of things going for us. We had the Manchester Union Leader and we had a Catholic conservative traditionalist economic populist message, which really sort of fit the times.
Last year's trade deficit cost us another four million lost American jobs. Our middle class is falling behind. I will rewrite these unfair trade deals that destroy our jobs. As president, I will make the United States again the mightiest manufacturing power on Earth.
RAZ: What is it about New Hampshire and insurgent candidates? Why are they successful there?
BUCHANAN: I think the people of New Hampshire are very receptive to candidates who challenge an establishment. And I remember one story - I was up in Laconia and a subway shop owner walked over to me about 100 yards from where I was, said, let me tell you a story, Pat. I've put an ad in the paper for a delivery guy, part-time, no benefits, and I got 250 applications. In one of them, a fellow drove all the way up from Nashua, 100 miles away.
And you had that sense, I think, when I was up there that I was clearly the nonestablishment candidate and Bob Dole was the establishment candidate. And New Hampshire has a great disposition, a great willingness, to unhorse the mighty. And I think that's one of the things that election was all about.
RAZ: You came out and you said famously the peasants have their pitchforks, and that became your kind of catchphrase.
BUCHANAN: All the peasants are coming with pitchforks after him.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BUCHANAN: In '96, I also said - when I got there, I said listen...
Do not wait for orders from headquarters. Mount up everybody and ride to the sound of the gun.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
BUCHANAN: Because the establishment is coming for us. And that was exactly true. I mean, the attacks after we won New Hampshire with the possibility that we could capture the nomination and defeat Dole, I think, set Washington almost wild in terms of its attacks. Senators were saying we have only one objective, and that's to stop Pat Buchanan.
RAZ: What do you think it was that gave you the edge in '96?
BUCHANAN: I had been a loyal soldier to the conservative movement. I'd been a Goldwater conservative. I'd worked for Nixon, written speeches for Agnew, worked for Ronald Reagan. I was the only one campaigning against global free trade because it was destroying the factories of New Hampshire and they were losing their jobs and they could see that.
I was the only one that said we're going to have to downsize these foreign commitments and stay out of these foreign wars and start building up our own country. So we had a different agenda than all the other candidates.
RAZ: Pat Buchanan, as you know, former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu is famous for saying people in Iowa pick corn and people in New Hampshire pick presidents. How pivotal do you think the New Hampshire primary will be this year in determining who the GOP nominee is?
BUCHANAN: I think it's going to be very important. Unless Romney collapses over the next five or six days, I think if he wins New Hampshire, he is one of the finalists then for sure. I think he's got the legs to go the distance.
RAZ: Yesterday on the program, we talked about some of the challenges that conservatives face right now in settling on a candidate. Say, Mitt Romney does become the nominee, how would you feel about that?
BUCHANAN: Well, if Mitt Romney becomes the nominee, it will be - it's going to be a real test of his capacities as a diplomat and a small pea politician, if you will, because the Republican Party is a divided party in many ways. You've got the Ron Paul contingent, which is libertarian, anti-war. He wants to bring the troops home.
But you've also got the evangelical Christians. One of them, of course, said he could, under no circumstances, support Romney, and he has a mega-church of 10,000 people. I think Mitt and his people are going to have to go down and unite this party around the proposition that all of us may disagree on some issues, but we all agree on the proposition that the country can't take four more years of Barack Obama. And if we divide, we get nothing. But it's going to be up to Governor Romney, if he is the nominee, to accomplish that.
RAZ: Pat Buchanan, do you become a bit nostalgic every four years around the time of the New Hampshire primary?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BUCHANAN: Yes. Yes, I do. I mean, it brings back a lot of fond memories, especially the '96 primary up there in New Hampshire. And Iowa did too. I've driven back and forth across that state many, many, many times.
RAZ: Do you think Bob Dole ever forgave you for that victory?
BUCHANAN: There's no question about it that these elections like this tend to put an end to friendships because you're in something like a championship fight. So there's no question about it that the relationship between Senator Dole and Pat Buchanan is not what it was before 1996.
RAZ: And what about with George H. W. Bush?
BUCHANAN: Well, we were good friends.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BUCHANAN: I've not been invited to the library.
RAZ: I got you. Right. You know, a lot of people look at New Hampshire around the country and they say this is the 42nd most populous state, just about 1.3 million people live in this state. That is so important in deciding, you know, a major issue for the rest of the country. Is it fair?
BUCHANAN: Yes, I think it is for this reason. Let's say you took the first primary in New York or California. Given the enormous size of those states and given the amount of resources you need to run in those states - I mean, $10 million is nothing in California - what you would get in the primaries if they began there is simply a ratification of the Gallup poll. So I think the fact that Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina are the first three is a good thing.
It is a healthy thing, because it does winnow the field and you do see if some of these front-runners really have a glass jaw and they can't go the distance. So I, you know, I'm very much in favor of maintaining New Hampshire as the first primary in the nation.
RAZ: That's Pat Buchanan, a three-time presidential candidate who won the Republican primary in New Hampshire in 1996. His latest book is called "Suicide of a Super Power." He's also a commentator on MSNBC. Pat Buchanan, thanks so much.
BUCHANAN: Thank you.
RAZ: Coming up, more New Hampshire nostalgia. In 1984, the road to the nomination seemed freshly paved for Democrat Gary Hart. He also won in New Hampshire against the odds. That's in a moment on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
Before the break, we heard from Pat Buchanan on his unlikely victory in New Hampshire in 1996. Now to another New Hampshire victory, this one in 1984. Just before the Iowa caucuses that year, Gary Hart wasn't getting much love from the media or the Democratic Party establishment. But after he made a strong showing in the state, the cameras started to follow him, a bit like Rick Santorum today.
Just a month or so before the New Hampshire primary of 1984, Gary Hart was polling 2 percent nationally and 5 percent in New Hampshire, far behind the presumed front-runner Walter Mondale. So Gary Hart took advantage of New Hampshire's tradition of bucking trends and going for insurgents. And he started campaigning on that theme.
GARY HART: This election is a choice between the past and the future, between special interests and new directions, between bosses and a new generation of leadership. It's your choice.
RAZ: Gary Hart is now a professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, but once upon a time, he was the great hope for the Democratic Party. And in 1984, his victory in New Hampshire almost upended the candidacy of Walter Mondale.
HART: There was a sense on the part of particularly younger Democrats that the party had become the stagnate. It was always harkened back to its Rooseveltian past. And so I felt that there was a generational opportunity there and felt that I - if I could get to New Hampshire that I had a very good chance of demonstrating that there was a base there as well as around the country for a new generation of leadership.
RAZ: Did you almost consciously or maybe unconsciously contrast yourself to Walter Mondale in the sense that, you know, you were young, you kind of had longish hair, your staff called you Gary, you had these sort of modish suits, you were a Westerner? I mean, did you think that that was going to sort of show the voters there was a stark difference between the two of you?
HART: Well, first of all, my wife would get a laugh about the modish suits. There were two of them and they weren't very modish.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
HART: In any case, no, it was a substantive difference. I had, in the '70s, in the Senate begun to talk about the impact of two revolutions: globalization and the information revolution and how we had to get ready for those to become more competitive and to use our technological advantage to transition from an industrial to a technology-based economy. And the traditional elements of the party didn't take it very seriously. That was the real contrast.
RAZ: Talk about the night that you won. I mean, you didn't just win it. You won it big, like 10 percentage points.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Gary, Gary, Gary.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The sounds of victory. Supporters of Colorado Senator Gary Hart in Manchester, New Hampshire, last night.
HART: Many people thought, including the front-runner, that this campaign would be over tonight. This campaign just begins tonight.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
RAZ: Were you surprised?
HART: I was surprised by the margin. After I ran a somewhat distant second in Iowa with almost no money, the press - a bit like Senator Santorum's experiencing now but even more so - began to see a race shaping up much, much differently than they had forecast. And when we landed the next day in New Hampshire, there were crowds on the street, a press entourage that tripled or quadrupled, and so there was this electricity in the air. And I knew I had a chance. I didn't see the landslide coming.
RAZ: So what happened?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
HART: Well, it didn't fall apart. As I said earlier, we carried 25 states and went to the convention with 12 over 1,200 delegates. But every one of the so-called superdelegates voted for Vice President Mondale, even though on the eve of the convention in San Francisco, the polls showed that I ran much more strongly against President Reagan than Vice President Mondale did.
RAZ: There was a point in the campaign - because you refrained from attacking Walter Mondale. But as you became a threat to him, his campaign felt it had to go after you. At a certain point, he says, well, look at Senator Hart. You know, where is the beef?
WALTER MONDALE: When I hear your new ideas, I'm reminded of the that ad, where's the beef, you know?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
RAZ: This is, of course, you know, a reference to the famous Wendy's hamburger commercial from that time. Do you think that damaged you?
HART: It became a kind of shorthand for those, I think, in the media and critics and analysts to say Hart's not going to sweep this thing. But the notion that somehow where's the beef destroyed my campaign was just nonsense.
RAZ: Hmm. When New Hampshire rolls around every four years, do you get a sense of nostalgia?
HART: Let's see. That was such a defining moment for many of us that I think it is one of those events that almost never reoccurs in your lifetime and you treasure it and you treasure the relationships that shared that experience with you. And so I think in that sense, sure. It was very hard work, but we had an awful lot of fun.
RAZ: That's former Senator Gary Hart. He won the Democratic primary in New Hampshire in 1984, beating the eventual nominee Walter Mondale by 10 percentage points. He spoke to us from Denver. Senator Hart, thank you so much.
HART: It's my great pleasure. Thank you.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
From NPR News, it's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz.
New Hampshire voters could make Mitt Romney's nomination a near certainty on Tuesday. Every presidential candidate in modern history who's won both Iowa and New Hampshire has gone on to win the party's nomination. And so this morning at the final debate before the vote, five of the six remaining candidates directed most of their fire at, as expected, front-runner Mitt Romney.
NEWT GINGRICH: Look, can we drop a little bit of the pious baloney?
REPRESENTATIVE RON PAUL: But I don't see how we can do well against Obama if we have any candidate that, you know, endorsed single-payer systems and TARP bailouts and challenge...
RICK SANTORUM: He wouldn't stand up for conservative principles, he ran for Ronald Reagan.
MITT ROMNEY: If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.
RAZ: Sounds from the debate in New Hampshire this morning. Since 1920, New Hampshire has been the first state to hold a presidential primary, and Granite State voters guard that status fiercely. Our cover story today: the New Hampshire effect: the birthplace and sometimes graveyard for presidential hopefuls.
In a moment, how Pat Buchanan almost ripped the Republican Party apart in 1996, and later, Gary Hart on his insurgent victory in the state in 1984.
But first to NPR's Mara Liasson. She's in Manchester, New Hampshire. And, Mara, Romney looked very confident this morning, but it seems like major elements of the Republican Party are still not prepared to accept him just yet, even if he does win in New Hampshire.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Well, there's no doubt that one of the most significant features of this race has been Romney's failure to expand his own electorate. In other words, he's pretty much getting the same vote totals that he got last time. It's just that the field of candidates against him is so fractured, they're dividing the anti-Romney vote.
He hasn't won over social conservatives. He hasn't won over the most conservative voters in his party. That may not be an impediment to him getting the nomination, but it is something to watch as he becomes, most likely, a general election candidate.
RAZ: Mm-hmm. Prominent evangelicals are in Texas this weekend. They went there to figure out who they are going to gather around and support. What do we know about that meeting?
LIASSON: Well, we know that all along, evangelicals and social conservatives and even Tea Party conservatives have not been happy with Mitt Romney, and they are trying to see if at this late hour, they can coalesce behind someone - that might be Rick Santorum - but there are some questions about this.
One, is it too late for anybody to put together the kind of campaign to actually challenge Mitt Romney? And, two, can these evangelicals and conservatives get behind one candidate? There's still people who are for Newt Gingrich, some are for Santorum, some are waiting to see if Perry can actually revive himself in South Carolina. So I think it's a little late for the social conservatives to try this.
RAZ: Mara, Romney seems to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but there is still damage to be done to him. I mean, a SuperPAC backing Gingrich is planning a mini-documentary about Romney's time in Bain Capital. Other candidates are saying he's a crypto-liberal. There's a subtext to the attacks that he's not a true Christian. Will these attacks create lasting damage for Romney if he does, indeed, become the nominee?
LIASSON: Well, that's a very good question. I've been thinking about that a lot. You know, Mitt Romney is not a beloved candidate. He doesn't spark a lot of passion among Republicans. And there is a question as to what would happen to the enthusiasm gap. Republicans had a lot more enthusiasm than Democrats, but if they nominate someone they're not crazy about, would some of that enthusiasm advantage go away for them?
But I do think that the desire to defeat Barack Obama will be all the unifying force that Romney needs. And the other thing to remember are the very things that make Romney suspect to conservatives are the same things that make him a stronger general election candidate with the ability to reach out to moderates and independents.
RAZ: That's NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson who's in New Hampshire covering the upcoming primary. Mara, thanks.
LIASSON: Thank you, Guy.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELLS RINGING)
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Just a few hours ago, bells rang across Tucson in remembrance of the first anniversary of the shootings there, which left six people dead and wounded 13 others, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. That day, a gunman fired more than 30 shots at a constituent event hosted by Giffords outside a Safeway supermarket. NPR's Ted Robbins joins me now from in front of that Safeway. Ted, it's hard to believe it's already been a year.
TED ROBBINS, BYLINE: It is, Guy. I was near here a year ago when you and I first spoke after the shooting. It was chaotic. There were ambulances, police tape around the whole area and a lot of shock. And at that point, nobody knew how many people had been shot or who was dead and who was wounded.
It's a much more pleasant scene now. There are still pockmarks in the pavement where the bullets struck. And last year, they were covered with piles of flowers within a day or two. Right now, there's a new makeshift memorial for the anniversary and there are flower bouquets and candles being placed right now as we speak.
We spoke with Heather Nutbrown and her mother Kim Nutbrown. They and a friend showed up at the Safeway for the bell ringing earlier today. It was done at the exact time of the shooting, 11 minutes after 10 o'clock in the morning local time.
HEATHER NUTBROWN: We came here after it happened and we felt like we needed to come here again. And the three of us came, so we came again together.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Yeah.
KIM NUTBROWN: Yeah. I think the message is to have hope and to be kind. You never know what tomorrow brings, and it does makes you feel full of hope actually. It really does.
RAZ: What is it that makes her feel hopeful? What did she say?
ROBBINS: Well, they actually found bells here, which had been left by a Tucson organization, which promotes kindness, Ben's Bells. There have also been a lot of events this weekend already, which have focused around health and resilience. Gabby Giffords showed up unannounced at one of them, at a trailhead, which is near Tucson and has been dedicated to Gabe Zimmerman, her staff member who was killed.
RAZ: Hmm. And now, I assume the events are more solemn. Is Giffords going to be at any of those?
ROBBINS: Yes. There is a program at the University of Arizona in which people are speaking in remembrance of those killed and wounded, and then a candlelight vigil this evening outside on the university mall. Gabby Giffords will be there along with her husband, Mark Kelly. We don't expect her to say anything publicly. She is still recovering from that gunshot wound to her head and it's affected her speech. But you never know.
President Obama phoned Giffords today in advance of the candle lighting. He was offering his support to her and to the other families who were affected.
RAZ: Ted, this was such a huge event for the community, for Tucson. How are people you've spoken with - how are they handling this?
ROBBINS: Well, some of them left Tucson. They felt they could better handle this anniversary away from the public. But it's been a pretty supportive weekend here. There's been a lot of hugging, even hugs for me, not something reporters are used to getting. Some people have told me that they expect to be emotionally drained by the end of today, and they said they'll focus on recovering tomorrow or Tuesday.
RAZ: That's NPR's Ted Robbins reporting from Tucson on the one-year anniversary of the shootings there that left six dead and 13 wounded, including, of course, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Ted, thank you so much.
ROBBINS: It's good to be with you, Guy.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
So tomorrow night for the first time in the history of the Bowl Championship Series, two teams from the same conference, the Southeastern Conference, the two best teams in college football, Louisiana State University and the University of Alabama, will face off in the BCS National Championship in New Orleans. Who's going to win? Well, to help us answer that question, Mike Pesca joins me now.
Mike, these two teams actually played each other back in November. LSU beat Alabama back then. So this has got to be the rematch that Alabama's been waiting for.
MIKE PESCA, BYLINE: Well, sure, because there was some question whether Alabama would be invited to play in this game, and there were two arguments against it. One argument was they already had their shot, but there's another argument about it, and that's made by computers. And the computers, not the human voters, they actually said that Oklahoma State should have been playing in this game. But so many human voters said, you know what, that game between Alabama and LSU was so close, and we happen to think that Alabama has the next best team.
I kind of like the fact that it's a rematch just because we have a frame of reference. And NFL games, you know, Super Bowls, sometimes they're a rematch, but at least everyone plays the same group of 31 other teams. This time, they know each other very well, and I think that adds to the drama.
RAZ: So, Mike, tomorrow night, who should we be looking out for?
PESCA: Guy, I like cake, and I like steak. But I don't want just eat cake.
RAZ: Right.
PESCA: And so far, in these bowl games, I have gotten cake. I have gotten dessert, which is offense. And all the college football fans have gotten so many games where the scoring has been so high - Oklahoma State and Stanford, those two teams totaled for 79 points. We just saw West Virginia put up 70 points. It's so sweet that I'm not even getting the sustenance of defense.
RAZ: Yeah. This is like a glucose overdose. This is going to be a low-scoring game?
PESCA: It will. The last one was. And one of the reasons it was low scoring was Alabama missed three field goals. But I would say having watched that game, it did seem that Alabama was better at moving the ball against LSU.
RAZ: Ha.
PESCA: Although once Alabama got into - deep into LSU territory, the majority of their plays went for negative yards.
RAZ: Mike, let me ask you about this conference, this Southeastern Conference, because I believe - and correct me if I'm wrong - this is one of the most lucrative football conferences in the country. They signed a huge TV deal. You've got two teams from that conference playing against each other. People who run that conference must be thrilled about that from a financial perspective.
PESCA: Right. The SEC is geographically a hotbed of football with teams in the South. Now they're actually stretching their tentacles to - in the future, include teams from the Midwest and the Southwest. Right now, the SEC is sort of like the Goldman Sachs of college football.
RAZ: Every year, of course, there's always the question of whether the BCS system is the right way to go, or should college football go towards a system like college basketball where you've got brackets and teams play against each other, there's an elimination and a final four and a winner. What do you think? I mean, is this system ever going to be reformed?
PESCA: It might never be reformed. The biggest argument that people use to defend the system is that it makes every regular season game meaningful. So with college football, they say, every game is meaningful.
RAZ: Ah.
PESCA: The season could be lost in week two. But look at this game. Alabama lost already. How is that game meaningful? They got their second chance. You know, this is standing what is usually the best argument for this system on its head.
RAZ: All right. So cake, but probably more steak tomorrow night. That's NPR's Mike Pesca in New York for us. Mike, thanks so much.
PESCA: Bon appetite.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
There was a time when Newark, New Jersey was the place to shop. The high-end department stores on Broad Street once drew crowds that rivaled Times Square. But nowadays, shoppers flock to Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. So Newark city officials are trying to lure them back. Nancy Solomon of New Jersey News Service headed to Broad Street in Newark to check out the city's newest target for revitalization.
NANCY SOLOMON, BYLINE: Newark's central shopping district features rows of discount clothing and beauty supply shops and an off-brand fried chicken restaurant. Their huge, brightly colored sign stretch two and three stories high. But peeking out from behind them, or high above them, are the old building names that represent Newark's storied past.
You had huge department stores. The Hanes department store, the Bamberger's were two of the largest.
Adam Zipkin is Newark's new Deputy Mayor for Economic Development.
ADAM ZIPKIN: You had S. Klein, and they were centers and attractions not just for people living in Newark but really for the region.
SOLOMON: The S. Klein building has been vacant for many years, yet the exterior of the building is still grand with ornamental details and a multistory sign that still reads "S. Klein on the Square." Zipkin has lived and worked in Newark since the 1980s when he went to law school here but his connection goes back even further. His parents were born and raised here, and he grew up hearing stories about shopping trips to Broad Street.
ZIPKIN: In the 1920s the intersection of Broad Street and Market Street was known as the busiest intersection at rush hour in the country, busier even than Times Square. And so it certainly has been an important retail district in the city for a long time.
SOLOMON: But during the middle part of the 20th century, Newark lost half its population. New superhighways, malls and desegregation of schools led to white and middle class flight, and it never really recovered. Now, New York's Fifth Avenue is the premier shopping district in the region, but even that avenue experienced a less glamorous past.
JOANNE PODELL: Some of us are old enough to remember when Fifth Avenue was a bunch of electronics stores. Not very attractive and certainly didn't demand the kind of visitors and shoppers that there are today.
SOLOMON: Joanne Podell is a commercial real estate broker. She stands at 52nd and Fifth and points out the big brand name stores that spend $2,000 a square foot to be here. Podell says Fifth Avenue changed in the 1990s when the local business improvement district restricted the types of businesses that could rent here.
PODELL: And so what happened was those stores were replaced by other types of retailers: apparel retailers, shoe retailers. And what we see here is a lot of jewelers as well.
SOLOMON: Back on Newark's Broad Street, rents start around $15 a square foot. Today, its discount stores serve the needs of Newark residents like Jessica Flores.
JESSICA FLORES: I'm just looking for sales. And pajamas are in sales, you know, clothing are in sales. I got kids, you know? Things are rough.
SOLOMON: Flores says she has no complaints about Newark's central retail district. but Zipkin, the Deputy Mayor, would like to see a little bit of Fifth Avenue glitz downtown.
ZIPKIN: We're not looking to necessarily go backwards and recreate exactly what was here before. But what we want is a vibrant, 24/7 downtown.
SOLOMON: Zipkin says the plan calls for converting vacant office buildings into apartments. He hopes the influx of residents downtown will draw a better mix of retail to Newark's central shopping district. But it remains to be seen if upper-income people will be drawn back to live in a neighborhood where the main items for sale are individual cigarettes out of the pack, wigs and discounted kids' clothes. For NPR News, I'm Nancy Solomon.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
There are all sorts of statistics people use to gauge the health of the economy and we're going to hear now about one of them. It's an annual report that comes from a place that makes money. We mean it manufactures money. The U.S. Mint.
David Kestenbaum of our Planet Money team explains.
DAVID KESTENBAUM, BYLINE: The Mint's report for 2011 just came out and here's something that might surprise you. The largest source of revenue - it's not the coins in your pocket.
RICHARD PETERSON: Revenue really was driven by precious metal bullion, gold and silver coins.
KESTENBAUM: This is Richard Peterson, deputy director of the Mint. The Mint makes gold and silver coins for collectors and investors.
PETERSON: Precious metal coins were up $800 million last year and that's approximately 30-some percent.
KESTENBAUM: Is that a high, an all-time high?
PETERSON: Yes, it is.
KESTENBAUM: People really wanted gold and silver coins this year, a sign that the global economy is still kind of freaked out, worried about Europe, about inflation, about everything, but you can find what looks like good news in the report. Demand for quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies - that was up. It had been down, way down, during the financial crisis.
Basically, people were so desperate for cash, they broke into their piggy banks.
PETERSON: People went into their piggy banks and their coin jars and spent those coins. And those coins flowed back into the banks and then ultimately back to the Federal Reserve. The vault started filling up and they turned off the spigot of new coin production from the United States Mint.
KESTENBAUM: Here's another detail from the global economy that pops up in the report. The price for metals is up. As a result, it costs more than a penny to make a penny and more than a nickel to make a nickel. That's been true for around five years. It now costs over two cents to make a penny and over 10 cents to make a nickel.
Peterson says the Mint is researching cheaper metals that could be used.
PETERSON: On the nickel right now, there are options that cost less than a nickel. On the penny, we're still evaluating.
KESTENBAUM: So it might actually be possible to make a penny for a penny?
PETERSON: I'll be happy to say, possible. Yes.
KESTENBAUM: For its entire history, the Mint has managed to make a profit minting coins for general use. That part of its business has always paid for itself, but it is about to take a big hit in connection with a coin you probably do not have in your pocket - the dollar coin.
As NPR has reported, over a billion dollar coins had piled up in vaults as the result of a law that required the Mint to make dollar coins honoring all the presidents. The Treasury Department last month basically ordered a halt. Big picture, that will save money. The Treasury estimates $50 million a year, but for the Mint, the dollar coin was a big money maker, the highest markup of any coin. It cost just 18 cents to make one last year and the Mint sold each one for face value, one dollar.
Now, most of that profit will go away. Peterson says he expects the Mint will still break even or better, making coins for everyday use.
PETERSON: We believe that we'll be in the black next year and we do have a reserve available if needed.
KESTENBAUM: By the way, any profits the Mint makes from those coins in your pocket, by law, those profits go to pay down the national debt.
David Kestenbaum, NPR News.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
A hospital in Atlanta is trying to shock people into doing something about childhood obesity. Georgia has more obese children than any other state except Mississippi. And hospital officials are hoping to reverse the trend with help from some harsh new billboards and TV commercials that feature overweight kids.
As NPR's Kathy Lohr reports, the ads are making an impact but the tactics are raising questions.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
KATHY LOHR, BYLINE: One ad filmed in black and white that's tough to watch, features a little boy and his mom entering a room with two folding chairs. They're both clearly overweight. They sit and look at each other.
(SOUNDBITE OF AN ANTI-OBESITY AD)
LOHR: The mother bows her head and the tagline appears. It reads: 75 percent of Georgia parents with overweight kids don't recognize the problem.
In another spot, a young girl speaks directly to the camera about a disease she says she has.
(SOUNDBITE OF AN ANTI-OBESITY AD)
(SOUNDBITE OF A GONG)
LOHR: The ads are modeled after anti-smoking and anti-methamphetamine campaigns intended to shock the audience.
LINDA MATZIGKEIT: It has to be harsh. If it's not, nobody's going to listen.
LOHR: Linda Matzigkeit is a vice president with Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, the pediatric hospital running the campaign. She says parents are in denial. Nearly one million Georgia kids are overweight or obese.
MATZIGKEIT: This is a medical crisis and I say, if you don't believe me, come visit our hospital and see the kids that we are now taking care of that, more and more, have Type II Diabetes, have hypertension, need knee replacements. And it's breaking our heart to see these adult-type diseases in the children that we serve.
LOHR: But some question the strategy. Rodney Lyn is a professor at Georgia State University's Public Health Institute.
RODNEY LYN: This campaign is more negative than positive.
LOHR: Based on his research, Lyn says the ads can hurt the very market they're targeting.
LYN: We know that, you know, stigmatization leads to lower self-esteem, potential depression. We know that kids will engage in physical activity less because they feel like they're going to be embarrassed. So there are all of these other negative effects.
LOHR: The ads are part of a five-year, $25 million anti-obesity effort. It includes training pediatricians, getting programs in schools and setting up a clinic to treat the medical and psychological issues related to obesity.
South of Atlanta, Gayla Grubbs owns a sandwich shop in Griffin, Georgia. One of the employees makes a turkey sandwich for Grubb's 15-year-old son, Sam, with some special instructions from mom.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Light on the mayo - I mean, no mayo, just no mayonnaise.
LOHR: Sam is obese and Grubb says she realized he needed help, so she took him to the children's clinic last year.
GAYLA GRUBBS: I wanted to give Sam every opportunity to feel good about himself and to get healthy. That was the main thing.
LOHR: In fact, Gayla said she didn't tell Sam he was going to the clinic until they started driving there. Sam says he didn't really mind.
SAM GRUBBS: I was being bullied a lot because of my weight. And after I started losing it, it cut down quite a lot. They don't call me names or anything like that anymore.
GRUBBS: It's a self-esteem issue and, you know, if you feel better about yourself, you're going to carry yourself differently and so that has helped.
LOHR: Sam has lost 20 pounds so far and wants to lose another 50 by the end of the year.
GRUBBS: I've been cutting back on my portion sizes a whole lot. Instead of, like, four or so pieces of pizza, I only have about two.
LOHR: And Sam says he doesn't eat pizza or fast food much anymore. This kind of family intervention is exactly what health officials hope to see more of. For the record, Gayla Grubbs says she's not upset by the anti-obesity ads that have raised controversy here.
GRUBBS: It plants a seed and what we do with that is our responsibility.
LOHR: The second phase of the children's health care ad campaign is about to begin and officials say it will focus on encouraging adults, parents, teachers and grandparents, to take action.
Kathy Lohr, NPR News, Atlanta.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
To life's many small irritations, you might add filling prescriptions. Millions of Americans may be surprised to discover that their local Walgreens or Duane Reade Pharmacy is no longer in their network. That's as of January 1st, and it's because of a contract dispute between the nation's largest drugstore chain, and the company that manages prescriptions for health insurers. Sarah Varney, of member station KQED, explains.
SARAH VARNEY, BYLINE: To figure out if you're affected by the dispute, look on the back of your insurance card. If it says Express Scripts, you can no longer fill your prescription at Walgreens - or its affiliates, like Duane Reade - under your insurance plan. Express Scripts is what's called a pharmacy benefit manager. Health insurers and others hire them to negotiate prices for drugs and oversee prescription drug programs.
Express Scripts, one of the nation's largest pharmacy benefit managers whose clients include the mega insurance giant WellPoint, had been negotiating a new contract to keep Walgreens in its network. But Express Scripts spokesman Brian Henry says the pharmacy chain was asking for too much money.
BRIAN HENRY: Their rates and terms, as they currently stand, would be as much as 20 percent more. And our clients aren't willing to pay that premium for basically, the same service that you can get at many other - thousands of other pharmacies.
VARNEY: That's a charge Walgreens adamantly denies. Michael Polzin is a Walgreens spokesman.
MICHAEL POLZIN: We did not propose any increase in our rates, so there would not be any significant savings to Express Scripts clients for excluding Walgreens from their network. So it's really a situation of all pain and no gain for their clients.
VARNEY: Health-care experts are somewhat befuddled by the standoff. Sean Brandle is a pharmacy benefit expert at the Segal Company, a New York-based employer-benefits firm. He says tussles between pharmacy chains and pharmacy benefit managers are pretty typical.
SEAN BRANDLE: There's like, this dance and at the end of it, normally, what you expect is that some kind of deal is going to be struck. But I guess in this instance, it looks like they were just too far apart.
VARNEY: Brandle says he's surprised Walgreens would walk away from so many pharmacy customers and all that in-store foot traffic. Express Scripts says of the 750 million prescriptions it processed last year, about 90 million were filled at Walgreens.
Caught in the middle of the dispute is one of the nation's largest health-insurance companies, WellPoint, and millions of its customers, like San Francisco resident David Forer. There's a Walgreens just down the street from his office, and he used to stop in weekly to pick up insulin for his daughter, who has type 1 diabetes.
DAVID FORER: They knew me on a first- name basis. They wouldn't even ask me my name when I came up; they would just go and get her prescriptions; they would ask how she was doing. And now, I can't go there anymore.
VARNEY: Forer has switched his family's prescriptions to a CVS pharmacy. But while CVS is a national chain, there just aren't as many of them on the city's streets as Walgreens.
FORER: I imagine there's going to be huge lineups now because there was very few CVSs, and so many people are going to have to switch to CVS. So this is a major inconvenience.
VARNEY: WellPoint says nationwide, there's another in-network pharmacy typically within a half a mile of a Walgreens, and the company is trying to help customers make the transition.
Pharmacy benefit expert Brandle says there could be an upside for all the headache. Brandle says Express Scripts should be able to negotiate steeper discounts with CVS and other pharmacies, since excluding Walgreens will mean more business for them.
For NPR News, I'm Sarah Varney.
BLOCK: And that story comes to us as part of a health reporting partnership with NPR, member stations and Kaiser Health News.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Audie Cornish.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block.
The Alaskan city of Cordova is used to snow, but not this much snow. Officials estimate that the southern coastal community along Prince William Sound has received about 18 feet so far this season. And it's testing the roofs and roads.
Joining me on the phone from his command center is Cordova Mayor James Kallander. And, Mayor Kallander, how bad is this compared to what you're used to up there?
MAYOR JAMES KALLANDER: Oh, this is precedent setting. We - even the old-timers say we're breaking new ground now.
BLOCK: Yeah, 18 feet. Eighteen feet is 18 feet.
KALLANDER: Yup. It's been pretty incredible.
BLOCK: Well, how do you deal with all that snow? What's the town doing?
KALLANDER: Well, this event started around 12th to 13th of December, and it's been snowing with great frequency since. And we have a pretty robust public works department. We have three loaders, big end loaders with snow buckets and two road graders that are all chained up. And these guys were doing pretty well until all the snow dumps filled up in town, and I'm talking about mountains of snow.
BLOCK: Yeah.
KALLANDER: And then we started just getting overwhelmed. I mean, it got to the point where we couldn't keep single lanes in subdivisions. So that's where I declared a disaster emergency.
BLOCK: And what happens when you declare a disaster emergency?
KALLANDER: Well, we have our procedure and process in our code of how you declare. And we've got, I think, around 60 or 70 National Guard folks came in yesterday on the ferry, all with shovels and climbing gear to get on roofs. And the Coast Guard held their ship back from deployment, and so there's 25 or 30 Coast Guard sailors that are pitching in, and Homeland Security has staff here. So we're getting some serious help here now.
BLOCK: What does it look like if you're driving around Cordova - assuming you can drive around Cordova, what does it look like right now with all this snow?
KALLANDER: Well, our snow dumps are - some of them are probably 25 or 30 feet high. All the roads, the main highways are pushed out now. We've had a reprieve for about 20 hours. So they're pushed out to almost full, with banks probably in the eight-foot range. All the streets signs, all the signage on the highway is covered. And we've abandoned some of the cross streets and made them into snow dumps.
BLOCK: Mm. What about electricity?
Electricity here is all underground. We've been working - the electric coop here has worked for probably the last six, eight years to move all utilities underground. So in that department, we're pretty good shape.
Mayor Kallander, I was looking at the weather forecast for Cordova, and I saw snow, snow and more snow coming your way. Is that what you're hearing?
KALLANDER: Yeah. We just - we've got a forecaster working with Homeland Security. We're looking at tomorrow potentially three more feet of snow.
BLOCK: Three more feet tomorrow.
KALLANDER: Yeah. With 40-mile-an-hour winds.
BLOCK: You ready for that?
KALLANDER: Well, we have to be, don't we?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: I guess there's not much choice.
No. No. You know, if it gets too severe, we'll just pull everybody in, and they'll just dig their way to wherever they got to go.
I've been talking with James Kallander, the mayor of Cordova, Alaska, which has had more than 18 feet of snow this winter and lots more on the way. Mayor Kallander, thanks so much and best of luck to you.
KALLANDER: Thank you, Melissa. Take care.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
And I'm Audie Cornish.
Tomorrow, New Hampshire hosts its first in the nation presidential primary. And according to a poll out today from Suffolk University, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney holds a commanding lead. But that lead is also 10 points less than it was several days ago.
BLOCK: Of the six major Republican candidates still in the race, all but one have either led or flirted with the lead in the polls or in Iowa. The exception is former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman. The Suffolk University poll shows him running third in New Hampshire, behind Romney and Texas Congressman Ron Paul.
Our colleague Robert Siegel is in Manchester, where he spoke with Huntsman yesterday.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Jon. Whoo.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Up here. Up here, up here.
JON HUNTSMAN: How's everybody?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Jon.
HUNTSMAN: Yeah. Good to see you.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: Great job.
HUNTSMAN: Thank you for being here.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The crowd outside the BeanTowne Coffee House in Hampstead, New Hampshire, is a mix: Huntsman campaign workers, local Republicans and undeclared independents. There are also some tourists, people who have come to New Hampshire, like baseball fans at spring training - they get to see the players up close - and a crowd of reporters and cameramen who cluster around Jon Huntsman as if he really were the rock star he aspired to be as a teenager.
Jon Huntsman is running as a conservative reformer. He's for congressional term limits. He's staunchly pro-life, and he's for a flat tax with just three brackets and no special exemptions or deductions.
HUNTSMAN: We've got special carve-outs for those who can afford a lobbyist and a lawyer on Capitol Hill. All these carve-outs and deductions are good for about 7 percent of the population. And I say, until we fix the tax code, until we improve the regulatory state of affairs, until we move toward greater, more confident and energy independence, we're going to have a hard time moving more than we have opportunity.
SIEGEL: But some of those carve-outs are pretty big and benefit a good number of people, for example, the mortgage interest deduction. We're better off without giving homeowners a break?
HUNTSMAN: I believe we are. I think we're incentivizing debt. We should be incentivizing equity. But beyond that, if we're going to do the job right in terms of clearing out all the loopholes in deductions, I say we clean it all out. We clean out all of the cobwebs. If you keep something in, then everybody is going to want their special break.
SIEGEL: What distinguishes Jon Huntsman in the GOP field is that he has actually worked in the executive branch of the federal government. He worked at the Department of Commerce and at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and he was U.S. ambassador to Singapore, and then in the Obama administration, ambassador to China. In Asia, Huntsman used his fluent Mandarin, which he learned as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan.
In Saturday night's ABC New Hampshire debate, he drew fire from Mitt Romney for having served President Obama in Beijing.
MITT ROMNEY: Governor, you were, in the last two years, implementing the policies of this administration in China. The rest of us on the stage were doing our best to get Republicans elected across the country and stop the policies of this president being - from being put forward.
SIEGEL: The following morning in the NBC debate, Jon Huntsman fired back.
HUNTSMAN: I was criticized last night by Governor Romney for putting my country first. And I just want to remind the people here in New Hampshire and throughout the United States that I think...
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
HUNTSMAN: He criticized me while he was out raising money for serving my country in China, yes, under a Democrat, like my two sons are doing in the United States Navy. They're not asking who - what political affiliation the president is. I want to be very clear with the people here in New Hampshire and this country: I will always put my country first, and I think that's important.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
SIEGEL: Jon Huntsman faults Mitt Romney on foreign policy, for example, Romney's pledge to formally cite China as a currency manipulator. Of course, he says the Chinese have manipulated their currency, keeping it artificially low. The U.S. has been calling them on it since the Bush administration, he says, and the Chinese have let the currency rise by 30 percent. Huntsman says that's one issue in Sino-American relations among many.
HUNTSMAN: You can either politicize it and get cheap points out of it, you know, by being heroic on the stage and get an applause line, or you can be a realist. I'm a realist. I know how that stuff works. You sit down with the Chinese at the negotiating table, and you've got a matrix of issues, one of which might be currency. The others are market access; you have North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Burma, South China Sea, the environment. You've got a lot of things on the table. You can't just one-off the relationship and expect it not to negatively impact everything else you're trying to do. It's highly unrealistic.
SIEGEL: On Afghanistan, you differ from your Republican rivals in that you say we should be getting out pretty soon. 2013, we should...
HUNTSMAN: That's right.
SIEGEL: ...be leaving.
HUNTSMAN: That's right.
SIEGEL: Would you be prepared as president to see civil war, to see a deterioration of the situation in countries where we've been fighting and for the U.S. to say we're out, we did our best, so be it?
HUNTSMAN: That may be inevitable, Robert. I'd like to tell the American people that over the last 10 years, we have something to show for our involvement: no more Taliban; al-Qaida is now in sanctuaries in Waziristan and beyond; Osama bin Laden is no longer around; we've had free elections; we've strengthened civil society; we've helped the police and military. I say it's time to get out. I believe civil war could very well be around the corner when you look at the lay of the land, the neighborhood. And I don't want to invest another penny in what could be a civil war, and I don't want another soldier to lose his or her life in what could be another civil war.
SIEGEL: That position distinguishes you in the Republican primaries. Let's say you get nominated, won't you and Barack Obama stand at some debate and say, well, we basically - we agree. We have the same view of Afghanistan. We have the same view of Iraq.
HUNTSMAN: He's listening to the generals on the ground, apparently, and he's taking a go-slow approach. I don't want to take a go-slow approach.
SIEGEL: Get out fast.
HUNTSMAN: I want to get out fast. I recognize that there's a counter-terror element to it, and indeed, it's a counterterrorist structure that we're going to have to have on all corners of the world whether the Horn of Africa, Yemen, Southeast Asia or Southwest Asia. That's intelligence, Special Forces and some training component. But I want to get out as quickly as we can because we have achieved our objective.
SIEGEL: In the dusk outside a private home in Bedford, New Hampshire, on Sunday, Jon Huntsman faced a makeshift podium of microphones and, once again, the army of media that now follows him. A reporter who's been here all year says Huntsman events in private homes used to draw crowds in single digits. Suddenly, they come in the dozens, sometimes a couple of hundred.
HUNTSMAN: I feel a little momentum; I feel a little surge. We're still clearly the underdog, and because of that, we have a lot of work ahead of us.
SIEGEL: The latest polls suggest that Huntsman is gaining by the day, but his rise would place him in third or with a huge surge in second place. Does he think he'll win a ticket out of New Hampshire to the primaries in South Carolina and Florida?
HUNTSMAN: I don't know how many tickets there are, but let's just say there are multiple tickets.
SIEGEL: More than two?
HUNTSMAN: I would say more than two.
SIEGEL: So if you came in third, you might still have a ticket to...
HUNTSMAN: I believe so.
SIEGEL: If you have a ticket out of New Hampshire, do you have the funds to compete in Florida, which will be - it's not going to be retail politics in coffee shops and diners. It's going to be all mass media in big media markets.
HUNTSMAN: Let's just say with each passing hour, beginning last night, we're getting a bump-up, a real bump-up in fundraising because people sense real momentum in New Hampshire. And these things have a way of taking care of themselves if you perform well. You've got to perform well; you've got to beat market expectations. And if you can do that, one of those tickets we just talked about coming out of New Hampshire could be a multimillion dollar affair. That's just the way it is.
SIEGEL: Well, Governor Jon Huntsman, thank you very much for talking with us.
HUNTSMAN: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: I spoke with Jon Huntsman yesterday. One possible source of funds is the Huntsman family fortune. Jon Huntsman Sr. founded a huge chemical company where the former Utah governor used to be CEO. The New York Times reported that Huntsman is reluctant to ask his father for money. The candidate called that story a little misinformed. He said the Huntsman family gives to humanitarian causes, and they don't consider a political campaign to be a humanitarian cause. Even so, the elder Huntsman is reported to have given much money to the Super PAC that supports his son. In Manchester, New Hampshire, this is Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
When we hear about hot tech companies, more often than not, all the founders are male: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga. Well, a new organization is trying to change that profile by funding companies created by women.
NPR's Laura Sydell has that story.
LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE: Kelly Hoey thinks a lot of investors may be missing some good business opportunities because they aren't coming from someone who looks like the next Mark Zuckerberg.
KELLY HOEY: You're looking for a white guy in a hoodie, and that next visionary is, you know, going to be wearing a skirt and a great pair of shoes. I don't know but they're going to look different.
SYDELL: Hoey is one of the three women behind Women Innovate Mobile. It's what's called an accelerator. It invests small sums of money in startups, gives them an office for three months, and helps refine their business plan. Hoey says it's like a greenhouse for startups.
HOEY: And they get mentoring. They are given access to the networks of resources. So, that may be funding, that may be expertise.
SYDELL: Accelerators are not a new idea. Among the most well-known is Y Combinator, based in Silicon Valley. Its nurtured new stars like Dropbox and Reddit. But only four percent of Y Combinator's grants - that's four percent - went to startups with a woman founder.
Veronika Sonsev is one of Women Innovate Mobile's founders. She says Silicon Valley may be missing some great opportunities, especially in the mobile space, where the perspective on, say, how to design a phone might be a little different coming from a woman.
VERONIKA SONSEV: They use phones to plan every aspect of their life, to manage their kids' schedules. And so, you know, I think given the nature of how women use telephones and all of the things that they do in their household, I can only imagine some of the ideas that they may come up with.
SYDELL: Of course, the question is why aren't women already out there turning their ideas into companies? Sharon Vosmek says the answer to that question is complex. Vosmek is the CEO of Astia, a nonprofit that helps women develop their business ideas. She says a lot of research indicates that women lack confidence. When a woman gets a C in calculus, she figures: I'm bad at math. But a guy?
SHARON VOSMEK: A young man with the same grade will perceive that he's a math whiz. He'll use it in the furtherance of his career to negotiate a higher salary and actually to have higher aspirations.
SYDELL: And Vosmek says starting your own company often requires a big dose of confidence.
And another reason, says Bill Reichert, a partner in Garage Technology Ventures, is that a lot of women entrepreneurs he sees don't have the computer science background.
BILL REICHERT: We tend to invest in companies that have very strong core technical teams, and so that population is disproportionately male.
SYDELL: But starting an Internet company isn't as technically difficult as it used to be. A woman founder can bring an idea or marketing experience.
Veronika Sonsev, a former executive at AOL who now has her own startup, says women have to stop being shy about their ideas. Sonsev says women can turn their daily challenges - whether it be seeing their child's calendar online or finding relevant health information - into business opportunities that a man might not see.
SONSEV: Now, how many times have you been in a situation and you're like, you know, if only someone would start a company to solve that problem, I would be a customer. Well, that's a great problem for you to solve, right? Why don't you start that company and help find other customers who are similar?
SYDELL: Women Innovate Mobile is taking its first round of applications through February 1st. Sonsev points out that they've already gotten inquiries from women as far away as Ireland and India.
Laura Sydell, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
As we just heard, Iran has been isolated by the West over concern that it's developing a nuclear weapons program. So, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is hoping to pick up some much-needed diplomatic support, with a visit to close allies in the Americas. Today, he's in Venezuela with President Hugo Chavez, who has accused the U.S. of trying to dominate the world. And from there: Nicaragua, Cuba and Ecuador, all sharply critical of U.S. foreign policy.
NPR's Juan Forero has that story.
PRESIDENT HUGO CHAVEZ: (Foreign language spoken)
JUAN FORERO, BYLINE: On his TV show, "Hello Mr. President," President Hugo Chavez attacks the Obama administration, saying it's trying to stop Iran from rightfully becoming a medium-sized power.
CHAVEZ: (Foreign language spoken)
FORERO: He says those efforts by the empire, as he calls the U.S., are laughable.
CHAVEZ: (Foreign language spoken)
FORERO: The U.S. is desperate, Chavez explains. He then has a message for President Obama: Focus on your own problems back home.
It was just the kind of message Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to Latin America to hear. Washington has slapped sanctions on Tehran, causing Iran's currency to tumble. And Europe is moving toward tightening the noose, part of a broad effort to cripple Iran's nuclear program.
Cynthia Arnson, at Washington's Woodrow Wilson Center, says Ahmadinejad's arrival here permits Iran to claim it still has friends.
DR. CYNTHIA ARNSON: And it's particularly useful to have allies in Latin America, which has traditionally been considered the United States' backyard. So it's a really important way of thumbing its nose at Washington and making common political cause with governments in the region, who also share an anti-imperialist and anti-U.S. ideology.
FORERO: Under Ahmadinejad, Tehran has moved energetically to build ties in the region. The Iranians have signed dozens of economic agreements with a number of countries.
(SOUNDBITE OF A NEWS CLIP)
FORERO: Today, on Venezuelan state television, a report touts a joint project with the Iranians that provided 2,500 poor families with homes.
But other projects promised by Tehran for the region - particularly dams and ports, refineries and hospitals - never materialized, says Arnson.
ARNSON: Some of these have gone forward, particularly in Venezuela. But I think there's a huge difference between the signing of the agreement and what is actually implemented or turned into something real.
FORERO: And Tehran has only received diplomatic support from a small group of small countries that are ideologically opposed to Washington, but wield limited influence.
Analysts say it's notable that the Iranian leader is not visiting Brazil or Mexico â countries with big, diverse economies and governments that carry international weight.
Still, the State Department says it's tracking Iran's role here. And spokeswoman Victoria Nuland recently told reporters the U.S. wants to discourage countries from dealing with Iran.
VICTORIA NULAND: We are making absolutely clear to countries around the world that now is not the time to be deepening ties, not security ties, not economic ties with Iran.
FORERO: Stephen Johnson is a former U.S. Defense Department assistant secretary for the region. He says that Washington is particularly focused on making sure Iran is not finding ways to circumvent sanctions. And the problem, he says, is that many of Iran's activities in the region are not transparent, particularly in Venezuela.
DR. STEPHEN JOHNSON: There are joint ventures in which members of the Iranian Guards that are taking part. Companies such as the tractor company and the car company have links to the Iranian Guards. So there are possibilities for exchanges there.
FORERO: For now, though, the U.S. is simply watching as Ahmadinejad gets the red carpet treatment in the region.
Juan Forero, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Primary season is in full swing, and that means the Republican presidential candidates are wooing not only voters but also high-profile endorsements. So far this season, celebrity endorsers have brought a little punch to the campaign trail - and a lot of levity.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
We start with former Republican presidential nominee John McCain, who has endorsed Mitt Romney. But at a campaign stop in South Carolina, McCain had this surprise for the pro-Romney crowd.
SEN. JOHN MCCAIN: I am confident, with the leadership and the backing of the American people, President Obama will turn this country around. We believe in America. We believe that our best days are ahead of us. President...
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: President Romney, Senator.
MCCAIN: Excuse me, President Romney. President Romney.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
MCCAIN: President Romney (makes noise).
BLOCK: The surging campaign of former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum got a very different endorsement ahead of the Iowa caucuses. It came from the world of reality TV.
JIM BOB DUGGAR: I'm Jim Bob Duggar with "19 Kids and Counting." And I've got with me - I've got - here is Jill and Josh and Jinger. And we have brought 12 of our 19 children here to Iowa to help, hopefully, put Rick Santorum over the top.
CORNISH: Duggar is no political novice. He publicly backed Mike Huckabee in 2008. But some of his fellow celebrity endorsers are new to the game.
REP. RON PAUL: Does anybody here know the name Kelly Clarkson?
CORNISH: You might have heard of her, the pop singer and "American Idol" winner. That's Texas congressman Ron Paul, talking about what it was like to win Kelly Clarkson's Twitter endorsement. In this case, Clarkson may have gotten as much out of it as he did.
PAUL: She endorsed me a couple weeks ago, and something happened because - I have to admit, I didn't know a whole lot about her, but I do know that our supporters were so enthusiastic about it, they went up and bumped up her sales - of her records - by 600 percent.
BLOCK: As Kelly Clarkson told NPR's Guy Raz, her endorsement of Ron Paul was really done on a lark.
KELLY CLARKSON: I was like, sitting at home with my brother watching "Leno," and I was like, man - I was like, I like this dude. I liked him the last time around. All the stuff he's going for is like, whether - whatever, regardless the topic, he's all for states' rights, and I think that that's very important.
BLOCK: Ron Paul, in fact, is feeling a lot of love from Hollywood types - or make that Carson City, Nevada, types. Add to the list Cami Parker, star of the HBO reality series "Cathouse." She's a legal prostitute at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch.
CAMI PARKER: What I like about Ron Paul is the fact that he can recognize that what works for one person in their own, individual community is not what is going to work blanketed across the entire country. And the right for each individual community to do what works for them is really, really smart.
BLOCK: Parker and her fellow working girls even launched a Pimpin' for Paul campaign.
PARKER: Any customer that comes into the Bunny Ranch and says, I'm pimping for Paul, gets a great discount off his party. And there's over 500 girls licensed here, and we all vote as a bloc. So we're hoping that people will listen to us because we do have a voice.
BLOCK: Finally, rock star Kid Rock has allowed Mitt Romney to use his song "Born Free" as a campaign anthem.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BORN FREE")
BLOCK: But Kid Rock wrote on his blog that doesn't mean he's endorsing Romney. He says any candidate can use the song - though he did say any contender bold enough to use another song of his, called "So Hott," has a good shot at winning his vote.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SO HOTT")
BLOCK: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Israel has charged five right wing settlers with helping to organize a raid on an Israeli military base. The raid happened last month in the occupied West Bank. Israel is making good on a promise to clamp down on extremist Jewish groups operating in the Palestinian territories. Among those groups is the Hilltop Youth movement. Their aim is to settle what they say is all of the land if Israel, including areas Palestinians want for their future state.
NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports from the unauthorized settlement outpost of Ramat Migron.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, BYLINE: So, I'm standing on a hill with a view through the olive trees in front of me to the mountains here in the West Bank. It's cold and it's Spartan. But it's this lonely outcrop and many others like it that gives the Hilltop Youth its name. The camp in front of me is only a few makeshift dwellings. It doesn't really seem like much but this is the seed from which the settlements grow.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The ideologically-driven hope is that this tiny camp will eventually expand into a recognized settlement. Many settlements started this way with a few makeshift shelters, then trailers, as more people who moved in and eventually, whole built-up areas with homes and schools and infrastructure.
It's quiet here at Ramat Migron today but it's been the scene of scuffles between the Israeli security forces and members of the Hilltop Youth in the past.
(SOUNDBITE OF A RIOT)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: In this video posted on YouTube, shot in September last year, riot police are seen pushing two young settlers away as the camp is demolished. Now, a few months later, it's been rebuilt by the very same people.
For years, extremist settlers have been carrying out what are called price tag attacks; for every outpost demolished by the army, they target Palestinians in revenge. Recently however that changed. In mid-December, dozens of extremist settlers broke into an Israeli army base instead, vandalizing army property. It shocked the nation and the government could no longer ignore what was happening.
EHUD BARAK: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Defense minister Ehud Barak used a word that is usually only reserved for Palestinian action: I see this as homemade terror, Jewish-made terror, which is unacceptable, he says.
The face of what Barak calls Jewish terror is unexpected. In another settlement in the West Bank, a fresh-faced 19-year-old, who is a member of the Hilltop Youth, agrees to meet with us.
Liat Weisel has a ready smile and a confident manner.
LIAT WEISEL MEMBER, HILLTOP YOUTH: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: We believe that all of the land of Israel belongs to the land of Israel and that's the reason I'm here, she says.
YOUTH: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Like many in the Hilltop Youth movement, she joined after then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon evacuated the settlements in the Gaza Strip in 2005. Many settlers felt betrayed that their country forcibly remove them from their homes, after initially sanctioning their presence in Gaza. So the Hilltop Youth have been fighting back.
YOUTH: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Weisel says once a week we meet with a rabbi in Hebron. We look at the situation and we evaluate where our presence will be most effective. The decisions are not made haphazardly. The five settlers that were just arrested are being charged with using classified satellite maps and gaining intelligence on planned demolitions from informants inside the military.
What do you think should happen to the Palestinians? I mean, what is there role in this?
YOUTH: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: She says matter-of-factly, we see them as occupiers. They're not supposed to be there. This is our land. The ideal situation is that they should leave, she says.
And when asked about the so called price tag attacks against Palestinians, which has seen mosques burned and property destroyed, she answers...
YOUTH: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Sometimes, because of the need to settle the land of Israel, things need to be done, she says. She declines to elaborate. She expresses no regret, either, over the attack on the Israeli military base. It's all in aid of what she sees as a Jewish holy war.
Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block and we begin this year with a welcome. For the next year, Audie Cornish, host of WEEKEND EDITION SUNDAY, will help host ALL THINGS CONSIDERED and today is her first day with us. It's great to have you here, Audie.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Happy to be with you, Melissa.
BLOCK: And we follow that hello with news today of a goodbye. White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley is stepping down after just a year on the job. He plans to return to Chicago. Taking over is White House Budget Director Jack Lew. The personnel move comes as President Obama prepares for a challenging reelection campaign. NPR's Scott Horsley joins us now from the White House. And Scott, a quick reminder here, it was another campaign that led to Bill Daley taking over as chief of staff in the first place.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Well, that's right, two elections, Melissa. Rahm Emmanuel, who had been Chief of Staff left to run for mayor of Chicago and then there was the midterm congressional elections that the president got that shellacking in. Daley was brought in to help kind of mend fences with the business community and reach out to independent voters. The president said this afternoon, it was a pretty tumultuous year.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We were thinking back just a year ago this weekend. Before he was even named for the job, Bill was in the situation room getting updates on the shooting in Tucson. On his very first day, Bill took part in a meeting where we discussed Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad. This was all before he even had time to unpack his office.
BLOCK: And Scott, the White House is saying that this came as a surprise to the president with Bill Daley leaving after just a year. Why so soon?
HORSLEY: Well, you know, he never really did unpack his office. It turned out not to be a great fit for this job. In fact, late last year, the White House went through a mini reorganization and Pete Rouse, the president's long time advisor, took over some of the day to day responsibilities for Bill Daley. That was kind of the writing on the wall. That outreach to the business community never really paid off. Relations with Congress have been sour.
Daley's resignation letter was actually dated January 3rd, but the president asked him to think it over for a few days. Daley said after spending some time with his family over the holidays, he decided he wanted to be back in Chicago. And the president said he understands, that they both love that city, but he promised to keep calling on Daley there by telephone for his counsel.
BLOCK: Now, we mentioned that Jack Lew will be taking over as chief of staff. Let's listen to the president today talking about the job that Jack Lew has done as White House budget director.
OBAMA: Jack's economic advice has been invaluable and he has my complete trust, both because of his mastery of the numbers, but because of the values behind those numbers.
BLOCK: And Jack Lew also has quite a bit of experience on Capitol Hill. Scott, tell us more about him.
HORSLEY: That's right. He began his career in public office as a staffer to Tip O'Neill, the famous House speaker, back when O'Neill was brokering deals with Ronald Reagan. I've heard Jack Lew speak nostalgically about that very different time in relations here in Washington. He was a big participant during the summer in the talks over the debt ceiling and, of course, as head of the Office of Management and Budget, he's been instrumental in preparing the president's new budget.
He is viewed, I think, on Capitol Hill as a straight-shooter, as someone they can do business with. And the president has said he wants to do business and get things done with lawmakers this year, even though he's been sort of campaigning against a do-nothing Congress. That said, times are very different now than when Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan were fighting hard during the work day and then swapping Irish stories after quitting time.
BLOCK: Okay. NPR's Scott Horsley, again, with the news that Bill Daley is stepping down as White House chief of staff. Scott, thanks very much.
HORSLEY: My pleasure.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
We move now to the occupation of New Hampshire. For months, legions of political operators have been living and working there, hoping to boost their candidates' chances in tomorrow's first-in-the-nation presidential primary. Polls show the race tightening, but former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney still holds a commanding double-digit lead. The race is already tight among the remaining candidates. That includes former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, who skipped the Iowa caucuses and Rick Santorum, who finished there in a virtual tie with Romney.
NPR national political correspondent Don Gonyea has this look at the final full day of New Hampshire campaigning.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: People driving to work through downtown Manchester this morning were greeted by high school kids who bused in from New York state waving Newt Gingrich signs from street corners.
(SOUNDBITE OF KIDS YELLING VOTE FOR NEWT)
GONYEA: Nearby on Elm Street, a man stands alone holding up a sign. His name is Keith Murdack(ph). He's in his 50s. He works as a driver. He's wearing a suit with a Ron Paul pin holding his tie in place.
KEITH MURDACK: I'm out supporting Ron Paul. I like his views.
GONYEA: Cold morning, you're walking up and down the street with a - flying an American flag.
MURDACK: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I had to go put some more money in my meter. You only get two hours around here and you got to go back with some more so...
GONYEA: Are you cold?
MURDACK: Oh, I'm freezing, but it's only my feet that are frozen, really.
GONYEA: The candidates are holding events and squeezing in interviews. One man suddenly in great demand is Jon Huntsman. He's in third place now in recent New Hampshire polls after he completely ignored the Iowa caucuses. He made the noon news on local station WMUR today.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Jon Huntsman is also continuing his blitz across New Hampshire, doing his best to connect with as many voters as he can. He has events planned this afternoon in Dover...
GONYEA: Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is holding his own in the pack of candidates behind Mitt Romney, was in Manchester for an event where he said a vote for Romney is not a vote for a real conservative.
NEWT GINGRICH: You really think that President Obama can be defeated by somebody who is clearly decisively different as a Reagan conservative or do you think he could be better defeated by somebody whose own record as a Massachusetts moderate in fact...
GONYEA: Ron Paul, meanwhile, campaigned at a barn in Hollis.
RON PAUL: Those of us who believe that the market ought to work in protecting liberty is most important, they call us cold-hearted. But if their programs don't work and ours do, wouldn't it be logical to conclude that we are the true humanitarians, not them?
GONYEA: Meantime, Rick Santorum was out in Salem, where he wrestled with a bad sound system and bouts of feedback from the speakers attached to the ceiling. He drew a contrast between his vision of the country and that of President Obama.
RICK SANTORUM: It's not about income inequality. Certain people are going to make more money than other people. But the question is does everybody have a chance to move up, that's the key.
GONYEA: Santorum also warned audiences not to settle for Romney, though his momentum from Iowa seems to have slowed in New Hampshire, where Romney, meanwhile, is running like the clear frontrunner he is.
MITT ROMNEY: Thank you, Jack. Thank you.
GONYEA: In the town of Hudson today, Romney's focus remained on President Obama and the struggling economy.
ROMNEY: He set the bogey for himself. He said, look, I'm going to borrow $787 billion and I'm going to get the economy going and keep unemployment below 8 percent.
GONYEA: The latest daily tracking polling from Suffolk University shows that Romney still has a lead of 13 points. Analysts say that puts him in a pretty secure place with the vote now just one day away. Political scientist Dante Scala of the University of New Hampshire says it's made this year very different from four years ago, when the race was volatile and when Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama after a hard-fought week on the ground.
DANTE SCALA: You know, what's different this year is the lack of excitement. I think there's been the sense that Mitt Romney is predestined to win New Hampshire and he's managed to pull off that impression without being accused of taking the state for granted.
GONYEA: But Scala says he'll find plenty to watch in the race for the slots behind Romney. Those contests are unpredictable and could determine the shape of the race in the coming states. Don Gonyea, NPR News, Manchester.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
I'm Audie Cornish. And it's time now for All Tech Considered.
Tens of thousands of techies and reporters are descending on Las Vegas this week. It's the annual Consumer Electronics Show, or CES. The show is the first opportunity of the year for companies to show off their newest gadgets. You can peruse everything from Internet-connected scales - if you really want to post your weight online, that is - to slender next-generation TVs.
NPR's Steve Henn is at the show in Vegas. Hello there, Steve.
STEVE HENN, BYLINE: Hey.
CORNISH: So, the show is all about gadgets. What are you seeing so far?
HENN: Well, I just got in last night and the show floor hasn't officially opened yet. But already, you can see a few themes that are developing this year. There is a big battle brewing for control of your living room. Tech companies like Apple and Google are eager to change the way we all watch TV. They're hoping more of us will stream what we watch online. And some of the device manufacturers are helping them out.
So, Lenovo, a computer maker, is introducing its first television set. It's a next-generation TV that will use Google's Android operating system. And instead of an old-fashioned remote, this remote has voice-recognition and it also has webcams that have facial recognition.
CORNISH: Facial recognition, so basically, like, my TV will start watching me. Now that sounds horrifying.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CORNISH: Why does it have facial recognition?
HENN: Well, Lenovo says this is all about parental controls. You know, so you can program your TV to watch your kids. But I think there's something else in the mix to all of this, too. You know, if your TV knows who's watching it, it's possible for a company like Microsoft or Google to start delivering really targeted television advertising; ads sort of like Web ads that are aimed directly at what that firm thinks you're interested in.
CORNISH: Steve, another sort of moment going on here at the CES is that Microsoft has announced it's the last time it's going to be taking part in the Consumer Electronics Show. Why is the company pulling out?
HENN: Well, executives say the timing of the show doesn't necessarily coincide with Microsoft's major product announcements. And there's another issue: This show is just so big, it's hard for any company - even one as big as Microsoft - to get its message out and really break through. You know, if you're not here it's hard to explain just how large the event is. There's something like 35 football fields of exhibition space.
So, companies are competing with thousands of rivals and they do crazy things. One tiny Vietnamese computer robotics manufacturer is hiring Justin Bieber to appear. So, some firms - most notably Apple - have decided this event just isn't for them.
So I think Microsoft is really stealing a page, maybe two pages, from Apple's marketing playbook. And I think in the coming year, you're going to see Microsoft trying to generate excitement around its own announcements, independent of big events like this.
CORNISH: Steve, in the end, what does it mean if Apple is gone and Microsoft is gone from the Consumer Electronics Show? What does it mean for this event?
HENN: Well, the organizers are trying to put the best face on it. But clearly, if you have too many large, important tech companies pull out of the event, that's a problem.
You know, personally, I've always thought that some of the most interesting exhibitors were the small ones. You have, you know, hundreds, if not thousands, of little businesses coming here each year to try and break out and capture people's attention. And as long as there's a critical mass of interesting products here, I think reporters and ultimately buyers - who are the two big audiences for the show - will continue to come.
CORNISH: Steve, thanks so much.
HENN: Sure thing.
CORNISH: NPR's Steve Henn at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
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A 28-year-old Iranian-American has been sentenced to death in Iran for spying. The parents of the ex-Marine say they are shocked and terrified by the ruling, which comes at a tense time between Iran and the U.S. The Obama administration insists the man was not working for the CIA, and that his case is yet another example of the lack of justice in Iran.
NPR's Michele Kelemen has our story.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Iranian news reports say authorities caught Amir Hekmati red-handed trying to infiltrate the Iranian intelligence system on behalf of the CIA. His alleged confession has been broadcast repeatedly by Iranian TV.
AMIR MIRAZAEI HEKMATI: (Foreign language spoken)
KELEMEN: Hekmati is a former Marine, born in Arizona. He went to high school in Michigan, where his family issued a statement today, saying a grave error has been committed. His mother writes that the verdict is the result of a process that was neither transparent nor fair. Amir is not a criminal, she says, appealing to Iran to show compassion and not murder her son.
At the State Department today, spokesperson Victoria Nuland says officials are working with Swiss diplomats, who represent U.S. interests in Iran, to confirm news of a verdict in the case.
VICTORIA NULAND: We've maintained from the beginning that the charges against him were a fabrication, and we call on the Iranian government to release him immediately.
KELEMEN: Nuland says Iran has a history of falsely accusing people of being spies. Allegations that Hekmati either worked for or was sent to Iran by the CIA, she says, are simply untrue. His family says that he was visiting relatives in Iran.
One Iranian expert at the Carnegie Endowment, Karim Sadjadpour, says he believes that.
KARIM SADJADPOUR: I have no reason to doubt that story. I just think that had I been able to speak with him before he went to Tehran, I would have strongly advised him to hold off on his visit because he does have a sensitive background.
KELEMEN: One that fits right into the Iranian narrative. Iran recently showed off a U.S. spy plane that apparently crashed inside Iranian territory and often accuses the U.S. of using dual nationals as spies.
Sadjadpour says Hekmati's case also comes at a particularly risky time as the U.S. tightens the financial noose around Iran over Tehran's suspect nuclear program.
SADJADPOUR: The level of economic and political coercion against Iran has reached unprecedented levels. And I think Iran is looking for leverage wherever it can find it. And this young man of Iranian origin, who ostensibly went to visit his grandmother in Tehran, I think unfortunately walked into a trap.
KELEMEN: Haleh Esfandiari, of the Woodrow Wilson Center, agrees. She says Hekmati must be devastated by the verdict and the time he's already spent in prison. She knows the feeling, having spent 105 days in solidarity confinement in Iran's notorious Evin Prison. Though Esfandiari was not surprised by the Iranian tactics in Hekmati's case, she was taken aback by the death sentence.
DR. HALEH ESFANDIARI: I was shocked because I never expect a death sentence for this kind of assertion, you know. And as usual, the trial was behind closed doors. They didn't make any evidence public.
KELEMEN: Esfandiari doesn't think Iran will carry out that sentence, but predicts this case could drag on for months or even years, and will be yet another source of tension between the U.S. and Iran.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. NASA, we have a problem. Once again, it relates to Apollo 13, the famous and near disastrous moon mission in 1970, and to the original checklist that the commander, James Lovell, used to guide his damaged spacecraft home, as highlighted in the movie, "Apollo 13."
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "APOLLO 13")
CORNISH: Lovell held onto that checklist for decades, a ring-bound notebook with his handwritten calculations in the margins. That is until last fall when it was sold at a Dallas auction house for more than $380,000. Now, NASA is challenging the sale of the notebook, as well as other memorabilia.
Joining us to talk more about this is Robert Pearlman. He edits the website, CollectSpace.com. Hello there, Robert.
ROBERT PEARLMAN: Hi. How are you?
CORNISH: Good. So start by reminding us exactly what happened with Apollo 13 and the role that this checklist played in saving it.
PEARLMAN: Well, Apollo 13 was meant to be the third manned landing on the moon, but as people remember from the movie with Tom Hanks, about midway through the flight, there was a explosion in part of their spacecraft and it became a mission not to land them on the moon, but to bring home the astronauts safely. And part of that was turning a lunar module, the lunar lander that would have taken Jim Lovell and Fred Haise to the surface of the moon and convert it into a lifeboat so that they could make it back to earth.
CORNISH: And I gather that the notebook had his notes about navigation and about transferring some of the information from the main spacecraft to this little lifeboat and Lovell has had it for decades, so why is he selling it now and what happened when he finally got it to market?
PEARLMAN: Jim Lovell had donated a lot of his memorabilia that he'd kept from the mission to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago in 2005. More recently, he was cleaning out a bookshelf at his home and he found this checklist. And he had already asked his children what they wanted to keep from his collection and he'd already given away all of this other material. And so he decided that someone out there might want to own this checklist and so he put it up for auction.
CORNISH: So what's the difference now? Because space memorabilia has always been popular. Why is NASA challenging this or any of the other artifacts that have made it to auction?
PEARLMAN: It's not entirely clear. Checklist sales have gone on for the past two decades or more and some of them have reached six figures, so it's not like, even though this one set a record for how much was spent, it wasn't outlandishly above other examples.
So, right now, that's part of the reason why the astronauts felt this was a misunderstanding. And they asked for a meeting and received one this morning with NASA administrator Charlie Bolden.
CORNISH: And what's happened, then, with the checklist and between NASA and Mr. Lovell?
PEARLMAN: Well, no agreement has been reached yet. This morning's meeting was basically to set an agreement that they have to agree upon new policies. Part of the problem was, 40 years ago, the policies that were in place that allowed the astronauts to keep mission-used equipment like checklists wasn't written down. And no one was really thinking about selling anything back then, it was just a souvenir of their flights.
Now, 40 years later, as these astronauts are in their 80s and they're retired and divesting of their collections, NASA is sort of struggling with the idea that they can sell for close to half a million dollars an item that the taxpayers paid for.
CORNISH: So was the issue that the astronauts still have the mementos or that they're trying to profit from them?
PEARLMAN: It's more about the astronauts trying to, not just profit, but assign them to other people. So what NASA is saying is that they'd like to have a say in where these artifacts go, in part to protect historic artifacts to be on display for the American public.
What people who've purchased these checklists have said is that they already served that role. They loan them and exhibit them at museums and they research and document them greater than some museums are even possible of doing. And so there needs to be a discussion now between collectors, museums astronauts and NASA about what best serves these remaining artifacts.
CORNISH: Robert Pearlman. He's the editor of the website, CollectSpace.com. Robert, thank you so much.
PEARLMAN: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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The Obama administration is imposing a 20-year moratorium on mining in and around the Grand Canyon. It says the ban on development will protect water supplies from potential contamination. The area is especially rich in uranium and congressional Republicans say the move will hurt job creation and energy independence.
From Flagstaff, KGZZ's Laurel Morales reports.
LAUREL MORALES, BYLINE: After years of debate and several short term bans, today's announcement focused on the long term. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar began by showing a short film about what he called the Southwest priceless American landscape.
SECRETARY KEN SALAZAR: Spectacular as it is, the Grand Canyon is more than rock and river. It's alive with more than 2,000 species of plants and animals.
MORALES: It just so happens that this treasure is surrounded by some of the richest uranium veins in the country, and when the price for uranium shot up a few years ago, mining companies staked thousands of claims on the land surrounding Grand Canyon National Park.
Republican lawmakers have been pressuring the Obama administration to allow these claims to go forward, but today Secretary Salazar said no.
SALAZAR: It is the right thing to do by way of protecting the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River and the millions of Americans who live and rely on the waters of that great basin.
MORALES: Salazar pointed out that seven Southwestern states and millions of people depend on the Colorado River basin. Much of the vegetable supply for the rest of the country comes from southern California's Imperial Valley. The moratorium announced today will allow for further study of the aquifer.
Scientists say they want to look into potential harm that can come from faults, fractures and sinkholes around those abundant uranium veins. Minerals consultant Michael Berry says currently the U.S. has to import most of its uranium from Russia to fuel nuclear power plants. He insists the process of extracting these pipes of uranium is contained and clean.
MICHAEL BERRY: It seems silly when the pipes on the northern Arizona strip - they're probably some of the highest grade pipes in the country. There really isn't any evidence that shows that mining of the pipes, with today's technology, has any impact. So I think it's too bad. I think it's a missed opportunity for the country, to be honest.
MORALES: For environmental groups, today's announcement is a big win in a very long fight. Roger Clark is Air and Energy Quality Director for the Grand Canyon Trust.
ROGER CLARK: No matter what the uranium industry says, there's no guarantee that the Grand Canyon would be safe from contamination on the surface and down deep in the groundwater. We already have evidence of contamination from former mines.
MORALES: One already operating mine a few miles outside the park is grandfathered in under this moratorium, as are many other existing claims. The ban affects new and future minerals exploration. Because of that, environmentalists are pushing for legislation that would strengthen and extend the moratorium indefinitely.
For NPR News, I'm Laurel Morales in Flagstaff.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. Tomorrow, New Hampshire voters will either catapult Mitt Romney securely onto the path to the Republican presidential nomination or undercut the air of inevitability around his campaign.
As NPR's Ari Shapiro reports, the former Massachusetts governor has been anticipating the catapult, but today, he stumbled.
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: Mitt Romney expected to spend his last full day on the New Hampshire campaign trail cruising to victory: friendly crowds and familiar faces in a state where he's been campaigning virtually nonstop for five years. He did not expect to be saying these sorts of things at a hastily called news conference.
MITT ROMNEY: Things can always be taken out of context and I understand. You know the context of what I was saying, which is - I understand that, in politics, people are going to try and grasp at anything, take it out of context and...
SHAPIRO: Here's what happened. This morning, in Nashua, Romney seemed cruising to a win. He was so confident, in fact, that he even veered left at a breakfast of business leaders, repositioning himself for a day when he is the Republican nominee and more moderate positions might win over independent voters.
Romney talked about the good side of banking regulations.
ROMNEY: You can't have everybody in the room deciding to open a bank in their garage and take other people's money.
SHAPIRO: He even sounded like a fan of social welfare programs.
ROMNEY: Our very poor always need to have a safety net, and occasionally, there are holes in the safety net that need to be repaired and as I become aware of that, I'll fix those things.
SHAPIRO: But while sailing happily toward the political center, Romney hit a storm. A man asked about what he would put in place of President Obama's health care plan and the former Massachusetts governor replied...
ROMNEY: I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means that if you don't like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people that provide services to me.
SHAPIRO: I like being able to fire people. Out of context, the line plays into every negative stereotype of Mitt Romney as the coldhearted businessman who made his fortune laying people off. His rivals piled on immediately. Jon Huntsman said Governor Romney enjoys firing people. I enjoy creating jobs.
The Democratic National Committee sent out a blast email with a link to the video. At a metal fabricating plant in Hudson, the campaign pulled together that last minute news conference.
ROMNEY: Oh, you saw. I was talking about insurance companies. Yeah. We like to be able to get rid of insurance companies that don't give us the service that we need.
SHAPIRO: His business record had already been under attack from the other Republicans in the race. They seized on this comment from the weekend.
ROMNEY: I know what it's like to worry whether you're going to get fired. There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip.
SHAPIRO: His rivals say that sounds absurd coming from a man whose father was a millionaire. Campaigning in South Carolina, Texas Governor Rick Perry told FOX News...
GOVERNOR RICK PERRY: Mitt Romney's never worried about a pink slip. Well, he might have worried about not having enough of them to hand out.
SHAPIRO: And a super pack affiliated with Newt Gingrich is promoting a new video accusing Romney's investment firm of making huge fortunes at the expense of American jobs.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD)
SHAPIRO: Romney insists that his firm, Bain Capital, created far more jobs than it cut, but his campaign has not provided the full accounting to back up those claims.
Speaking to reporters today, Romney tried to shrug off these attacks, but his explanation seemed to contain a gaff of its own.
ROMNEY: If you think that I should spend my entire campaign carefully choosing how everything I say relates to people as opposed to saying my own experience and telling my own experience, that that would make me a very different person than I am.
SHAPIRO: The gaffs clearly rattled Romney's team that has built a reputation on being disciplined. The campaign is ready for a long fight through one primary state after another, but they would prefer a quick, clean victory by a decisive margin.
Here in New Hampshire, Romney has deep enough roots and a strong enough lead that his rivals don't really expect to knock him out of first place tomorrow night. Many of them are looking ahead to next week in South Carolina, where voters are more conservative and perhaps Romney could be more vulnerable.
Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Manchester, New Hampshire.
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Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum lost to Mitt Romney by just eight votes in the Iowa caucuses, but in New Hampshire, he trails Romney by double digits, locked in a battle for third place with Newt Gingrich and Jon Huntsman.
NPR's Mara Liasson reports that many voters there don't doubt Santorum's convictions. They're just not sure he can beat President Obama.
RICK SANTORUM: How are you? Thank you very much...
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: One day to go and Rick Santorum is in MaryAnn's Diner in Derry engaging with patrons on everything from chocolate milk to Iran.
SANTORUM: I asked you, would you declare war? You said you (unintelligible). Is the United States allowed to do strikes without declaring war?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Yeah.
LIASSON: At the Lawrence Barn in Hollis, people were literally hanging onto the rafters to hear his pitch, a not-so-subtle attack on Mitt Romney.
SANTORUM: And the decision is going to be basically this: Do we want someone who's going to go and campaign and say, vote for me. I can win? Or do we need someone who says, American stands for something? Those are the choices.
LIASSON: Santorum is known as a culture warrior, but here, he highlights his ethnic blue collar background. He's proposing tax advantages for manufacturing and he's the only Republican candidate talking about social mobility.
SANTORUM: There are countries in Western Europe where you're more able to rise through the ranks of income in Western Europe than you are now here in America. That is not a good thing.
LIASSON: Santorum says he's a full spectrum conservative, but his reputation as a champion of conservative values is what matters most to schoolteacher Cheryl Herney(ph). A Romney voter four years ago, she's switching to Santorum.
CHERYL HERNEY: Because of the things that he stands for, family values, character. He doesn't waiver. He knows the economy. He knows foreign affairs. He knows all of that, but his message about the family ties is what's important.
LIASSON: Compared to Iowa, there are about half as many social issues voters like Herney hear in New Hampshire. Mike Dunbar and his son Mike, Jr., instance, came to Hollis to make sure Santorum wasn't just a family values guy.
MIKE DUNBAR, SR.: I came in not sure. I'm going home sending money.
MIKE DUNBAR, JR.: I wanted to see the whites of his eyes and see if all these principles he really seemed to believe in and I really think he does.
LIASSON: But not everyone was convinced. Sandra Zeen(ph) from Nashua cares about electability.
SANDRA ZEEN: He's one that I'm considering, but I also balance it with who can win, so I'm afraid that people might see Santorum as an extremist, extreme right.
LIASSON: And that's one of the hurdles Santorum has to overcome as he tries to convince Republicans that a conviction politician can win a general election. Here's how he described himself at Saturday night's debate.
(SOUNDBITE OF REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE)
LIASSON: The question for Santorum in New Hampshire is whether enough voters look at this cause guy and see a plausible presidential nominee or, more immediately, the right conservative to challenge Mitt Romney.
Santorum encountered a new obstacle in that effort today: Newt Gingrich. Just a few days ago, Gingrich said he would be teaming up with Santorum to attack Romney, but today, Gingrich turned on Santorum for supporting a sales tax hike in Pennsylvania 15 years ago and Gingrich pointedly noted, quote, "Santorum's Iowa caucus boost shows signs of fading." That may be true in New Hampshire, but in South Carolina, which votes next Saturday, Santorum has surged into second place.
Mara Liasson, NPR News, Manchester.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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And I'm Audie Cornish.
The Supreme Court today tried to untangle a three-court knot in a Texas redistricting case. The case tests the allocation of four new congressional seats that were created largely because of the state's booming Latino population. But it could have nationwide repercussions.
As NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports, the Texas case pits the rights of minority voters under the Voting Rights Act against the powers of the state legislature.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: The Voting Rights Act requires that states with a demonstrated history of racial and ethnic discrimination, like Texas, get pre-clearance, in advance, before putting into effect a new redistricting plan. The fastest way to do that is under the Justice Department's 60-day pre-clearance system.
But amazingly, this is the first year since the 1965 Voting Rights Law was enacted that the decennial redistricting has occurred when a Democrat was president and Democrats were running the Justice Department. Perhaps because of that the Republican-controlled Texas legislature took the alternative and longer pre-clearance route, seeking approval from a three-judge court here in Washington, D.C.
So far, however, that has not worked out well for the state. It's not won pre-clearance to date. And now, it's challenging an interim plan drawn up by a federal court in Texas. The interim plan gives greater weight to the state's exploding Latino population. But the result is that three out of four new congressional seats would likely go to Democrats, as opposed to the GOP plan, which would likely result in three out of four seats going to the Republicans.
The state says its map should be assumed valid pending pre-clearance. But on the steps of the Supreme Court today, Domingo Garcia, representing a coalition of Hispanic groups, said the Texas redistricting shows why the Voting Rights Act bars adoption of a plan that has no yet been pre-cleared.
DOMINGO GARCIA: What we've seen the Texas legislature do is they gerrymandered and divided Latino communities all over the state of Texas in order to maintain political control.
TOTENBERG: Inside the Supreme Court chamber, the state's lawyer, Paul Clement, was first up. He contended that the Texas court should have deferred to the state legislature for an interim plan.
Justice Sotomayor, the court's only Hispanic justice, interrupted: Doesn't that turn the Voting Rights Act on its head? Instead of the state having to show its plan is not discriminatory, minorities would have the burden of proving it is discriminatory.
Justice Ginsburg then noted that the trial on the Texas pre-clearance application is set to begin next week and end February 3rd. And Justice Alito questioned how the state could hold its scheduled primaries in April. Texas has one of the earliest congressional primaries in the nation, he observed, why can't it be pushed back?
Lawyer Clement replied that the Supreme Court should send a message to the Texas court and others drawing interim plans that when pre-clearance is pending, the state legislature's plan should be presumed valid unless there are violations of the law.
But Justice Kagan noted that the Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that only the Justice Department or D.C. court can find such a violation. And Justice Sotomayor asked why the courts should defer to a state legislative map that drew an antler-shaped district - in her words - in El Paso that was challenged for allegedly minimizing the Latino vote.
Next up was the Obama administration's Deputy Solicitor General Sri Srinivasan, who asserted that the interim plan was drawn up based on neutral principles. Justice Alito suggested that the idea of neutral principles is a fiction, given the fact that many political principles, such as incumbent protection, are permissible.
The last lawyer to argue was Jose Garza representing minority groups. He noted that the pre-clearance court here in Washington has already written a preliminary opinion, saying that Texas does not even dispute some allegations of discriminatory purpose in its redistricting plan.
Several justices asked how fast they could expect a decision on pre-clearance from the D.C. court with the trial set to end February 3rd. Garza replied that he expected a decision within 30 days. Chief Justice Roberts, puckishly: And how soon would you expect our decision on the appeal from that ruling? Garza, tongue firmly in cheek: Later this afternoon, Your Honor. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
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Now to some feathered visitors to the lower 48 from way up in the Arctic tundra. This winter, a whole lot of snowy owls have been spotted all across the country, way farther south than you would usually see them and in greater numbers, from Washington state to Maine and as far south as Oklahoma. The sudden appearance is called an irruption, and it makes for exciting times for birders like Jim McCormac. He's a biologist with Ohio's Division of Wildlife. Welcome to the program, Jim. Have you had some snowy owl sightings yourself?
JIM MCCORMAC: Just yesterday, Melissa.
BLOCK: Yeah. What did you see?
MCCORMAC: Well, we've got about 15 that I know of here in Ohio.
BLOCK: Wow.
MCCORMAC: And we're right at the southern limits of their irruptions when they do come down. And there's a particularly famous one up by the little town of Jumbo, Ohio. You've probably not heard of it.
BLOCK: I haven't.
MCCORMAC: But anyway, the snowy owl is very cooperative, and I saw them yesterday.
BLOCK: And what - it was a male?
MCCORMAC: I should say her, female.
BLOCK: It was a her, female. What did she look like?
MCCORMAC: If you crossed your eyes and blurred your vision, it looked like a big white grocery sack out in the field. They stand about two feet tall, and these are not shrinking violets, see, by any stretch of the imagination. If one is around, it's going to be sitting out in a prominent perch in the middle of a field, probably on a little knoll where everyone can see it. They're not very scared of anything. As a matter of fact, they can successfully defend their nests from animals like Arctic fox and gray wolf. These are tough guys, so it's pretty easy to spot them.
BLOCK: And if they're flying, the wingspan is just amazing, right?
MCCORMAC: Five feet.
BLOCK: Wow. Well, why are they here this winter, Jim? What are you hearing about them?
It's all about lemmings.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
MCCORMAC: You know, the ones that jump off the cliffs every four years, which they really don't do. But lemmings are little furry sausages with legs, and they really, really drive a lot of what goes on with predators, including snowy owls. So the probable theory, actually, is there was a superabundance of lemmings this year up in the Arctic. And there were so many lemmings that the owls in response will lay more eggs, so there's a lot more young owls. And so there's not enough food to get through the winter, so a lot of them come south.
BLOCK: And good news for you and for a lot of other avid birders out there.
MCCORMAC: Oh, absolutely. These are incredibly charismatic animals. I mean, just imagine if you're a kid and you're into "Harry Potter," now you get to go see Hedwig in the flesh, sitting out in the field. People who really don't even have that much interest in birds are going ape over these things. And we've had some of these owls in Ohio that have attracted hundreds of visitors, made all the local papers, newspaper, radio and, well, now, they're on NPR. And so...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: Well, here's the one possible downside of all this, I guess, Jim. I was just looking at a photograph from Lawrence, Kansas, of a snowy owl that was injured after it hit a power line. It had a broken wing and ultimately died. There's a mention of another one that was hit by a car. I mean, if they're used to big open spaces in the Arctic tundra, they're in for a rude awakening, I guess, when they come this far south sometimes.
MCCORMAC: I'm glad you brought that up, Melissa. That's a really a good point. These owls have seen more polar bears than they had people, so they really don't know what we're about. They're not used to motorized threats, power wires, these sorts of things. And when they do arrive at these southern latitudes, they tend to be really stressed and somewhat emaciated and hungry. And people should not press them either. I really want to stress that. Photographers, avid birders, give the birds a lot of distance, don't disrupt them, cause them to fly, things like that because that's another peril that they face.
BLOCK: For people like myself who might want to try to find one or see one in the next little bit, how long will they be around, and where should we look?
MCCORMAC: Oh, generally, when they do come down like this, they're here for the duration. As a matter of fact, they're still showing up. Every day, there are new reports. Probably, by February's end, you're going to see the owls moving back out because it's going to be time to get back up north.
BLOCK: That's Jim McCormac with Ohio's Division of Wildlife. We were talking about the irruption of snowy owls there and across the country. Jim McCormac, thanks so much and happy owling.
Thank you, Melissa.
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This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. This can be a harrowing time for high school seniors and their parents waiting for responses to college applications, but it hardly compares to what high school students in India go through.
NPR's Corey Flintoff reports that admission to India's top colleges is much tougher than it is even for Ivy League schools here.
COREY FLINTOFF, BYLINE: Many of the candidates for India's top colleges come from exclusive private high schools like this one, the Delhi Public School. On the playing fields, girls and boys in white shirts and neckties play fierce games of cricket and badminton. It's a sort of warm-up for the intensity they'll have to put in to applying for universities.
The school graduated about 1,000 seniors last year, virtually all of whom went on to college. Mamta Sharma, the director of international admissions at the school, says that more than 400 of her graduates qualified for top foreign universities, including prestigious colleges in the United States. She says they fall into two categories.
MAMTA SHARMA: Some who are planning to go abroad, irrespective of Indian university criteria, et cetera. And the other group - they try for India and, if they don't get in, they go abroad.
FLINTOFF: Sharma says some very good students weren't able to get into the Indian colleges of their choice. India is a country of 1.2 billion people and, like most things in life here, getting one of the limited places at the best schools is incredibly competitive.
DINESH SINGH: So it's a very difficult game, given the numbers.
FLINTOFF: That's Dinesh Singh, the vice chancellor of Delhi University, an amalgam of 80 top colleges in the capitol city. It's India's equivalent to Oxford, Cambridge and the American Ivy League. All told, Singh has about 50,000 slots to fill with incoming students each year, but that's a drop in the bucket compared with the more than three million students who are trying to get into colleges throughout the country.
The numbers are so large that most college admissions are based not on a student's performance in high school, but on their scores on a single set of exams. Some colleges expect those scores to be in the high 90s or even 100 percent. Singh says there's simply no other way.
SINGH: There's no way you could interview all of them. Given the diversity, it's very difficult to give weightage(ph) to other aspects of a student's career, and so you largely rely on the test scores.
FLINTOFF: Students complain that making college admissions dependent on a single set of test results is like gambling your career on a single throw of the dice. Saumya Swaroop is one of a growing number of students who are sidestepping the Indian system. She didn't even apply to India's top universities, aiming instead for American schools. She's now on a scholarship at Princeton.
SAUMYA SWAROOP: You could say that the system never really made any sense to me, to be frank. It is - how can they exactly judge the merit of a student on the basis of what happens in a six-hour long exam?
FLINTOFF: Swaroop says India's top schools may be missing talented students who have a lot to offer but simply can't make the cut. The problem's not going to get any easier. More than 120 million Indians will reach college age in the next few years. One way to ease the demand for top flight education might be to allow foreign universities to establish branches in India. The government is considering legislation that could make that possible.
Corey Flintoff, NPR News.
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Finally, this hour, we remember a musician who was known for his precision.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC, "ETUDE FOR PIANO NO. 3 IN E MAJOR")
CORNISH: That's Alexis Weissenberg playing Chopin's "Etude for Piano No. 3 in E Major." In 1982, New York Times critic Bernard Holland called one of his performances chillingly scientific. That same critic, a year later, concluded this after another performance: Judging from the unrelenting applause at the end, Mr. Weissenberg impressed his listeners deeply. One may agree or disagree, but one pays him heed. He is never boring. Alexis Weissenberg died Sunday at the age of 82.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CORNISH: Kirill Gerstein is a pianist who calls Weissenberg his mentor.
KIRILL GERSTEIN: I think he was not at all cold, neither as a person nor as a musician. I think there was a burning intensity that you could always sense. At the same time, it was a burning intensity that was not frivolous or one that was just on the spur of the moment, instinctive one.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GERSTEIN: I think he held this fire that sometimes came across as violent. And this process of holding his intensity and controlling it tightly, this meeting of energy and control, I think it was very much an honest manifestation of how he was as a person and what he believed as a musician. And this won him admiration of many musicians.
CORNISH: Alexis Weissenberg was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1929. He was an only child, and his mother began teaching him to play the piano. He told Kirill Gerstein a story about the impact music had on him at an early age.
GERSTEIN: As a young child, even though he was born into a Jewish family, his grandmother would take him to a Bulgarian Orthodox Church where he would hear this typical sound of the Orthodox choir. And he told me that he remembers once hearing this deep, deep bass of the priest singing a prayer, and he instinctively ran towards the priest and just put his ear to the stomach of this man while he was singing one of these ultra-low notes. And the priest, instead of pushing him away, he actually embraced him, and he said that he always remembered for the rest of his life, and he said that it - he felt that it was really an influence on how he perceived music.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CORNISH: There is a dramatic backstory in the life of Alexis Weissenberg. In 1941, Bulgaria allied itself with the Nazis. Weissenberg and his mother fled, carrying with them only sandwiches and an old accordion. That accordion proved fateful. He and his mother were caught at the border and sent to an improvised concentration camp. It just so happened that a German officer there enjoyed listening to Weissenberg play Schubert on that accordion. One day, the officer unexpectedly took them to the train station and said good luck. And that train delivered them to Istanbul and to safety.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CORNISH: After the war, Weissenberg made it to New York, where he studied at Juilliard. Later, he lived in France and Switzerland. In addition to performing, he taught master classes. Kirill Gerstein studied with him and said he leaves as part of his legacy many young pianists who he touched through his teaching.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CORNISH: Alexis Weissenberg had been ill with Parkinson's disease. He died Sunday at the age of 82.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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In the run up to today's primary, pundits, reporters and campaigns themselves have devoted a lot of energy to setting expectations for the candidates. And that has inspired NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: This may well be the worst story you've heard yet on politics. Really, I beg you, you should have very, very low expectations for this story. And this expectations thing, it's important stuff.
JON HUNTSMAN: We've got to wake up, when all is said and done, on Wednesday morning or Tuesday night and find that we have exceeded market expectations.
ANDREA MITCHELL: You know, Romney is in such a commanding position, what about the expectations game...
HUNTSMAN: That will indicate that we've likely exceeded market expectations.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Well, his only rival here is expectations.
MARK MCKINNON: The bar got raised, and Rick Santorum came out of nowhere, beating expectations.
HUNTSMAN: We don't have to win, Wolfe, we have to beat market expectations.
FOLKENFLIK: That was Republican candidate Jon Huntsman on CNN, NBC's Andrea Mitchell, Huntsman again, NPR's Mara Liasson, former Republican campaign consultant Mark McKinnon on Bloomberg TV and Huntsman once more. Boy, Huntsman might win if he were only facing a guy actually named expectations. And as far as what I have to offer you, it's almost better just to check out Wikipedia. Seriously.
JEFF GREENFIELD: What both candidates and journalists are trying to figure out is, is one of these candidates gaining strength? Is he or she performing better than we thought and particularly better than the numbers suggested a week or two ago?
FOLKENFLIK: Jeff Greenfield covered presidential politics for several decades and he says primary season expectations can create a looking glass world where a win quickly becomes a loss, as it did for Edmund Muskie, whose weaker-than-expected win in New Hampshire in the 1972 Democratic primaries dealt his hopes a mortal blow.
GREENFIELD: You're pulling these numbers out of your head, or another body part, and it doesn't mean anything. Voters are so much more volatile and so much less measurable than in the November general election that it's almost a fool's errand.
FOLKENFLIK: Earlier, Newt Gingrich pointed to polls to boast he'd be the nominee, but here's all he could muster after poor results in Iowa.
NEWT GINGRICH: When we first began running, we thought if we keep coming in the top three or four - remember, people in June and July said I was dead.
FOLKENFLIK: Candidates need to preserve their plausibility. And reporters, yeah, they're looking for some drama, especially since the drama is quickly draining from this primary season. So people of America, you deserve better, something more rousing, like the call made by South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, something here for Mitt Romney.
GOVERNOR NIKKI HALEY: We don't just need a win in New Hampshire, we need landslide in New Hampshire.
FOLKENFLIK: Haley didn't get the memo, but Ron Paul did. When Fox News' Bret Baier asked him about expectations, Paul offered a classic of the genre.
RON PAUL: What I'm thinking about is, you know, it looks like a three-way-tie, you know, tight race and that we could come in first or we come in third.
FOLKENFLIK: You know, or not. Hey, as long as Ron Paul finishes, he just about meets those expectations. But all this stuff gets tricky. If you know someone is lowering expectations, does that then raise your expectations? And if a reporter like me explicitly points this out in a story like this, do all those expectations go back down again? I'm sorry, I've made this whole thing so much more confusing. I really am a bad, bad reporter. Or am I?
David Folkenflik, NPR News.
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At a new Walgreens store in downtown Chicago, customers can get a fruit smoothie and a manicure while they wait for their prescription. Walgreens opened the new upscale version of its drug store on State Street today hoping to distinguish itself from the competition. NPR's David Schaper checked it out.
DAVID SCHAPER, BYLINE: At a typical Walgreens store, you'll walk in and see cosmetics, greeting cards and candy and snack aisles. Not so at this new huge Walgreens drugstore on State Street in the heart of Chicago's Loop.
ROB EWING: Now, you walk in, and the first thing you see is our sushi chefs preparing sushi throughout the day.
SCHAPER: Rob Ewing is the district manager for Walgreens in Chicago.
EWING: This is not your grandmother's Walgreens.
SCHAPER: Behind the sushi bar is a fresh bakery, a coffee bar, a juice bar and fresh produce. There's a huge wine and liquor section and even a humidor with cigars and other tobacco products. On the upper level, there's a look boutique, with higher end cosmetics and a nail salon offering manicures. And there are, of course, pharmacists and a clinic with a nurse practitioner who can diagnose and treat everything from ankle sprains to ear infections.
EWING: We have everything that a traditional drugstore would have and more in this 27,000-square-foot here: newspapers, Redbox, you know, peanuts. We have everything here, with just a bigger selection.
SCHAPER: Rob Ewing says this store is meant to be a destination for downtown office workers, tourists and the growing population in downtown Chicago condos. And some elements of this new look will appear in neighborhood Walgreens in the city, suburbs and across the country.
EWING: One of the challenges has been and our customers tell us that they couldn't tell the difference between a Walgreens and a CVS or a Rite Aid or something. And I think, now, we're kind of separating ourselves from the rest of the group.
SCHAPER: Walgreens has been losing market share to CVS, Target and other chains here in its hometown. Retail consultant Mara Devitt of McMillan Doolittle in Chicago says the chain is gambling a bit with this new flagship store, but she says it should boost its brand in the crowded marketplace.
MARA DEVITT: Anything, if it's this size, in any location, in today's economy is a risk, but I think this is a pretty calculated risk.
SCHAPER: The concept is borrowed from New York's Duane Reade store on Wall Street. Walgreens acquired the Duane Reade chain in 2010. On the first day of business in the new flagship store today, many Walgreens customers liked what they saw.
TRACY ANZELONE: Very impressive. I really like the lighting and the layout. It's very nice.
SCHAPER: Tracy Anzelone works as an office manager a couple of blocks away.
ANZELONE: Oh, I had to come get the frozen yogurt. Very tasty.
SCHAPER: Retiree Dan Fischman says he remembers when the old Walgreens store that opened in 1926 at this site had a cafeteria and a soda fountain, as did many drugstores. And he longed for those days as he tried a sample from the sushi bar.
DAN FISCHMAN: This is a vegetarian something, which I don't like. I'm going to throw it away.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SCHAPER: Would you rather see a soda fountain here than a sushi bar?
FISCHMAN: For me, yes, because I'm 80 years old, so I know what it would used to be years ago with Walgreens. And, no, I'm still from the old school.
SCHAPER: But Fischman concedes for the younger generation, in 2012, a sushi bar in a Walgreens is probably just fine. And if the sushi doesn't set right, there's always Pepto-Bismol right upstairs. David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.
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And I'm Melissa Block. New Hampshire voters are casting their ballots today in the first presidential primary of 2012. It's a crowded race that could become a little less so after tonight's results. Mitt Romney remains the favorite. He has been from the beginning. And NPR's Ari Shapiro joins us now from Romney headquarters in Manchester. Ari, Mitt Romney has been the frontrunner in New Hampshire for some time by a hefty margin. What's at stake in this vote tonight for him?
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: Well, look, on the one hand, if he wins tonight, no matter how small the margin, it would make him the first non-incumbent Republican ever to win both Iowa and New Hampshire. That said, the campaign is hoping for, certainly, and in some way expecting him to come out head and shoulders above everybody else, which would help secure the air of inevitability that has surrounded him in this campaign. Romney has spent tons of time here in New Hampshire over the last five years.
He was governor of neighboring Massachusetts. He owns a house here. And here's what he told voters at his last rally before voting here last night in Manchester.
MITT ROMNEY: And so we come, you know, taught our little boys, little guys, how to ski here, went swimming here, taught them how to water ski on Lake Winnipesaukee. We've been coming here. We love the state.
SHAPIRO: So they're expecting a big win. But, Melissa, even if he does not secure a decisive win, this campaign has laid the infrastructure and set up the finances to go the distance, as evidenced by this morning. The campaign sent reporters a chart showing some of the states that vote in February and March and beyond and showing which candidates had registered to compete in those states. Not all of them have. And it shows that while this campaign is aiming for a quick, clean victory, they're ready for something that's a bit messier.
BLOCK: And Ari, much has been made of something that Mitt Romney said yesterday on the campaign trail, something his rivals have pounced on. Why don't you go through what he said and what the reaction has been?
SHAPIRO: Yeah, he was talking about health insurance companies and saying that if one charges too much or gives you bad service, you should be able to get a better one. But in making that point, he used the, perhaps, inapt phrase, I like being able to fire people, which everybody pounced on, took out of context and used it to portray him as sort of a cutthroat Wall Street coldhearted man who made a fortune off of firing other people.
The Romney campaign says, look, my record at Bain Capital was one of job creation, not job destruction. But the slip of the tongue on Romney's part brought about a last-minute cascade of attacks on him in the 24 hours before the final results come in here in New Hampshire.
BLOCK: Yeah. And let's take a minute, Ari, to focus on Mitt Romney's rivals in New Hampshire. Who is playing well with the voters there?
SHAPIRO: Well, you know, Jon Huntsman has staked his entire candidacy on a good performance in New Hampshire. He seems to be doing better than he was, but it's not clear whether that will be well enough to stay alive after tonight. Rick Santorum, who virtually tied Mitt Romney in Iowa, is trying to capitalize on the social conservative vote here, but that's less than half as large a population than they are in Iowa. You have Ron Paul, who's looking to independent voters, younger voters and libertarian voters.
They have a strong presence here in New Hampshire. And then, Newt Gingrich has been one of the loudest voices attacking Romney. He's been saying, look, if this guy's going to collapse under pressure, better that he do it now in the primary race than when he's face to face with President Obama in the general election. Then, the last guy still in the race you have is Rick Perry, who jumped right ahead from Iowa to South Carolina and is not competing here in New Hampshire tonight.
BLOCK: And Ari, you mentioned independent voters, the undeclared voters in New Hampshire, that's a hefty slice of the electorate. What do we know about the voters who are going to vote today in New Hampshire?
SHAPIRO: Well, as of yesterday, about half of them told pollsters they still hadn't made up their mind, so a surprise certainly is possible tonight. A typical New Hampshire voter is different from a typical Republican elsewhere in the state. They tend to be fiscally conservative, not so much socially conservative, very different from South Carolina, which votes next. Although, I should say that while South Carolina is very socially conservative, that's also a very pragmatic state where Republicans have chosen the ultimate nominee in every primary race going back to Reagan in 1980.
BLOCK: Okay. NPR's Ari Shapiro reporting from Mitt Romney's campaign headquarters in Manchester, New Hampshire. Ari, we'll be checking back in with you throughout the evening. Thank you so much.
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More than half of states had forced sterilization programs at one time, but few were as aggressive as North Carolina's. Some 7,600 men, women and children were sterilized by that state's eugenics board up to the mid 1970s. Sterilization was seen as a way to control welfare costs and improve the caliber of the population. Well, today, a task force in North Carolina took a step toward becoming the only state to offer compensation to eugenics victims.
From member station WFAE, Julie Rose has the story.
JULIE ROSE, BYLINE: For more than 25 years, Elaine Riddick has fought for money from the state of North Carolina. But when she learned she may receive $50,000, she just sounded tired.
ELAINE RIDDICK: I just want it to be over. I just want it to be over.
ROSE: Through tears, Riddick once again told of how she was sterilized at 14, just after giving birth to her only son. It was 1968 and the North Carolina Eugenics Board declared her unfit for parenthood. Why? Because she lived in poverty and had poor hygiene. Riddick didn't realize the delivery doctor had sterilized her until she was 19, newly married and eager to get pregnant again.
She was one of the first North Carolina eugenics victims to come forward. She sued for a million dollars and lost. Fifty thousand dollars is hardly enough, she says. But...
RIDDICK: You just have to accept it. And with the mental health benefits, I think I would be able to get the help that I need to get over this.
(SOUNDBITE OF WEEPING)
ROSE: Riddick and other victims say they suffered depression, alcoholism and suicidal thoughts as a result of sterilization. Psychological counseling is another recommendation from a task force created by the governor to look at compensating eugenics victims.
Janice Black was 14 when social workers labeled her feeble-minded and recommended sterilization. Today, Black is 59. She says $50,000 is chump change.
JANICE BLACK: That's how I feel, its chump change. Still, no amount of money is not going to give back what was already taken from you.
MEGHAN BROWN: Governor Perdue knows that monetary compensation will never be sufficient.
ROSE: Governor Bev Perdue sent staff member Meghan Brown to the final meeting of the Eugenics Task Force with that message. The committee of five volunteers spent months listening to victims and wrestling with how much to pay the more than 2,000 estimated to still be alive.
The recommendation of $50,000 is now in the hands of Governor Perdue and state lawmakers who continue to struggle with tight budgets. That political reality led the task force to not recommend compensation for the families of sterilization victims who have already died.
Which means Australia Clay and her sister would get nothing.
AUSTRALIA CLAY: We took care of our mother. Our mother came home - they sent us home what was left and we took care of her. And otherwise, my mother has been sterilized involuntarily for nothing.
ROSE: The Eugenics Task Force did not come to its recommendations easily. Chairwoman Laura Gerald says it was much harder than she anticipated, but compensating the victims is important.
LAURA GERALD: And sends a clear message that we in North Carolina are people who pay for our mistakes, and that we do not tolerate bureaucracies that trample on basic human rights.
ROSE: North Carolina was hardly alone. Almost three dozen states had eugenics sterilization laws. To date, only seven have formally apologized and none have paid any money to victims. If North Carolina lawmakers do as the task force suggests, their state will have gone further than any other to make amends.
For NPR News, I'm Julie Rose in Raleigh.
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Now a story about the challenges of military communication on the battlefield.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO COMMUNICATION)
BLOCK: This is radio traffic from an Army convoy in eastern Afghanistan that's having trouble communicating.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO COMMUNICATION)
BLOCK: For the past 15 years, the Army has spent billions on an ambitious program to develop new radios that would allow simpler, integrated battlefield communications. It was called the Joint Tactical Radio System, or JTRS. But the Army has scrapped most of that program after finding that the radios didn't work as hoped and had grown too big to be useful in combat.
Military writer David Axe has been looking into the failure of JTRS and he's written about the program for the Center for the Public Integrity's website, IWatchNews.org.
David Axe, welcome to the program.
DAVID AXE: Thanks. Thanks for having me.
BLOCK: Why don't you explain the idea behind these radios? What problems were they supposed to solve?
AXE: So presently, the Army possesses about - oh, I don't know - a hundred different models of radio. And it's not just the Army; it's the Air Force, the Marines, the Navy, and other government agencies that work with the military. Together, have scores and scores of different radio types for doing different things.
And as warfare grows more complex, the communication infrastructure grows more complex to the point where today, if you imagine an infantry company, say, a hundred guys on the frontline in a place like Afghanistan. When they go out for a mission, they may carry along with them a dozen different types of radios. And when it comes time to communicate, their radio infrastructure is weighing them down.
In a very literal sense, it weighs them down - makes them static. They have to hold still to talk. And when you hold still in a place like Afghanistan, you become vulnerable.
BLOCK: When you say they would have to hold still to be able to communicate, I mean clearly we were just listening radios that were mounted in vehicles. So there is that capability.
AXE: Oh, right. But in a place like Afghanistan you have to get out of your vehicle to patrol and to fight. And not a lot of roads, and that's typical across many battlefields. And the handheld radios only got a limited range, especially when you're in a valley - you're surrounded by mountains. And in situations like that you either need a very high-powered radio or unique satellite communications, which requires its own sort of complex antenna that you have to deploy.
But to get all of those radios working, all at the same time, you pretty much have to hold still.
BLOCK: And the idea, as you've described it, was for these JTRS - this new system - to be compatible whether it's a radio in a vehicle, they were designed, some for use in by units on foot, others for individuals soldiers that would be held by hand, right?
AXE: Yes, the idea was to create a universal radio. And I think the Army realized early on that that was hopelessly ambitious. It aimed to be too universal and to pack too many capabilities into one radio box. The best example of that is the main JTRS radio, something called the GMR, the Ground Mobile Radio. And that was the radio for trucks. It had to perform a lot of different functions and it had to do that while encrypting the communications, and also not using too much power and fitting inside the vehicle.
And all these competing demands made it technically impossible to pack all of those capabilities into a box of size and weight that could realistically be carried by existing vehicles.
BLOCK: Now, Boeing got the original contract back in 2000. It was just $2 million to start, that's chump change for the military. How much did that balloon to over time?
AXE: For the Ground Mobile Radio and the main JTRS equipment, about $6 billion to the present day.
BLOCK: And of that cost, anything to show for it for the military?
AXE: Well, yes. Not as much as the military would like, certainly not as much as responsible taxpayers would like. The Ground Mobile Radio itself has been canceled. But some of the smaller JTRS radios survived. The handheld versions are still in development and some are being bought in small quantities for the frontline troops.
The airborne version, still in development. And these may yet bear some real fruit. But the main effort, the main hardware, sure - canceled.
BLOCK: It does seem like a reasonable expectation and a good idea that the Army would try to find one radio system that would work across all these different platforms, in a sense. How much of the trouble do you think was foreseeable from the outset? And how much was it just, you know, a technological hope that didn't work out but was worth trying?
AXE: A lot of this is rooted in the 1990s, and in this attitude that the whole military adopted in the '90s, of a heightened faith in technology that ran headlong into a couple ground wars in Asia, that has since sort of forced the Army to take a reality check, I guess you could say.
BLOCK: Meaning what exactly?
AXE: Well, the Army no longer has this ambition of replacing all of its radios with one universal radio. Instead, the Army is now going out to industry and saying: Do you have something that's slightly better than existing radios? If you do, we'll buy a few thousand of them and then in a couple of years we're going to ask you again. So it's an evolutionary approach instead of a revolutionary approach.
BLOCK: David Axe, thank you very much.
AXE: Thank you.
BLOCK: David Axe's article is titled "Failure to Communicate." It's on the Center for Public Integrity's website, IWatchNews.org.
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A federal appeals court has struck down Oklahoma's ban on Sharia law. The ruling said the state amendment, which was passed in 2010, discriminated against Muslims.
NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty reports.
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY, BYLINE: Seventy percent of Oklahomans passed the amendment to their state constitution. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: Seventy percent of Oklahoma voters passed the amendment.] It barred courts from recognizing Sharia law - that is, Islamic law - as valid. Supporters said they weren't singling out Islam; it applied to all religious laws. Still, they only mentioned Islam.
Dan Mach, an attorney at the ACLU, says in effect, that meant that Catholics or Jews could make agreements or draw up wills that cite their religious beliefs, but Muslims could not.
DAN MACH: The Constitution flatly forbids the government from singling out one religious faith for official opprobrium, and this so-called Save Our State amendment does just that.
HAGERTY: A Muslim man named Muneer Awad sued. He argued that he wanted his estate distributed according to Islamic law and that under the ban, a court could not execute his will. Soon after that, a federal court in Oklahoma ruled that the ban violated Awad's First Amendment rights.
Today, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver agreed, ruling unanimously that the state was favoring all other religions over Islam, in violation of the establishment clause.
Ira Lupu, a religion law expert at George Washington University Law School, says the ruling is no surprise.
IRA LUPU: I would have been shocked if there had been contrary outcome. Every responsible First Amendment religion clause lawyer in the United States, of whom I'm aware, as soon as this was passed - before it was passed, when it was being considered - looked at this and said, this is clearly unconstitutional.
HAGERTY: The Oklahoma attorney general had no immediate response. The ruling is likely to stop other states from following Oklahoma's lead. According to the ACLU, legislatures in more than half of the states were considering similar bills.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR News.
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Once upon a time in political history, the New Hampshire primary was held in March. Imagine that. Candidates spent the winter all but living in New Hampshire. As other states started holding earlier primaries, the Granite State inched its contest up on the calendar. These days it has less of a monopoly on the campaigns. Still, the first in the nation primary has a special cache and it can make or break would-be presidents.
Joining us to talk about what we might expect from New Hampshire is NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson.
Hello, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hello, Audie.
CORNISH: We'll talk about the candidates, of course. But first, Mara, let's talk about issues. Is there any particular issue that has risen to the forefront in New Hampshire?
LIASSON: Well, this issue of what kind of capitalism is fair. This is the whole argument about Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain Capital. And I think it's absolutely extraordinary that you would be having an argument inside the Republican Party about what kind of capitalism is fair and what kind isn't.
Newt Gingrich has, more articulately than any Democrat on the left, made the argument that someone who makes money while - tremendous amount of money for investors - while the company they invest in goes bankrupt, that's undermining capitalism; there's something wrong with that.
And I think after the Wall Street bailouts where people felt that the people who were at fault came out fine and the taxpayers were left on the hook shows you that that strikes a chord even in the pro-business, pro-corporate, pro-Wall Street Republican Party. And I think that's going to continue.
CORNISH: Is this an issue that's going to continue to be up for debate in the contests in South Carolina and Florida?
LIASSON: Well, I think so because the Super PAC supporting Gingrich has spent more than $3 million to buy airtime, to air ads about this issue. And I talked to a senior Romney adviser today, he said it's just as well this issue came up now. We've got two weeks to beat it back. And, yes, I think this is going to continue because Gingrich thinks this is the way to go after Romney. It's best to go after someone in their main argument.
This is what Romney says is the reason he should be president - his business experience. And, as Gingrich said today, he said the first thing you have to do was stop Romney. And that's what he's going to do and this is the issue he's going to try and do it with.
CORNISH: Mara, looking at this issue, something like this coming to the forefront in New Hampshire, what does it say to you about what the New Hampshire primary means to the modern Republican Party?
LIASSON: Well, I think that New Hampshire and Iowa are still really important. I don't know if you're suggesting that maybe it's time to do away with the New Hampshire primary. But I think retail campaigning is still important. Yes, candidates spent less time campaigning in New Hampshire and Iowa, for that matter - fewer retail events. But at the end, there was the same intense campaigning in New Hampshire.
They talked to voters. They held press conferences. They exchanged charges and barbs. They had to defend themselves. Gaffs were made. So I think that kind of hothouse political environment is still really important for both parties.
CORNISH: Mara, in the minute we have left, let's talk a little bit about the candidates. Who has the most at stake tonight?
LIASSON: Well, other than Romney - who, of course, wants to go out of New Hampshire with a big win - I think Jon Huntsman has the most at stake. He has had a bit of a surge in New Hampshire. If that surge continues and he can come in second, I think that will vindicate his decision to spend so much time there. But it's hard to see what other state he can do well in after New Hampshire.
And I also think that for the conservative candidates who are running to be the alternative to Romney - Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum - how they place in New Hampshire is very, very important for them.
CORNISH: And, of course, Ron Paul is in the race for second place in New Hampshire. Do we expect him to be competitive in the next contest, no matter how he does tonight?
LIASSON: Well, he is running fourth in the polls in South Carolina and Florida. He said he's going to basically skip Florida. It's a winner-take-all primary, so he can't get delegates even if he places rather than wins. But I do think you're going to see him campaigning in caucus states where he does better, and a grassroots organization like the one he has the matters more. So I think he's not going to be as competitive in the next two, but it sounds like he's staying in for the long haul.
CORNISH: NPR's national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Mara, thanks so much.
LIASSON: Thank you, Audie.
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New Hampshire is inundated not only by presidential candidates but also by their families. This year, some of the candidates' children have been nearly as present on the campaign trail as their fathers.
With that in mind, NPR's Robert Smith has this guide: Five Ways to Use Your Kids to Get Votes.
ROBERT SMITH, BYLINE: The number one reason to nudge your children to the front of the political stage is so reporters like me can do stories like this. Think about it. Would the Jon Huntsman campaign rather me play a clip of this...
JON HUNTSMAN: I think there is a manufacturing renaissance that's around the corner for this country. I really do.
SMITH: Or a clip of his 20-something-year-old daughters channeling Justin Timberlake?
HUNTSMAN DAUGHTERS: (Rapping) We're bringing Huntsman back. The rest of them are one big circus act...
SMITH: Funny and cute wins every time. Here in New Hampshire, the Huntsman daughters are constantly on TV talking about their father, and apparently their new career in viral videos.
But there is a danger in using your kids as reporter bait. Mitt Romney found that out when his son Matt joked that his father would release his tax returns only after President Obama released his grades and birth certificate - not funny, not cute. More embarrassing and distracting.
So, it might be better to use your offspring for campaign purpose Number Two: Talk to other young people. That's what the Huntsman daughters say is their main job.
MARYANNE HUNTSMAN: 'Cause we all offer something that's different. We have very different personalities.
SMITH: Think of them as them as the "Charlie's Angels" of politics.
ABBY HUNTSMAN: I'm Abby.
SMITH: She specializes in media.
LIDDY HUNTSMAN: Liddy.
SMITH: Mobilizes the youth vote.
MARYANNE HUNTSMAN: Maryanne.
SMITH: No, she's not a master of disguise and karate. Maryanne does finance. Just don't call them campaign props.
MARYANNE HUNTSMAN: We're the exact opposite of that. If you've seen our Twitter feed, we are - you know, we have an awesome responsibility, too, to get our generation excited and to introduce voters to our dad. We're not just waving and smiling.
SMITH: OK. OK. Reason Number 3 to bring the kids on a campaign...
MARYANNE HUNTSMAN: Waving and smiling.
SMITH: You got to do it. This is the traditional opening gambit here in New Hampshire to get a crowd on your side. At just about every event, candidates do this long list of every relative in the audience. And if you have a family like Mitt Romney you can kill a lot of time.
MITT ROMNEY: Third son is coming tonight. Ben is my fourth. And the fifth son is Craig and his wife, Mary. Would you please stand?
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
SMITH: And if your kids are very young and very cute, your TV ads can be wall-to-wall waving and smiling.
(SOUNDBITE OF A POLITICAL AD)
SMITH: Just watching Santorum's ads, you can see his kids reading, his kids playing board games, throwing a football, riding a tire swing. That's probably more video than you have of your own children.
OK, Reason Number 4 to use your kids in politics: The human shield. When Newt Gingrich was getting flack for his multiple divorces, his daughter Jackie Gingrich Cushman came to his defense.
JACKIE GINGRICH CUSHMAN: We're a family that is still very close, that has gone through hard times like many families, probably most families do.
SMITH: Almost sounds like a politician herself, which, by the way, is the last reason to use your children in politics. Number 5: You can create a dynasty. Look at Senator Rand Paul, the son of candidate Ron Paul. Rand was all over New Hampshire this weekend - filling in for his dad, getting big crowds, and sounding very much like his father.
SEN. RAND PAUL: We really should take away the power of the Federal Reserve to manipulate and create interest rates, and then I think we'd be much better off.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
SMITH: Who knows, maybe someday he'll be running for president against one of the Huntsman daughters, and reporters can do features on the five ways they use their dads.
Robert Smith, NPR News, Manchester.
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The president of South Korea is in Beijing for talks with Chinese leaders. At the top of their agenda is the political transition in North Korea. Ever since Kim Jong-il died in December, both China and South Korea have advocated open dialogue with the North.
But as NPR's Mike Shuster reports from Seoul, that's a reversal for the South Korean president and it could have an impact on the country's elections later this year.
MIKE SHUSTER, BYLINE: On the surface, it may all sound predictable. The conservative president of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, urging dialogue with North Korea, known formally as the DPRK, in a speech last week.
PRESIDENT LEE MYUNG-BAK: (Through Translator) If the DPRK comes to the table with sincerity, we can together open up a new era on the Korean Peninsula. We have to solve mutual trust issues through dialogue and take the road of mutual benefits and common prosperity.
SHUSTER: But buried in these quite ordinary-sounding words is a sharp shift in South Korean policy. When Lee Myung-bak became president four years ago, he turned away from engagement with North Korea, which had been Seoul's goal for nearly a decade, says Paik Nak-chung, professor emeritus at Seoul National University.
PROFESSOR PAIK NAK-CHUNG: He discontinued practically all the North-South exchanges. That amounts to a radical reversal of the previous policy. That process had started already with his inauguration in 2008.
SHUSTER: Behind President Lee's cold shoulder to Pyongyang was the belief that, without South Korean support, especially without South Korean aid and investment, the North Korean regime would collapse. The conservatives in South Korea were convinced of that, says Park In-kyu, editor of the liberal website, PRESSian.
PARK IN-KYU: They hate North Korean regime and they hope - they want collapse of North Korean regime.
SHUSTER: But the North Korean regime did not collapse, despite constant food shortages and isolation from most of the world. At the same time, the conservative approach never became popular in South Korea and, says Professor Paik, it has put the conservatives at a disadvantage going into an election year.
NAK-CHUNG: I think it has been definitely counterproductive. These days, I think, President Lee and his advisors are showing some signs of catching on.
SHUSTER: It's not as if North Korea is especially popular in South Korea. It's not. The frost turned to ice in 2010 when North Korea sunk a South Korean warship in March of that year, killing more than 40. Then, in November, unleashed an artillery barrage on an isolated island, leaving several more dead.
President Lee demanded an apology from North Korea and cut off nearly all of South Korea's remaining financial interactions with the North. The apology never came, but says Daniel Pinkston, the chief analyst in Seoul with the International Crisis Group, many in South Korea blame the tension on President Lee's aversion to engagement with North Korea.
DANIEL PINKSTON: South Korean society is very divided and some people blame the provocations of the past and the tension in inter-Korean relations on the conservative hawkish policies of the Myung-bak government. Now, whether you think that's true or not does not matter, but if the electorate feels that way, then it might shift how they vote.
SHUSTER: That's precisely what opinion polls are showing in South Korea, a move toward the left as elections for South Korea's legislative assembly in April approach. Couple that with widespread dissatisfaction with the lead government's record on the economy and there's a real chance, Professor Paik says, for the left to return to power.
NAK-CHUNG: The liberals have a very good chance of taking control of the National Assembly. If they win the Assembly elections, their chances of winning in the presidential election will improve.
SHUSTER: President Lee cannot run for reelection. The South Korean constitution limits presidents to a single five-year term, but because conservative prospects don't look good, it seems obvious why, in the aftermath of Kim Jong-Il's death, Lee is suddenly talking about dialog and urging the Chinese leaders to protect the status quo in North Korea.
Mike Shuster, NPR News, Seoul.
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Last week in Boston, 7,000 mathematicians, math teachers and math enthusiasts from all over the world converged for something called the Joint Mathematics Meeting. Naturally, there was a lot of this...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN 2: C plus S minus two.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Well, S is A plus B and C is two.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN 2: Right.
BLOCK: But reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro also found a lot that he wasn't expecting.
ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO, BYLINE: This meeting's like a big family reunion. It just happens to be packed with people who adore math. Sarah-Marie Belcastro is a mathematician based in western Massachusetts. She also crochets and knits. Belcastro pulls out one of her current projects.
SARAH-MARIE BELCASTRO: Okay. This is crochet and this is mathematical. The origin of this is, I wonder what it would look like if I made a hyperbolic mobius band.
SHAPIRO: Belcastro's crocheted mobius band is stunning. She could wear it like a wide bracelet. The edges are ruffled and they're a warm purple. For Belcastro, it's a way of visualizing a mathematical object.
BELCASTRO: I want to see what I'm thinking about better. For a lot of the knitted projects, I can make things that I can look at that I couldn't see otherwise or at least not see as well.
SHAPIRO: Belcastro stands up and, within minutes, she bumps into a colleague and friend of hers.
BELCASTRO: Some origami paper with you?
TOM HULL: Of course I do. You want me to fold something?
SHAPIRO: Tom Hull is a math professor at Western New England University. He studies the math of origami and how to use origami to teach math.
HULL: I'm making something called a square twist. It takes that inner diamond in the center of the paper and literally twists it 90 degrees.
SHAPIRO: Oh, wow.
HULL: I kind of think that you can't do origami without doing math. Whenever you fold a point to a line, you're actually doing calculus. Math is hidden in origami. You just don't see it, but your hands are doing it.
SHAPIRO: I stop in on a mini course on backgammon. A large magnetic playing board stands at the front of the room.
ARTHUR BENJAMIN: Black is trying to build a blockade.
SHAPIRO: After revealing the rules, the instructors launch into a game against the computer. Before long, Arthur Benjamin, a math professor at Harvey Mudd College, dashes to an easel.
BENJAMIN: So the average role in backgammon is seven plus seven over six.
SHAPIRO: The 30 audience members include teachers and professors who might bring something like this to their students. They're rapt, hooked on watching the unfolding game. Eventually, it's over.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
SHAPIRO: And the mathematicians have won.
BENJAMIN: Math definitely makes me a better backgammon player. If you can figure out probabilities, it's essentially like rolling the game out infinitely many times. It gives you a great deal of information.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SHAPIRO: In between giving and listening to formal math talks, a good sized crowd has gathered for the mini course on math and dance.
KARL SCHAFFER: One arm up. I don't care if you mirror me or otherwise.
SHAPIRO: Karl Schaffer is leading the class in a full body warm-up on a dance floor that the meeting organizers have provided. Schaffer is a mathematician at De Anza College and co-directs a small contemporary dance troop in California.
SCHAFFER: I would like the participants to experience creating movement phrases and performing them for each other in ways that deal with mathematical concepts.
SHAPIRO: Concepts like shape, symmetry and number sequences. Everywhere I turned at this meeting, I saw mathematicians celebrating the connections between math and the other elements of their lives.
Colin Adams is a mathematician at Williams College who writes and performs plays about math and he says these kinds of efforts help translate a love and passion for math into friendlier arenas.
COLIN ADAMS: You know, I mean, sometimes people get turned off easily because they just get bored and the goal has always been to keep their interest long enough to see the beauty of the mathematics.
SHAPIRO: It's about trying on a kind of aesthetic, one in which math spins and weaves and sings and where it wins the game every single time. For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel Shapiro.
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And I'm Melissa Block.
It is primary day in New Hampshire, and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney sounds hopeful.
MITT ROMNEY: I hope that you're going to be able to give me a bigger margin of victory than eight votes that I got in Iowa. Think we can do that? Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING)
BLOCK: That's Romney speaking to a packed, middle-school gym last night. All of the state's polls will be closed by the end of this hour. And Romney has long been the clear front-runner.
We're going to spend the next few minutes on the heated battle between the other Republican candidates for second and third place. We'll hear from four of our reporters, all at various campaign headquarters in Manchester, New Hampshire.
First up is NPR's Don Gonyea, who's covering the campaign of former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. And Don, has Rick Santorum been able to build on the boost that he got out of Iowa, where he came eight votes shy of beating Mitt Romney?
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: Well, he got a lot more action here. He had bigger crowds; he had a lot of press following him around everywhere. He got a lot of coverage. There was a good bit of buzz, but it does not seem to have translated into any big, big boost in the polls. He's still in a battle for fourth place here; could be in fifth place. I mean, we'll see how it all works out tonight.
But again, it's a very different population here than Iowa. A lot of Christian conservatives there; that was his base. He talked a lot about social issues in Iowa. He talked about it here as well - he kept getting drawn into it by hecklers and questioners at town halls even though here, he would have rather talked about economic populism. But that was the story for him the past week.
BLOCK: And Don, presumably, Rick Santorum now heading into far more favorable territory in South Carolina - which votes next, after New Hampshire.
GONYEA: Exactly. They've had an eye on South Carolina the whole time. They did feel they had to come here. They felt that it was important to go to all of the states. Campaigning here is a way to get respect in South Carolina. It just shows that you're a candidate who feels you need to run everywhere, and need to see what you can do - talk to people all over the country.
But again, South Carolina will have many more of those evangelical voters. Now, there are still a number of candidates who are looking for that same vote, so we'll see how it's divided up. But he does expect a warmer welcome there.
BLOCK: OK, Don, thank you. That's NPR's Don Gonyea at Rick Santorum's New Hampshire campaign quarters.
We turn now to NPR's Robert Smith, who is stationed with the Ron Paul campaign. And Robert, Paul's message hasn't changed since 2008, the last time he ran for the Republican presidential nomination. In New Hampshire last time, he placed fifth. Why does he expect to do better this time?
ROBERT SMITH, BYLINE: Well, yeah, he got 8 percent of the vote last time. And it was hugely disappointing for him and his supporters because New Hampshire is supposed to be this hotbed of libertarianism - "Live Free or Die," that whole thing. But Ron Paul thinks he can do better this time, simply because the world is so much different than it was four years ago. I mean, I saw him four years ago, and I've seen him on this campaign trail. And he's talking about exactly the same things - smaller government, debt, banks, modern money, getting rid of the Federal Reserve. But, you know, four years ago, that stuff didn't seem to matter as much. People didn't know what the Federal Reserve was.
And now, I find - talking to his supporters - they're far more literate about what's going on in the economy. And Ron Paul, when you talk to him about this, thinks that that means his message resonates more.
But there are also a couple of structural things that are really going to help Ron Paul tonight. I mean, one is that he does very well with independent voters. And you know, four years ago, independents could choose the Republican or Democratic primary. But this year, exit polls are showing that there is a huge surge of independent voters in the Republican primary. And that's good for Paul. And the exit polls are also showing that the voters are describing themselves as economic conservatives, but not necessarily social conservatives. And once again, that's very good for Ron Paul.
BLOCK: And briefly, Robert, if Ron Paul does manage to pull off a second-place finish tonight, what does that mean, going forward?
SMITH: Well, you know, I don't mean to be flip, but it doesn't really matter very much. Ron Paul is going to go on, no matter what. He's said that. He's going to South Carolina; he's going to try and amass as many delegates as he can, and go to the convention. For Ron Paul, it's about the movement, building the movement. He talks about that - not necessarily becoming the next president of the United States.
BLOCK: OK. NPR's Robert Smith, from the Ron Paul campaign headquarters. And now to NPR's Tovia Smith, who's covering Jon Huntsman's campaign.
And Tovia, Jon Huntsman has been talking about a surge of momentum that he's been feeling there in New Hampshire. Are you picking up on that energy, where you are?
TOVIA SMITH, BYLINE: We are. We're in a pretty small bar, and it's already pretty full here. They're expecting a big crowd - as they've been seeing, suddenly, at all their campaign events the past few days. The campaign tweeted us a little bit earlier, kind of gloating, telling reporters - you know - expect to be packed in tight here tonight because like - you know, sorry, they booked the place a whole four days ago, when they were at the bottom of the pack.
And now, what a difference. I spoke to a guy holding a sign at a polling station today, who said he's been with Huntsman since August, back in the dark days - as he said - and no one even knew who Huntsman was. Now they know; they come to events and, you know, these guys can only hope they vote, too.
But clearly, Huntsman has struck a chord. Voters have been telling me they started paying attention to him when he stood up to Romney at the debates over the weekend, defending his service as ambassador for President Obama - and not just because he showed a little feistiness, but also because of the message of unity - you know, country before politics both in principle and for practical reasons because, as Huntsman says, the GOP can't win back the White House without independents.
And you know, that's resonating. As a matter of fact, we just watched the campaign, literally, unwrap a giant, brand-new sign for this stage here, with their new "Country First" tagline. They literally, just took it out of the wrapper. The line is working, and they're going with it.
BLOCK: OK, so great expectations within the Huntsman campaign. Big money questions that would face Jon Huntsman moving forward, though.
SMITH: True but, you know, they've got like a kind of anything's possible attitude here right now. He's just first, getting focus and consideration from folks. And as Huntsman says, if you do well, people will invest in you. Just like the campaign says, money has been pouring in - relatively pouring in, anyway, since the Sunday debate. And they're banking on momentum kind of taking care of the money issue, going forward.
BLOCK: OK. That's NPR's Tovia Smith, covering Jon Huntsman's campaign. And finally, we turn to NPR's Andrea Seabrook, who is following Newt Gingrich in New Hampshire. And Andrea, going into the primary today, Newt Gingrich was spending a lot of time attacking the front-runner, Mitt Romney.
ANDREA SEABROOK, BYLINE: He sure was - stinging, sharp attacks on Romney, especially the time that Romney led Bain Capital, the investment firm that bought a lot of companies. And some of them went bankrupt; some of them did very well. And of course, he and the other executives at Bain Capital did very well in this scheme - well, it's normal business.
But there is a - attack ad - it's really kind of an attack movie - that should be premiering tomorrow, as there are some journalists who have copies of it already - that is all about Romney's time at Bain. And Gingrich - his campaign got a special boost of money in the last day or so, to allow them to buy this movie and run it, finance it. And it really is - seems to be trying to throw Romney off his game as the whole campaign, the whole - entire primary moves south, into more friendly Gingrich territory.
BLOCK: And one question would be, does it not only throw Mitt Romney off his game, but what about his voters? Are they having second thoughts? Have you gotten any sense of that, there in New Hampshire?
SEABROOK: You know, it's interesting. People who are very strongly for Romney seem to sort of see it as this sort of last gasp of the Newt Gingrich campaign. But people who are questioning whether Romney should be the front-runner really find these attacks to be a problem. They find his time at Bain Capital to be a problem.
That doesn't necessarily mean that they are running to Newt Gingrich as their candidate. But it does seem to be putting some people off.
BLOCK: OK. NPR's Andrea Seabrook, thanks so much - along with Tovia Smith, Robert Smith and Don Gonyea, all in Manchester, New Hampshire.
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And I'm Melissa Block. Fleeting expletives are back in the news. The Supreme Court heard arguments today testing the constitutionality of an FCC regulation. Currently, the FCC can punish broadcasters with stiff fines for the fleeting use of vulgar language or nude images. The rule applies only to radio and over-the-air TV networks like Fox and ABC, not to cable TV.
Here's NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that the FCC could punish broadcasters for vulgar language or images aired during prime time when children are more likely to be watching. But that was when a handful of TV networks were the sole purveyors of TV fare, and even then the agency regulated with a relatively light hand.
During the Bush administration, however, the FCC changed its rule to allow stiff fines for even fleeting and isolated use of dirty words or nudity. The agency immediately and retroactively cited the Fox Network for a live broadcast of the Billboard Awards when Cher and Nicole Richie used the F word and the agency fined ABC for a brief showing of a woman's nude buttocks during its drama "NYPD Blue."
The networks then went to court, contending that the new rule was so vague and arbitrary that it violated the free speech rights of the broadcasters. Today in the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli representing the Obama administration said that with a broadcast license comes an obligation to meet certain decency standards and that Congress intended over-the-air broadcasters to provide a safe haven for family viewing.
Justice Ginsburg: But one cannot tell what's indecent and what isn't. The FCC, the censor, says "Saving Private Ryan," which is full of expletives, is OK. "Schindler's List," which has nudity, is OK. But "NYPD Blue" is not. Answer: We would concede that there's not perfect clarity in this rule, but this is a context-based rule and the alternative would be to ban all use of certain words and all nudity.
Justice Kennedy: What you're saying is that there's a public value in having a different standard for broadcast TV, even though when you channel surf, it's not readily apparent which channels are covered by the FCC rule and which are not. Justice Scalia: Just as we require a certain modicum of dress for the people that attend this court, the government is entitled to insist on a modicum of decency for those who get licenses to broadcast on the public airways.
Justice Kagan: I think what the networks are really saying is that even if some regulation is permissible, the FCC has not set any standards, and under its policy nobody can use dirty words and nudity except Steven Spielberg.
The lawyers representing the networks picked up that theme during their argument time. Carter Phillips, representing Fox: As we sit here today, the networks are facing literally thousands and thousands of ginned up computer-generated complaints that are holding up literally hundreds of TV license renewals so that the whole system has come to a screeching halt.
Chief Justice Roberts: Is there not a legitimate objective to have a safe harbor? Answer: There are many channels devoted to programming without bad language and others devoted only to children's programming. Justice Alito: But if we rule in your favor, will people who watch Fox be seeing a lot of people parading around in the nude and screaming expletives?
Phillips said that Fox and all the other networks have guidelines barring that and that advertisers wouldn't tolerate it either. Justice Alito: What would you put on that you are not able to put on now? Phillips responded with a list of events that have not been carried live for fear of the isolated events of remark: the Pat Tillman memorial service, football and basketball games, local news events. Justice Breyer, dryly: But what Fox was penalized for was two women on television who basically used a fleeting expletive, which seems to be naturally a part of their vocabulary.
Lawyer Seth Waxman representing ABC echoed the charge that government censorship with no rhyme or reason is unconstitutional. The situation is so unpredictable and arbitrary, said Waxman, that right now, the FCC has pending before it - and has for years - complaints about the opening of the last Olympics, which included a statue very much like some of the statues in this courtroom with bare breasts or buttocks.
At that, Justice Scalia craned his neck to look at the phrases on the wall and Waxman helpfully gestured: Right over here, Justice Scalia. At that point, the whole court, including Scalia, dissolved into laughter.
Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
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Now to Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad delivered a defiant speech today. He called protesters mongrels misled by foreigners and he vowed to stay in power. Assad also criticized the Arab League, which has an observer mission inside Syria.
NPR's Peter Kenyon has more on the story from Istanbul in neighboring Turkey.
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: The Syrian president has made few public comments since his country erupted in mid March, but his theme has been broadly consistent. He wants to enact reforms, but can't do so in an atmosphere of chaos. In a national address at Damascus University today, he insisted that a new constitution, elections and reforms are still possible. But through an interpreter, he said the top priority is to restore security.
PRESIDENT BASHAR AL-ASSAD: (Through Translator) This cannot be achieved without striking with an iron fist against tourists. We cannot relent and we will not be lax with those who are perpetrating killing or intimidating or conspiring with the foreigner against his own homeland and people.
KENYON: The theme of Syria, the victim of a foreign conspiracy, played heavily into the nearly two hour address. Assad accused external powers of conspiring to destabilize Syria. Assad singled out the Arab League, which suspended Syria last year for sharp criticism, saying the body was essentially fronting for Syria's Western enemies.
AL-ASSAD: (Through Translator) After they failed with the Security Council, simply for their failure to convince the world of their lies, they had to maintain an Arab cover and an Arab platform to launch their designs.
KENYON: Opposition activists inside Syria posted videos and supplies unverified reports of continued violence. The opposition local coordinating committees report scores of people killed in the past few days, with the highest death toll today coming in the northeastern city of Deir ez-Zor.
Fears that Syria's problems may spill over beyond its borders continue to worry the neighbors. Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan says concern is growing that peaceful protests could devolve into all-out war. He's heard through an interpreter.
PRIME MINISTER RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN: (Through Translator) The situation in Syria is heading towards a religious sectarian racial war and this needs to be prevented.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTESTERS)
KENYON: But as the protests and the crackdown continue, analysts say Syria will likely continue to defy its international critics. The next question may be whether the rising death toll convinces holdouts on the UN Security Council, led by Russia and China, to drop their objections to stronger action by the Council.
Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Istanbul.
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In New Hampshire, voters are still lining up for their chance to cast the first primary ballots of this year's presidential contest. The New Hampshire primary remains a key test for frontrunners and also-rans alike. And this year it's especially relevant for one seasonal resident of the state, Mitt Romney, the former governor of neighboring Massachusetts. But there's plenty of opportunities for others to make news there tonight.
And keeping track of all things New Hampshire in Manchester, is NPR's senior Washington editor Ron Elving.
And, Ron, let's start with a timetable question. How close are we to knowing the result from New Hampshire's vote today?
RON ELVING, BYLINE: We're getting pretty close, Melissa. Some of the polls are going to be closing at 7 P.M. Eastern Time here in New Hampshire, some more at 7:30. And all the polls will be closed here by 8 P.M. Eastern Time.
Now, we expect that officials will begin releasing some of the results from the early-closing parts of the state, before all the polls are closed. Remember, we heard those Dixville-Notch numbers back at midnight. And then we expect to get a little peek at some of the exit polls that have been underway, all day long. So we should be having some straws in the wind, let's say, by the time all the polls have closed by 8 P.M. Eastern.
BLOCK: And, Ron, the expectation has been that Mitt Romney will win in New Hampshire. Conceivably will win big if the polls leading up to the vote are right.
What questions are you looking for answers for tonight, besides that Mitt Romney win?
ELVING: The big question, most salient question is how well, how easily, by how much did Mitt Romney win. If it's an easy win for him, well then it's a well baby check. And the Romney campaign will smile and go on. If the margin does not reflect Romney's substantial polling lead, if it's, let's say, in the single digits instead, that means trouble.
BLOCK: Trouble because that would mean some of the attacks of his fellow Republicans are taking a bite?
ELVING: Yes, indeed. And also, because they sense that Mitt Romney is just unsatisfactory, even to the people who are his neighbors, even to the people who seem to like him the most. It's pervasive throughout the country and throughout the Republican Party, there's a sense that, Gee, this isn't quite good enough. We want somebody who can knock off President Obama in the fall. Maybe Mitt Romney isn't the guy.
BLOCK: Ron, let's pitch for it a little over 10 days from now to South Carolina, which votes on Saturday the 21st. A very different electorate down there, different terrain. What are you thinking will be shaping up in the South Carolina primary?
ELVING: It is better ground for some of the other candidates, other than Mitt Romney Southerners. For example, like Newt Gingrich or even, for that matter, Rick Perry the governor of Texas who abandoned New Hampshire where he came into the debates here is, but really hasn't campaigned here recently. He went on to South Carolina to campaign and it does seem to be a friendlier place for him. It also has a great number of great more of the social issues conservatives we saw in the Iowa caucuses a week ago I was in. And they are natural base is for Rick Santorum, someone else who's probably not going to have a great time here today.
So, over the next 10 days so we expect that down in South Carolina we're going to be hearing and hearing a different issue mix. And we're also going to be hearing a good deal more of this talk about Bain Capital and the years that Mitt Romney was there, as an investment and it was a businessman.
There's a huge ad buy you that Newt Gingrich is put on already in South Carolina, multimillion dollar ad buy using money and he just got from a Las Vegas casino owner. And they're going to be making this case that Mitt Romney plundered some companies, or to companies into bankruptcy is a template a lot of people out of work.
BLOCK: Ron, the delegate count in these early-voting states is really small. If you look at the math, the majority of delegates won't be chosen until March, April, later than that. But it's these January events that get so much attention and so much of our focus.
ELVING: That's right. It's partly because they're first, of course. And this year - as opposed to you're supposed to 2008, 2004, 2000 -four 2000 and the majority of the delegates are really being chosen quite late. It ought to be reforming around the country by the time the most of the delegates have actually been chosen.
But, you know, the field of candidates who have a chance to win those later delegates that will be chosen in the spring, is going to be shrinking. They start shrinking tonight. And they will definitely be with you with old and he will win out down will to live probably just one, if Mitt Romney can run the table and when all the January events. No Republican non-incumbent has ever won Iowa and New Hampshire. That would be a formidable performance.
BLOCK: OK. NPR's senior Washington editor Ron Elving in Manchester New Hampshire. Ron, thanks so much.
ELVING: Thank you, Melissa.
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Two of the top Republican contenders in New Hampshire are Mormon, Mitt Romney and John Huntsman. And that's made life interesting for two young Mormons who have been going door-to-door in the state. They're campaigning not for Romney or Huntsman but for Jesus Christ.
Ike Sriskandarajah of turnstylenews.com caught up with the two missionaries in Exeter to hear how they're balancing politics and proselytizing.
IKE SRISKANDARAJAH, BYLINE: Most canvassers wear candidates' buttons and carry campaign signs. But these two young men stand out for having neither.
TAYLOR BAYLES: We're definitely in the spotlight. Generally, walking around New Hampshire in a suit and tie with a name tag makes you in the spotlight.
SRISKANDARAJAH: That's Elder Taylor Bayles, a religious title the Mormon Church gives this missionary even though he's just 20 years old. His canvassing partner is Elder Kyle Hodson who's 21.
KYLE HODSON: From 10 o'clock until 9 o'clock at night, we go out. We talk to people on the streets, and we knock on doors.
SRISKANDARAJAH: These two want to share their faith. But a few days before the New Hampshire primary, there's something else people want to talk to them about.
BAYLES: Who you voting for?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
HODSON: It's definitely a topic of conversation that comes up quite a bit.
SRISKANDARAJAH: And the obvious question to ask a couple of Mormons this year?
HODSON: Two people, like, within just a couple minutes of each other asked us the exact same question. They just yelled at us: Huntsman or Romney?
SRISKANDARAJAH: But it's a question they can't answer. Despite the fact that Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney are both Mormon...
HODSON: The church has a longstanding policy of neutrality as far as candidates and the parties. As representatives, we mimic that neutrality. But, you know, we are people. We do have opinions. We just choose not to voice them during these two years that we serve.
SRISKANDARAJAH: But Hodson held a day planner with a blue bumper sticker that seemed to say otherwise.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BAYLES: Mostly, we were just in Hampton the other day, and Mitt Romney was holding a breakfast. And we walked by and they gave us stickers.
HODSON: We actually thought we'd try and collect as many as we could.
BAYLES: Yeah.
HODSON: So it's not really much of a preference. It's just more for fun.
BAYLES: Yeah. So I'm looking for like a Ron Paul sticker or like Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry. Whoever can give me a sticker, that's what I'm looking for.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SRISKANDARAJAH: So a Romney sticker this year might just be decorative. But when Hodson does become politically active, he won't necessarily vote his faith.
HODSON: I wouldn't consider myself smart if I chose to just vote for a member of the church, just because I'm a member.
SRISKANDARAJAH: For now, though, they're in the political dark. During their mission, no newspapers or TV, just scriptures and hymns, and 30 minutes of Internet a week at the local public library.
(SOUNDBITE OF TYPING)
BAYLES: We're on mormon.org, and this is the Our People tab.
SRISKANDARAJAH: Bayles scrolls through a checkerboard of Mormon faces.
BAYLES: There's an opera singer, a mathematician, high school student, artist, cancer survivor.
SRISKANDARAJAH: He knows the story behind each face. It's the only website these guys are allowed to visit for two years. And this, the Our People section, is based on the multi-million dollar I'm A Mormon campaign, aimed at defying Mormon stereotypes, advertising: the church is a big tent. It's even got an Australian professional athlete.
(SOUNDBITE OF A MORMON CAMPAIGN AD)
SRISKANDARAJAH: The faith had a different face a generation ago when Huntsman and Romney were just boys carrying out their own missionary rites of passage.
BAYLES: Jon Huntsman served his mission in Taiwan, and Mitt Romney served his mission in...
HODSON: Paris.
BAYLES: â¦France. Yeah, the Paris, France mission.
SRISKANDARAJAH: Now, those former missionaries are going door-to-door trying to persuade New Hampshire residents to believe in them as presidential candidates. So who has the harder job?
BAYLES: Hmm. I'd say it's probably harder for us to do our work than it would be for a campaigner.
HODSON: The message that we share, it's - I don't know, when we go and talk to people about Jesus Christ, we not only help them develop a faith in Christ, but help them act on it. And that usually involves making some changes in their lives. And a lot of times, those changes can be hard.
SRISKANDARAJAH: Probably harder than picking a presidential candidate. For NPR News, I'm Ike Sriskandarajah in Exeter, New Hampshire.
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It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Audie Cornish.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block.
A Russian tanker carrying more than a million gallons of precious fuel is slowly making its way toward Nome, Alaska. If it makes it, it will be a first. That's because the Bering Sea is frozen solid this time of year. Nome is not accessible by road. The city's winter fuel supply is usually delivered by sea in the fall. But a monster storm and shipping delays kept that fuel from arriving. And the city has been iced in ever since. So the tanker, the Renda, is now attempting to make a first ever winter fuel delivery to Alaska's western coast with a Coast Guard icebreaker, the Healy, leading the way.
And we're joined now by the captain of the Healy, Captain Beverly Havlik. Welcome to the program.
CAPTAIN BEVERLY HAVLIK: Hey. Thank you very much.
BLOCK: And why don't you tell us what you see as you look forward as you head through the Bering Sea right now?
HAVLIK: Well, we see a great deal more ice. The ice is a pretty dynamic force. It moves constantly. There's always forces from the outside against the ice edge. Plates will move and then press against Renda. We have the horsepower to power through and come back and make a relief path alongside the ship and release the pressure. So we get back into the track that we've just made, and they could follow along behind us again.
BLOCK: How thick - Captain Havlik, how thick is the ice that you're trying to break through?
HAVLIK: This ice where we've been operating in the last 24 hours is - it's about two to three feet thick.
BLOCK: Is there any chance, Captain Havlik, that you will not be able to make it to Nome with this fuel supply coming behind you?
HAVLIK: Mm. I don't want to speculate on that. And we're making steady progress forward. That's going to be my message.
BLOCK: Now, once you break through the ice, what has to happen? How close behind you is the tanker, the Renda, and is there a chance that the ice might freeze over or that the path might close up behind you?
HAVLIK: The vessel is pretty close behind us. They've been following us a quarter of a mile to about a half mile behind. And we haven't had so much the problem with the ice freezing, but it's a little colder this morning. It's 18 below zero. And as we make a path by the tanker and come back into the track we've made, it's a - it has some refrozen crust on top of it.
BLOCK: Once you get close to the harbor at Nome, what has to happen to get the oil off that tanker and to the people in that city?
HAVLIK: Well, that's a - there's a whole bunch of people, as I understand, in Nome working out what's going to take to get the fuel from Renda pumped over to shore. It's going to take some hose and some ingenuity, I believe.
BLOCK: And then where do you go from there?
HAVLIK: Well, when this operation is done, we'll escort Renda, the Russian tanker, back out to the ice edge, and they'll go their direction, and we'll go ours. And probably that will be back to the home port in Seattle.
BLOCK: Captain Havlik, how long have you and your crew been away from home?
HAVLIK: You know, we left home port back in May, and we were headed toward home with - after our last science mission. And we were - when this opportunity arose, we were extended in this deployment, so we would have been home for the holidays. And it's been eight months. We're coming up on eight months here.
BLOCK: Well, Captain Havlik, best of luck and thanks for talking with us today.
HAVLIK: Well, thank you very much.
BLOCK: Beverly Havlik is the captain of the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy, which is now about 90 miles from Nome, Alaska, and the Bering Sea, clearing a path for the Russian fuel tanker Renda.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Voters have been going to the polls in New Hampshire since seven o'clock this morning. Just in the past hour or so, we've gotten a first look at exit polls conducted for the National Election Pool. And for a bit of what they tell us, I'm joined now in the studio by Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. Andy, good to see you again.
ANDREW KOHUT: Hi, Melissa.
BLOCK: What are you hearing? What are you finding about who turned out today?
KOHUT: Well, it's a very distinctive electorate as GOP electorates go. It's very moderate. Only 49 percent of the people who cast a ballot were tested in the exit polls and they're Republicans. A week ago, 74 percent of the caucusgoers in Iowa are Republicans. And 40 years ago, an even larger number, 61 percent compared to 49 percent today said they were Republicans. And they're conservative, a majority of them.
But most of them describe themselves, 66 percent is fiscal conservatives, relatively few say they're social conservatives. And that's because the percentage of this electorate that is white evangelical or evangelical is pretty small. It's just 23 percent, 77 percent say, no, I'm not an evangelical. In Iowa, a majority were evangelicals. So, it's conservative but kind of temperate conservative, fiscal conservative rather than more social conservative.
BLOCK: Yeah. And this fiscal conservative, I can anticipate what issues were top on their mind as they went to the polls today.
KOHUT: When they went to the polls, the number one thing they said was the economy, 60 percent. Number two was the deficits. So there's 85 percent saying that was the issue that mattered most to them. Again, more concern about the economy than we saw a week ago. A little less concern about the deficit.
What they were looking for were two things. They wanted a candidate best able to defeat, 33 percent said that that's what they were looking for. Secondly, they said the candidate who had the right experience, 27 percent. Relatively few, 14 percent, said we're looking for a true conservative. A week ago in Iowa, 24 percent said true conservative. So we have quite - this is quite a different electorate. It's different than Iowa. It's different than many of the primaries that we're going to be studying.
BLOCK: OK. Andy, thank you so much.
KOHUT: You're welcome.
BLOCK: That's Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
We're going next, though to Doug Wead, who is a campaign advisor to Texas Congressman Ron Paul. Doug Wead, welcome to the program.
DOUG WEAD: Hey, thank you very much.
BLOCK: And so far, looking like your candidate has come in a strong second in New Hampshire. Your take on tonight's results?
WEAD: Well, we're very pleased, especially with our own internal polling. We asked some questions that the network hasn't asked. And pretty ecstatic about the results. We found that a lot of the voters â corruption was an issue for a lot of the voters, corruption on Wall Street, corruption on K Street, corruption in Washington. And our candidate is â a screen writer could not create a more pure candidate than Ron Paul, who the lobbyists won't even tempt, who gives back part of his congressional allowance, who won't take the pension. So, we're very encouraged by that and we're encouraged by Huntsman's strong showing. We hope that he'll stay in the race.
BLOCK: Why do you hope he stays in the race?
WEAD: Well, the conservative vote is split four ways in the Republican Party, and the liberal-moderate vote is all to Romney if Huntsman drops out. So, we were hoping for a strong showing. We didn't want to give up second place. But we wanted him to do good, not too good but it looks like he's coming in just about perfect for us. And so, we're very happy tonight.
BLOCK: You like that split on that side of the field.
WEAD: Yeah, absolutely.
BLOCK: Let me ask you this. The thinking was that Congressman Paul would not compete terribly strongly in Florida. It's a very expensive media market, a big state to cover. Are you rethinking that now, given tonight's results?
WEAD: Yes, we are. And there's been a little bit of a misunderstanding regarding the story. Jessie Benton(ph) on our campaign has us totally focused on each contest as it comes. Of course, we plan ahead. But like a college football team, we're not supposed to be playing that BCS game. We're supposed to be focused on the game we play. And the next one now is South Carolina. That's where our focus is. But we'll be players in Florida. We have strong ground game there, a lot of people participating. And because it's all proportional, this is going to be a little more arcane, a little more of a marathon than most pundits are saying, this run for the nomination.
BLOCK: I'm curious about something. Some of the other Republican candidates have been beating up on Mitt Romney in the past few days, notably for his work with Bain Capital, and how they've taken over companies, in some cases laid workers off. Ron Paul seemed to come to his defense. In fact, he said it's a little weird of me coming to Mitt Romney's defense but he says they're misunderstanding how the market works. Reorganization is a proper role. What do you think voters think about that argument?
WEAD: I don't know what they think about it but I can tell you, working for Ron Paul is quite a hoot because he is absolutely incorruptible, based on principle. And sometimes those principles will take a surprise turn. Sometimes we wish he'd be a little more political but he's just absolutely guided by the principles he believes in, mostly the Constitution. And if he saw that as a principle, even if it hurts him to talk about it, he'll talk about it. So, that's what we love about him, too, though.
BLOCK: Okay, well, Doug Wead, thanks for talking to us tonight.
WEAD: Thank you very much.
BLOCK: Doug Wead is a campaign advisor to Texas Congressman Ron Paul.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm joined now by former Senator Bob Smith, former New Hampshire senator, who is a supporter of Newt Gingrich. Welcome, Senator Smith.
BOB SMITH: Thank you. I'm glad to be with you.
BLOCK: And let me ask you. It looks like your candidate, Newt Gingrich, is coming in at this point, anyway, based on early returns, fourth in New Hampshire. A disappointing finish?
SMITH: I didn't hear you and I didn't hear the result. Could you repeat that again?
BLOCK: Yeah, it looks at this point, with early returns, like Newt Gingrich is trailing. He's, at this point, in fourth or fifth today in New Hampshire. Is that a disappointing result for you?
SMITH: Well, of course, there's no substitute for winning. I agree with (unintelligible). But, you know, look, this is â the race is not over here. It's an endurance run. We're clearly going to go to South Carolina. There will be a huge fight there. You know, I'm hoping â if those numbers are accurate â I have not seen or heard any until you just told me. I'm on the road and I'm just, you know, working my way back to the studios to do another interview. So, you know, if it is fourth, that's the way it is, or fifth, whatever it is, I, you know, obviously we wanted to win, we fought hard. We knew that this state was going to be tougher with Mitt Romney. We understand that.
But we're going to go on to South Carolina, where I think there will be a battle â somebody is going to have to be, quote/unquote, the "conservative alternative" to Mitt Romney. And we just don't know who that's going to be at this point.
BLOCK: And Newt Gingrich said today to reporters that it would be hard to keep his campaign going if he doesn't win in South Carolina. Do you agree with that?
SMITH: Well, I'm going to let him do the talking on that. I know that I'm going to do everything I can to win South Carolina and Florida. Clearly, you know, look, the game is you have to win somewhere. I mean, you can't keep losing. You have to win, so, you know, clearly, South Carolina is high stakes for him. We know that.
BLOCK: We mentioned that Congressman Gingrich has been attacking Mitt Romney for his record with Bain Capital, for that company's performance and taking over some companies, and in some cases, laying off workers. And Mr. Gingrich has come in for some criticism about that, saying he's basically attacking free markets, attacking capitalism. Do you think that issue has gained traction with voters? It doesn't seem to have done him much good in New Hampshire.
SMITH: Well, it's hard to say. I mean, the numbers were pretty much what he polls were, if those numbers were accurate tonight. You know, this issue was â really came up as a result of a third party political expenditure, if you will, a Super PAC. You know, and that's where the term predator, predator capital, you know, predatory practices, all that evolved out of that, you know, out of that ad, which Gingrich had nothing to do with. He can't, by law. And those are the Super PACs.
And it's interesting that there were not many. Where were all the criticisms of the folks in New Hampshire who were calling, you know, for several weeks, calling Newt Gingrich a, you know, unfit, unstable, and all this, a liar and all these things when, you know, Romney wasn't doing it but, you know, it was being said by surrogates. But you move on. I mean, I don't hold any grudges on this kind of stuff. It's politics, it happens. It's unfortunate. I think Newt tried very hard to stay on the issues, you know, throughout the campaign and people started attacking him and he came back.
I don't, as far as Bain, you know, I think the real issue here â no one has said this but I believe this is more about - you know, when you go to South Carolina, the average guy on the street, when you talk about leveraged buyouts and, you know, and all these kinds of terms, you know, and hedge funds and all these things, these people are trying to make a living. They're trying to, you know, feed their families. And I think that this is typical of establishment Republican politics. Yes, it's capitalism, certainly, I agree. But â and it's nothing â I don't think there's necessarily, it's evil. But, I mean, it's capitalism. But it's capitalism at the upper levels, the Wall Street levels rather than Main Street. And I think that we need to be talking to the folks on Main Street.
BLOCK: Okay, Senator Smith, thanks for being with us.
SMITH: You're welcome.
BLOCK: That's former New Hampshire Senator Bob Smith, a supporter of Newt Gingrich.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
In Indiana, Republican legislators and Governor Mitch Daniels continued their push today to make their state the 23rd Right to Work state in the country. Democrats there are working to delay the process as long as possible.
But as Indiana Public Broadcasting's Brandon Smith reports, they have few options left.
BRANDON SMITH, BYLINE: 2012 isn't the first time Republicans have tried to pass Right to Work in Indiana. Last year, pushing the bill sent House Democrats fleeing to Illinois for five weeks, halting business in the legislature and forcing Republicans to take it off the table. This time around, Democrats have stayed in Indianapolis, but off the House floor. They denied a quorum the first three days of session last week.
Minority leader, Pat Bauer, says the goal of his caucus is to buy more time for the public to study the bill.
PAT BAUER: This is such an important bill, such a controversial bill, the whole state ought to hear from it. We don't need to ram it through.
SMITH: Republicans say they've done anything but. Over the summer, a legislative study committee took 20 hours of testimony on Right to Work. And a joint House and Senate committee spent more than five hours on the bill last week. Speaking at that committee meeting, Democratic Senator Jim Arnold all but conceded defeat.
STATE SENATOR JIM ARNOLD: I truly don't believe also that any minds or any votes are going to be changed by what was said here today.
SMITH: The two sides seem entrenched. Right to Work legislation would ban union contracts that require non-union employees to pay fees for representation. Supporters say it will bring more jobs to Indiana. Opponents say it's nothing more than a union-busting bill that will create lower wages, health benefits and worsen safety conditions. And with Democrats doing their best to stall it again, Republican House Speaker Brian Bosma says this new session smacks of the movie "Groundhog Day."
BRIAN BOSMA: We will do our very best to encourage them to do what is right, which is to show up at work and do what they were elected to do, even if you disagree with what you think the result might be. Democracy is about participating, not going on strike.
SMITH: But Republicans have some added leverage this time. An anti-bolting statute was passed last session and daily $1,000 fines could be assessed on members absent three or more days straight without excuse. Bauer acknowledges the difficulty the threat of fines puts on his caucus.
BAUER: And we know we can't stay out indefinitely, but we did need to slow the process down, which we've succeeded in doing.
SMITH: Over the weekend, Democrats held public meetings around the state. And Monday, House Democrats returned to the floor, allowing the chamber to finally conduct business. But the legislative cease-fire didn't last long. Tuesday morning, Right to Work passed a House committee along party lines. The committee chairman didn't allow more public testimony or amendments to be heard, and House Democrats left the floor again. Whether they come in for session each day is in a constant state of flux.
Brian Vargus teaches political science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. He says the idea that Bauer keeps stressing is that more time will allow the public to be educated and make their voices heard. But he's not seeing any signs of that.
BRIAN VARGUS: The hearings they had around the state did not generate that much coverage and I don't know that they were attended by anybody but union members who were already involved.
SMITH: Vargus says hoping public opinion will sway enough Republicans to defeat the measure is the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. And even though Pat Bauer represents South Bend, home to the Fighting Irish, this legislative game appears to be in the final quarter and it looks like there's little to stop Right to Work from becoming law in the coming weeks.
For NPR News, I'm Brandon Smith, from Indianapolis.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. This year's Detroit Auto Show could set the stage for a shake-up in the luxury car scene, which is fiercely competitive and hugely profitable. There's a new kid on the block from Cadillac. The company says its small, high-performance car, the ATS, can compete head to head for the first time with Audi, Mercedes-Benz and BMW. Tracy Samilton of Michigan radio has that story.
TRACY SAMILTON, BYLINE: It's grueling, getting a brand-new small luxury car like the ATS ready. So you take it on the toughest testing track in the world, the Nurburgring in Germany. Chris Berube's driving around GM's slightly more mundane test track in Milford, Michigan today. But he's been on the Nurburgring a lot recently.
CHRIS BERUBE: It's treacherous. It's been defined as infamous.
SAMILTON: Berube is lead development engineer for the ATS. He says performance is the price of admission for this kind of car. Sometimes exceeding 150 mph, only the best drivers in the auto industry are permitted onto the Nurburgring.
BERUBE: So, you're operating the vehicle at very high speeds, very high lateral accelerations, and the guardrail is 2 feet off the pavement. So mistakes are costly.
SAMILTON: And then there's those three places on the track where the car goes completely airborne. Engineers call that full compression, better known as wham. If luxury-car makers like BMW are worried at all, they're not showing it. BMW is unveiling its new 3 Series at the Detroit Auto Show this year. The 3 Series is a direct competitor to the ATS. BMW's North American president, Ludwig Willisch, is at the automaker's auto show lounge where waiters are serving espresso.
LUDWIG WILLISCH: We take every competitor serious.
SAMILTON: On the other hand...
WILLISCH: I'm quite relaxed.
SAMILTON: That's because competitors have been trying and failing to take down BMW for decades.
WILLISCH: Obviously, we're the leader in that segment for years, so we are very authentic with the car. We have a very sharp profile, because it is the ultimate driving machine.
SAMILTON: But after Nurburgring, GM is pretty confident the ATS has a, quote, "silk glove" refinement that the competition just doesn't have. Aaron Bragman is an analyst with IHS Automotive. He's seen the car, but he hasn't driven it yet.
AARON BRAGMAN: It basically is meant to go head to head with the best offerings from the German automakers. And, on paper at least, it seems that they've accomplished that.
SAMILTON: Bragman says there's potential for the car to do well in the U.S. and a lot of potential for it to do well in China, the world's largest and fastest-growing car market. But he's doubts the ATS can compete in Europe, BMW's home turf. GM global marketing head, Joel Ewanick, says the company is serious about being one of the top global players for luxury cars.
He insists selling Cadillac in Europe can and will happen, some day.
JOEL EWANICK: Well, I'm not going to say it's going to be easy. I mean, no one's ever said it's going to be easy.
SAMILTON: Easy or not, the stakes are high for General Motors. The company an awful lot riding on this one vehicle. Luxury cars like the ATS bring in more profit per car, much more than GM's small economy models like the Chevy Cruze. Not surprising, given that the Cruze costs around $17,000 and the ATS will likely cost at least twice that. Meanwhile, don't expect Cadillac's competitors to worry all that much before the ATS arrives in dealerships this summer.
For NPR News, I'm Tracy Samilton.
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And I'm Melissa Block.
U.S. relations with Pakistan are nearly frozen. And to make matters worse, relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai are getting frosty again. Over the weekend, Karzai surprised Americans, demanding that the largest U.S.-run prison be turned over to Afghan control sooner than planned.
As NPR's Quil Lawrence reports, this is the latest in a series of announcements by the Afghan government - moves that appear designed to embarrass and annoy U.S. officials and to complicate American plans to withdraw from Afghanistan.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: A special commission named by President Karzai gave a news conference over the weekend at the Government Media and Information Center. The multi-million dollar facility was built by U.S. government donations, but it's become the venue for increasingly anti-American announcements by the Karzai administration.
It was here last month that Afghan officials condemned Americans for causing civilian casualties in the war against the Taliban, without mentioning that 80 percent of such deaths are caused by insurgents, according the United Nations. The U.S. Embassy pulled out its team of advisors from the media center the same day.
Most recently, the topic was prisons.
GUL RAHMAN QAZI: (Foreign language spoken)
LAWRENCE: Gul Rahman Qazi read a list of prisoners' complaints about ill-treatment in the largest U.S.-run prison in Afghanistan. Americans say they're taking the allegations seriously, but U.N. monitors say conditions in the American prison are not nearly as bad as in most Afghan facilities.
The prison had been slated for transfer to Afghan control this year in any case, but President Karzai has demanded it be turned over this month. It's not clear whether that's possible, but the sudden announcement took the American Embassy by surprise.
That was intentional, says Afghan political analyst Omar Sharifi.
DR. OMAR SHARIFI: First, he has to show his anger and that's one of the ways to show his anger. And, on the other hand, it also sends a message that it's impossible to have anything meaningful without the Afghan government.
LAWRENCE: Karzai is angry, Sharifi says, because he feels that the Americans are trying to by-pass him on a number of issues, especially in efforts to start peace talks with the Taliban. American officials have been meeting with Taliban figures over the past year. And last month, they secured an offer from Qatar to open up a Taliban office, where preliminary negotiations can begin. But the Taliban have, for years, ruled out talks with Karzai, who they see as illegitimate.
When news of the Qatar office leaked, Karzai withdrew the Afghan ambassador in Qatar. A few days later, Karzai relented. But observers say he's still feeling angry and out of the loop.
Many recent announcements by Kabul have been in retaliation, says Sharifi. But Karzai is also in the process of negotiating a strategic partnership deal with Washington, which may involve long-term U.S. military bases here. Karzai needs to show the Afghan public that he's not a yes-man for the Americans, says Sharifi.
SHARIFI: He wants to establish his credentials as a guy who is tough to negotiate and also who's capable of delivering. Now, about the delivering part, we have to wait and see.
LAWRENCE: Karzai's tough demands are popular with most Afghans, but it's dangerous for him to keep making them because it makes him look weak when the U.S. doesn't comply, according to Kate Clark, of Afghan Analysts Network in Kabul.
KATE CLARK: The Americans have basically up to now put pretty well all their eggs in the Karzai basket. And Karzai needs the Americans to survive. Most Afghans don't think he'd survive a day without American forces and American money. So, in a way, they're in bed together. And, you know, both partners irritate the other occasionally. But it's like - it's sort of like a dysfunctional marriage where neither side feels it can walk out.
LAWRENCE: The American initiative for negotiations with the Taliban may be the first step outside that marriage. And Clark says President Karzai is making clear his irritation and his fear of being abandoned.
Quil Lawrence, NPR News, Kabul.
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Computer chips and technology are invading all sorts of previously dumb devices. Phones are now smart. Cars are becoming connected computers on wheels. Call it the computerization of everything. As NPR's Steve Henn reports, how we interact with these machines is evolving too.
STEVE HENN, BYLINE: At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, touch pads are everywhere: in phones, in tablets, laptop screens. And Brad Feld has had enough.
The whole idea that it's, you know, socially acceptable or functionally acceptable to have a whole mass of humanity that's staring down at a tiny piece of glass and pounding on it with their thumbs is kind of absurd.
Feld's a venture capitalist at the Foundry Group. His firm's investing aggressively in start-ups that are creating new ways for humans and computers to interact.
BRAD FELD: Twenty years from now, the way we interact with computing will be unrecognizable to us today.
HENN: But judging from the displays at CES, the touch pad craze hasn't crested yet. Just inside Microsoft's enormous booth here, there's a giant touch pad the size of a tabletop.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
HENN: It looks like the love child of an iPad and a flat-screen TV, but...
STEVE CLAYTON: It's a bit different to that.
HENN: Steve Clayton is from Microsoft. Clayton says this table doesn't just respond to touch. It's actually watching us, paying attention to where we are, where we're standing.
CLAYTON: If I click on one of these images or I tap on one, the image rotates to me, and that's because this surface, this device can see. It can see the orientation of my finger, and it can present the image towards me.
HENN: More and more computers are doing just that: paying attention, watching and listening to us. Microsoft's Kinect responds to gestures. Apple's Siri listens to our voices. And observant little machines are popping up in places you might not expect.
MATT RODGERS: So Nest is the first learning thermostat.
HENN: That's right, a learning thermostat. Matt Rodgers is a founder at Nest. His little thermostat observes patterns in your house, then programs itself.
RODGERS: So you use it just like you use a normal, you know, nonprogrammable thermostat. Turn it up and turn it down and make yourself comfortable, and Nest will learn your patterns.
HENN: If you turn up your heat and then leave the house, Nest has sensors that will notice you're out and turn the heat down. You end up programming the computer inside this thermostat without even realizing you've done it. And John Underkoffler envisions a day where machines all around us respond to how we move and what we want.
JOHN UNDERKOFFLER: That all of this stuff really is, in a sense, my life's work, at least my adult life's work.
HENN: Underkoffler is best known as the brains behind the futuristic computers in Steven Spielberg's film "Minority Report."
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "MINORITY REPORT")
HENN: Spielberg didn't want Tom Cruise to mess around with keyboards or touch screens in a film set in the future.
UNDERKOFFLER: When I proposed to Steven that it could be a gestural interface, that it would be body centered - human centered - and that you could literally point at the screens and command the pixels and sift data using your hands at a distance, I think Steven loved that idea.
HENN: So Cruise stands in front of a screen and conducts his computer like Mickey Mouse in "Fantasia."
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "MINORITY REPORT")
HENN: Underkoffler built a working model at MIT. After the movie, he refined it and started a company called Oblong. For now, the full Oblong system can cost up to half a million dollars, but eventually, he hopes it will control all sorts of common machines.
UNDERKOFFLER: Obvious computers like laptops and desktops, but also computers that you don't think about: the front of your microwave oven, the dashboard of your car, the TV set in your living room.
HENN: And Oblong executives at CES this week say they see more and more signs this transformation is on the way. Steve Henn, NPR News, Las Vegas.
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Finally, this hour, a story that's making us feel quite small. Astronomers using telescopes in Chile have found the largest distant galaxy cluster ever seen. It's nicknamed El Gordo or The Fat One in Spanish. Just how large is it?
It's two with 15 zeros following it in solar masses.
In solar masses. That's Felipe Menanteau of Rutgers University, who led the study that discovered the cluster. And help us understand the size of this galaxy cluster. What is the meaning of that number?
FELIPE MENANTEAU: Well, it's a really, really big number, but what is actually interesting is it is the most massive cluster seen ever in the distant universe. And, you know, there's something neat about being the most massive because, you know, you win the contest right away. But it also - it's giving us an independent way of measuring the current cosmological model in terms of the amount of dark matter and dark energy that makes our universe.
BLOCK: So when you think about this discovery of the largest distant galaxy close to El Gordo that you've found, how does that play into answering some of the big questions that are still out there about the universe, the origin of the universe?
MENANTEAU: Well, one of the remaining questions is the question about the origins and where is everything is coming from, and that's something that cosmology and astronomy are trying to do. So finding El Gordo is confirming our picture of how the universe formed and what is the content in terms of dark energy and dark matter. So what we're doing is that we're actually putting a point there where at - in the very early universe where we believe the structures were formed.
BLOCK: And when we talk about a galaxy cluster, what does that mean? What's happening?
MENANTEAU: So a galaxy cluster is a bunch of galaxies together held by gravity. What I mean of a bunch, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of galaxies. And these are the largest bound structures in the universe, bound by gravity. And these are the densest places of the universe. So clusters of galaxies are interesting for two reasons. One is that we can use them as a signpost in our road for testing the growth of structure of the universe. Another reason why they're so interesting is that, as we're seeing in El Gordo, they're amazing laboratory for astrophysics.
So in El Gordo, we're also seeing emerging clusters. And not long ago, those were two independent very massive clusters that merged and we - actually, we caught them in the act of merging, of crashing against each other.
BLOCK: You caught them as they were colliding.
MENANTEAU: Exactly. We don't know exactly how long ago in terms of in astronomical - in astronomical time, it was very recent. It really looks like a comet. And what we're really seeing is that the hot gas that has been actually stripped from one cluster into the other as one actually cluster is passing through the other.
BLOCK: So El Gordo is something like seven billion light-years away. Catchy name, El Gordo.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: How did that - did you come up with that?
MENANTEAU: Well, we knew that we have found something unique and extraordinary. I mean, there might be less than a handful of clusters like this in the whole universe, and we wanted to give it a name so people will remember it because in human life, being massive is not something that you're proud of. You're actually always trying to go in the other direction. So we decided to call it El Gordo in order to honor the Chilean connection. And, you know, we were able to get away with calling somebody fat without nobody being offended.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: Nobody would - nobody will mind seven billion light-years away.
MENANTEAU: I hope so. And, you know, yeah, yeah, we're not going to hear the shouts from here.
BLOCK: I've been talking with astrophysicist Felipe Menanteau of Rutgers University. He led the study that discovered El Gordo, which is the largest distant galaxy cluster ever seen. Thank you so much.
MENANTEAU: Thank you. It was my pleasure.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GALAXY SONG")
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Pope Benedict XVI is headed to Latin America in March. And Vatican officials have announced his travel plans: a visit to Mexico, where nearly 100 million Catholics live, and a less obvious choice; communist-run Cuba. The 84-year-old pope does not travel often. And as Nick Miroff reports from Havana, his visit will be a strong show of support for Cuban church leaders who are pushing for change.
NICK MIROFF, BYLINE: More than anywhere else in Cuba, the Santa Rita Church in Havana's Miramar District is the place where religion and politics intersect.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHOIR HYMN)
MIROFF: Every Sunday after Mass, a few dozen activists known as the Ladies in White march along the street outside in the only act of public protest tolerated by the Castro government.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD)
MIROFF: The origins of Pope Benedict's upcoming trip to Cuba can partly be traced back to here and the spring of 2010 when government-organized mobs attacked the women outside the church as foreign television cameras rolled. Cuba's church leaders intervened. And in the dialogue with Raul Castro that followed, more than 100 jailed dissidents were freed, including all the Cuban inmates considered prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International.
The women's weekly protests and calls for freedom continue today with the church's protection.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHANTING)
MIROFF: Under Raul Castro, Cuba's Catholic Church has recovered a degree of prominence it hasn't had in 50 years. Castro said the island will welcome Benedict with affection and respect, announcing he would pardon nearly 3,000 more prisoners in advance of the pope's visit.
PRESIDENT RAUL CASTRO: (Foreign language spoken)
MIROFF: This is a demonstration of the strength and generosity of the Cuban revolution, Castro said in a December 23rd speech to Cuba's parliament.
The stated purpose of Benedict's trip is the 400-year anniversary of Cuba's patron saint, La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. But the visit will also give the Vatican's blessing to this emerging church-state relationship. Orlando Marquez is the spokesman for the Havana Archdiocese.
ORLANDO MARQUEZ: The church has always expressed its support to the changes that are taking place in the country. And the church, what it is saying is that those changes are good. Those are the changes that people want. Those changes must continue. And the Holy See knows that. I think that he also is coming to be together with the church in Cuba, with the Cuban bishops, in this process that we are living right now.
MIROFF: Pope Benedict's visit comes 14 years after his predecessor John Paul II's historic trip to Havana when he met with Fidel Castro and famously urged Cuba to open to the world and for the world to open to Cuba. Today, the island's diplomatic ties to much of the world are stronger, and Cuba receives record numbers of tourists and Cuban-Americans. But relations with the U.S. remain stuck and the 50-year-old trade embargo is still firmly in place.
Roberto Veiga is the editor of Lay Space, a church-published journal that has become a leading forum for economic and political debate on an island where almost all other forms of media are controlled by the state. He says Cuba will continue opening up more, but on its own terms.
ROBERTO VEIGA: (Foreign language spoken)
MIROFF: The world can guide Cuba and help Cuba along in its transformation. Those who will decide and influence the process directly are Cubans, Veiga said. That includes Cubans on the island and those abroad, but it will be for Cubans to determine.
That has also been the Church's message, as it encourages reconciliation among Cubans and Cuban exiles. With the pope planning to celebrate mass in the public plazas of Havana and Santiago de Cuba, thousands of Cuban-Americans and other U.S. residents may travel back to the island to be there. For NPR News, I'm Nick Miroff in Havana
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And I'm Melissa Block. Another Iranian nuclear scientist was killed today in an explosion while driving his car. It's the fifth such death in five years, and Iranian officials immediately blamed Israel. It's also the latest sign of escalating tensions between Iran and the West. From Istanbul, NPR's Peter Kenyon looks at whether relations can only get worse or if there's still time for diplomacy.
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: Television footage showed the street where engineer Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan's life ended, in much the same manner as other nuclear scientists before him, in Tehran's rush-hour traffic. Eyewitnesses told Iranian media that a motorcycle pulled up alongside Roshan's car and a man attached a magnetic bomb before speeding away. There was no claim of responsibility, but officials called it the work of the Zionists, Iran's term for Israel.
It was impossible to say if they were aware of remarks made Tuesday to an Israeli parliamentary by Lieutenant General Benny Gantz. Gantz predicted that 2012 would be a year in which Iran experiences increased international pressure, including, in his words, events that happen unnaturally. Nuclear analyst David Albright at the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, speaking before the latest assassination, said Tehran must be feeling the pressure financially, diplomatically, and from covert operations.
DAVID ALBRIGHT: It knows that some of its scientists are under threat by assassination. There's been cyberattacks. There's efforts to get Iranians to defect. And we've called it kind of a third way. All those things are continuing, and that's added to the pressure.
KENYON: This is the latest in a series of increasingly belligerent signals between Tehran and Western capitals. The American and European drumbeat for ever more painful sanctions has been greeted by Iranian war games, missile tests and threats to close the vital oil shipping lanes of the Straits of Hormuz. U.S. and British warships have since raised their profiles in the Persian Gulf.
Most analysts agree that there's a built-in disincentive for Iran to try to block the Straits, the fact that it would also choke off Iran's own oil exports. But Columbia University Middle East expert Gary Sick, says there is one circumstance under which Iran might take such a drastic step: if Western sanctions against the Iranian central bank are implemented, because that would mean Iran could no longer get paid for its crude.
GARY SICK: Iran has indicated quite clearly - and I'm not sure this has been understood in the West. They've indicated that if they are no long able to sell their oil, they will regard that as a blockade or an act of war, even though it's done through the banks. In that event, they have said they're not going to just sit on their hands.
KENYON: Much of the hostility can be traced to Western fears that Iran's nuclear program includes a drive for weapons capability, which Tehran denies. Iran's announcement that uranium enrichment has begun in a hardened underground site called Fordo, near the holy city of Qom, hasn't helped matters.
Analyst Mark Fitzpatrick at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London says the most troubling aspect of the move is Iran's current emphasis on enriching uranium to 20 percent, which is closer to weapons-grade. But he also notes that amid all the saber-rattling, Iran has offered to resume nuclear talks with six world powers. No date has been announced, and Fitzpatrick says he's pessimistic about a breakthrough anytime soon. But there may be a diplomatic component to Tehran's insistence on enriching to 20 percent.
MARK FITZPATRICK: Iran may feel that it's strengthening its hand in any upcoming negotiations by making more valuable this card of a willingness to stop producing 20 percent enriched uranium. It's probably equivalent to the Western view that by ratcheting up sanctions the West strengthens its hand, because it's a sanction that could be later withdrawn in negotiations.
KENYON: Analyst Gary Sick says a deal that sees Iran agreeing to stop its 20 percent enrichment may be the only plausible avenue for a diplomatic success in the near future. Whether that's possible in the current climate, and if it is, whether that would ease the current tensions, are among the questions now being debated in Tehran and Washington. Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Istanbul.
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We just heard about why Iran might want to close the Strait of Hormuz. Now, NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman looks at whether or not they could actually pull it off and how.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: First, things first. Can Iran close the world's most important oil route?
GENERAL MARTIN DEMPSEY: The simple answer is, yes, they can block it.
BOWMAN: That's General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on CBS's "Face the Nation."
DEMPSEY: They've invested in capabilities that could, in fact, for a period of time block the Strait of Hormuz.
BOWMAN: Capabilities that play to Iran's strengths since its ships and aircraft are no match for the American military. One tactic: Iran could lay mines.
MICHAEL CONNELL: Mines are sort of a poor man's navy. I mean, anybody can buy mines.
BOWMAN: That's Michael Connell. He runs the Iranian studies program at the Center for Naval Analyses, a Washington think tank.
CONNELL: Mines, you know, they are tricky things. If you just throw a few in the water, it makes things complex because then you have to go out and sweep for them and make sure the channels are clear before you start sending vessels through.
BOWMAN: Meaning mines are a cheap and easy way to wreak havoc.
NORMAN POLMAR: It would close the strait.
BOWMAN: Norman Polmar writes on U.S. and foreign navies.
POLMAR: For how long, that's the big question. It might be a day. It might be a week. It might be a couple of weeks.
BOWMAN: Iran has never laid mines at the Strait of Hormuz, but it has placed mines inside the Persian Gulf. During its war with Iraq in the 1980s, a U.S. Navy ship hit a mine and was damaged. The U.S. responded by attacking Iranian aircraft and ships. The U.S. has several options if Iran tries to close the Strait of Hormuz now.
ADMIRAL TIM KEATING: You know, laying mines is an act of war, so it would be up to our nation's leaders to determine just how aggressive our response would be.
BOWMAN: That's retired Admiral Tim Keating, who commanded the U.S. 5th Fleet in Bahrain during the run-up to the Iraq war. He says the best way to defeat mines is to find the mines and identify the mine layers.
KEATING: We'd likely know immediately, if not very shortly thereafter, which ships were doing it, where they were coming from, where they're going back to.
BOWMAN: The surveillance includes sophisticated drone aircraft and a sophisticated mammal.
KEATING: We've got dolphins. And how lovable is Flipper? But they are astounding in their ability to detect underwater objects.
BOWMAN: Dolphins were sent to the Persian Gulf as part of the American invasion force in Iraq.
KEATING: I'd rather not talk about whether we used them or not. They were present in theater.
BOWMAN: But you can't say whether you used them or not.
KEATING: I'd rather not.
BOWMAN: Mines might be the cheapest way for the Iranians to close the strait. Another possibility says Norman Polmar, the naval expert, Iran's fast boats, its small and lethal naval vessels. These boats have emerged as a key weapon for the Iranians. During war games, they have developed dozens of them in the Persian Gulf, mounting mock attacks on target ships. Again, Admiral Keating.
KEATING: Fifty of anything coming at you is a bit of a challenge.
BOWMAN: And last year there were reports that the Iranians upgraded the boats, possibly with better torpedoes. Still, Iran may not have to disable an oil tanker, let alone close the Strait of Hormuz, to hurt the United States. Just by talking tough, Iran can drive up the cost of oil. Tom Bowman, NPR News, Washington.
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Nigeria is grappling with a combination of protests and deadly violence. A group of Islamic extremists has been bombing churches, and there's mounting anger over a dramatic rise in the price of gasoline. A nationwide strike began on Monday, paralyzing the country and putting pressure on the president.
NICK MIROFF, BYLINE: NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton reports.
OFEIBEA QUIST-ARCTON, BYLINE: Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation and the continent's top crude oil exporter. But Goodluck Jonathan is facing the most sustained challenge to his presidency. Earlier today, Boko Haram, the anti-Western and anti-government Islamist sect claiming responsibility for a series of deadly attacks on mainly Christian targets since Christmas, released a video. The man regarded as the group's leader, Abubakar Shekau, tried to justify the killings, adding...
ABUBAKAR SHEKAU: (Through Translator) We are ready to negotiate if that is in line with how God says it should be done. But we will not negotiate on the terms of infidels.
QUIST-ARCTON: Cold comfort for President Jonathan. Shekau says the attacks on churches are retribution for the killing of Muslims. He warns that the police and the army are no match for Boko Haram militants, who want Islamic law imposed in largely Muslim northern Nigeria. Nigerians from both the Christian and Muslim communities are living in fear as tension and violence increase. Five people were killed in an attack on a mosque and Islamic school this week. Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor heads the Christian Association of Nigeria.
AYO ORITSEJAFOR: We are saddened by everything that is happening. Our people are being killed like animals. We are saying to Muslims, our Muslim friends and brothers, co-owners of Nigeria, please, let us work together, show us that we are one. We can't continue to pay the price. Join us.
QUIST-ARCTON: President Jonathan also has big problems with the labor unions and Nigerians who accuse their leaders of corruption and living fat on the country's oil revenues, while the people remain poor. Today marks day three of a crippling strike after the president announced the scrapping of what he says are unsustainable fuel subsidies. The pump price for gas immediately doubled. President Jonathan...
PRESIDENT GOODLUCK JONATHAN: (Through Translator) I assure all Nigerians that I feel the pain and share the anguish that you all feel. I personally feel the pain to see the sharp increase in transport fares and the prices of goods and services.
QUIST-ARCTON: His apparent empathy simply enraged Nigerians.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing in foreign language)
QUIST-ARCTON: Tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets this week, vowing to force the president to reverse his decision. As he struggles to defuse Nigeria's parallel crises, there's worrying talk that West Africa's most powerful nation may be heading for a breakup or another civil war, prompting calls for dialogue and reconciliation. Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, NPR News, Accra.
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Musician David Was is not sitting by his radio or his television eagerly awaiting primary results this election season. Instead, he's been turning to a particular genre of music as a refuge from the political cacophony.
DAVID WAS, BYLINE: The next 40-some weeks or so are going to be a screaming tower of political babble, a cacophony of accusing and boasting, pandering and slandering. I watch the news these days with the mute button permanently depressed, lest I fall into a permanent depression myself. There's only so much contention and vitriol a sensitive soul can bear.
Fortunately, I've developed a sonic antidote to the nerve-rattling chorus of pundits and office-seekers - a cappella music, human voices singing solo melodies or merged in harmony. Best of all, they rarely sing about downbeat temporal matters like unemployment, budget deficits or gun control. In fact, a cappella literally means from the chapel in Italian, and refers to its roots in early religious music.
I, personally, favor the Gregorian chants of the medieval era, which hit the top of the "Billboard" New Age charts in the ninth century or so.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WAS: By the 14th century, vocal music took a turn for the secular, as composers like Guillaume de Machaut wrote paeans to courtly love by night, while penning liturgical music to pay the bills by day. I like to think of him as a pre-blues-era Robert Johnson, torn between singing Satan's songs or walking the narrower musical path to salvation. Johnson chose the blues over gospel, while Machaut worked both sides of the aisle, excuse the pun.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WAS: Lo these many centuries later, a cappella music is alive and well, whether on TV's "Glee" or in pop music, courtesy of groups like Take 6.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WAS: Or with musically mischievous college ensembles doing their spot-on re-creations of songs like Michael Jackson's "Human Nature."
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WAS: So here's the prescription for election year sensory overload - silence the devil television and turn up the angelic strains of human voices united in harmony. As it turns out, we can all get along.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BLOCK: Musician David Was lives in Los Angeles.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. Fresh out of New Hampshire, one by one, the Republican presidential candidates landed today in South Carolina. It holds the next primary January 21st, and it's the first Southern state to vote. Mitt Romney got off to an enthusiastic start, speaking to supporters in the capitol, Columbia.
MITT ROMNEY: It's so warm outside. This is different than New Hampshire. I got to tell you, it's going to be great campaigning in the Palmetto State. What an honor...
CORNISH: Mitt Romney is the man to beat, so NPR's Brian Naylor has been paying close attention to how Romney's challengers spent the day in South Carolina. Hello, Brian.
BRIAN NAYLOR, BYLINE: Hi, Audie.
CORNISH: So, you were at a Jon Huntsman event today. And he, of course, finished third last night in New Hampshire. He went all out. He's pretty much out of money. What's next for Huntsman?
NAYLOR: It's not clear, Audie, exactly what he hopes to accomplish here in South Carolina. As you mentioned, he's got no money to speak of, no organization in the state to speak of, but he intends to continue to campaign. He appeared at a rally, at a more of a classroom lecture setting at the University of South Carolina's business school, talking about his message of restoring trust in government. You know, he hopes to get the so-called earned or free media from appearances before cameras and hopes to get on the news.
He said today that South Carolina voters don't want to be told by the establishment what to do. I think by the establishment he means, presumably, South Carolina's governor, Nikki Haley, who endorsed Mitt Romney. And I think he, you know, intends to hang in here at least through South Carolina, by all accounts, as a possible alternative to Mitt Romney.
CORNISH: What did you see today from the second place finisher from New Hampshire, Ron Paul?
NAYLOR: Well, another enthusiastic rally at an airport hangar. I've been to a couple of these. This one wasn't quite as filled as an earlier hangar appearance in New Hampshire, but still, there were a lot of enthusiastic banner-holding supporters. He, you know, got a pretty good reception, a lot of enthusiasm as you can hear in this little tape bite.
RON PAUL: We thought we had sent out a pretty positive message out of Iowa. I think we sent out a pretty positive message last night out of New Hampshire. And I think South Carolina is next on the list.
NAYLOR: So, he intends to soldier on with his smaller government rhetoric, which is popular and will likely go over well in South Carolina. But he also talks, you know, about bringing troops home from bases overseas and that may be a tougher sell in South Carolina, frankly, because there are a lot of bases here. There's a large military presence and it's not clear whether that part of his message is going to go over well.
CORNISH: What about in terms of resources? How positioned is Ron Paul for the next round of primaries?
NAYLOR: Well, I think he's got money. There have been ads on TV from his campaign and also from a Super PAC supporting him. So he'll be able to get his message out. He's got an organization here, probably not as extensive as the one he had in Iowa or New Hampshire. And then, from South Carolina, it's a little unclear. There's been talk that he may skip Florida, which is the next primary at the end of the month, and move on to later primaries because Florida is such an expensive media market.
And he may go to places - focus on places like Nevada, where presumably they're more receptive to his libertarian appeal.
CORNISH: Brian, now that you've spent some time in South Carolina, what do you see there when you turn on your TV, lots of ads?
NAYLOR: Lots and lots and lots of ads. There's been talk of different campaigns and Super PACs spending millions of dollars and buying thousands of TV ads. And it's already starting to show up some ten days in advance of the primary here. This is one ad I've seen a lot of. It's from the campaign of Newt Gingrich and it takes direct aim at Mitt Romney and his differing positions on abortion. Here's a little of that ad.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL COMMERCIAL)
NAYLOR: And what's most interesting, Audie, is that ad is directly from the Gingrich campaign and most campaigns don't like to do negative ads.
CORNISH: NPR's Brian Naylor, speaking with us from Columbia, South Carolina. Thanks, Brian.
NAYLOR: Thank you, Audie.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
To get an insider's perspective now on the race for the Republican presidential nomination in South Carolina, we turn to Chad Connelly. He's the state's GOP chairman. Connelly told me today he's not good at making predictions, but South Carolina voters are.
CHAD CONNELLY: I think this really comes down, when you look historically, Melissa, at South Carolina, we really do pick presidents. We've got a 30-year track record of picking the eventual nominee. And right now, there's no question, Governor Romney has a head of steam. He has all the momentum, but there's some other campaigns and candidates that have been working really hard here. And South Carolina voters are fickle. They're particular. They want to make that decision themselves.
And I really believe with all my heart, having watched this most of my adult life, whoever goes out, meets people, connects with the voters and creates a buzz out in the communities and the churches and at the kids' ball games, that's who's going to win this thing.
BLOCK: Will you expect to hear, say, a more explicitly religious values message from Mitt Romney there in South Carolina than voters heard in New Hampshire?
CONNELLY: You know, I think here it is kind of expected, that people want to know a little bit about your faith and are you true to your faith, that kind of thing. But, you know, I really do think the whole Mormonism issue, if that's where you're headed, is kind of overblown because as a Christian myself, I can tell you, people aren't that worried about the religion as much as the relationship. They're concerned about your relationship to Christ and how you apply that religion isn't as important to them.
But having a faith matters and having a character matters and people do expect that out of candidates.
BLOCK: I did hear some of that concern voiced on my last trip to South Carolina, where there were some conservative voters who said, look, I do not believe that Mormonism represents a true Christian faith and that will come back to hurt Mitt Romney here.
CONNELLY: Well, you know, four years ago, Bob Jones himself endorsed Mitt Romney. The public perception of Dr. Jones was, boy, he's a hard-line fundamentalist Baptist and there's no way that he'll ever accept a Mormon. And that was kind of the narrative, the message that went out. And when Dr. Jones endorsed him, all that kind of went away because he said himself, I'm not looking for a guy who's theologically perfect. I'm looking for a guy who can run the country. And so I really think that's an overblown story, to be honest with you.
BLOCK: I want to ask you, Mr. Connelly, about the role and the influence of the Tea Party in South Carolina. Your governor, Nikki Haley, endorsed Mitt Romney and in the process, she enraged a lot of her Tea Party supporters who helped her get elected in the first place. There's been a backlash against her. Do you think that will become a factor in this primary?
CONNELLY: We're in the middle of a primary and I think it's expected - I've got Tea Party buddies. I've got Republican - people would call them establishment. They've been around the party a long time. And I have Republican Party activist buddies. I have independent buddies. And they work for or they're helping put up signs for all six different camps. So again, this is one of those national messages that I think has really been distorted and overblown. I don't find it to be true at all.
BLOCK: Are you concerned about the sharpened attacks within the Republican field? We have Rick Perry now comparing a company like Bain Capital, Mitt Romney's private equity company, comparing them to vultures swooping in and feasting on a carcass. You know, executives making really handsome profits and having workers lose their jobs, including there in South Carolina. Do you worry about the effects of this bitter campaign on the Republican field?
CONNELLY: I really don't. I think that the primary process is a time-honored situation that it makes our candidates tougher. I think that works for both sides. I think people are used to it. It gets to be a down and dirty fight. And in the end, they come together to work against somebody like Obama.
BLOCK: A down and dirty fight, you mentioned. South Carolina does have a history of very ugly politics, vicious smears.
CONNELLY: Oh, yeah.
BLOCK: Expect more of the same?
CONNELLY: You know, I think that's the way it goes every four years. I don't care if you're wearing a Democratic uniform or a Republican uniform; we've certainly got that reputation. All I know is it didn't start with me. It ain't my fault kind of deal.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CONNELLY: But it is that we surely have that reputation here of the sharp elbows and the backyard brawls. So, I would anticipate this will be more of the same.
But I got to tell you, I think it's been tame so far. I mean, you know, we've seen nasty whisper campaigns. We've seen nasty mailers. And I really haven't seen much of that this time around. And I know the TV ads are really cranking up. We'll see what the campaigns pop out and the Super PACs pop out. But in times past, I can name places where it seemed to be a lot worse.
BLOCK: Well, you've still got 10 days ago.
CONNELLY: That's right. We're excited to be the center of the political universe and I knew this would happen. You know, you can just kind of see it coming down to South Carolina.
BLOCK: I've been talking with Chad Connelly, the chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party. Mr. Connelly, thanks so much.
CONNELLY: Thank you, Melissa. Have a wonderful day and come to Myrtle Beach for our debate next Monday.
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It's time for your letters and a correction. Yesterday, we reported that 70 percent of Oklahomans passed an amendment to their state constitution barring courts from the recognizing Sharia Law. What we meant to say was 70 percent of voters in Oklahoma passed that amendment. Our mistake.
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Last week, we brought you news of a California woman who's suing the automaker Honda in small claims court. Heather Peters, of Los Angeles, says her 2006 Civic Hybrid falls far short of the 50 miles per gallon promised by the car dealer. So she's asking for $10,000. Our story also mentioned that the automaker faces a class-action suit brought by other similarly disgruntled Civic Hybrid owners.
CORNISH: Well, listener Robert Godley(ph) of Lothian, Maryland, also owns the 2006 Civic Hybrid and he felt compelled to write in. After logging 147,000 miles, he says, he's pleased to report that his hybrid has consistently averaged the promised 50 miles per gallon, and at times even better.
BLOCK: He writes this: I once drove from Lynchburg, Virginia to Oswego, New York on a single 12 gallon tank of gas - a rate better than 56 miles per gallon, over mountains and at interstate speeds. Like those suing Honda, Godley did notice a drop in performance after a system upgrade. But he still calls the car one of the best investments he's ever made.
CORNISH: On Monday's program, we spoke about the snowy owl. Typically at home in the Arctic tundra, it has been increasingly spotted in the Lower 48. Jim McCormac, a biologist with the Ohio Division of Wildlife, told us the reason is believed to be a superabundance of lemmings in the Arctic, a staple of the snowy owl's diet.
JIM MCCORMAC: There are so many lemmings that the owls in a response will lay more eggs, so there's a lot more young owls. And so, there's not enough food to get through the winter, so a lot of them come south.
CORNISH: And with a wing span up to five feet, a snowy owl can be a pretty impressive sight.
MCCORMAC: I mean, just imagine if you're a kid and you're into "Harry Potter," now you get to see Hedwig in the flesh, sitting out in the field. People who really don't even have that much interest in birds are going ape over these things.
(SOUNDBITE OF "HARRY POTTER" THEME)
BLOCK: Well, Lizabeth Ewing(ph) of Bloomington, Indiana, heard that interview on her commute home. And about 30 minutes later, she writes: The coolest thing happened as I was exiting the highway to head home. A large snowy owl swooped in front of my car within a couple of feet of my windshield. Talk about perfect timing.
CORNISH: Thanks for sharing and keep the letters coming. Just go to NPR.org and click on Contact Us at the bottom of the page.
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Hostess Brand, the maker of Twinkies, Wonder Bread, and other legendary food items, has filed for bankruptcy. The company says it needs to restructure if it's going to stay alive.
As NPR's Larry Abramson reports, Hostess is struggling to keep up with changing tastes and labor problems.
LARRY ABRAMSON, BYLINE: This is actually the second time that Hostess Brands has gone to bankruptcy court. If the judge approves this restructuring plan, Hostess says it's gotten a commitment of $75 million in financing from Silver Point Capital to keep the company going. It's a dramatic fall for a household name.
MITCH PINHEIRO: Hostess used to be - and Wonder - used to be the largest bread company in the United States at one point.
ABRAMSON: Mitch Pinheiro is an analyst with Janney Montgomery Scott. Hostess has slipped from that lofty perch to number four in the bread biz. It's still a big player, with a 10 percent share. But Pinheiro says even that slice of the market is at risk because the company is losing ground to competitors that are, well, less white bread.
PINHEIRO: Hostess missed the move by consumers from white bread to your better-for-you breads.
ABRAMSON: Hostess tried to beef up the Wonder Bread's reputation by fortifying it and by coming out with a whole-grain bread, but the slow erosion of market share continues. People in this country still need a lot of bread for sandwiches. But Harry Balzer, with the NPD Group, says mom just isn't as likely to slap a piece of Wonder Bread on your plate at meal time.
HARRY BALZER: That piece of toast that you had in the morning time. That side dish at dinnertime that was a piece of bread, less likely to occur.
ABRAMSON: But Hostess says the real problem is not changing tastes. In a statement today, the company pointed the finger at a slew of labor contracts. Spokesman Erik Halvorson says the company's cost structure is no longer competitive.
ERIK HALVORSON: And that's primarily due to the legacy pensions that we have and the extensive medical benefit obligations and restrictive work rules.
ABRAMSON: The Teamsters Union scoffed at that idea today. The union represents thousands of drivers and other employees and says they made plenty of sacrifices when Hostess went into bankruptcy the first time, in 2004. The Teamsters Union says it remains committed to finding a solution. Hostess says no layoffs are planned as a result of the bankruptcy filing.
Unlike other companies, Hostess actually employs the drivers who distribute their baked good. Mitch Pinheiro, of Janney Montgomery Scott, says hostess will have to move to independent contractors to compete.
PINHEIRO: And without getting concessions and being able to restructure those liabilities, Hostess will forever be behind the eight ball.
ABRAMSON: Topping the list of those obligations, Hostess owes nearly a billion dollars to one union pension fund.
Twinkie sales are slowing but are still strong. They remain this country's most popular snack cake and are firmly ensconced in the pop culture lexicon. Generations of kids asked mom to put a Twinkie in their lunchbox, thanks to constant urging from TV characters, like Twinkie the Kid.
(SOUNDBITE OF A TWINKIE COMMERCIAL)
ABRAMSON: Since then, of course, the snack with the infinite shelf life has become a bit of a joke in an increasingly health-conscious culture. But for the company's 19,000 workers, the future of Hostess is anything but funny.
Larry Abramson, NPR News.
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Another major point of tension between the U.S. and Afghanistan is the prison at Guantanamo Bay. The offshore detention facility turns 10 years old today and it still holds some 170 captives, some of whom are said to be staging protests inside the prison this week. It's been nearly three years since President Obama's executive order aimed to close it. But the prison is not only open, it's due for some pricey upgrades.
Miami Herald Reporter Carol Rosenberg has reported extensively on Guantanamo and she joins me now to talk about it.
Welcome, Carol.
CAROL ROSENBERG: Thank you.
CORNISH: Now, Congress has been, of course, the most effective foe to the Obama administration's plan to close the facility - obviously using the power of the purse to prevent transfers, to prevent the opening of civilian prisons to this population on U.S. soil.
But what are some of the other reasons that it's so hard to close Guantanamo Bay?
ROSENBERG: International affairs. I mean, many of the men that they'd like to send away need to go to Yemen, which was the ancestral birthplace of bin Laden, and where a lot of people left to join al-Qaida or train in Afghanistan. These are people that the Obama administration, and the Bush administration before them, have concluded should go back to Yemen to rehabilitation and to monitoring.
But, as we know, this is not a stable country. There is a big al-Qaida franchise there. And there's concern about sending them back to that country without monitoring, and the instability.
And the other thing is, Europe has taken a number of men from Guantanamo, resettled them, given them new starts. And the unwillingness of the United States to resettle some of the people themselves, I'm told, is a problem. You know, Europe has said we've done our part, we think that the Americans have not done theirs. And that between Congress's limitations and unwillingness to even settle them on U.S. soil or set up a prison inside the U.S., Europe is less inclined to take and help resettle some of the men who both the Bush administration and the Obama administration have agreed shouldn't be there at all.
CORNISH: Many Americans and - you're talking about the rest of the world - associate Gitmo with those early images we know of prisoners in orange suits and goggles and shackled. How has the look and feel of Gitmo changed over the last decade?
ROSENBERG: Oh, it's a completely different place from those first images. You know, at the beginning, the prisoners were in open air cells and those orange jumpsuits. And their guards, the Marines, were in tents in the mud just up the road. And everybody is in buildings now. Most of the detainees are in penitentiary-style buildings. The ones that we've seen are being held in things that look like prisons in the United States.
They've got cell doors and they've got three meals a day coming in. And they actually have satellite TV. And the guards are watching them through usually one-way glass or from behind barricades. And so, it's become far more institutionalized.
CORNISH: And, as you've reported, that comes at an extremely high cost.
ROSENBERG: Yeah, the Obama administration finally put a price tag on this. We've been asking for years and they told Congress, as part of their debate over - with Congress about how to try and hold people - that it costs $800,000 a head, a year to keep a detainee at Guantanamo.
CORNISH: Carol, you've written about the developments people should watch as the prison goes into the next decade. And can you talk about maybe the top three things people should pay attention to when it comes to Guantánamo?
ROSENBERG: Well, first thing everyone should watch for is the death penalty trials. They're going to have initial appearances this year with the five men who supposedly plotted the 9/11 attacks. And we have the USS Cole bombing trial. These are the first capital trials at military commissions. And there's going to be a lot of attention to just how fair and how those trials proceed.
And then, another big question is whether the transfers will resume. The last two men to leave Guantanamo this year have both died. And the U.S. has not been able to send people to resettlement in other countries. There is - under new legislation, there's an expectation that the transfers will resume, and that some of the 89 men they don't want there will start to leave.
And then there's, I think, just a general issue of tension. You know, it's 10 years old, detainees are complaining through their lawyers that it's harder to be a prisoner there these days and that the guards are being pretty tough on them. That there had been a liberalization of what you were allowed to keep and what you're allowed to do, and that there is a new kind of tough doctrine in the prisons. And the lawyers say that the detainees are pretty unhappy right now.
And I think it's just a general sense of futility. And we really have to watch the tensions and make sure - see what's going on in terms of conflict between guards and prisoners in the new decade.
CORNISH: Carol Rosenberg, she's reporter for the Miami Herald. Thanks so much for talking with us, Carol.
ROSENBERG: Thank you.
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South Carolina is the new battleground in the Republican presidential race. It's the first primary in the South, and Mitt Romney brings momentum from back-to-back victories in Iowa and New Hampshire. But NPR's Debbie Elliott reports that the state is also new terrain for Romney, where he has to appeal to religious conservatives and Tea Party voters.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Chad Connelly has printed bumper stickers reading: We Pick Presidents - referring to the state's track record of selecting the eventual Republican nominee for 30 years now.
CHAD CONNELLY: This is where the battle royale is going to take place.
ELLIOTT: He says former Massachusetts Governor Romney comes in with a strong lead, but the nature of the electorate here leaves an opening for a rival like Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum. About half of likely voters in the primary are evangelicals, and, historically, social issues have been important. They still are, Connelly says, but not necessarily the first thing on people's minds.
CONNELLY: Right now, everybody's attention is focused on jobs and economy, but there is a threshold of acceptance level. You know, you got to be pro-life. I mean, goodness gracious, if you're not taking care of life, you don't care about anything else. And traditional marriage and traditional values matter.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: You have a thought for some cheese with grits?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Yes, please.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: OK.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Thank you.
ELLIOTT: Over breakfast at the Lizard's Thicket country-style restaurant in Columbia this morning, voters did rank the economy as their most pressing concern.
BOBBY BRANHAM: Unemployment, absolutely.
ELLIOTT: Bobby Branham of Chapin works for an insurance company. He says South Carolina's nearly 10 percent unemployment rate has taken a toll.
BRANHAM: I'm fortunate I have a job, but there's a lot of people out there that don't. I do real estate on the side, and I see a lot of foreclosures. And it's sad when I go out there and I'm looking at all of these homes that people just had to run away from. They're desperate. And I think the politicians are really out of touch.
ELLIOTT: Branham says he's a Republican-leaning independent and plans to vote for Mitt Romney because of his business background and executive experience. At a nearby table, Nicholas Thorpe is having his usual Wednesday breakfast with his Sunday school class from Columbia First Baptist Church. He's been out of work for six months now and is decidedly behind Mitt Romney.
NICHOLAS THORPE: I've been able to reconcile my faith differences with him.
ELLIOTT: He's talking about Romney's Mormonism, a faith some evangelicals don't believe is true Christianity. Thorpe says that's not the point.
THORPE: I look at Romney's moral leanings and directions that he wants to take the country and find out they still line up with my belief systems, and feel I can support him and still be a Southern Baptist, if you will.
ELLIOTT: But other candidates are hoping to gain ground by portraying Romney as out of line with traditional South Carolina values. Newt Gingrich's camp started running this ad today.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAMPAIGN AD)
ELLIOTT: As Gingrich, Santorum and Rick Perry all reach for social conservatives here, voters have yet to coalesce around any one of them as the alternative to frontrunner Romney.
DR. CURT BAIR: Nobody in this current field excites me.
ELLIOTT: Curt Bair is a doctor in Columbia.
BAIR: I think Ron Paul is a good man. I think he's a constitutionalist, but I don't think he stands a chance in this election. Newt Gingrich, I think, is a fairly conservative guy, but he strikes me as a career politician. And Romney is just way too moderate for me.
ELLIOTT: Over the next 10 days, Romney will be trying to convince South Carolina Republicans otherwise. Debbie Elliott, NPR News, Columbia.
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Mitt Romney's business background has played a starring role in his campaign, but some of his Republican rivals are trying to use it against him, suggesting Romney made his fortune at the expense of U.S. workers. The debate could grow louder in South Carolina. As we just heard, the unemployment rate there is high, near 10 percent. And NPR's Scott Horsley reports that a PAC supporting Newt Gingrich has threatened to spend millions on anti-Romney advertising.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Even as he claimed victory in the New Hampshire primary last night, Mitt Romney fired a defensive salvo. He said GOP rivals challenging his business background are trying to put free enterprise on trial.
MITT ROMNEY: The country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy. We have to offer an alternative vision. I stand ready to lead us down a different path where we're lifted up by our desire to succeed, not dragged down by a resentment of success.
HORSLEY: You can certainly hear resentment in Randy Johnson's voice. Johnson is one of the workers who lost their jobs at an Indiana paper company after Romney's investment firm bought their plant in 1994.
RANDY JOHNSON: He made money. If that was his goal, he made a lot of bucks. Is that what we want, people that are worried about money more than the workers?
HORSLEY: The scrutiny has also shined a spotlight on the lucrative business known as private equity, where Romney made his fortune. Steve Judge, who heads a private equity trade group in Washington, says the business model is pretty simple.
STEVE JUDGE: We buy companies that have significant potential for growth. We invest capital and effort and expertise to improve their performance and, hopefully, increase their value.
HORSLEY: There are a number of ways to do that. A neglected company, like Dunkin' Donuts, might use an infusion of private equity money to grow, open new stores and hire new workers. That's a win for everybody. But Colin Blaydon, who heads the Tuck Center for Private Equity and Entrepreneurship at Dartmouth, says, sometimes, boosting value can also mean cutting costs.
COLIN BLAYDON: You might ask your employees to take lower pay. You may shift the jobs somewhere else. You may replace people with robots.
HORSLEY: In that case, the gains are not so widely shared. Private equity firms can also multiply their profits through financial engineering: borrowing most of the money to purchase a company, then quickly recouping their own investment through dividends and management fees. It's a bit like a homeowner who puts $5,000 down on a house, then quickly withdraws $10,000 in home equity loans. MIT professor Howard Anderson says some companies crumbled under the resulting debt load.
HOWARD ANDERSON: Sometimes, a company couldn't sustain the debt, and they had already taken money out.
HORSLEY: In fact, of Bain's top 10 investments, four of the companies ended in bankruptcy. But Bain still walked away with more than half a billion dollars in profit. Newt Gingrich told Fox News that doesn't sound like the free market.
NEWT GINGRICH: It's one thing to say, look, if a company has failed despite your best efforts, and you've put money into it, and you take a loss right along with all the workers, that's free enterprise. But if the rich guy is taking all the money, and the working guy is being left an unemployment check, that's not sound, healthy capitalism. That's the kind of thing that I think, frankly, makes people very suspicious of Wall Street.
HORSLEY: Steve Judge, of the private equity trade group, insists firms like Bain could not survive if they routinely drove companies into bankruptcy. Dartmouth's Blaydon adds that while private equity's bareknuckle cost-cutting may be painful, it's really what any good manager should do.
BLAYDON: That's what we want in our economy, if our economy is going to be more valuable and more competitive.
HORSLEY: But workers, like Randy Johnson, are not so sure. Bain Capital made more than $100 million off his company, even though his plant shut down and the company wound up in bankruptcy.
JOHNSON: To this day, I still don't understand why people think that making profit over good jobs, helping communities, families - at what point does the profits take control?
HORSLEY: That's a question Romney's rivals will be asking in South Carolina. And if he wins the GOP nomination, it may be a question voters are asking in November. Scott Horsley, NPR News.
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In a landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that church employees, whose jobs include preaching their faith, cannot sue for employment discrimination. It's the first time the court has recognized a ministerial exception to anti-discrimination laws. But the decision applies to more than ministers. They can apply to church teachers and other employees.
As we hear from NPR's Nina Totenberg, the case began with a Lutheran teacher fired over a disability.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Cheryl Perich, a teacher at the Hosanna-Tabor Lutheran Church in Michigan, took leave when she was diagnosed with narcolepsy. But when her doctor certified her to return to work, the school asked her to resign. And when she threatened to sue under the Americans With Disabilities Act...
CHERYL PERICH: Their response was to fire me. I can't fathom how the Constitution would be interpreted in such a way as to deny me my civil rights as an elementary school teacher.
TOTENBERG: The school did not dispute it fired Perich because of her threat to sue, but it maintained that part of its faith requires that such disputes be resolved only internally, within the church.
Today, the Supreme Court said the church acted in accordance with the Constitution's freedom of religion. Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts noted that since the passage of the Civil Rights Act nearly a half century ago, the lower courts have carved out an exception that allows ministers to be hired and fired without regard to the civil rights laws.
Today, the Supreme Court made that position the law of the land. But on the more difficult question of determining who is and is not a minister, the court was equivocal, saying that would have to be determined on a case-by-case basis.
The court, however, used Cheryl Perich's case to set out some broad guidelines. It agreed that even though the bulk of Perich's time was spent teaching secular classes like math and science, she still qualified as a minister. She led her students in prayer each day, escorted them to chapel, taught a religion class four times a week, and she was what the church designated as a called teacher, as opposed to a contract teacher.
While contract teachers had the same duties, the court said, Perich, in order to qualify for tenure, completed an ecclesiastical course of study at a Lutheran college. And after passing an oral exam, she was issued a ministerial commission. None of these factors alone would be determinative, said the court. But taken together, they were.
Chief Justice Roberts acknowledged both the interest of society in enforcing anti-discrimination laws and the interest of religious groups in choosing who will preach their beliefs, teach their faith and carry out their mission. The Constitution, he said, strikes the balance in Perich's case by requiring the church be free to choose those who will guide its way.
Experts were divided today about just how far reaching the court's decision is. University of Virginia law Professor Douglas Laycock, who represented Hosanna-Tabor, saw the ruling as a homerun for the church.
DOUGLAS LAYCOCK: It is unanimous. It's unanimous that she counts as a minister. It's unanimous that ministers can't sue. It's unanimous that it doesn't matter whether the church had a religious reason or not. The courts can't inquire into that. That's the story here today.
TOTENBERG: George Washington University law professor Ira Lupu agrees.
IRA LUPU: When the court says that you can have no inquiry into whether this religious reason is pre-textual and just a cover for some kind of discrimination, that is a big deal.
TOTENBERG: Others, however, disagreed. Here's Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion, which filed a brief supporting Perich.
DANIEL MACH: Obviously, we are disappointed in the result. But, really, in the grand scheme, I don't think that the implications of this case are all that broad. It's a relatively unique, limited set of facts.
TOTENBERG: Other experts also characterized the decision as narrow, noting that religious organizations did not get what they ultimately wanted, a total immunity from lawsuits. Indeed, the court acknowledged the parade of horribles that some have suggested, that a church could fire someone for reporting sexual abuse to police or for reporting school health and safety violations to civil authorities. And the court today went out of its way to leave those kinds of questions unresolved.
Justice Thomas, in a concurrence, said he would have completely deferred to the church on all such questions. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
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Here's a title for a medical study that you just couldn't make up: An Outbreak of Legionnaires Disease Associated with a Decorative Water Wall Fountain in a Hospital. Yikes. The study was published yesterday in the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology. It found that a water wall in a Wisconsin hospital lobby - perhaps intended to be soothing - in fact helped to spread a potentially life-threatening bacteria. Thomas Haupt is the lead author of that study. He's an epidemiologist for the Wisconsin Division of Public Health. Thomas, welcome to the program.
THOMAS HAUPT: Glad to be here.
CORNISH: First of all, explain briefly what Legionnaires' disease is.
HAUPT: Legionnaires' disease is a respiratory infection that results in pneumonia. Symptoms would include headache, high fevers, lack of appetite. It has about a 10 percent fatality rate and that's something that actually is caused by inhalation of bacteria from a contaminated water source.
CORNISH: So Thomas, in 2010, eight people contracted Legionnaires'. They had all been in the hospital lobby, but they call came from different places and I'm wondering how you did the detective work to link them to this particular water wall.
HAUPT: Well, it started off with our routine surveillance for Legionnaires' disease in Wisconsin. We did notice that within a four week period in this small area we had at least eight cases of Legionnaires' disease. Our follow-up is to ask questions as to where they may have been in the 10 days prior to their onset of illness. At least six of the patients identified that they had been in one particular hospital.
Through further follow-up, the other two patients actually we found out that they were in the hospital as well, picking up some pharmaceuticals at the pharmacy, which is directly adjacent to the water wall. We tried to get a hypothesis as to what exactly was being - what was the cause, and the water wall seemed to be the most logical. So we did the follow-up testing on the water and on the foam that was in the water, which was used to prevent splashing. And we found that they were badly contaminated.
CORNISH: Now, how is that possible? I would assume you might be able to use chlorine or something to keep it clean. I mean, what was the problem with the water wall specifically?
HAUPT: The use of chlorine within - and this, again, is in an atrium of a hospital - would have caused a lot of smell. The hospital did great routine maintenance, but one of the downfalls was - actually, there were several. So they put this foam in and they also had lights underneath, plus the water wall was also directly adjacent to a fireplace. Now, Legionella disease, every water supply has some if you look for it closely enough. But the fact that it was warm water through the heat that was produced, it produced very high amounts of Legionella disease. Now...
CORNISH: So you basically have a breeding ground and then the conditions for breeding.
HAUPT: That's exactly right. You know, and just a small portion of that foam had well over a million colony forming units of Legionella bacteria, which is very, very high.
CORNISH: Wow. So just walking by it, you can essentially take in vapors?
HAUPT: You can take in vapors. Actually, it's an aerosol mist from water and it usually affects - Legionella affects people who have some kind of an underlying illness, or are on some kind medications where their immunity may be lower. Smoking is also a risk factor, where your lungs are affected and by just getting small amounts of Legionella inhaled, you can actually come down with Legionella disease.
CORNISH: And it's interesting detective work because I think in your report, I read that one of the patients who came down with it was a delivery person who had been a smoker.
HAUPT: That's right. And when he came down with it, he actually was not in a position - he was very sick and we had to look back at his manifests from his truck route and we tracked it down to find out that yes, indeed, at least twice in that 10 days prior to his onset of illness, he had been in that hospital lobby.
CORNISH: Thomas, thanks so much for talking with us.
HAUPT: Thank you very much for having me on.
CORNISH: Thomas Haupt is the lead author of a study linking a water wall in a Wisconsin hospital to an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease. By the way, all eight of the people who contracted Legionnaires' have recovered.
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You can buy Twinkies on the cheap right now. Safeway, just around the corner from our office here in Washington, has them on sale - two boxes for five bucks. So the NPR Science Desk was inspired to take part in the fine, long-standing tradition of experimenting with Twinkies.
NPR's Allison Aubrey reports on their findings.
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: My colleagues, Julie Rovner, our health policy correspondent, and Adam Cole, a new addition to our team, had one idea.
So, what is your experiment, guys?
JULIE ROVNER, BYLINE: All right, I think this is the classic example of the immovable object meeting the irresistible force.
AUBREY: All right, let's hear it.
ROVNER: I want to know if you put a Twinkie into Mountain Dew, will it dissolve.
AUBREY: Aha, playing off Pepsi's claim in a recent lawsuit that a mouse would disintegrate in Mountain Dew.
ADAM COLE, BYLINE: So we got our big two-liter Mountain Dew.
(SOUNDBITE OF FIZZING)
AUBREY: And they poured it into a bowl. Now, there's long been speculation about the Twinkie's amazing structural properties. It's rumored that the perfectly spongy and delicate cake will stay intact if unopened for years and years. It apparently survived flights on the NASA space shuttle. So how sturdy is it?
COLE: Yeah.
ROVNER: All right. And we are drubbing the Twinkie into the Mountain Dew. Oh, but it's floating.
COLE: It's floating.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
COLE: This just in: Twinkies float in Mountain Dew.
AUBREY: We'll see in a moment if it actually disintegrates. Meanwhile, ideas for other experiments poured in. At what temperatures do Twinkies ignite? Do they explode in the microwave? Is the Twinkie magnetic? And my favorite from brain correspondent Jon Hamilton: Is the Twinkie addictive? Now, how would you test that?
Well, start with lab rats, of course.
JON HAMIILTON, BYLINE: Well, say you had a rat in a cage, right, and every time they hit the bar another Twinkie would come out. My question is would they keep hitting that bar until they literally died from eating Twinkies?
AUBREY: Wow, loving the Twinkie to death. That would be taking Twinkie-love a little too far.
Now, back at the Mountain Dew lab, I asked Julie and Adam if they've ever eaten a Twinkie.
ROVNER: Oh yeah, of course I've had a Twinkie.
COLE: I have never had a Twinkie.
AUBREY: And Adam says he doesn't plan to try one, even if it is an endangered icon.
COLE: There's one thing for sure I do not want to drink or eat any of that.
AUBREY: So, could there be a generational divide here? The 20-somethings like Adam who grew up with an irreverent take on the Twinkie, seeing it as an abstract object, a toy, even, to play or experiment with - not real food. And then there are those who grew up loving the Twinkie, looking forward to seeing it in our lunch boxes.
Can you guess which group my colleague Dick Knox, our medical correspondent, belongs to?
RICHARD KNOX, BYLINE: Oh, I love the cream center and, you know, surrounded by all this kind of fluffy light. It's just kind of luscious.
AUBREY: Dick says that when he was a kid, unbeknownst to his parents, he opened up a charge account at Parson's, his corner grocery store, and started buying Twinkies for all of his friends.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
AUBREY: That's how you became the ambassador to Twinkie?
KNOX: Right. I was very popular for about a month. And then my father got this bill from Parson's.
AUBREY: Needless to say, the Twinkie-fest ended. But Dick says his love for them did not.
So, back to that 20-something experiment. How is that Twinkie doing after two hours in the Mountain Dew?
COLE: It's not disintegrated. It is still intact.
ROVNER: No, I think a little bit of the outer coating came off. But boy, that Twinkie still looks like a Twinkie.
COLE: Mm-hmm.
AUBREY: An immovable force that's worth saving or is the Twinkie an icon than we can let go?
Allison Aubrey, NPR News.
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You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
Plenty of writers attempt to tell stories through letters. In fact, English literature has a long tradition of epistolary novels from Bram Stoker's "Dracula" to Saul Bellow's "Herzog." Author Stewart O'Nan's favorite book falls into this category, but with an interesting twist. All the letters here are addressed to dead people. That's just one of the reasons O'Nan says: You must read this.
STEWART O'NAN: I first heard of Christie Hodgen way back in 2001, when I was a judge for the National Endowment for the Arts. Her story of a younger sister dealing with a troubled, possibly mentally ill brother flat knocked me out. The other judges on the panel agreed: Here was a powerhouse writer. I felt privileged to read her work before the rest of the world, so why did it take me so long to discover her second novel, "Elegies for the Brokenhearted," which came out last summer?
I'm not sure how I found the book. Maybe I saw it in a bookstore while I was out on tour. I know it wasn't from word of mouth and definitely not advertising. I hadn't read a review of it either, so it must have been dumb luck running into it somewhere. I remember I didn't like the cover. It was a blah photo of two girls sitting under a cherry tree. And "Elegies for the Brokenhearted"? Wow, I thought, what a terrible title. My initial reaction, from painful and repeated experience, was sympathy for a fellow author.
But wait. Open the book. Here's the epigraph that welcomes you. It's from Nathanael West's "Miss Lonelyhearts": The letters were no longer funny. He could not go on finding the same joke funny 30 times a day for months on end. And on most days, he received more than 30 letters, all of them alike, stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife. It's a warning from Hodgen that we're in for some mordant, bitter stuff - and we are.
The elegies of the title are laments, songs of mourning addressed directly to five people, now dead, who changed the life of our narrator. Mary Murphy is a girl from a broken, messy home. Her older sister Malinda is an addict who disappears for years, leaving Mary behind with her equally unstable mother. While focusing on the troubles of a drunk uncle, a high school laughingstock, an angry college roommate, a tortured composer and her own piece-of-work mother, Mary shows us her halting coming of age, transforming from the quiet kid sister to a wise and reconciled young woman.
Naturally, a book of elegies is going to be sad. But within each separate remembrance, Hodgen is also brutally funny, letting her company of outcasts fight back against a world that spurns them. Her characters aren't grotesques so much as people on the edges. Hodgen's narrator isn't cuddly either. Mary is just as puzzled and angry as her subjects, holding off anyone who comes too close. Add to that the formal challenge of writing in the second person and the inherent structural problems of addressing each of the deceased separately, and there's a degree of difficulty to "Elegies" that might seem insurmountable.
Yet for all its depth and complexity, it's an easy, captivating read that any casual reader can appreciate. With each successive character, we care that much more for Mary, and for them. "Elegies for the Brokenhearted" by Christie Hodgen, forget the bad jacket and crummy title. This is a great book.
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CORNISH: Stewart O'Nan's latest novel, "The Odds," comes out next week.
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The Supreme Court ordered a new trial this week for a Louisiana man charged with five brutal murders. The court found that prosecutors had failed to turn over statements that raised doubts about their only witness to the crime. The case is bringing new attention to prosecutor misconduct. That's led to the dismissals of other blockbuster convictions, including the corruption case against former senator Ted Stevens.
NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson reports.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: It's not every day that eight Supreme Court justices throw their weight behind a defendant convicted of busting into a New Orleans home, demanding drugs and money at gunpoint and leaving five dead bodies on the ground. But that's exactly what happened this week, where nearly every member of the High Court ruled Juan Smith should get a new trial. Kannon Shanmugam argued the case.
KANNON SHANMUGAM: Our client, Mr. Smith, was convicted based solely on the testimony of a single eyewitness and the Supreme Court, in essence, said that in a case of that variety where there are contradictory statements by that eyewitness, there is a duty to disclose.
JOHNSON: But the district attorney's office in Louisiana did not disclose police notes revealing the witness said he couldn't identify any of the perpetrators, exactly the opposite of what he testified to in court when he told the jury he recognized Juan Smith.
The failure to turn over those notes ran afoul of an almost 50 year old holding by the Supreme Court in a case known as Brady vs. Maryland. The Brady case has come to stand for something big in criminal law, that prosecutors are obliged to turn over any evidence that could help the defense in the interest of justice.
But the Supreme Court has heard a few cases now involving violations of Brady by the district attorney's office in New Orleans alone, not to mention the high profile debacle at the Justice Department, which walked away from the corruption conviction of the late Senator Ted Stevens in 2009 because prosecutors failed to turn over evidence about inconsistencies with their star witness.
Barry Pollack is a defense attorney in Washington.
BARRY POLLACK: In the run of the mill case, it's very hard to know that you didn't get something and so I certainly believe, from my experience, that the cases that we're reading about really are just the tip of the iceberg and that there are many more violations that courts and the public never learn about.
JOHNSON: Former prosecutors like Peter Zeidenberg say deciding what to share with the defense before a criminal trial can be a tricky process.
PETER ZEIDENBERG: It's just an inherently difficult decision for a prosecutor to make because you're obviously biased. You believe this defendant that you're prosecuting is guilty or you wouldn't be doing it.
JOHNSON: And ever since the Ted Stevens fiasco where the prosecutors themselves became the subject of a criminal investigation and a blistering report that could emerge later this month, there have been a lot of nervous people in the Justice Department worried about the consequences of making a bad decision.
Brandon Garrett is a law professor at the University of Virginia who studies wrongful convictions. He says prosecutors should just open their files, all of their files, before a trial.
BRANDON GARRETT: Forget about suing prosecutors later or overturning convictions based on this conduct. We want there to be full exchange of information from the beginning so that errors never happen in the first place.
JOHNSON: Lawyers for Juan Smith say there's an irony in his case. Most defendants in state court proceedings don't get the right to a lawyer after they've been convicted. But because Smith faced the death penalty for another crime where lawyers are also fighting for his innocence, he was entitled to lots of free legal help, help that uncovered the missing police files that cast down on the witness against him. Again, Washington defense lawyer Barry Pollack.
POLLACK: If you think about the way the system works, it's like you're playing a game of poker, but in this particular casino, the person dealing the cards gets to look at them first and decide which cards to give you.
JOHNSON: As for the district attorney in Louisiana, he says he'll press his luck and try Juan Smith all over again for the murders.
Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington.
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This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
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And I'm Audie Cornish.
Two years ago today, a powerful earthquake destroyed much of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. The quake killed, by some estimates, 300,000 people and left two million homeless. Today, hundreds of thousands of Haitians still live in makeshift camps.
But NPR's Jason Beaubien reports that the country has also come a long way.
(SOUNDBITE OF A STREET SCENE)
JASON BEAUBIEN, BYLINE: Two years later in Port-au-Prince, the effects of the earthquake are still present everywhere; the tent encampments, the cracked buildings, the empty lots. Schools operate in open plywood classrooms. But the most visible piles of rubble have been hauled away and life has returned to a rhythm similar to what was here before the quake.
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BEAUBIEN: On Delmas, a main Port-au-Prince street, a radio blares from speakers in front of a guy selling pirated CDs. Women, sitting along the side of the road, hawk everything from vegetables to cigarettes to pharmaceuticals. Overloaded tap-taps, the pickup trucks that serve as the main form of public transportation here, chug up the hill. This scene this week could just as easily have been from Port-au-Prince before the quake.
President Michel Martelly says Haiti had huge challenges even before the disaster. The pop star turned politician took office last year. Martelly says his administration is finally in place and moving forward to tackle the country's problems.
PRESIDENT MICHEL MARTELLY: You go by the airport, we have already integrated one phase of the airport. You go by the streets, you see some camps are being emptied out. And now we need everyone's participation, everyone's input. We need to better use the money that's given, channel that money properly and we'll be heading to the right direction.
BEAUBIEN: Three major hotel projects are under way in Port-au-Prince. A giant industrial park is being built in the north of the country. Martelly has launched a program to provide free education to almost a million kids by taxing international phone calls and remittances. Despite some of the funds allegedly going missing, the program remains extremely popular.
But the challenges for Martelly and Haiti, as a whole, remain huge. Infrastructure needs to be rebuilt. A cholera outbreak that struck a half million people and killed thousands needs to be tackled. And hundreds of thousands of earthquake victims are still living in squalid encampments in Port-au-Prince.
For the last two years, Gerline Rousole has been sharing a canvas tent with her three brothers and her 7-year-old son. She says this camp is hell.
GERLINE ROUSLE: (Through Translator) It's been really, really tough out here in this hot sun. In the day time, we cannot stay inside our tents because it's so hot. When we go out to try to find some shade, thieves come with razors and steal our valuables. And at night, I can't sleep because I'm afraid of robbers.
BEAUBIEN: Rousole is 22 years old but looks far older. Like most of the thousands of other residents of this camp, she bathes in the street by pouring water over herself from a basin. She says people are living here like pigs.
Two years ago, Rousole didn't just lose her home in the quake, she lost both her parents.
ROUSLE: (Through Translator) The worst thing is that if my parents were still alive, I wouldn't be here.
BEAUBIEN: And many people have moved out of the camps.
LEONARD DOYLE: From a peak of one and a half million, we're down now to - we're hitting 500,000 people still under canvas. I mean, it's very, very tough for them but it's quite a dramatic drop in numbers.
BEAUBIEN: Leonard Doyle, with the International Organization for Migration in Haiti, says the conditions in the camps are very difficult and residents who had any resources at all left.
DOYLE: It's kind of left behind a population that's more vulnerable, poorer, more difficult to resettle.
BEAUBIEN: Some camps are being ordered to shut. Over the last few weeks, authorities cleared two large camps in the commercial hub of Petionville. Residents were offered $500 vouchers to pay for one year's rent anywhere else.
In the wake of the 2010 disaster, international donors pledged billions of dollars to help Haiti recover and rebuild. That money provided emergency medical care, plastic tarps, water service to the camps. It paid to clear the streets of rubble. At some of the organized encampments, what used to be rows of white tents are now rows of plywood shelters.
But Haiti doesn't appear transformed. The roads are still terrible. Earthquake debris still clogs prime housing lots. The destroyed National Palace has yet to be demolished.
AMBASSADOR KEN MERTEN: I think, you know, we need to be careful not to hold Haiti to different standards or higher standards than we hold other countries to.
BEAUBIEN: Ken Merten was the U.S. ambassador to Haiti when the 7.0 quake hit Port-au-Prince and he's still the ambassador today.
MERTEN: If you look at European cities after World War II, places like Cologne and Rotterdam, it took 10 years-plus to rebuild. I don't see why we'd expect it to happen a whole lot faster here.
BEAUBIEN: For millions of Haitians, living conditions remain very difficult. Jobs are scarce. There's a shortage of housing. People struggle to feed their families. But Ambassador Merten, and many people on the streets, say there's a sense now that Haiti is making progress and moving slowly towards a better place.
Jason Beaubien, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: And this is NPR's Martin Kaste.
The pipeline fight in Washington has been understandably frustrating for Canada, and the conservative-led government there is particularly peeved at American environmental organizations. Here is Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver speaking to the CBC.
JOE OLIVER: Their objective is to prevent development of resources in Canada.
KASTE: On Monday, Oliver went on the offensive, accusing American greens of not only blocking the Keystone XL, but, worse, he says they're also trying to keep Canada from selling its oil to anybody.
OLIVER: There are some groups in the United States that do have that view, and they're sending money into Canada, and they're trying to game the system.
KASTE: The system the Americans are trying to game, he says, is this one.
(SOUNDBITE OF PUBLIC HEARING)
KASTE: These are public hearings for a new pipeline that would run from Alberta to Canada's west coast to fill up oil tankers bound for Asia. The Canadians figure if the U.S. blocks the Keystone XL, that's all the more reason to make sure they can sell oil to China. The terminal would be near the village of Kitimat on British Columbia's wild northern coast. And the local Clifford Smith told the regulators that he worries about spills.
CLIFFORD SMITH: The proposed pipeline will come through our back door, and the ships will come in and transport the crude oil. We are indeed facing a double-barreled shotgun.
KASTE: These hearings are just getting started. An astonishing 4,500 people have signed up for a turn at the mic in towns and villages all along the pipeline route. And the process may drag on for two years. Kathryn Marshall calls it a mob-the-mic tactic.
KATHRYN MARSHALL: You know, signing up all kinds of people to speak on an issue, but they're all kind of saying the same things and they're being encouraged to sign up by one organization, kind of like a filibustering kind of campaign.
KASTE: Marshall runs a pro-industry organization called Ethical Oil, which is running radio ads right now in British Columbia.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO AD)
KASTE: The ads call out environmental organizations by name. One of those is Ecojustice Canada.
KAREN CAMPBELL: And it's poppycock.
KASTE: Karen Campbell is a staff lawyer at Ecojustice. In her Vancouver office, she acknowledges the $275,000 received a few years ago from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in California, but she says that hardly means Ecojustice is somehow under American control.
CAMPBELL: These are positions that we have taken and would be taking, and it's fortuitous. And it's great for us that there is support from foreign foundations for this.
KASTE: She points out that American money weighs heavily on the other side of this debate. American oil companies have a big stake in Alberta. Campbell is visibly shaken by the government's attack on environmental organizations. She says she's just not used to this kind of political intensity.
CAMPBELL: What's happening here is just so un-Canadian, and it's almost too American for me. And - but that's what it is.
KASTE: But others say it's not so new. Margaret Wente, a columnist for The Globe and Mail in Toronto, says natural resource battles can be deeply divisive in Canada, and invoking the ugly American is an old tactic.
MARGARET WENTE: Historically, Canadians have been hypersensitive to American influence and the suspicion that American money is playing a part in Canadian politics. And Canadians don't like to be pushed around by Americans.
KASTE: But usually, it's business interests that are accused of being under American control. What's new about this situation, she says, is that the tables have been turned, and now it's the environmentalists who find themselves accused of being the lackeys of the nefarious Yanks. Martin Kaste, NPR News.
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The "Intergalactic Nemesis" started in a coffee shop in Austin, Texas in the 1990s, then it morphed or, as this recent trailer goes...
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BLOCK: The "Intergalactic Nemesis" is traveling around the country with three actors, 1,200 graphic novel images, a sound effects guy and music. NPR's Margot Adler reports that it's a throwback to another era with some timeless appeal.
MARGOT ADLER, BYLINE: The "Intergalactic Nemesis" started with some scripts, a few actors, some crazy noises.
JASON NEULANDER: And the writers did not hold back. There was literally a sound for everything.
ADLER: Jason Neulander is the director and producer of the show.
NEULANDER: Including something that's still in the show, like the sound of hypnotism.
(SOUNDBITE OF NOISEMAKING TUBES)
ADLER: Just two children's noisemaking tubes. Eventually, they teamed up with a graphic artist. There's a score involving piano and organ, a foley artist making the sounds, three actors standing in front of old-fashioned microphones and comic book images projected on a large movie screen.
Neulander said it was fun mixing two old forms originally created in the '30s, radio plays and comics.
NEULANDER: But without contemporary technology, this production would not be possible. Last year, I had to buy a brand new laptop because my old one didn't have the processing power to run the slide show.
ADLER: It's 1933. There's a woman reporter, an evil hypnotist, a time-traveling librarian and alien sludge monsters. Chris Gibson plays nine characters in the show. He has four death scenes. He loves being encouraged to overact.
CHRIS GIBSON: It's a real treat as an actor to literally be encouraged to go as far as you possibly can.
I wouldn't be bringing any frail little children to Cladmore.
MOLLY SLOAN: Is that so?
GIBSON: Aye. Too many strange things. I don't even trust me eyes anymore. Lights coming on and going off in the wee hours of the night, terrible sounds and (unintelligible) demonic sounds. It's the devil's work, for sure.
ADLER: You had no idea?
TIM KEOUGH: I had no idea what I was walking into.
ADLER: Tim Keough says his girlfriend, a comic illustrator, bought the tickets to surprise him.
KEOUGH: Kind of blew my mind. The sound effects you could actually feel like they were in a cave. It felt like an alien planet with sludge on the walls.
ADLER: Jason Arias and Cecilia Macarewicz appeared to be in their 20s. They were totally taken with the foley artist and the old time radio feed.
JASON ARIAS: I absolutely love the use of, like, children's toys for the sound effects. He had, like, these weird tubes that he would swing around.
CECILIA MACAREWICZ: They even had, like, the old school microphones. That was great. I was like, oh, my gosh, this is the 1940s. So I really enjoyed it.
ADLER: 1930s, actually. Many eyes in the East Village Cinema were riveted on Buzz Moran, the foley artist, perhaps because you don't often get to see sound effects being made except on live radio shows. Moran uses lots of children's toys and gets effects they were not intended for, like the slide whistle.
BUZZ MORAN: So, normally, you would just play...
(SOUNDBITE OF SLIDE WHISTLE)
MORAN: ...with the slide whistle. So, instead, I blow into this other area.
(SOUNDBITE OF BLOWING)
ADLER: And you get a gas jet on the alien planet. Or a little toy that allows kids to change their voices.
MORAN: Normally, you would speak...
(SOUNDBITE OF ROBOT VOICE)
MORAN: Just a voice changer, but since it has a speaker attached to it, you can take the microphone and make it feed back, make a nice little laser sound.
(SOUNDBITE OF LASERS)
ADLER: And, of course, most traditional, a box of macaroni and cheese and a child's train whistle.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRAIN)
ADLER: For director Jason Neulander, "The Intergalactic Nemesis" gets back to his inner 12-year-old. He was seven when "Star Wars" came out, still his favorite film, and he loves pulp science fiction from the 1930s and '40s. So when I say, this is really fun, but there isn't any deep purpose to it, as there is in some of the best science fiction, he says sometimes it's important to just have an escape.
NEULANDER: Life can be hard and I feel like, right now, in the times that we're in, it really can't hurt to have an opportunity for a couple hours of people from age seven to 70 and older to go into the theater and escape for just a little while from their daily lives and just go on a pure, unadulterated adventure.
GIBSON: Here we are, Cladmore.
ADLER: "The Intergalactic Nemesis" is currently touring the galaxy from Burlington, Vermont to Park City, Utah.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ADLER: Margot Adler, NPR News, New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BLOCK: And you can see "The Intergalactic Nemesis" for yourself, or at least clips of it, at our website, NPR.org.
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This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. From NPR News, I'm Melissa Block.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. The oil industry and environmentalists are fighting over a proposed pipeline that would run from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. And, in this election year, President Obama is caught in the middle. Industry says the Keystone XL pipeline would create jobs. Environmentalists worry it would lead to more pollution. Mr. Obama has until next month to say yes or no on the project, and that has supporters and opponents lobbying heavily. We're going to bring you the debate now from both sides of the U.S.-Canada border. We start in the U.S. with NPR's Jeff Brady.
JEFF BRADY, BYLINE: The 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline would bring oil from Alberta down through the middle of the U.S. to refineries on the Gulf Coast. When the company behind the pipeline, TransCanada, proposed it, executives had no idea it would be so hotly debated.
JACK GERARD: The Keystone XL pipeline will be a presidential election issue and will likely play out much broader.
BRADY: That's Jack Gerard, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute at a recent industry event. He predicts the pipeline issue will even show up in local political races. As if to ensure that, his group started running TV ads this week in Midwestern states.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV AD)
BRADY: The ad encourages people to call or write President Obama and tell him to approve the pipeline. Ads from opponents concerned about pollution associated with tar sands oil are more difficult to find. They're generally low-budget affairs, like this one on YouTube that features hand puppets. They portray old men around a boardroom table, plotting to get the pipeline approved.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)
BRADY: Just a few months back, it looked like the administration had found a way to put off the sticky election year issue surrounding the pipeline. The State Department said it had more work to do on the project and would delay approval until after the 2012 election. But then Congress passed legislation, forcing a decision by February 21st. Now the lobbying campaigns are in full swing. Oklahoma's Republican Governor Mary Fallin sent a letter to President Obama on Tuesday.
GOVERNOR MARY FALLIN: And so I'm encouraging the president to consider signing the Keystone pipeline agreement so that we can create economic stimulus for our national economy and put Americans back to work.
BRADY: Pipeline supporters like Fallin focus on the benefits of getting oil from a friendly neighbor, and the thousands of workers who would get jobs during construction.
FALLIN: In my opinion, the only thing standing in the way between more energy production in America and job growth and more economic stimulus in our nation is the president.
BRADY: But environmentalists say there are more important issues here.
SUSAN CASEY-LEFKOWITZ: This is not the right step forward if we want to be building a clean energy future and a clean energy economy in the United States.
BRADY: Susan Casey-Lefkowitz with the Natural Resources Defense Council says the pipeline would allow tar sands oil production in Canada to expand. She opposes that because it releases more pollution than traditional oil production.
CASEY-LEFKOWITZ: We've been encouraging our members to call the president and thank him for already standing up to big oil on this pipeline and say that, essentially, we have his back. We know that he's going to do the right thing and reject the Keystone XL pipeline.
BRADY: The president has not said which way he's leaning. As both sides wait for a decision, the lobbying campaign in the U.S. is growing more intense. Jeff Brady, NPR News.
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One topic that's getting scant attention this election season is climate change. Instead, the economy and social issues are front and center, but scientists are working as hard as ever to figure out how much the earth is warming and what to do about it. Some now say it's time for a new strategy. As NPR's Christopher Joyce reports, a strategy that gets faster results.
CHRISTOPHER JOYCE, BYLINE: Durwood Zaelke is a grizzled veteran of the climate wars. He was in Kyoto in 1997 when the world's nations drafted a treaty promising to curb warming, and he's watched that promise fizzle while the planet's temperature continues to rise. Zaelke says the Kyoto treaty focused too much on the main greenhouse gas: carbon dioxide.
DR. DURWOOD ZAELKE: I mean, that's like picking a fight with the biggest bully in the schoolyard. You get your lunch money stolen. You get your pants pulled down, and you get sent home humiliated. We've made about that much progress with CO2.
JOYCE: Most CO2 comes from big power plants and factories, the engines of economic development. Few governments have been willing to endanger development with limits on CO2.
Zaelke runs the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development in Washington, D.C. He says it's time to look for other climate solutions.
ZAELKE: You can't expect one treaty system to address every cause of climate change. It's too complex of a problem.
JOYCE: A growing number of scientists agree. They're focusing less on CO2 and more on other things that warm the planet, especially ozone and black carbon. Black carbon is mostly soot from burning wood, charcoal and dung.
Climate scientist Drew Shindell, with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says ozone and soot live in the air for only a few months or years before they degrade or fall to Earth. If you slow or stop producing them, pretty soon the atmosphere will be fairly soot and ozone-free.
PROFESSOR DREW SHINDELL: So these things really have an immediate and quite powerful, in many cases, effect on climate both at global and regional scales.
JOYCE: Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, stays in the atmosphere for much longer. So, curbing CO2 from smokestacks won't show benefits for many decades.
Shindell says cutting ozone and soot could slow warming by half a degree Celsius by 2050.
SHINDELL: By averting a half a degree of projected warming, that's really a substantial portion of whether the planet really goes over two degrees or stays below that.
JOYCE: Two degrees warmer is when most climate scientists say bad things start happening to the planet.
Shindell says there are economic reasons for cutting ozone and soot, as well. For example, ozone is created when methane gets into the atmosphere. Methane is essentially natural gas; it escapes from coal mines, livestock waste ponds and pipelines. It's valuable, and capturing it saves money. Also, ozone damages commercial crops and causes smog. As for soot, it causes respiratory disease and millions of premature deaths.
SHINDELL: If you factor in the air quality benefits and their large effects on health, then you find the reductions are really giving you benefits.
JOYCE: Benefits that outweigh the costs.
Shindell bases his calculations on wide-ranging assumptions about global health and economic gains, as well as what it would all cost. The numbers vary widely and are likely to be questioned. But the study does confirm others that say ozone and soot should be added to CO2 on the climate hit list.
And climate activist Durwood Zaelke says that unlike carbon dioxide, the tools to reduce these pollutants are familiar.
ZAELKE: We have laws and we have institutions in most countries that already know something about controlling this. We already know the technology. We already know how to do it.
JOYCE: And it wouldn't take an international treaty to do it, either.
Shindell's research appears in the journal Science.
Christopher Joyce, NPR News.
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One of the biggest issues in this year's presidential elections is going to be health care - who gets it, who uses it, and who pays for it. And we got some new numbers this week from the federal government to help us understand what's at stake. For example, we learned that America spent $2.6 trillion on health care in 2010. That's a little more than $8,000 per person.
But we also learned, in a separate study, that people don't actually spend health-care dollars equally. In fact, half the population uses so little health care that they only account for about 3 percent of the nation's health-care spending.
With us to help process all this, and what it might mean on the campaign trail, is NPR health policy correspondent Julie Rovner. Hello, Julie.
JULIE ROVNER, BYLINE: Hey, Audie.
CORNISH: So half the population uses almost no health care in any individual year. So where are all these dollars going?
ROVNER: Well, they're going to do very sickest people. In 2009, the top 1 percent of the population accounted for just under 22 percent of all health-care spending. The top 5 percent of the population spent nearly half of all health-care dollars.
CORNISH: So what do we actually know about those people, other than the fact that they have extremely high medical bills and are probably very sick?
ROVNER: Well, this particular study looked at the people who've stayed in that top part of the spending curve in both 2008 and 2009. And it found that they were much more likely to be elderly, more likely to be women, more likely to be white, and more likely to have public health-insurance coverage. Conversely, those who spent the least were - not surprisingly - more likely to be in good or excellent health but also, younger people, Hispanics and African-Americans.
CORNISH: So what does a study like this mean, politically? I guess, what are the implications there?
ROVNER: Well, whenever we see numbers on overall health spending - and it happened again this week, when we got those spending numbers for 2010 - we tend to see those numbers divided by every person in the U.S. But, of course, as this other study demonstrates, nearly half the population uses little or no health care every year. So that $8,000-a-year number isn't that meaningful.
And we know that a lot of people may not be using health care because they don't have health insurance. But a lot of people may have health insurance and simply are healthy and don't use it - which may be good or bad. Some of them probably should be going to the doctor for preventive care but aren't. In any case, some of those people may be happy with their health insurance because they've never used it, or they've never used it for anything other than very routine or minor care.
It's not really into something major happens that you find out if your insurance is good or not. And it's not until you really need health insurance that you realize how important it is to have. Just ask one of those very high spenders, who average about $90,000 in medical bills per year.
CORNISH: And I'm wondering if these types of numbers also, in some way, explain why the health-insurance industry says it can't cover people with pre-existing health conditions unless everyone is required to have coverage, too. I mean, this is what the individual mandate is all about. And of course, it's incredibly controversial, and under legal review.
ROVNER: That's right. This type of cost distribution is exactly what insurance is built for. Every year, you have a small number of people with very high costs, whose bills are paid by the premiums of a large number of people with very low costs. But if those healthy people don't buy insurance and only the sick people do, then there are no low-cost people to cover the high-cost people's bills.
But whether Congress can require that, of course, is what the Supreme Court will decide later this year. And Republicans, of course, want to repeal the requirement even if the court does uphold it.
CORNISH: So Julie - I mean, what would Republicans like to do instead, given what we've learned from these numbers?
ROVNER: Well, what Republicans say is that they would like to have high-risk pools for people who are sick and have trouble getting insurance. Or they would like to let the states have their own proposals. It hasn't worked up until now, but that's not to say that it couldn't work in some future iteration.
CORNISH: So Julie, essentially, they're arguing that there is no need for an individual mandate.
ROVNER: They're arguing there's no need for a federal mandate; that this should be up to the states to decide.
CORNISH: NPR health policy correspondent Julie Rovner, thanks so much.
ROVNER: You're very welcome.
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And I'm Melissa Block. Mitt Romney is pushing back today against attacks on his years working at the private equity firm, Bain Capital. Right now, most of those attacks are coming from other Republicans. And the Romney campaign had not been very aggressive in responding until today. NPR's Ari Shapiro has reported extensively on the candidate's years at Bain. He's now travelling with Romney and he joins us from Greenville, South Carolina. And Ari, what is the new pushback for Mr. Romney?
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: You know, we didn't hear a lot of it in his stumps speeches in the last day or so in South Carolina, but after this morning's rally here in Greenville, he held a news conference where he pushed back again and again on this idea that he made his fortune by eliminating jobs during his years at Bain. Here's part of what he said.
MITT ROMNEY: There are some businesses that are growing and thriving and we were fortunate enough to be able to be part of that in a small way and there's some businesses that have to be cut back in order to survive and to try and make them stronger.
SHAPIRO: And Melissa, you're going to hear more of this narrative in the coming days. The Romney campaign is creating ads that are going to feature people who will say the Mitt Romney is responsible for creating their jobs and you'll also see prominent Republicans who are not formally connected with the Romney campaign speaking out, people who will say that they are defending capitalism. This was something we heard last night at a Romney rally from South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley.
She said, we have a real problem when we have Republicans talking like Democrats against the free market. We believe in the free market, she said.
BLOCK: Ari, has the Romney campaign talked about why they waited 'til now to really take after their critics on this issue?
SHAPIRO: You know, Romney is a frontrunner and he has not wanted to wade into the fray against the people who, in most cases, are far behind him in the polls. He has always kept his sights on President Obama. And frankly, nobody really believes that these attacks will pull Romney off the path to the nomination, but there are growing fears that they could weaken him in a general election against President Obama. And also, you know, Romney had some self-inflicted wounds in the last week or so.
Over the weekend, he said he knew what it was like to worry about getting a pink slip. On Monday, he made this comment, taken out of context, that I like being able to fire people. Of course, he was talking about firing health insurance companies that charge too much or provide bad services, but they were kind of wide open doors that Romney just left for the other Republicans in the race to walk right on through.
BLOCK: Ari, when you look at the record of Bain Capital during Mitt Romney's time there, what does it show?
SHAPIRO: Well, look, Bain invested in hundreds of companies and some of them did really, really well, became household names - Staples, The Sports Authority and so on. There are also plenty of examples of companies that failed, that went bankrupt, that outsourced jobs, that laid people off. And in many of those cases, Bain made tons of money even though the workers at the bottom of the pyramid lost their jobs. Bain's goal was never job creation. Bain's goal was always to make money but job creation was one frequent outcome.
Another occasional outcome was layoffs. And so, nobody disagrees about any of that. What they disagree about is the total. Mitt Romney often says, net, net, gains, losses, you're looking at 100,000 jobs created. And you can't argue that there were lots and lots of jobs created, but there are no exact numbers and so it's really difficult to do the kind of detailed fact checking that would allow us to say, yes, Bain ultimately, at the end of the day, created this many jobs or destroyed this many jobs.
BLOCK: And with the primary in South Carolina a week from Saturday, does this debate continue? Do you figure that his opponents are gonna keep hammering away at this issue?
SHAPIRO: Absolutely. And this is not the only things they're hammering away at. There's an ad by Newt Gingrich that hammers away on Mitt Romney's record on abortion. They're attacking, really, in any way that they can find. All of that said, Mitt Romney's the only person ever to have won both Iowa and New Hampshire who was not an incumbent Republican and nobody has ever won South Carolina without first winning Iowa or New Hampshire.
South Carolina, in every primary race since 1980, has chosen the person who goes on to be the eventual nominee. All of those arrows point pretty strongly towards Mitt Romney.
BLOCK: Okay. NPR's Ari Shapiro traveling with the Romney campaign in Greenville, South Carolina. Ari, thank you.
SHAPIRO: You're welcome.
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Aides say President Obama won't get deeply involved in the political campaign until Republicans settle on a nominee, but Mr. Obama has already been busy fundraising. Today, his campaign announced that it raised $130 million last year. And as NPR's Scott Horsley reports, even when the president is conducting his official duties, it's easy to sense the political subtext.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: This week, President Obama hosted a group of business leaders at the White House. He said he wanted to spotlight companies like Masterlock and Ford that have decided to move some overseas jobs back to the United States.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: After shedding jobs for more than a decade, American manufacturers have now added jobs for two years in a row.
HORSLEY: Mr. Obama and his advisors have long stressed the importance of high-paying manufacturing jobs while lamenting the outsized roll that finance plays in the U.S. economy. Those words take on new meaning in the context of the presidential campaign in which likely opponent Mitt Romney's come under scrutiny for his role at Bain Capital, buying and selling companies with the help of borrowed money and in some cases, sending jobs overseas.
OBAMA: I don't want America to be a nation that's primarily known for financial speculation and racking up debt buying stuff from other nations. I want us to be known for making and selling products all over the world stamped with three proud words - Made in America. And we can make that happen.
HORSLEY: To be sure, the president's message is not new, nor is it necessarily crafted with Mitt Romney in mind. From his first few months in office, Mr. Obama has been warning the U.S. needs to move beyond what he calls a bubble and bust economy. Here he is in April of 2009, calling for a new foundation of education, cleaner energy and tighter regulation of the financial sector.
OBAMA: It is not sustainable to have an economy where, in one year, 40 percent of our corporate profits came from a financial sector that was based on inflated home prices, maxed out credit cards, overleveraged banks and overvalued assets.
HORSLEY: Three years later, the president's basic argument has not changed. He has gotten more pointed, though, in his criticism of the GOP platform. At a Chicago fundraiser last night, Mr. Obama faulted Romney and the other Republicans for their insistence on rolling back regulations.
OBAMA: They figure, well, since China pays really low wages, let's roll back the minimum wage here and bust unions. Since some of these other countries allow corporations to pollute as much as they want, let's get rid of protections that help make sure our air is clean and our water is safe.
HORSLEY: Mr. Obama also challenged the notion that lowering taxes for the wealthiest Americans, those the Republicans brand job-creators, somehow trickles down to benefit everyone else.
OBAMA: It didn't work when we tried it under the previous president. It's not going to work now.
HORSLEY: Mr. Obama has called for higher taxes on the wealthy. Romney faulted the president this week for practicing what he called the bitter politics of envy.
MITT ROMNEY: I stand ready to lead us down a different path where we're lifted up by our desire to succeed, not dragged down by our resentment of success.
HORSLEY: Mr. Obama argues he's not trying to punish profit, but he says even the wealthy are better off when the fruits of the U.S. economy are more broadly shared.
OBAMA: When you talk to people on Main Streets and in town halls, they'll tell you we still believe in those values. Our political parties may be divided, but most Americans, they understand, no, we're in this together. We rise and fall together as one nation, as one people. That's what's at stake right now. That's what this election is about.
HORSLEY: Barack Obama and Mitt Romney both stress the ideal of the United States as one indivisible nation, even if they have very different visions of what that nation ought to look like. Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.
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William Janklow, a former Republican governor and congressman from South Dakota, died today at a Sioux Falls hospice center. He was 72 years old. Janklow announced in November he had an inoperable brain tumor.
As Cara Hetland of South Dakota Public Broadcasting reports, Janklow was known both for his combative yet compassionate way of dealing with people and issues, and for the tragedy that ended his political career.
CARA HETLAND, BYLINE: William J. Janklow, or Bill to South Dakotans, was the state's longest-serving governor, elected four times. Janklow was born in Chicago but grew up in Flanders, South Dakota. As a teenager he was often in trouble and was given the option by a judge of incarceration or the Marines. He chose boot camp. And after serving, he returned to South Dakota to attend law school and serve as a legal aid lawyer on the Rosebud Reservation.
WILLIAM JANKLOW: Until 1972, for more than six and a half years, I spent virtually every waking moment representing the clients that came in the door.
HETLAND: Janklow's next clients soon became all the residents of South Dakota. He was elected attorney general before running for governor in 1978. He often spoke of being a humble servant of the people. Here's the oath of office in January of 1979.
JANKLOW: We're only on this planet for a short period of time. In the history of the world, we only get a very small part of it. Graveyards are full of people who thought the world couldn't get along without them, and somehow the world does.
HETLAND: Janklow's early philosophy of openness and speaking out became his calling card. Bill Janklow was known for telling it like it is. When Canadian cattle had diseases, Bill Janklow closed the borders to trucks hauling livestock, making them go around South Dakota. He often acted first and explained later.
Republican Janklow was not your typical party politician. He partnered with former Senate majority leader, Democrat Tom Daschle on many projects and over time they became close friends. In this 1999 interview, Daschle explains.
TOM DASCHLE: You work closely with Bill Janklow and you realize how much he's willing to put on the line and how far he's willing to go beyond halfway to achieve something. And you got to respect that. And you going to start thinking you wish more people in politics were like that.
HETLAND: But not everyone likes Bill Janklow. Some considered him a bully, yet, South Dakotans continued to elect him to public office. In 2002, Bill Janklow was elected to Congress. And while serving as the state's lone House member, he ran a stop sign, killing a Minnesotan motorcyclist. Janklow was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and served 100 days in jail. He resigned his seat and did not return to public life.
In November of last year, he called a press conference to announce he was dying of brain cancer.
JANKLOW: I gave a damn about what I did. I enjoyed it. And I did what I felt was right. And if I had it to do over, I'd do everything I did except I'd stop at a stop sign. And other than that, I'd have done everything that I did, 'cause I had a heck of a ride and I had a good time, and they treated me better than they've ever treated anybody.
HETLAND: Janklow never cared what people thought of him. His larger-than-life image will live on in the programs and policies he put into place, while doing a job he loved.
For NPR news, I'm Cara Hetland in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
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Now a snapshot of public health in Haiti two years after the earthquake.
I'm joined by Dr. David Walton of the non-profit group Partners in Health. He's directing the construction of a new hospital about 30 miles north of Port-au-Prince in Mirebalais.
Dr. Walton, welcome to the program.
DR. DAVID WALTON: Thank so much for having me.
BLOCK: Sounds like a big hospital that you're in the process of building; 320 beds, 180,000 square feet. What are your hopes for that hospital?
WALTON: Our hopes are actually quite ambitious. We really - with the construction of this hospital in the reconstruction phase of Haiti, we really hope to create a new paradigm for health care delivery in this country, particularly in the public sector where I think over the past few years, even pre-earthquake, health care delivery has been very difficult to find quality care and care that is reliable for the millions of people who can't afford private care.
BLOCK: When we talked to you on the program one year ago, on the one-year anniversary of the earthquake, you said that your main feeling then was one of frustration about the very slow pace of progress that you saw. Are you still as frustrated now as you were then?
WALTON: I'm a little bit less frustrated. You know, the reconstruction efforts, again, have been mired with a myriad of difficulties. But I think that one year later - although I don't think any of us working in Haiti or even the Haitians themselves are satisfied with the progress. Certainly there are many instances of people working very hard and diligently, you know, to put this country back together and bring it to a place that hopefully will exceed even where it was pre-earthquake.
BLOCK: What can you tell us - we heard Jason Beaubien mention the cholera outbreak there in Haiti. What's the update on that? And are you seeing any signs of progress on that front?
WALTON: The cholera situation is still quite difficult. You know, it's not as apparent now because we're currently in the dry season. And the seasonal variation is such that with fewer rains, the transmission rate is much lower. So it's a bit faded from view. However, we fully expect that when the rainy seasons recur later this year, we'll see another large upsurge of the cases of cholera.
And again, this is the worst epidemic of cholera in the world today, with over 7,000 people perishing since the initiation of the outbreak.
BLOCK: If one way to prevent a cholera outbreak like the one you've seen is better sanitation, clean drinking water, are you seeing any progress on that since a year ago, say, one year after the earthquake? Are things better now than they were then?
WALTON: I think progress is limited, certainly, on that score. I mean, I think if you look at some of the areas - I mean, the problem with drinking water and sanitation is immense. You know, this is one of the most water-insecure nations in the hemisphere, and actually perhaps in the world. And the sanitation system is little to none here.
So, I think attacking that or really addressing that is a critical feature of prevention of transmission of this disease. But that is a very, very long process. There has been some incremental improvement in the last year. But certainly, I think most of us would agree that, you know, it's difficult to even measure how much progress has been made because the real numbers probably won't be even apparent, in terms of measuring the efficacy of those interventions, until many years down the road.
BLOCK: Dr. Walton, you've been working in Haiti for 14 years now. When you talk to the Haitians you've come to know very well over that time, what's their outlook? Are they hopeful? Are they discouraged, frustrated, despairing?
WALTON: You know, I would say it's a mixture of frustration and hope. Haiti is an incredible country and it's one of the, I think, one of the more interesting countries certainly in this hemisphere, in so far as the history of the country and such - what has happened over the last 200-plus years. And again, it's in a very, very difficult place on so many levels.
But the people with whom I speak to, the patients and other of my colleagues, remain optimistic. I think it's normal to be frustrated by the lack of progress and the promises that have been made and not yet kept. But I think there is an undying hope that for a better future, and looking at sort of the highlights of progress that have been made to demonstrate to them that, in fact, things will continue to get better.
BLOCK: I've been talking with Dr. David Walton. He is director of the Mirebalais National Teaching Hospital Project with the nonprofit group Partners in Health in Haiti.
Dr. Walton, thank you very much.
WALTON: Thanks so much for having me.
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It's time now for Letters.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CORNISH: Earlier this week, we remembered the pianist Alexis Weissenberg, who died Sunday at the age of 82. He was known for the precision of his playing. One critic even called it chillingly scientific. But pianist Kirill Gerstein, who knew him well, told us that Weissenberg was just the opposite.
KIRILL GERSTEIN: I think he was not at all cold, neither as a person nor as a musician. I think there was a burning intensity that you could always sense.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Well, Scott Watkins, a professor of piano at Jacksonville University in Florida, couldn't agree more. He writes this. I had the great honor of a lesson with Mr. Weissenberg in the 1990s. He immediately put me at ease, although I was scared to death. After what seemed like three hours of intense work, I glanced at my wristwatch. Forty minutes had passed and it seemed as if we had covered all of the music. It was an experience that I will never forget and from which I draw inspiration and courage. His artistry was exceptional, equal only to his humanity.
CORNISH: Now, to something light or, as Richard Knox, our medical correspondent here at NPR, put it...
RICHARD KNOX, BYLINE: Fluffy, light. It's just kind of luscious.
BLOCK: We are, of course, talking about the Twinkie. Yesterday, after we learned that the Twinkies maker, Hostess brands, had filed for bankruptcy, our science desk decided to run an experiment.
JULIE ROVNER, BYLINE: I want to know if you put a Twinkie into Mountain Dew, will it dissolve?
BLOCK: That's NPR health policy correspondent Julie Rovner.
CORNISH: And, for the record, the Twinkie did not dissolve. It floated.
BLOCK: Well, our little experiment inspired James Wells(ph) of Cincinnati to send us this story. He is the youngest of seven kids and writes, it was rare that a box of Twinkies went unmolested in my household, so much so that my mom started to hide them in unusual places. Needless to say, game on. My brothers and sisters and I found Twinkies in the dryer, under the couch, even in my mom's underwear drawer. All is fair in love and Twinkie war. However, my mom found the ultimate hiding spot, so much so that she forgot where she hit them.
CORNISH: Wells goes on to say, it was not until we retired our 19-inch black and white TV that we found the Twinkie graveyard. There, behind the TV, was a Twinkie box with one lone survivor. Now, only carbon dating would have been able to tell us how long that Twinkie had sat behind the TV. The TV had been host to shows ranging from "Ed Sullivan" to "M.A.S.H." So we decided that there was really only one thing to do and it was delicious.
BLOCK: And so was your letter, Mr. Wells. Thanks for writing. To write to us, just go to NPR.org and click on Contact Us at the bottom of the page.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV COMMERCIAL)
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And I'm Audie Cornish. Today at noon, America's oldest working clock tower rang out for the first time since the 1800s.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL RINGING)
CORNISH: Old South Meeting House in Boston was a Puritan gathering place. Ben Franklin was baptized there and the Boston Tea Party was planned there, but the belfry has been silent since 1876, after the brick building was nearly destroyed in the great Boston fire.
Today, that silence came to an end and Curt Nickisch of member station WBUR was there.
CURT NICKISCH, BYLINE: When the last strike reverberated away into the sound of raindrops on the roof above, David Hochstrasser breathed a sigh of relief.
DAVID HOCHSTRASSER: No one alive has ever seen this clock actually strike a bell. I had a lot of doubts and a lot of worries along the way.
NICKISCH: He's been hooking up the 1766 power clock to ring the bell on the hour ever since the bell was raised to the belfry a few weeks ago to fanfare. A choir sang as a crane gently lifted the 876 pounds of cast iron into the clock tower.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHOIR SINGING)
NICKISCH: In the crowd below, Mary Holland craned her neck and camera.
MARY HOLLAND: It was very exciting to see and it seems a little hokey, you know, like we're grown up and we are jaded now, but it gave me, like, goose bumps. This is our history. This is America. You know, the Revolution. It was really cool, you know.
NICKISCH: Really cool because this bell was cast in 1801 by Paul Revere. It's been hanging in a church in the Boston suburbs, an old Baptist congregation, but the church recently closed and the remaining members, including Joanne Nelson, agreed to let Revere's bell go.
JOANNE NELSON: And today was really very emotional watching it go up into the - 'cause this is where it belongs. This is where it belongs. It's going to ring.
NICKISCH: And so it did for the first time today. James Storrow's heart swelled with pride.
JAMES STORROW: It felt like something I was put here to do.
NICKISCH: He's from an old, wealthy Boston family and donated the money to install the bell.
STORROW: I feel my ancestors patting me on the back, saying, good job. And that's not a feeling I'm used to.
NICKISCH: It's also a new feeling to hear Paul Revere's bell ring out from the Old South Meeting House. He's believed to have taken part in the Boston Tea Party here. The silversmith used his engravings to foment revolution. Later in life, after this country was founded, he turned to casting bells. Now, this one rings on the hour over Boston, a symbol of peace, democratic order and freedom.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL RINGING)
NICKISCH: For NPR News, I'm Curt Nickisch in Boston.
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A new era today in the growth of the Internet. For the first time, organizations can apply for an Internet address all their own: .com or .org can now be replaced by, say, .starbucks or .newyork. The expansion was planned by the one organization empowered to regulate the global Internet, it's called ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. As NPR's Tom Gjelten reports, debate over the new policy has highlighted one key question: Who, if anyone, should control the Internet?
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: Anyone who wants their own Internet suffix, their own domain name, will have to pay $185,000 for it. This development could be costly even for those who just want to keep someone else from grabbing their name. Not surprisingly, ICANN has been criticized for pushing the change. And in Congress, members have been eager to offer the ICANN leadership some free advice.
REPRESENTATIVE ED MARKEY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I believe that ICANN's proposed changes need to be closely scrutinized. And I thank the gentleman...
REPRESENTATIVE DORIS MATSUI: Mr. Chairman, I believe ICANN needs to take a step back, slow down and reexamine this proposal. The Internet...
REPRESENTATIVE CLIFF STEARNS: I think you folks should take to advice here and not charge so much here.
GJELTEN: Democrats, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and Doris Matsui of California, plus a Republican, Cliff Stearns of Florida. Unhappiness with ICANN on Capitol Hill is bipartisan. Some members of Congress actually wanted the Department of Commerce to order ICANN to delay the domain name expansion.
The Internet was a U.S. creation and ICANN was chartered by the Commerce Department, but by urging the Commerce Department now to give ICANN orders, members of Congress may inadvertently aggravate another problem: Internationally, there is currently a big pushback over U.S. domination of the Internet and a growing move to diminish the U.S. role.
Kieren McCarthy, an analyst of Internet governance issues, says some U.S. officials worry pressure on the Commerce Department to dictate ICANN policies could backfire.
KIEREN MCCARTHY: It's making the Internet look exactly like the rest of the world fears that it is, which is a U.S.-controlled entity.
GJELTEN: In fact, nearly half of all Internet users today are in Asia. ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom, this week, said the domain expansion will reflect the way the Internet is destined to change in the coming years.
ROD BECKSTROM: You're going to see more different languages in domain names, I would predict, and so it's going to look more like the world and it's going to look less like one individual country and I think that that's a good thing.
GJELTEN: But ICANN's increasingly international focus may not be enough to satisfy governments that resent the U.S. role in Internet governance. Those complaints are likely to come to a head this December, when the International Telecommunications Union, a UN agency, holds a meeting in Dubai to rewrite legally binding global treaties in such a way as to radically change how the Internet would be governed worldwide.
MCCARTHY: It's extremely serious. It's absolutely - it's fundamental.
GJELTEN: Kieren McCarthy.
MCCARTHY: Everyone knows that changes will be made at this UN meeting in December in Dubai and now the effort is to limit the impacts that those changes will have.
GJELTEN: The move is led by China, Russia and India, all of which, in one form or another, favor putting the Internet under the supervision of the United Nations.
David Gross, who has represented the United States at other international telecommunications meetings, says UN supervision could jeopardize ICANN's current approach under which the Internet is overseen by a variety of groups. It's called the multi-stakeholder principle.
DAVID GROSS: Governments, including the U.S. government, but others, as well, the private sector, technical groups, NGOs, non-governmental organizations, and others should all have a say in how the Internet should develop.
GJELTEN: That's how ICANN works now, but if the Internet were brought under UN control, governments alone could control the Internet. Some would want to keep it free and open, but not all of them, Gross says.
GROSS: Other governments, of course, would like to see increased governmental control as a way of suppressing free flow of information or suppressing innovation and changes that the Internet brings.
GJELTEN: China and Russia, in particular, are proposing new restrictions on Internet activity and those governments are big movers behind next December's UN conference on the Internet. They will be opposed by the United States.
Tom Gjelten, NPR News, Washington.
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And I'm Melissa Block. Controversy is swirling and a judge is stepping in after outgoing Mississippi governor Republican Haley Barbour pardoned some 200 people this week. This was one of Barbour's last acts in office.
Murderers, robbers, arsonists and drug dealers are among those granted a reprieve. Jeffrey Hess of Mississippi Public Broadcasting reports now on what's happened since.
JEFFREY HESS, BYLINE: In the state capital of Jackson late last night, a judge put most of the 200 pardons on hold. Some inmates, including several murderers, have already been released from prison and some may have left the state. The Mississippi attorney general, Jim Hood, believes the pardons are unconstitutional. He says, under state law, letters must be published in local newspapers asking for the pardon.
JIM HOOD: We're going to start going through the process of determining whether there was any publication on all of those, start serving each one of them, and then we'll bring every one of them into court, give them a chance to be heard and show us, you know, did you have any proof that it was published? If they don't, the constitution's clear. Those attempted pardons by former Governor Barbour are void.
HESS: Just 21 people who were pardoned remain in prison. Mississippi's constitution does offer broad clemency powers to the governor. Still, Matt Steffey, a constitutional law professor at the Mississippi College of Law, says the number of pardons is unusual.
MATT STEFFEY: This is an exceptionally large number when you look at governors in other states, even more populous states. It's not unprecedented, but it's, you know, and especially and proportionately, a very large number and it's a large number, at least by comparison to recent governors here in the state.
HESS: Some of the people worked as prison trustees at the governor's mansion and knew the governor personally, but in most cases, it's not clear why these 200 were pardoned.
Before this week's announcement, Barbour had pardoned just five people in his eight years in office. In a written statement, Governor Barbour says he checked with the parole board and issued the pardons so residents could have their full rights restored, such as voting and owning a gun.
The action surprised state lawmakers and the new governor, Phil Bryant. They've pledged to alter the state constitution. Bryant says governors should retain their power to pardon, but in much more limited circumstances.
GOVERNOR PHIL BRYANT: The only time that I would think, as governor, I would look at that is if someone - if evidence beyond a reasonable doubt would indicate someone had been wrongly convicted of a crime. And so you do want to leave that narrow opportunity because that has happened in Mississippi and we want to be able to utilize that pardon if that was necessary.
HESS: The pardons have outraged the victims and their families, who say they were not notified and now fear for their safety. Sandy Middleton runs a victims' advocacy group in Jackson called the Center for Violence Prevention.
SANDY MIDDLETON: I was appalled. Absolutely. I was appalled at what this means and the message these pardons send. The message is that, to victims, that they can't trust us.
HESS: The future of the pardon and the people who receive them is in legal limbo. A hearing is set for later this month to review some of the pardons. If the judge agrees they're unconstitutional, people who still owe time could end up back in prison.
For NPR News, I'm Jeffrey Hess in Jackson, Mississippi.
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And I'm Audie Cornish.
U.S. military investigators have now identified two of the four Marines seen on a video that's making the rounds on the Internet. In it, the Marines appear to be urinating on the dead bodies of three Afghan men, suspected Taliban fighters.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
CORNISH: On the video, you can hear the Marines joking around. The Marines were based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. They served in Afghanistan last year. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and senior military officials are condemning the video as utterly deplorable. And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton added her voice today.
SECRETARY HILLARY CLINTON: Anyone, anyone found to have participated or known about it, having engaged in such conduct must be held fully accountable.
CORNISH: Joining us now to give us an update is NPR's Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman. Hello, Tom.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Hi, Audie.
CORNISH: What's the latest on this?
BOWMAN: Well, again, investigators have identified two of the four Marines pictured in this video. And at this point, the Pentagon is treating the video as authentic. Now, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service has been called in to mount the investigation. And also, the Marine commandant, General Jim Amos, is expected to name a general to mount an internal probe to look into this whole thing.
CORNISH: And do we know what unit the Marines came from?
BOWMAN: Yes, it was 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment out of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. These Marines who were involved in this act were part of a scout sniper team from that battalion. They served from last March through September of last year in Helmand province, in the northern part of the province, in an area called Musa Qala and Now Zad.
And what's interesting is Helmand Province has become largely pacified over the past year or so. So, you know, Marines I talk with - who are ready to head over there - are very concerned about the impact this could have on operations in Helmand province. They're worried about there could be a backlash, increase in violence over there that could hurt their efforts as they head over there.
CORNISH: And, Tom, we've seen the impact of these kinds of things in the past. I'm reminded of the pictures at Abu Ghraib showing American soldiers laughing at naked Iraqi prisoners, stacking them up in pyramids.
BOWMAN: You know, that's right. And this is what can make Marines and soldiers very, very angry. It puts them at greater danger, and we saw that in Abu Ghraib, where there was an uptick in violence after Abu Ghraib. And also, this can hurt the efforts at counterinsurgency.
The whole point of a counterinsurgency effort is to work with the local population, with the village elders and local officials, and try to get them to work with their government, and try to get them to pinpoint where Taliban fighters are. And when something like this happens, you get the population working against the Americans and the Afghan government.
CORNISH: And what about the Afghan government? How is the leadership responding to this?
BOWMAN: Well, Afghan President Hamid Karzai today called the video simply inhuman. And even the Taliban came out with a statement saying the Marines' action was, quote, "against all international human rights."
CORNISH: That's NPR's Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman. Thanks so much, Tom.
BOWMAN: You're welcome, Audie.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The battle over the future of the United Kingdom has begun. Scotland's government is run by separatists determined to end their nation's 300-year union with England. Their leader has long promised a referendum on independence. And this week, he finally named a time: the fall of 2014. But will it pass?
NPR's Philip Reeves went to a coastal town in the North East of Scotland to test the waters.
(SOUNDBITE OF FISH MERCHANTS CALLING OUT)
PHILIP REEVES, BYLINE: Fraserburgh is a quiet town. But mornings here get off to a noisy start. The town's fish merchants gather before dawn to buy and sell last night's catch.
(SOUNDBITE OF FISH MERCHANTS CALLING OUT)
REEVES: This is one of Europe's biggest fishing ports. Outside, in the harbor, rain whistles in from the North Sea. Seals cruise among the fishing boats, searching in the darkness for scraps.
A man drags a crate of monkfish to a nearby van. Pulled low over his eyes is a wooly hat emblazoned with the Scottish flag.
(SOUNDBITE OF SEAGULLS)
REEVES: This place is not much like anywhere in England. Yes, there are a few bars, cafes with Wi-Fi, some fancy cars. And also, just outside town, a magnificent golden beach. But this is a close-knit, traditional community, a sprawl of low dark granite homes separated from London by 600 miles and centuries of culture and history. The locals speak a dialect the English cannot understand.
BRIAN TOPPING: A young girl is a quine or a quiney. So if you say, how are you, my dear, or how are you, little girl, you'd go, you'd say, fit like my quine. And a boy is a loon or a loonie. So you'd say, how are you, my son, or how are you, young boy, you'd say, fit like my loonie.
REEVES: Brian Topping's a Scottish nationalist with a career in local politics that spans nearly three decades.
TOPPING: I live and breath for Scotland to be independent. Every person I help, everything that I do is to hope and further Scotland becoming an independent nation.
REEVES: Scotland already has limited autonomy; its own educational system, judiciary, and a parliament run by Scottish nationalists. Key issues, though - finance, defense, foreign policy - remain in the hands of the British government. That's the problem, says Topping.
TOPPING: We don't really want to be told by people who we didn't elect, down in the Westminster government - and no disrespect to them. We are a proud nation. We should be able to be in charge of our own destiny, make our own decisions.
REEVES: Fraserburgh is a nationalist stronghold. Polls suggest in Scotland, generally, only about a third of the population favors completely severing ties with England. Britain's prime minister, David Cameron, is worried those numbers might grow. Cameron's ardently opposed to the breakup of the United Kingdom. He's begun the battle for Britain by picking a fight with the Scottish nationalists over their referendum's timing and legality. He has the support of all the big three main British political parties.
Mid-morning in Fraserburgh and workmen are boarding up the windows of a vacant building. A handful of shops in the main street have already closed. Britain's economic stagnation is taking its toll here. For the first time, Fraserburgh has had to shut down several key tourist attractions, like museums, for the winter months. Ian Watson, chair of the Fraserburgh Development Trust, says public spending cuts have hit hard.
IAN WATSON: I think they've just more or less taken a broad brush approach and just cut about everything (unintelligible) a sensible way to go. They probably would have needed to be much more selective and consider the economies and local areas like Fraserburgh.
REEVES: Scotland, it's financed by a block grant from London. Some here believe the British government's heavy austerity cuts are bolstering Scotland's separatists. In Fraserburgh, there are some pockets of prosperity. The smell of beer drifts out of a small brewery. The BrewDog Company was founded less than five years ago by two young local men. They started out on a shoestring, making craft beers with wacky names and the slogan Beer for Punks. It's turned into a multimillion dollar business. One of the founders, 29-year-old James Watt used to skipper a fishing boat. Watt favors more autonomy for Scotland, but adds...
JAMES WATT: I think complete independence might make us a bit isolated and make it more difficult for businesses.
REEVES: If Scotland becomes independent, it'll likely join the European Union and might have to join the euro. Bad idea, says Watt.
WATT: I think the E.U.'s future is in severe jeopardy at the moment. And I think the single currency has been an unmitigated disaster.
REEVES: Watt says this is simply not the moment to jump ship and bail out of the U.K. Philip Reeves, NPR News, Fraserburgh.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. The new year is when many journalists crack their knuckles and start churning out trend stories, forecasting the ideas and technology that will shape our lives in the future. It's a practice that goes back a long way, but hardly anyone ever checks up on those predictions.
Well, the "Saturday Evening Post" dug into its archives and found an article from December 1900, titled "What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years." And the author of that article got quite a few things right.
He predicted a slew of future technologies, from battlefield tanks and mobile phones to air-conditioning and digital cameras. Jeff Nilsson is the history editor for the "Post." He is speaking to us from Indianapolis, where the magazine is based. Hello, Jeff.
JEFF NILSSON: Hi.
CORNISH: So the article originally appeared in your sister publication at the time, the "Ladies' Home Journal." But can you give us a sample of one of the predictions, how John Elfreth Watkins described it, and how it applies today?
NILSSON: Sure. One of them is - reading here - the American will be taller from 1 to 2 inches - and that's almost exactly how much the average height of an American has increased in the past 110 years. Another one was a prediction: Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China, a hundred years hence, snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later.
CORNISH: Now, who was John Elfreth Watkins, and why was he able to come up with these predictions?
NILSSON: Well, that's a good question because what information we have about him would indicate that he would be a civil engineer, which is the - what he was. He worked for the Smithsonian, putting together a museum of transportation. He worked as a railway engineer for several years. But in all of that, there's not much indication that he would be that much of a visionary, or be able to go that much far out of his realm.
But one of the things he mentioned was that these weren't all his predictions. He had talked with other experts in other museums and other archives, getting their opinions, so it wasn't just his predictions. But on the other hand, we have to give him credit for choosing because I'm sure he got quite a few wild ideas that he ignored.
CORNISH: What are the predictions that just turned out to be flat wrong?
NILSSON: Well, I think when he predicted that the letters C, Q and X were going to drop out of the alphabet - I don't know where that came from...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
NILSSON: ...but somebody steered him wrong on that. The fact that food would be delivered through pneumatic tubes to houses and that when people finish the meals, they could send their dirty dishes back to the kitchen by pneumatic tubes - that hasn't exactly panned out.
CORNISH: No. I can tell you from my kitchen sink, that has not panned out.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CORNISH: Jeff, what are some of the other predictions that you got a kick out of?
Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife, sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. And furthermore, they'll be able to do this without the intervention of an operator or a hello girl, as they were called in the 1900s.
Jeff, one thing that's interesting about this is they're all positive changes, right?
NILSSON: Yeah. There is no expectation of many of the tragedies of the 20th century. There's not talk of world wars. There's no talk about diseases or social unrest or strikes, or any of the things that we, I think, would probably find most often in predictions of today, which tend to be a little bit more pessimistic in tone. The 1900s was a time of great faith in science, and science was going to achieve all of these great things.
CORNISH: Jeff Nilsson - he's the history editor for the "Saturday Evening Post." Thank you so much for talking with us, Jeff.
Thanks, Audie.
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We end this hour with a warning. Football fans, if you're tired of hearing about Denver Broncos' quarterback Tim Tebow, about his multiple miraculous come-from-behind victories, his greatness, his Christian faith, we're sorry because this is happening.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TIM TEBOW'S FIRE")
JOHN PARR: (Singing) I can see a new horizon underneath the blazing sky. I'll be where the eagle's flying higher and higher. Going to be a man in motion. All I need is my Bronco team. Take me where the future's lying, Tim Tebow's fire.
BLOCK: That's right, "Tim Tebow's Fire." The singer is John Parr, who wrote and recorded the original song, "St. Elmo's Fire." It was a huge hit back in 1985 and the theme to the Brat Pack movie of the same name. So why in the world would Parr dust off his pop gem and turn it into a valentine to pro football's flavor of the season? Well, John Parr joins me now from his home in northern England to explain. John, Tim Tebow wasn't even born when this song came out in 1985. Why now? Why has "St. Elmo's Fire" become "Tim Tebow's Fire"?
PARR: It's a strange set of circumstances, Melissa. Really, what happened was I've been living in America for the last seven months, doing shows for the American military, for the troops and their family. And they asked me if - and so I did - I want to pitch a song for "Monday Night Football." So I wrote a song for the vacant slot for that, went up to ESPN to pitch the song. And they said to me: Have you got your guitar? Would you go on set and play "St. Elmo's Fire"? Which I did.
And just as they were going to roll the cameras, they said: You couldn't call it "Tim Tebow's Fire," could you? So I did it just for fun way back then. But then, as I've, you know, seen Tim play and seen the man he is, I thought maybe he deserves better than this because, obviously, that song is written about another athlete. It was written about Rick Hansen, the wheelchair athlete.
BLOCK: Yeah. Let's talk about that. So you originally wrote it for a Canadian Paralympian, right?
PARR: Yes. What happened was David Foster and I were writing the theme song for "St. Elmo's Fire," the movie, and I really just couldn't get inspired, you know, to write the lyrics. And David showed me a little five-minute TV segment. The Rick was just setting out on the Man in Motion tour for Vancouver. He had no money. And I thought we've got to lend this guy a hand. So I made the lyrics seemed like the wheels with Demi Moore's jeep, but really, it's Rick. And likewise, I saw it with Tim.
You know, it's the same thing. It's about one man kind of against the world. I mean, the last three weeks, I've seen Tim, you know, be the greatest thing on the planet. Last week, nobody wanted to know. And then Saturday, everything changed, and he's the largest thing again. Life is like that, isn't it?
BLOCK: You know, it's interesting when you look at the lyrics, the references that you dropped in - let's see - let's figure out a couple here. Instead of a few miles down the road from the original, now it's just four downs to go.
PARR: Yeah.
BLOCK: Underneath the blazing sky, that was the original. Now, it's blazing on the Mile High, Mile High Stadium.
PARR: Yeah, blazing on Mile High. I mean, you know, I didn't want to pull the whole song apart. I just thought so much of it fits it, you know? And because it was an every man lyric or an every woman lyric, you know, we've all got a dream. We're all trying to achieve something in our own way.
BLOCK: Now, John, coming from where you're coming from as an Englishman, are you really an American football fan?
PARR: I wasn't. I mean, we Brits don't get NFL and NASCAR, but living in America these past seven months, I've really, really enjoyed getting into it. And I can see - really see the attraction.
BLOCK: Are you a fan of Tim Tebow and the Broncos?
PARR: I'm a fan, generally, of him. I mean, it's funny. I've not seen many Broncos games. I'm definitely a Tim Tebow fan because of two things. I think he's a complete maverick, and he believes in something. I mean, everybody doesn't share his religious belief, but I think we live in a world where people have lost faith in anything. And I just like it that here is a man that believes in something, his teammates believe in him. And it just inspired me.
BLOCK: John Parr, the songwriter behind "St. Elmo's Fire," now "Tim Tebow's Fire." John, thanks so much.
PARR: Thank you so much, Melissa.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TIM TEBOW'S FIRE")
PARR: (Singing) Growing up. Got to keep your eyes on the ball. Make it fly. Give it everything, give your all. But maybe sometimes if you feel the pain, you'll find you're all alone...
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After finishing second in New Hampshire's GOP primary and third in Iowa's caucuses, Texas Congressman Ron Paul has done better than any Republican presidential contender not named Mitt Romney. Paul has attracted support from outside the Republican Party by advocating everything from legalizing marijuana to an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. GOP officials gather this week for the winter meeting of the Republican National Committee in New Orleans, and NPR's David Welna talked to them to find out what they make of Paul and his place in the party.
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: Four years ago, Ron Paul finished fifth in New Hampshire's GOP presidential primary and got just under 8 percent of the vote. On Tuesday, his share of the vote shot up to nearly 23 percent and put him in second place behind Mitt Romney. Paul's success so far is part of the buzz here at the Republican National Committee's winter meeting. Phyllis Woods is a national committeewoman from New Hampshire.
PHYLLIS WOODS: I think some of us were a little surprised, but I think conventional wisdom was that he has, you know, his support had kind of flatlined. I mean, it kind of leveled out.
WELNA: Some of the party officials here in New Orleans are happy to see Paul doing well. For supporters of Mitt Romney, Paul may have helped keep down the vote tallies of the four other top GOP contenders. Michigan committeeman Saul Anuzis is a longtime supporter of Mitt Romney.
SAUL ANUZIS: Ron Paul brings a lot of energy to the party and a lot of new people to the party, so I think it's actually healthy to have him out there.
WELNA: For his part, Nebraska Republican Party Chairman Mark Fahleson hopes Paul's advocacy of smaller government and expanded liberties makes its mark on the GOP.
MARK FAHLESON: I think at the end of the day, in the event he is not the nominee, that many of his ideas will be subsumed within the Republican platform and perhaps adopted by the nominee.
WELNA: Still, many Republican officials remain wary of the Texas congressman. Jan Staples is a committeewoman from Maine. She doubts Paul and his ideas have much support among the party faithful.
JAN STAPLES: Most of us have a bit of a libertarian streak, leave most people alone. But we don't want to leave people alone to the point that we become a lawless sort of there's no rules, anything goes, what's happening now is just fine with all of us.
WELNA: And while Paul has ground operations in states across the map, it was impossible to find any GOP official who considered his candidacy a real threat to frontrunner Romney. Ralph Seekins, a committeeman from Alaska, does not expect Paul's support will keep growing.
I think that he's probably got the people that are going to support him at this point, and I don't really think that he's going to be able to pick up those that drop out later on.
And might that prompt Paul to run as a third-party candidate, something he has not categorically ruled out doing? Seekins doesn't think so.
I don't think he's that dumb because that would simply be a vote for Obama. I don't think that that's what he wants to do.
Oklahoma committeewoman Carolyn McLarty is hoping Paul won't make an independent run.
CAROLYN MCLARTY: He is a Republican. He's always run as a Republican. Well, no, he hasn't always run as a Republican. But lately, he has, so hopefully, he won't take off on his own like that.
WELNA: One reason Republicans don't expect Paul to buck his party is it's so hard to get on the ballot at this point in many states. They also point to the fact that his son, Rand, is a Republican U.S. senator from Kentucky, deepening the Paul identity with the party. One thing everyone does seem to expect is that Ron Paul will compete in every primary, then make a stand for his ideas at the nominating convention in Tampa. David Welna, NPR News, New Orleans.
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From deep snow in Alaska, now to a cold winter memory and a song. All this winter, we've been asking for Winter Songs and the stories they evoke. Well, today, we hear from a listener about one tough winter in Rhode Island, and the song that got him through it.
THOMAS MULLEN: My name's Thomas Mullen. I'm a novelist. And my Winter Song would be R.E.M.'s "Sweetness Follows."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SWEETNESS FOLLOWS")
MULLEN: It's a kind of dark and brooding song. It has this low, fronting cello and spectral organ. And I'm from the Northeast and there, winter is very cold, and it's also very dark. Very often, you know, the sun has set by 4 o'clock. So that song, particularly, reminds me of a Christmas vacation of 1994.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SWEETNESS FOLLOWS")
R.E.M.: (Singing) Readying to bury your father and your mother, what did you think when you lost another?
BLOCK: And what was going on in that vacation? What was happening?
MULLEN: Well, I was home for break. It was my junior year, and my family had gone through a big financial reversal that fall. My dad's business had gone under. We'd gone bankrupt, and we'd lost our house. And, you know, we weren't sure if it was going to get worse. So when I came back, you know, my family - we spent some time in the old house, you know, boxing up our things and trying to decide, you know, what are we going to put in storage, in some extended relative's basement; or what might we take to, you know, an antique store or sell in a yard sale.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SWEETNESS FOLLOWS")
R.E.M.: (Singing) Listen here, my sister and my brother, what would you care if you lost the other?
BLOCK: Where would you have been listening to this song back in '94, Thomas?
MULLEN: So we had some friends who were actually away on a Caribbean cruise for the holidays, and they'd asked if I could house-sit for them. It was this big, empty house on the river, with the wind howling and darkness surrounding me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SWEETNESS FOLLOWS")
R.E.M.: (Singing) Ooh, oh, oh, sweetness follows.
BLOCK: How did this song from R.E.M. - this song, "Sweetness Follows" - filter into that tough financial time for your family?
MULLEN: It was - it's always hard to tell what, exactly, Michael Stipe is singing about. He's notoriously hard to pin down. But it sounds like he's singing about, you know, burying your father and your mother and, you know, a falling out with two siblings.
And whether he's talking about literally being at a funeral, or whether he's talking about the dissolution of a family or a family fight, the emotions seem the same. And he's talking about how we're all lost in our little lives, and we can be distanced from one, and blind to the other.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SWEETNESS FOLLOWS")
R.E.M.: (Singing) It's these little things, they can pull you under. Live your life filled with joy and wonder. I always knew this altogether thunder was lost in our little lives.
MULLEN: You know, the song is called "Sweetness Follows," and so whether he's singing about, you know, heaven, or whether he's singing about forgiveness or just, you know, the inevitable rise of the sun after a dark night, you know, I think back to that time. And it was tough, and it was dark, and it was hard for everyone but, you know, we got through it. My parents are fine. You know, they've moved on; they've got a great house, and they've got great jobs. My sister is raising a family. I'm raising a family. You know, we got by.
And, you know, even though it's a dark and brooding song and he speaks pretty bluntly about tough things, there's always that feeling that, you know, somehow we get through it.
BLOCK: That redemption, sweetness following.
MULLEN: Yeah. And I know a lot of people now are dealing with similar issues. But, you know, you work through it, and you hold on to what you have. In the song, he talks about still striving to find a way to live your life filled with joy and wonder and staying all together, and that's what we did. And, you know, no matter how dark the times are, there's always a sunrise ahead, and we just have to stick together.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SWEETNESS FOLLOWS")
R.E.M.: (Singing) Yeah, yeah, we were altogether lost in our little lives.
BLOCK: That was listener Thomas Mullen with his Winter Song, R.E.M.'s "Sweetness Follows." And you can still send in your Winter Song stories at npr.org. Please use the subject line Winter Song.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SWEETNESS FOLLOWS")
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These days, if you hear a story about a retired pro football player, it's likely about his struggles with injuries sustained years ago on the field. This is not one of those stories.
This is the story of what a once great running back does with his life after winning a Heisman Trophy and playing nearly a decade of pro football. In the case of Eddie George, he tackles Shakespeare and Julius Caesar.
From member station WPLN in Nashville, Bradley George - no relation to Eddie - has our story.
BRADLEY GEORGE, BYLINE: In Shakespeare's play, Julius Caesar dies a quick and violent death.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "JULIUS CAESAR")
GEORGE: The scene where Marcus Brutus kills Caesar is probably the most famous death scene in all of theatre. It's where Julius Caesar utters those famous words: Et tu, Brute?
Despite his early demise, Caesar is a plum role for former Tennessee Titans running back Eddie George.
EDDIE GEORGE: I was not put on this earth strictly to be a football player and then that's it, dwindle away. And I have aspirations of being an artist, an entertainer and an actor and I'm working hard toward that.
GEORGE: George worked hard for eight seasons with the Titans. He never missed a start and he played in the Super Bowl. But when he left football, George wanted to try acting, so he set out for Hollywood. George says it was a disaster. He didn't know what he was doing, so he came back to Nashville and sought out an acting coach.
GEORGE: He took me through a boot camp of improv work, of cold readings, of scene study, of character analysis, of all of that. So I really have a gist of what I was doing, a landscape of the theatre.
GEORGE: Now, with some performing tools, George has landed some bit parts in a few films and acted in some plays, but he's still a hero to Titans fans. Tens of thousands would watch him play every Sunday.
Denice Hicks of the Nashville Shakespeare Festival knows some of those fans will come out to see Julius Caesar because of him, but...
DENICE HICKS: He is a really strong actor, really, really strong, and a charismatic stage presence. There is no other actor who could play Caesar the way he could.
GEORGE: George's Caesar sports a bald head and a toga. He looks confident without being cocky. While he's relaxed and soft spoken off stage, on stage, his voice booms.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "JULIUS CAESAR")
GEORGE: (as Julius Caesar) Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (as Brutus) Fear him not, Caesar. He's not dangerous.
GEORGE: Audience member, Sherry Lawler, isn't a football fan, but she says George has a stage presence that's reminiscent of a famous actor in an iconic role.
SHERRY LAWLER: He reminds me of Yul Brenner as the king in "The King and I."
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
GEORGE: Eddie George says acting isn't just a hobby for a retired athlete. He says he hopes this production of Julius Caesar will lead to more opportunities to hone his acting chops.
GEORGE: This is not like - you know what, this is cool. I'll put this on my bucket list. You know, I did a Shakespearian piece. No. This is something that I've worked hard at, that I'm working hard at and this is just the next thing that presented itself that I've had an opportunity to do.
GEORGE: There's plenty more Shakespeare for George to do. There are even plays where the main character doesn't die at all.
For NPR News, I'm Bradley George in Nashville.
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This winter, Russia has seen its largest anti-government demonstrations in 20 years, sparked by parliamentary elections that were widely seen as fraudulent. From Moscow, NPR's Jackie Northam reports that as in the Arab world, the Internet and social media are driving the Russian protests.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC VIDEO)
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: In recent years, Russians who got their news and information from state-run television saw one reality which extolled the virtues of the country's leadership, like Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. But now, there's an alternative.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC VIDEO)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Singing in foreign language)
NORTHAM: This is one of many slick videos found on the Internet that disparages and satirizes Russia's government. This one says: Welcome to the nuthouse, where the inmates vote for Putin.
Some 50 million Russians are now on the Internet, absorbing these videos and using it as a forum to vent their own frustration and downright anger over government corruption, the political system and election fraud. Analysts say it was social media - Internet, Facebook, Twitter and the like - that helped mobilize people to protest against the result of December's parliamentary elections, widely seen as fraudulent.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Chanting)
NORTHAM: It's believed more than 100,000 people showed up for this demonstration on December 24th. The next protest rally is set for February 4th, and organizers are busy preparing for it using the Internet.
ALEXEY KOZLOV: This is the account number and here are possibilities how to do it: credit card, cash, repaid cards.
NORTHAM: Thirty-eight-year-old Alexey Kozlov peers at his laptop computer, opened to a page on Yandex. It's the Russian equivalent of Google. Kozlov, a director at an investment firm here in Moscow, is helping organize online contributions for the protest rallies. The money will pay for hot meals and a proper stage and sound equipment.
Kozlov says contributions have been flooding in from all over Russia - on average of 1000 rubles, about $30 - and that the donations shot up after Prime Minister Putin charged that the rallies were being funded by foreigners.
KOZLOV: And when our authorities begin to say that this is money from state department, I think that more than 5,000 people who really transferred the money, they became very angry about this.
NORTHAM: Kozlov says organizers are also using the Internet to get input from citizens on who should speak at the rallies. Kozlov says he sees the use of social network in Russia growing, becoming more bold. Already, video footage showing fraudulent practices at polling stations during the parliamentary elections lit up the Internet last month. And this week, this showed up.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken)
NORTHAM: Igor Drandin, a 31-year-old Web designer, recorded and posted the video showing about two dozen university students allegedly falsifying election registration forms. Drandin is a member of an activist group called Democratic Choice, which will start training people to be observers during the March presidential election.
IGOR DRANDIN: (Through Translator) We'll certainly recommend them to get a video camera to record everything because this is the most efficient way to struggle against those cheaters. They are afraid of video.
NORTHAM: This has all caught the government off guard, says Nikolay Petrov, an analyst at Moscow's Carnegie Center.
NIKOLAY PETROV: Two months ago, Putin was telling that Internet doesn't deserve any real attention. And, too, it's the place where pornography dominates. And now, he's eager to order for bigger presence of the government and of authorities in general in Internet.
NORTHAM: But it was a rocky start. Putin's own website was unveiled Thursday. The comments section quickly filled with calls for him to resign. Those comments later disappeared from the site.
Jackie Northam, NPR News, Moscow.
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One year ago today, India recorded its last case of polio. That's a major milestone in a long struggle to wipe the disease off the Earth. As NPR's Richard Knox reports, authorities hope eradicating polio from India will help conquer it in the three countries where it's still a menace.
RICHARD KNOX, BYLINE: India started its war on polio 17 years ago. It used to have more cases than anywhere in the world. Gradually, the virus was eliminated in much of India, but not from large areas of the north in predominantly Muslim communities such as Moradabad, a city of 4 million, 100 miles from New Delhi.
(SOUNDBITE OF CRYING CHILD)
KNOX: This week, at a busy clinic there, 18-month-old Mozamma Gul got her polio vaccination. Her mother, Varisha, had absolutely no qualms about the vaccine.
VARISHA GUL: (Through Translator) No. No. We give it to our children.
KNOX: But not so long ago, many parents in Moradabad refused polio vaccination. They were afraid of the vaccine. Now, she says...
GUL: (Through Translator) There's nobody here like that. Everyone here gives their children the medicine.
KNOX: That acceptance is crucial in the great achievement India is cautiously celebrating today: a whole year without a single case of polio anywhere. If analysis over the next few months confirms it, this means polio is still circulating only in neighboring Pakistan, in Afghanistan and in Nigeria. A few other places, such as China and Chad, have recently battled importations of polio from these countries.
DR. HAMID JAFARI: India is a major, major victory.
KNOX: That's Dr. Hamid Jafari, who leads the World Health Organization's polio eradication team in India.
JAFARI: It has established the feasibility beyond doubt of eradication. That if it can be done under such tough conditions in India, this can be done anywhere else.
KNOX: And conditions were no tougher anywhere in India than in Moradabad.
MICHAEL GALWAY: Moradabad really was the litmus test for India, whether it could get rid of polio there, it could get rid of it anywhere.
KNOX: Michael Galway of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation says many cases of polio throughout India were traced back to Moradabad and surrounding areas, in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
GALWAY: Genetically, we tracked every single virus in the country. We could tell you exactly where that virus came from. And in the end, all roads led back to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
KNOX: Victory over polio in these areas is a story of massive persuasion as much as medical science. That's because these districts have big Muslim populations. And many Muslims believed rumors that polio vaccination was a plot against their community.
Hakeem Syed Masoom Ali Azad is an influential Muslim cleric, an Imam in Moradabad.
HAKEEM SYED MASOOM ALI AZAD: (Through Translator) There were two kinds of misconceptions. Number one, people said the medicine contain ingredients derived from pork, which is prohibited in Islam. Second, they said the medicine would make our children infertile.
KNOX: Unable to have children of their own. So vaccination strategists began a massive education campaign, beginning with respected scholars in Muslim universities and reaching all the way down to trusted shopkeepers. So-called influencers were identified alleyway by alleyway in the neighborhoods of Moradabad. Imams preached sermons, issued fatwas of approval, and announced vaccination clinics from their mosques.
AZAD: (Through Translator) We took the medicine ourselves in front of them and gave it to our children in front of them. People slowly began to come around. Thank God. Because of our effort, our district hasn't had any new polio cases.
KNOX: But Dr. Jafari of the WHO says India's work is far from finished.
JAFARI: High levels of immunity in India will have to be maintained until, you know, there is global eradication achieved.
KNOX: So this Sunday, 100,000 vaccinators will fan out across high-risk districts such as Moradabad to vaccinate 40 million children. Every new Indian baby needs to be vaccinated in case the virus re-appears. Every child crossing the border from Pakistan will be vaccinated to prevent importation of the virus. Jafari's main worry is complacency. But his team is allowing itself a quiet celebration today.
JAFARI: We will maybe have some cake and pass that around because people have worked extremely hard over the years.
KNOX: In 2011, the WHO thinks the world had around 700 polio cases. That's half the number in 2010. Richard Knox, NPR News.
CORNISH: We had help with this report from Elliott Hannon in Moradabad.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
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And I'm Audie Cornish.
Call it a gesture, call it an election year conversion. President Obama called it a step in the right direction. He announced today that he wants to combine half a dozen agencies into one with the mission of promoting trade and commerce at home and abroad.
As NPR's Scott Horsley reports, it's part of a broader government streamlining effort that the president says he wants to undertake if Congress gives the okay.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Boosting the U.S. economy is President Obama's top priority, but he says it's harder to help small businesses and promote exports when the task is scattered across six different government agencies.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: In this case, six is not better than one.
HORSLEY: Mr. Obama wants to consolidate large parts of the Commerce Department, the Small Business Administration, the U.S. Trade Representative and other agencies under a single Cabinet secretary. Before he can do that, he needs a green light from Congress.
OBAMA: With the authority that I'm requesting today, we could consolidate them all into one department with one website, one phone number, one mission, helping American businesses succeed.
HORSLEY: The White House says the move would eliminate one to 2,000 government jobs through attrition and save taxpayers $3 billion over the next decade. Mr. Obama told an audience of small business owners at the White House today the consolidation would also improve service.
OBAMA: Go talk to ordinary Americans, including some of the small business leaders here today, they'll tell you that to deal with government on a regular basis is not always the highlight of their day.
HORSLEY: I decided to call Roy Paulson, the owner of a California manufacturing firm who's gotten help from the Commerce Department to boost his sales overseas. Paulson had high praise for the hardworking employees at Commerce and the Small Business Administration, but he admits it can be difficult to navigate the government's bureaucratic maze.
ROY PAULSON: You almost need a GPS to figure out the U.S. government. I know that in the U.S. government they are also frustrated because they themselves get confused and don't know what to do.
HORSLEY: Paulson says in his own business, he needs to step back occasionally and see if there's a way to operate more efficiently. He thinks the government should do the same.
PAULSON: This reorganization that the president is discussing not only could be applied to commerce. But let's assume that it was a good model, what they achieve there, he could apply that into other areas also.
HORSLEY: In fact, Mr. Obama's asking Congress for the power to streamline other parts of the government where agencies overlap. Each reorganization would be subject to lawmaker's up or down vote.
OBAMA: This is the same sort of authority that every business owner has to make sure that his or her company keeps pace with the times. And let me be clear. I will only use this authority for reforms that result in more efficiency, better service and a leaner government.
HORSLEY: Congressional Republicans expressed a grudging willingness to consider the president's proposals, though some were skeptical about whether Mr. Obama would be interested in shrinking the federal bureaucracy if this were not an election year.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.
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And this being an election year, there is of course a lot to talk about with our regular Friday political commentators E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and David Brooks of the New York Times. Welcome back to you both.
E.J. DIONNE: Good to be with you.
DAVID BROOKS: Good to be here.
BLOCK: We're coming off Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, heading toward the South Carolina primary a week from Saturday. Mitt Romney, of course, coasted to victory in New Hampshire. South Carolina should, theoretically, not be as friendly a place for him, but his poll numbers have been really strong there. Do you think that holds, David Brooks?
BROOKS: I guess so. You know, I guess the wild card for me is this Bain issue, this issue about Bain Capital. Newt Gingrich, or at least his PAC, released a completely meretricious demagogic video which may have some effect. I think Bain Capital, on average, added value to the economy. They had every incentive to really do good for companies in the long run. Nonetheless, I think a lot of people take a look at Wall Street, take a look at financiers, take a look at capitalists who are not people who just start businesses, stay in place with their own product line, but who move from company to company, changing things very radically.
I think there could be a level of distrust. And so far, the Romney explanation for that has been pretty flat-footed. So, that could change things. But right now, Romney's still the prohibitive favorite.
BLOCK: E.J.?
DIONNE: It's hard to see his losing in South Carolina, and South Carolina is historically actually pretty good for establishment candidates. George W. Bush stopped the McCain rebellion with a pretty vicious campaign back in 2000. But I agree this Bain issue is a real problem. If not now, then later because one of President Obama's weaknesses has been with white working class voters. And I think the Bain issue and the way private equity works in terms of the part of it that - and often strips companies of assets or loads companies with debt, a lot of ordinary people look at this and say, this is not a good way to do capitalism.
And so, I think Romney, as David said, hasn't handled it very well. So, I think a lot of working class voters, lower middle class voters, have doubts about Romney today that they didn't have two weeks ago.
BLOCK: I want to talk to you about this a bit more because in his victory speech on Tuesday, Mitt Romney talked about desperate Republicans who he said were chiming in with President Obama on what he called the politics of envy. And the issue here is his time at Bain, also his claim that the talk of economic inequality was fueled by envy. Mitt Romney was asked about that the next day in an interview on the "Today" show on NBC. Let's take a listen.
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MITT ROMNEY: I think it's fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy and the like, but the president has made this part of his campaign rally. Everywhere we go or he goes, we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street, it's a very envy oriented, attack-oriented approach and I think it will fail.
BLOCK: E.J., what about that envy oriented approach that Mitt Romney's talking about? We're back to the 1 percent, aren't we?
DIONNE: I thought that was a terrible answer. It just doesn't look good when a rich guy says, anybody who cares about inequality is exhibiting envy. He's accusing a majority of the country, judging from some of the polls showing how much people care about rising inequality. He's saying a majority is committing this sin of envy. And the other part is that we should discuss this in quiet rooms? I mean, you talk about feeding charges of elitism. It's OK. We want to keep this issue away from the riff-raff. I mean, he really has handled this very badly so far.
BLOCK: David, do you agree, bad handling of this issue on Mitt Romney's part?
BROOKS: I like quiet rooms.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BROOKS: Smoke-filled quiet rooms, preferably. You know, I don't think he's handled it well. He said this questioning of his Bain experience is either, you know, envy, division or an attack on capitalism. It's not. It's a legitimate point. I think most LBO firms and most private equity firms, as I say, do add value. They increase churn. So there are layoffs at the beginning when the private equity firms get involved, because they do lay off people. But the studies show that over the long term, they increased hiring and they increased jobs by making the firms more efficient.
Nonetheless, it's legitimate to ask was Bain doing the good kind of LBO activity, which really does help a company or were they, you know, getting these dividends by loading these companies with debt? The second issue, which I think Romney has not really begun to address is, is business experience a good preparation for political experience. That's not an easy case to make. Historically, it has not been a good correlation. Jon Corzine was pretty good at Goldman Sachs. I'm not sure he was a great governor of New Jersey. So, Romney really has to explain that a little more.
DIONNE: And I think his other problem is he made his business experience a centerpiece of his whole campaign. He doesn't want to really talk much about his time as governor of Massachusetts. But he's saying, I'm a business guy so I can create jobs. So, he invites us to look at the side of Bain that didn't create jobs and the side of private equity that does sometimes blow up companies, leaving the people in private equity still richer anyway. Those are legitimate questions.
BLOCK: A related question here. Mitt Romney has not released his tax returns that presumably would show how much he made when he was at Bain Capital and also how much he made since he left in the profit-sharing retirement arrangement that he has. Will he have to release those returns, do you think? How potent an issue might this become, David?
BROOKS: Yeah, I've never heard of a case where we've actually learned anything. We might learn that he's rich. I think we know that he's rich. I think the two issues that are sort of salient are what tax rates is he paying? Private equity guys sometimes pay these very low Warren Buffett level tax rates and that might be embarrassing for him.
Second, we'll, I guess, learn his charitable deductions. If he doesn't tithe the way he says he does, that might be an issue. I rarely think learning this stuff actually changes anything.
BLOCK: E.J., do you think he has to release them? Will he?
DIONNE: I think the pressure on him will grow precisely because the Bain issue has put the question of how did he make his money, what kind of taxes did he pay on the table. And now, a lot of Democrats - if he doesn't release them - want to say, well, what is he hiding? This was going to justify those kinds of questions, which he doesn't want Democrats to feel so free to ask.
BLOCK: Well, last question briefly about a new Gallup survey that shows within the American electorate, conservatives outnumber liberals nearly two-to-one; 40 percent conservative, 21 percent liberal, 35 percent say they're moderate. David Brooks, what does that say to you?
BROOKS: Well, it's we're still a center-right country. If you ask people: What do you fear more, big business or big government, a vast majority fear big government more than big business. It's not true that the Republicans outnumber Democrats two-to-one, because a lot of those people who call themselves conservatives are actually Democrats. But it means we're a country that's still center-right, still basically suspicious of government.
DIONNE: If you ask that question with the word progressive in there instead of conservative, the split is much closer. Conservatives have always outnumbered liberals. A lot of people who say conservative are talking about being old-fashioned family people and have quite liberal views on economic issues. Nonetheless, it's an advantage for the conservatives.
BLOCK: OK. E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and Brookings Institution, David Brooks of The New York Times, thanks to you both. Have a great weekend.
DIONNE: You too, thank you.
BROOKS: Thank you.
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Apple has halted store sales of its iPhone 4S in China after fights erupted outside its flagship outlet in Beijing.
As NPR's Frank Langfitt reports, scalpers and angry would-be customers marked the phone's Chinese launch.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: At the Apple store in Beijing's Sanlitun shopping district, scalpers scuffled overnight causing the store to keep its door shut. Some in the crowd responded by hurling eggs at the windows.
In a statement to Reuters, an Apple spokesman said, quote, "To ensure the safety of our customers and employees, the iPhone will not be available in our retail stores in Beijing and Shanghai for the time being."
Crowds are more orderly at the Apple store on Shanghai's Nanjing Road, but not much happier. A man surnamed Xie arrived around 5:30 a.m., far behind the early birds who camped out the night before.
XIE: (Through translator) They said a thousand people have already been inside the store and I don't have much hope, because they said it's sold out.
LANGFITT: Buyers continued to exit the store and hand the iPhones to scalpers. A teacher in a black wool cap surnamed Chen was angry.
CHEN: (Through translator) I think I've been cheated. They sold them to the scalpers. The people in line just want to buy it for personal use, but now there are none left.
LANGFITT: Scalpers called huang niu, or yellow bulls in Chinese, seem well-organized. At another Shanghai store, they bussed in some 200 people from a nearby province to buy iPhones on their behalf. The recruits wore identical baseball caps as though part of a tour group.
The crush for iPhones here partly comes down to numbers. Apple has just six stores in China where the brand has tremendous cachet. In the first nine months of last year, Apple sold more than five million phones here. The iPhone 4S sells for nearly $800 on Apple's China website.
Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Shanghai.
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Hundreds of prisoners walked free in Myanmar today, including some of the countries best-known dissidents. President Obama called the move a significant step. His administration has been trying to promote reforms in the reclusive Asian nation.
And as NPR's Michele Kelemen reports, the U.S. responded to today's release by offering better ties and an upgrade in diplomatic relations.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: This was the news Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been waiting to hear ever since she visited Myanmar, or Burma, late last year.
SECRETARY HILLARY CLINTON: This is a substantial and serious step forward in the government's stated commitment to political reform. And I applaud it and the entire international community should, as well.
KELEMEN: Among those released were dissidents who, she says, have been languishing in prison for years. They include monks involved in the so-called Saffron Revolution of 2007, ethnic minority activists, and veterans of the 1988 student protest movement.
Wai Hnin Pwint Thon tells the BBC she heard from her father, a former student activist who had been serving a 65-year prison term.
WAI HNIN PWINT THON: He sounds very happy. But at the same time, he said don't forget there are political activists who are still remain in jail.
KELEMEN: Like her father, she's cautious about the changes taking place in the country, which could easily be reversed.
THON: What we have to bear in our minds that I know too well my father and his friends, they won't stay quiet. They will still be outspoken about it. And the law that put them in prison in the first place is still remain in place under this military backed government. So, if they are outspoken and critical about the government and they can go back to prison anytime.
KELEMEN: Others are sounding more upbeat. Secretary Clinton, for instance, was welcoming news that in addition to releasing prisoners, Myanmar's government announced a ceasefire this week with ethnic Karen rebels. Clinton says she promised Myanmar's President Thein Sein that the U.S. would respond to any positive steps he takes. And she says she's keeping that pledge by upgrading the U.S. embassy, which has been at the charge d'affaires level for more than two decades.
CLINTON: We will identify a candidate to serve as U.S. ambassador, to represent the United States government and our broader efforts to strengthen and deepen our ties, with both the people and the government.
KELEMEN: While the Obama administration says it's matching action with action, T. Kumar of Amnesty International USA says Washington is moving too fast.
T. KUMAR: These are kind of piecemeal gifts that the Burmese administration is giving out to satisfy primarily, I will say, the United States. And, unfortunately, the Obama administration is getting satisfied very quickly when it comes to Burma.
KELEMEN: The U.S. still has sanctions on Myanmar and those won't be eased unless Congress is convinced things are moving in the right direction. Secretary Clinton spoke today with two senators getting ready to travel to Myanmar, Republicans Mitch McConnell and John McCain.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
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A controversy, now, in our nation's capital. It's over plans for a memorial to President Dwight Eisenhower. As NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports, members of the Eisenhower family object to the design by architect Frank Gehry, and they now want to stop the process altogether.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: The site for the Eisenhower Memorial is just south of the Mall, near the Air and Space Museum, with a clear view of the U.S. Capitol. Right now, the space doesn't look like much, and it's divided by streets. In Frank Gehry's design, traffic would be redirected. The site would be turned into green space, partly enclosed by three large, metal tapestries.
DAN FEIL: And it becomes a park with a memorial within it.
BLAIR: Dan Feil is the executive architect for the Eisenhower Memorial Commission. He says the images on the tapestries will depict the vast Kansas countryside where Eisenhower grew up.
FEIL: The idea is to show where he came from, and where his value set came from.
BLAIR: Within the park, there will be three different depictions of Eisenhower - as a young boy, as a general, and as U.S. president. The tapestries are made of woven stainless steel that creates an almost transparent, mesh-like effect. Susan Eisenhower, the president's granddaughter, does not like them.
SUSAN EISENHOWER: You could call it an iron curtain - which, you know, symbolically, I don't like the image of that very much.
BLAIR: Eisenhower has several concerns. She's worried about how the tapestries would survive the elements over time. She thinks the Memorial Commission is moving too fast. But most of all, she thinks the concept places too much emphasis on Eisenhower's roots.
SUSAN EISENHOWER: This is about a transformational figure who liberated Europe from the Nazis, and went on to transform America into a global superpower after the war. So to focus on a little boy and his dreams is a real loss of an opportunity to make a statement.
BLAIR: That characterization of Frank Gehry's work makes Dan Feil seethe. He says to say the design looks like it's about a little boy...
FEIL: ...is like saying the Lincoln Memorial is about a guy in a chair. This is about a great man.
BLAIR: Gehry's design includes inscriptions from three of Eisenhower's historic speeches, including his presidential farewell speech in 1961.]
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.
BLAIR: The memorial also includes two, large, stone carvings. One would show Eisenhower as a general during World War II, addressing the 101st Airborne Division before D-Day. Another would show him as president, with his hand on the globe.
FEIL: Gehry wanted an emotional impact with substance, and he got it.
BLAIR: Eisenhower's grandson, David, was an original member of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission. Dan Feil says he signed off on both the decision to hire Frank Gehry, and on Gehry's tapestry design. David Eisenhower resigned from the commission in December. Attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.
MARTIN MOELLER: With memorials, you get a lot of people weighing in with a lot of different ideas and agendas. It's a very complicated sort of thing to design these projects.
BLAIR: Martin Moeller is the senior curator at the National Building Museum, where there happens to be an entire show about monuments that never happened - called "Unbuilt Washington." There's a drawing of a pyramid-style mausoleum that was proposed for George Washington.
MOELLER: But the family intervened, saying he's already been buried at Mount Vernon; you can't have the body.
BLAIR: The exhibit also includes plans from the 1960s, for an FDR memorial that was never built. Roosevelt's family rejected those plans because they were too colossal for a man who once said he didn't want anything bigger than his desk. An FDR Memorial was finally built in the 1990s.
Memorials are so subjective. And the people who make the decisions are in Washington, where nobody agrees on anything. Getting beyond the design stage, and raising the money for construction, are monumental hurdles.
According to the Eisenhower Memorial Commission, construction of Frank Gehry's design will be completed by 2015. Members of the Eisenhower family have requested an indefinite delay.
Elizabeth Blair, NPR News, Washington.
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One of the top athletes in the new Olympic sport of ski halfpipe is in critical condition in a Utah hospital. Twenty-nine-year-old Canadian Sarah Burke was injured when she fell during a training run in Park City earlier this week.
Burke is considered a pioneer in a sport where competitors on skis do the same tricks and flips that snowboarders do, all in a super-sized halfpipe. NPR's Tom Goldman reports.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: In a sport where the potential is always there for spectacular crashes, Sarah Burke's fall reportedly was rather innocuous. She landed after performing a trick. According to one witness, she whiplashed onto her side. The fall tore an artery, which caused bleeding in her brain.
A hospital release yesterday said: We need to observe the course of her brain function before making definitive pronouncements about Sarah's prognosis for recovery.
Burke was injured in the same halfpipe where U.S. snowboarder Kevin Pearce suffered a brain injury in 2009. Those in the sport say the Park City halfpipe is one of the best. And the 22-foot walls - they used to be 18 - don't necessarily make it more dangerous.
This is U.S. ski halfpipe coach Mike Jankowski.
MIKE JANKOWSKI: It actually becomes safer, in many ways, because you have a broader area to land in.
GOLDMAN: American Jen Hudak is one of Burke's top rivals. Hudak says a big part of her sport is managing fear. And it's going to be harder in the aftermath of Burke's accident.
JEN HUDAK: I would imagine that that sits on everyone's mind. And I think especially for the girls in the sport right now, I think it's something that a lot of them are going to be considering when they're on the hill.
GOLDMAN: Hudak considers Burke a friend, and an inspiration. Burke not only was one of those who lobbied hard to get ski halfpipe into the Olympics - it'll start in 2014 - but she fought for the inclusion of women in the sport as well. Burke talked about it in the Ski Channel feature film, "Winter."
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "WINTER")
SARAH BURKE: It was a lot of sad calls to my parents, not understanding why I could beat half those boys but they wouldn't let me in the contest. I remember sending emails to X Games, you guys got girls yet?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
GOLDMAN: Her pushing paid off. Girls got into the X Games, where Burke has won four gold medals. Burke has been considered a contender for the first Olympic gold medal in her sport.
Tom Goldman, NPR News.
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The glam is back this year at the auto industry's premiere fashion event. The annual North American International Auto Show, otherwise known as the Detroit Auto Show, opened its doors to the public this week. And a year of healthy sales has inspired the auto companies to strut their stuff.
Sonari Glinton covers business and the business of cars, and he joined me earlier from the floor of the Cobo Convention Center, to describe the scene there this year.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Well, what you're seeing at the auto show this year is luxury. All the luxury brands have seen their sales increase by double digits. And the lavish displays are back. So, I'm standing at two-story display that has about 25 cars. These individual displays cost about $7 million and up.
Now, GM and Chrysler are more subdued, but they are here and they even have concept cars. Last year or the year before, it wouldn't have made sense to have, you know, spend $500,000 on a car that was never going to go anywhere. So, this is a very different tone than the last few years.
CORNISH: So, Sonari, what are the trends that you're seeing at the show this year?
GLINTON: Well, the big trend this year is the return of the passenger sedan, the car, which is kind of funny and I'm new enough to this beat to still find that a bit ridiculous that the car companies would find religion and go to cars. But for so many years, the American carmakers especially focused on SUVs and trucks, and now they're really making a go at the regular car.
Because of the economy, Americans are, you know, stepping down. They're stepping out of their SUVs into cars and fuel economy is playing a big role. Each automaker has at least one car that gets 40 miles per gallon. Chrysler has a new Dodge Dart. Ford has a brand new Fusion. Even Cadillac has a fuel efficient car. That's the ATS.
So, the compact and mid-sized sedan market, which was normally a place that the American automakers didn't even compete in because that was the sole territory of the Japanese. They're competing in it for real right now.
CORNISH: And, of course, it was a tough year for Japanese carmakers last year. So, what messages were they sending at the car show?
GLINTON: Well, the real message is that they're back. You know, the earthquake and tsunami severely hurt Toyota and, to a greater degree, Honda, which cut down its production by about 200,000 cars. The best way to get the message is from one of the executives. Let's listen to John Mendel. He's with American Honda.
JOHN MENDEL: Many of our competitors were enjoying the race with Honda running at half throttle and they temporarily picked up a lap or two in the process while we were in the pits. We're here to serve notice to the competition. We're back to full power and we're again racing with a vengeance.
GLINTON: OK. I speak fluent car exec and that means, don't mess with us, guys. Honda and Toyota - they're like the Lakers. You know, they don't always make it to the finals, but they almost always make it to the playoffs. And so, if I were Honda's competition or Toyota's competition, I would be taking them very, very seriously.
CORNISH: Sonari, you said you're new to the beat, but I know you're having a lot of fun. What do you consider the most fun part of the auto show this year?
GLINTON: Well, Audie, in honor of your first week at the show, I am standing at the Audi booth and in the luxury car division. This is where all the fun seems to be happening. You know, I'm looking at Bentley, which - the new Bentley Continental, which I'm going to get some quality time to sit in. Mercedes is nearby. They have a hybrid. Even Cadillac has some new interesting cars. Mercedes is over the way, so that's the fun part. The luxury part is definitely where the fun is and where the interesting stuff is going on.
CORNISH: NPR's Sonari Glinton joined us from the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Thanks so much, Sonari.
GLINTON: You're welcome.
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From the stage, now to the small screen. We have a pile of new shows this winter season and new episodes of returning shows, including the biggest series of all, "American Idol."
Eric Deggans of the Tampa Bay Times joins us once again to help sort through the options. Welcome, Eric.
ERIC DEGGANS: Thank you.
CORNISH: Let's start with your favorite TV show of the season coming up.
DEGGANS: Yeah. My favorite has got to be "Justified." This is entering its third season on FX and it's about this U.S. marshal by the name of Raylan Givens. And he's in the modern world, but his attitude is really more like an old school gunslinger-type marshal. And he constantly has to pull himself back from shooting and killing people who cross him. And now, he finds himself in this weird position where he wants to settle down while also chasing down some of the most dangerous criminals in Kentucky.
And I think we've got a clip here that shows him in a fight with his archrival and also, weirdly, an old friend, Boyd Crowder.
(SOUNDBITE OF SHOW, "JUSTIFIED")
TIMOTHY OLYPHANT: (as Raylan Givens) I'm a deputy U.S. marshal here.
WALTON GOGGINS: (as Boyd Crowder) (Unintelligible) Givens, Raylan.
OLYPHANT: (as Raylan Givens) And you think I'm going to hand a man over to you to be murdered like he's what? Some pig I borrowed from you?
GOGGINS: (as Boyd Crowder) You gave me your word.
OLYPHANT: (as Raylan Givens) I've got half a mind to kick...
DEGGANS: And the fight starts.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
DEGGANS: Boys will be boys, you know.
CORNISH: Another show - another police show that you're interested in is "Southland," right? And I remember this being on network TV and then kind of bouncing to one of the sort of cable channels after suffering in the ratings.
DEGGANS: Yeah. You know, "Southland" was an NBC show and it really had the unfortunate luck of debuting the season before NBC decided to give Jay Leno his own show at 10:00 p.m. and blow out all the 10:00 p.m. dramas. So, they had a season where they struggled in the ratings and NBC cancelled them. But TNT picked them up.
It's still, I think, one of the best depictions of an urban police force that's on television now. I can't watch the "Law and Orders" and the "CSIs." They're a little too fantastical for me, but "Southland" is about getting inside the head of cops.
CORNISH: OK. So, you've given us the lowdown on some returning favorites, but are there any freshmen, any new shows that you love?
DEGGANS: Well, everybody's going to look at "Luck," which is the new HBO series starring Dustin Hoffman. That premieres later in the month. It's almost a feature film that's been stretched out over a series. Dustin Hoffman is playing a gangster who gets out of jail and decides to buy a race horse.
(SOUNDBITE OF SHOW, "LUCK")
DUSTIN HOFFMAN: (as Chester Bernstein) Beautiful day at the track. And so the jackpot will top $3 million. Good luck.
DEGGANS: So, all the action is set around the racetrack. And the creative minds behind this are David Milch, who we know created "Deadwood" and also was the creative force behind "NYPD Blue," and Michael Mann, who was the creative force behind "Miami Vice." And what I love about this series is that it is about middle-aged guys, from the richest gangster to the losers who, you know, lose their welfare check at the track every week. And there's no series out there who really focuses on middle-aged guys in all their crusty glory.
CORNISH: So, Eric, let's help everyone save some time and talk about the shows they shouldn't bother watching.
DEGGANS: OK. Well, there's a show on CBS called "Rob" that just started. It stars Rob Schneider, who used to be in "Saturday Night Live" and the "Deuce Bigalow" movies and he actually married a Latina woman. And so the comedy is based around this idea of him marrying a woman he doesn't know well and then trying to get to know her Mexican-American family. And it's just awful. It's a bad sitcom and it piles stereotypes on top of it. He says he feels like he's at a Julio Iglesias concert when he's hanging out with her family. It's just terrible.
ABC has another comedy that's also pretty bad called "Work It" about men who have to dress up like women to get work.
CORNISH: And why do people hate this show so much? Because, I mean, I've watched a few "Bosom Buddies" episodes in the past. Like, what went wrong here?
DEGGANS: Well, two things. I think representatives of the transgender community said it encourages people to make fun of men who dress like women. And then some feminists are upset because they feel like it exaggerates this idea of the man-cession, men losing jobs more than women in the recession, which was true early on, but does not seem to be so true now.
CORNISH: Lots to choose from, Eric. Thanks so much.
DEGGANS: Thank you.
CORNISH: Eric Deggans is a TV and media critic for the Tampa Bay Times.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. It's been expected since December, and today it happened: a credit downgrade in Europe. Nine European countries were hit. Most notably, France lost its top AAA rating, and Italy was taken down two notches. The downgrades will likely make the task of solving Europe's debt crisis even harder. NPR's economics correspondent John Ydstie joins us to sort through what happened. John, tell us, what are the other countries that were downgraded?
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: Well, first of all we should say it was the credit rating agency Standard & Poor's that issued the downgrades. The other two big credit rating agencies, Fitch and Moody's, haven't followed suit. In addition to France being downgraded one notch and Italy by two notches, Austria also lost its AAA rating, and Spain was also downgraded two notches, as was Portugal. On the other hand, Germany and The Netherlands, along with Finland, retained their AAA ratings.
CORNISH: Now, the thing is the S&P warned back in December that this might happen, so why are markets surprised?
YDSTIE: Well, that's a good question. In some ways, I think S&P is simply confirming what the market has already told us. In fact, in past weeks, France and Italy were already paying higher interest rates to borrow money as if their credit ratings had already been lowered. And there were no big changes in those rates today. Stock markets fell a bit in Europe and in the U.S., though only moderately today, less than 1 percent. So it would be easy to say this is formalizing what we already know. But I talked to Mohamed El-Erian, he's the co-CEO of the big bond fund PIMCO, and he suggested we shouldn't be too complacent.
MOHAMED EL-ERIAN: The easy thing to say is, no, we're not worse off. After all, S&P had signaled back in December. But there's a difference between signaling and doing something. And when you actually do something, you trigger second- and third-round effect.
CORNISH: John, second- and third-round effects, what might that be?
YDSTIE: Well, for one thing, it might complicate the bailout mechanism the EU has put in place to handle problems like Greece. The EU rescue fund depends on the guarantees of the EU countries. And France is the second biggest economy in Europe, it's been downgraded. That could complicate funds. That could complicate things for the fund as it tries to raise money. Countries like Japan might not lend unless they are paid a higher interest rate. Or potential lenders might just change their mind and not participate in the emergency fund at all.
Also, the downgrade affects contracts. Let's say you're a borrower and your contract with your lender requires you to have collateral of AAA bonds, like France's old bonds. Well now they're not AAA, so you're not living up to the contract. And there could also be political effects in Europe.
CORNISH: Political effects, especially for someone like maybe French President Nicolas Sarkozy?
YDSTIE: Well, that's certainly a possibility. But there could also be broader effects in terms of relations within the European Union. Remember, Germany retains its AAA rating and France is diminished. Now, throughout the development of the European Union and the euro currency, France and Germany have been pretty much equal partners. But as one European analyst told me today, this action makes France less like Germany and more like Italy, so it could cement Germany's position in the driver's seat in Europe. France's finance minister tried to put the best face on it today. He said, this is not a catastrophe. It's an excellent rating. That is the new AA+ rating. But he acknowledged it's not good news.
CORNISH: NPR's economics correspondent John Ydstie. John, thanks so much for talking with us.
YDSTIE: You're welcome.
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A split has divided the Republican presidential race. On one side, fiscal conservatives tend to prefer Mitt Romney. On the other, social conservatives prefer just about anyone else. Well, this week that schism moved to South Carolina. NPR's Ari Shapiro has our story from Greenville.
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Show up at Bob Jones University around 11:15 on any weekday morning and the campus will be a ghost town. Wait a few minutes and it will look like someone flipped a switch, students and teachers milling everywhere. You've just seen the end of chapel. It's daily, and it's mandatory. This school is a bastion of the most conservative brand of evangelical Christianity. Many of these students are just old enough to vote for the first time in the presidential primary a week from Saturday. Daniel Flotton is planning on casting his vote for Rick Santorum. He says religion is not the only deciding factor for him.
DANIEL FLOTTON: It's not that important for me as you can fake religion, say you're a Christian just to get votes. So, for instance, Mitt Romney, his Mormonism is not really a turnoff as much as his politics.
SHAPIRO: Twenty-year-old Emily Downing has a similar view. She's planning on voting for Ron Paul.
EMILY DOWNING: I wouldn't necessarily vote for somebody just because they're a Christian because not every Christian has amazing leadership abilities, but I would want them to have good morals. So that is important to me.
SHAPIRO: David Overly, who's voting for Mitt Romney, thinks a lot about a candidate's religion.
DAVID OVERLY: I think it's important. I think it's very important.
SHAPIRO: And so, the fact that he's Mormon, does it give you pause at all?
OVERLY: Yeah, it does. It does some. But again, we - you get in a situation where you look for the best candidate, and I think he's the best one.
SHAPIRO: That may not sound revolutionary. But until a decade ago, this school referred to Catholicism and Mormonism as cults. Bob Jones was once hugely influential in Republican politics.
CARL ABRAMS: That really goes all the way back to the 1920s, probably, with the founder of the university.
SHAPIRO: Carl Abrams teaches history and political science here. Bob Jones used to be a station of the cross for aspiring Republican presidential candidates. That changed after the 2000 campaign. George W. Bush delivered a stump speech here without mentioning the school's ban on interracial dating. The school ultimately dropped the ban and apologized. President Bush apologized, too, for failing to speak out. Today, Bob Jones no longer officially endorses or hosts candidates. Abrams thinks it's for the best: Why invite people's criticism?
ABRAMS: If they are offended by our stand for supernatural Christianity, that is understandable, and we're not surprised. But suffering for political causes, that is unwise.
SHAPIRO: So this week, something happened that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago.
MITT ROMNEY: Thank you. Thank you. My goodness. Thank you. We got some old friends here this morning. You're kind to be here.
SHAPIRO: The man who is expected to be the next Republican presidential nominee came within five minutes drive of Bob Jones, and you would never have known the school existed. So why did Romney come here at all? Business consultant Ralph Callahan was in the audience of the rally. He explained that Greenville used to be a textile capital of the world. When that industry went offshore, city leaders courted foreign companies, and it paid off.
RALPH CALLAHAN: BMW put their first non-German plant here. Bosch is here. Hitachi is here. There is just - there are probably more investment - foreign investment in the upstate of South Carolina per capita than any place in the United States.
SHAPIRO: And all that foreign investment has brought an influx of people who have changed the voter gene pool in the region. The evangelicals met the businessmen. And they mixed, says Jim Guth, who teaches political science here at Furman University.
JIM GUTH: The gap between those two groups isn't nearly as wide as it is in other parts of the country in the Republican Party. A lot of business conservatives are also social conservatives. They're church people. They're active parishioners of various conservative congregations.
SHAPIRO: So the fact that the Michelin Man lives in the same town as Bob Jones allows Romney to come here and make a pitch like this:
ROMNEY: I want to make America the most attractive place in the world again for investments.
SHAPIRO: ...without having to worship at the altar of the evangelicals. Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Greenville, South Carolina.
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Mitt Romney is getting blasted in a new 28-minute film. It's distributed by a super PAC that supports Newt Gingrich. Independent fact-checkers have found it rife with inaccuracies. And today, in Florida, Gingrich called on the super PAC to either remove the inaccuracies or pull the film off the air and off the Internet.
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We're going to talk about some of those inaccuracies now. The film is called "King of Bain," Bain being Bain Capital, the private equity firm that Romney led in the 1980s and '90s.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "KING OF BAIN")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: For tens of thousands of Americans, the suffering began when Mitt Romney came to town.
BLOCK: The movie is funded by a super PAC called Winning Our Future. Bill Adair is editor of the nonpartisan fact-checking site PolitiFact, and he joins me in the studio to talk about the film. And, Bill, a lot of the film focuses on a number of companies that Bain Capital took over and what happened after. Explain what the film says.
BILL ADAIR: What it says, basically, is that Romney profited while thousands of people lost their jobs and it uses very stark, sort of classic political propaganda techniques claiming that Romney walked away with tens of millions of dollars.
BLOCK: OK. Well, one of the companies that the movie focuses on is the chain store KB Toys. Let's listen to a part of the film.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "KING OF BAIN")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Romney and Bain bought the 80 year old company in 2000, loaded KB Toys with millions in debt, then used the money to repurchase Bain's stock. The debt was too staggering. By 2004, 365 stores had closed.
BLOCK: OK. Bill Adair, PolitiFact has been looking into the claims about KB Toys. What'd you find?
ADAIR: Well, the implication here is that Romney and Bain Capital drove KB Toys into bankruptcy by loading it up with debt and we've rated that claim mostly false. The truth about KB Toys was it was in trouble before Bain bought it and it was suffering because it was a chain of stores in shopping malls at a time when the whole trend in the industry was toward big retailers like Wal-Mart and Target. So KB Toys was having a really difficult time competing and was in trouble when Bain got it.
BLOCK: Another interesting point that comes up here, the movie says Romney and Bain bought the company. Well, a lot of these deals that the movie talks about were actually after Mitt Romney had left as the head of Bain Capital, but he did, according to the New York Times reporting, still have a financial interest. He was getting a share of the profits, based on his retirement agreement with the company.
ADAIR: And, indeed, it is incorrect to say it the way they do, that Romney and Bain Capital drove KB Toys into bankruptcy because Romney left in 1999, Bain got involved with KB Toys in 2000. So although he continued to get money from the firm, he was not making these management decisions, as far as anyone knows.
Now, he did, though, get some money from the investments in this company and others and to the extent that they paid off, Romney benefited.
BLOCK: A couple of other claims in the film that you've been truth-squading, they have to do with Mitt Romney's homes. One claim is that he's planning to bulldoze a $12 million, 3,000 square foot home near San Diego and replace it with an 11,000 square foot home. Another claim made by a laid off worker is that he has 15 homes. What'd you find?
ADAIR: Well, in the case of the home in San Diego, they pretty much get that accurate. It's - indeed, those are Romney's plans, so we've rated that mostly true. What kept it from being fully true was the plans seem to be on hold while Romney waits to see if he becomes president.
As to the claim made in the film that he has 15 homes, of course, we know he's very wealthy. Is he that wealthy? In fact, when we looked at public records, we could find only three homes: one in New Hampshire, the one in California and one in Massachusetts. The 15 seems to be based on various properties that he has lived in over the years, so we rated that claim false on our truth-o-meter.
BLOCK: OK. Bill Adair, thanks for coming in.
ADAIR: Thanks for having me.
BLOCK: Bill Adair is editor of the nonpartisan website PolitiFact.com.
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And I'm Melissa Block. Penn State president Rodney Erickson has spent the past few days getting grilled by alumni. More than two months after a child sex abuse scandal upended the university, alums are angry, but their focus is not so much the alleged crimes, instead it's how administrators have dealt with the scandal, specifically their decision to fire long time football coach Joe Paterno.
Last night, Erickson met with Penn State alumni in suburban Philadelphia and NPR's Jeff Brady was there.
JEFF BRADY, BYLINE: Just days after child sex abuse charges were filed against retired assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, the board of trustees fired football coach Joe Paterno and the school president. That's when Rodney Erickson took the helm.
Last night, in a hotel meeting room, before a crowd of about 600 alumni, Erickson laid out an overriding goal for his tenure.
RODNEY ERICKSON: I will not allow this great university and its long and historic legacy as a leader in higher education to be defined by this horrible tragedy.
BRADY: While a strong statement, that was not one of the applause lines of the evening. Here's Penn State alum Beth Wells.
BETH WELLS: Why did the board fire Joe Paterno prior to conducting an internal investigation?
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
BRADY: President Erickson referred questions about Paterno's firing to the board of trustees, which issued a statement Thursday. It said trustees unanimously decided letting the coach go was in the best interest of the university.
That didn't go over well at another meeting in the same hotel last night. Downstairs, a group of alumni who want to get rid of the entire board of trustees held a competing conversation. Former Penn State and pro football player Franco Harris responded to the board's statement that it acted in the best interest of the university.
FRANCO HARRIS: They think that we are that dumb. That's exactly what they said two months ago and they still want us to swallow that.
BRADY: Harris is a legendary Pittsburgh Steelers running back who played in the 1970s and early '80s. It didn't take long for someone in the audience to suggest he campaign for a seat on Penn State's board of trustees.
HARRIS: OK. Now, OK. Now, you know my running days are over.
BRADY: Back upstairs in the official meeting, 1982 graduate Anthony Lubrano chastised President Erickson for not issuing an apology to former Coach Paterno.
ANTHONY LUBRANO: You haven't even yet called the man. There has been no one from this university, no one in an administrative capacity, call Coach Paterno. Coach Bill O'Brien called him Monday night and he's only been with us a couple of days.
BRADY: Much of the discussion centered on the firing of Paterno and how the scandal has harmed Penn State's reputation. At one point, President Erickson steered the conversation toward the 10 alleged victims.
ERICKSON: There are some things that happened here, if true, we need to take responsibility for. If there are victims, by God, we need to do right by them. We need to see that they get justice.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
BRADY: Penn State alumni raised more than a half million dollars to help victims of sexual assault in the weeks after the scandal broke. Two months on, many of them are now focusing their anger on how the school's leadership treated Joe Paterno.
Jeff Brady, NPR News, Philadelphia.
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An update now on pro basketball's shorter than usual season. Thanks to a labor dispute between owners and players, the National Basketball Association began play almost two months late. But the NBA didn't trim its schedule nearly as much, which means teams are playing a lot of games in not a lot of time.
Sportswriter Stefan Fatsis joins us now as he does most Fridays. Hi there, Stefan.
STEFAN FATSIS, BYLINE: Hey, Audie.
CORNISH: So just how compressed is this year's schedule?
FATSIS: Well, normally, NBA teams play 82 games apiece over 170 days and that works out to about a game every two-plus days. And at that pace, teams this season should be playing 57 games. But the NBA's owners and players needed to maximize revenue during the shortened season, so they decided to cram in 66 games.
It may not sound like a huge difference, but it really is. Every team has to play on three straight nights at least once. You're going to see stretches of five games in six nights, nine games in 12 nights, and for the players, the routine pounding of basketball, plus the travel, is going to be physically brutal and it's already having some effects.
CORNISH: In what ways? Where are you seeing it, on the court or off the court?
FATSIS: I think you're going to see it in both places. A lot of these games are going to be a little raggy because you're going to get a lot of bench players playing, players are going to be called up to fill in for injured players. And that's what we're seeing already.
About two-thirds of the league's 30 teams have had key players sit out games with injuries: LeBron James, Dwayne Wade of the Miami Heat, both watched the game from the sidelines last week. Derrick Rose of Chicago, Stephen Curry of Golden State, Carmelo Anthony of New York. The list goes on. Big name players are getting hurt on a daily basis.
To combat this wear and tear because of the schedule, teams are practicing less. They're going to rest important players more, but there's going to be pressure on these guys to come back sooner than maybe they should because, if you miss 10 days, you're going to miss a 10th of the season.
CORNISH: So does this help out the younger players or the more experienced players?
FATSIS: Well, normally, experience counts for a lot in the NBA. Last year, the oldest teams - Dallas, Boston, Los Angeles, San Antonio - they all did well. Dallas won its first title.
The thinking this year is that the compressed schedule is going to be especially burdensome for these older teams, though. The website Hoopism is doing a season long study of how teams are faring based on age, and so far, the older teams are doing better than the younger teams, overall, but we're only about 10 or 12 games into the season.
There are some interesting data points, though. The two oldest teams, in terms of age based on minutes that their players play are Dallas and Boston. They're off to very slow starts.
Two of the youngest teams, Philadelphia and Oklahoma City, are off to great starts. It'll be interesting to see how this evolves as the season grinds on.
CORNISH: And, Stefan, one more thing before I let you go. I want to talk about this article that appeared in Sports Illustrated about Michael Jordan because it sort of busts the creation myth about him.
FATSIS: Yeah. It's a fantastic piece by Thomas Lake that appears in this week's issue of Sports Illustrated. Throughout Jordan's career, he's said that there's only one coach that ever cut him from a team and it was this guy Pop Herring. And Thomas Lake goes back and basically debunks this myth. He shows how Jordan, when he was in 10th grade, wasn't cut from the varsity. He didn't make the team. He made the JV instead. There was only one 10th grader on the varsity and he was on the team because he was much, much taller than Jordan and they needed size on this team.
But much more than taking apart this story that Jordan has told over and over in his career, this is a very sad story about the decline of this coach, Pop Herring, into mental illness at a very, very young age. Thomas Lake tracks him down and tells a very moving story about Michael Jordan's coach.
CORNISH: Stefan Fatsis joins us most Fridays to talk sports. You can hear more of him on Slate magazine's sport podcast, "Hang Up and Listen."
Stefan, thanks so much.
FATSIS: Thank you, Audie.
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And I'm Melissa Block. On Tuesday, we talked with the mayor of Cordova, Alaska, and heard about the unusual amount of snow the city has received: at that point, more than 18 feet this winter. For an update, today, we reached Cordova resident Wendy Rainey. She and her husband run the Orca Adventure Lodge on the outskirts of town. She said, since Tuesday, there's been more snow than rain, and today, finally, is a beautiful day.
WENDY RAINEY: And a beautiful day up here right now is any day without precipitation. So it's very cold. We've switched gears and gone from rain, which we had a majority of yesterday, mixed rain and snow, making everything a big slushy mess, to a freeze last night. And now, we're looking at an ice skating rink.
BLOCK: Well, how are you keeping up with the shoveling?
RAINEY: We're actually catching up. We've had hired some folks from town and had a crew digging out here to the point where yesterday when the National Guard reached us for their list, we've turned away the diggers but did accept help with loaders.
BLOCK: Have you put the kids to work with the shovels?
RAINEY: Oh, yeah. We have twin 16-year-old boys that are intimately familiar with shovels right now.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: That's kind of harsh. You know, we have read earlier this week that Cordova needed a certain kind of shovel, a scoop shovel that it didn't have, that the shovels they had there just weren't able to keep up with the amount of snow. Is that true?
RAINEY: That's true. Actually, we made a desperate call to a company that comes in here in the winter, and they run a heli-ski operation. And we made a desperate call to them to airfreight us some shovels when this all started, and I'm really glad we did that because the shovels were breaking because of the weight of the snow. And once it crusted up and frozen, you can't even use the scoop shovels. It's just too dense to maneuver it.
BLOCK: What are you most worried about right now, Wendy?
RAINEY: Right now, the focus has changed from collapsing buildings to digging out fuel tanks and being able to keep the fuel supplies running so that we can continue to keep buildings heated, and we don't get a freeze-up.
BLOCK: And what about the kids? I know school was out earlier this week. What's happening there?
RAINEY: School has been out all week, so they've basically had roughly a month off for Christmas break this year, and I think they're ready to go back. I'm ready for them to go back, but...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
RAINEY: ...they've been keeping themselves pretty busy.
BLOCK: How unusual is it for school to be closed for so long?
RAINEY: I don't know that they've ever had a snow day that is on record here in Cordova.
BLOCK: Ever?
RAINEY: A lot of times, if you live out of town, it's kind of a parental decision. The school will say the buses aren't running. If, you know, if you want to keep your kids at home, please do. It's parental discretion, but I don't recall a weather day for the school.
BLOCK: Wendy, how high is the snow piled right now outside your lodge there?
RAINEY: We had a day of wind and rain, so it's actually come down a little bit, but there's still snow piles that are up over 20 feet. In town, they're 20 to 30 feet plus, and it's still - you really have to watch your kids because even though, you know, they're like a magnet for kids, they're not stable, and they are dangerous. And if a child fell into the center of a snow pile, it would be like being buried in an avalanche.
BLOCK: Wow. Well, what are you hearing about the forecast? Is there more snow on the way, or are you getting a break?
RAINEY: I think we're getting a break. We're at cold and clear right now, which is - it has its good and bad. You know, the cold and clear makes it very icy and very treacherous to maneuver, but I was digging out my ice spikes for my boots out of the closet this morning, and we'll keep going because this is only the beginning of the winter.
BLOCK: I've been talking with Wendy Rainey, who's co-owner of the Orca Adventure Lodge in Cordova, Alaska. Wendy, hang in there and thanks for talking with us.
RAINEY: Thank you. You guys have a great day.
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When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney lists his credentials for the Oval Office, it often goes something like this.
MITT ROMNEY: I worked at one company, Bain, for 25 years. And I left that to go off and help save the Olympic games. If I'm president...
CORNISH: That's a reference to the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Romney took over as CEO after a bribery scandal threatened the organization of the games.
A decade later, NPR's Howard Berkes finds contradictory accounts of Mitt Romney's role and motivation in those Olympics.
HOWARD BERKES, BYLINE: Remember that the 2002 Olympics closely followed the attacks of September 11th.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Ladies and gentlemen, the American flag that flew at the World Trade Center on September 11th is being carried into the stadium.
BERKES: Standing a few feet away in a spotlight, were President Bush and Mitt Romney, who'd spent three years trying to rescue the games from scandal, erase a budget deficit and bolster a massive security effort.
Fraser Bullock was Romney's chief operating and financial officer at the Salt Lake Olympic Committee.
FRASER BULLOCK: It culminated in opening ceremonies when we have 55,000 people gathered, the world watching, and where there's absolute reverence and silence in the stadium, in what was becoming a healing moment for the world after the tragedy of 9/11.
BERKES: But here's a completely different view of the same scene, from Ken Bullock - who has no relation to Fraser - but sat on the board of directors of the Salt Lake Olympic bid and organizing committees.
KEN BULLOCK: To be able to walk out there with President Bush and the flag from the Twin Towers, I mean we knew it was a stage that you couldn't dream of having.
BERKES: Ken Bullock directs the Utah League of Cities and Towns and tried to make sure the Olympics involved average people in communities across the state. He believes Romney saw an opportunity in the Olympics after failing to win a Senate seat in Massachusetts five years before.
BULLOCK: This was part of his game plan was: I'm going to come here, get a national profile, be able to look at how I can position myself so that I can move into higher office. He's an opportunist. And he took advantage of that.
BERKES: About a year before the games, Romney told NPR he was too busy to think about his political future.
ROMNEY: The Olympics is completely consuming and occupying. And I don't really know what's going to happen when it's over. And I don't give it much thought yet. Maybe someday I'll begin thinking about that.
BERKES: In the same NPR interview, Romney described the challenge of staging the games as his task.
ROMNEY: What I look at with the games is that I've been given an enormous responsibility. And an entire country and the Olympic team from the United States and the world, to a certain extent, expect me to do the job well. And I want to fulfill that responsibility.
BERKES: This image of Olympic savior was actually cast in six official collector-quality, enameled metal Olympic pins. Critic Ken Bullock has them in his collection.
BULLOCK: We have Valentine's ones with all the Olympic mascots around saying how much we love you, Mitt. We have him pulling up a sled of some sort where mascots are saying: Are we there yet, Mitt? We have Superman Mitt with the flag and the Clark Kent chin. I don't know how to put words to describe how narcissistic they are.
BERKES: Three Olympic pin collectors and experts consulted by NPR say they've never seen pins like these featuring an organizing committee chief. But there's nothing insidious or egotistical in that, says Fraser Bullock, Romney's right-hand man at the Olympics.
BULLOCK: Somebody from the marketing department came to him and said: Hey, we've got an idea for a pin that we think might generate some revenue and sell. And Mitt could care less whether his face is on a pin or not. But it became a very popular pin and generated revenue for the organizing committee. And that's where he was coming from: How do we make more money?
BERKES: Romney was a cheapskate, Bullock says, as he tried to address a $400 million deficit. The Olympic bidding scandal made corporate sponsors skittish. Bullock credits Romney with restoring confidence and raising $800 million. He also slashed spending, even cancelling catering for board meetings.
BULLOCK: For lunch we had Domino's Pizza and it was a dollar a slice. Because he knew he could buy a pizza for $5, cut it into eight slices and make $3 a pizza. That type of mentality and message reverberated throughout the organization. And everybody knew that's what we were going to do. We were going to be very responsible with every penny.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The president and CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, Mr. Mitt Romney.
BERKES: By the time the closing ceremony began, the Salt Lake Olympics were already receiving rave reviews from Olympic officials and even cynical journalists. Some called it the best organized winter games ever. Romney received much of the credit and took center stage again.
ROMNEY: Well, Olympians and people of Salt Lake City, we did it.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING)
BERKES: And just three weeks later, back home in Massachusetts, Romney announced he was running for governor.
ROMNEY: I'm in. The bumper stickers have been printed. The website is going up tomorrow morning. The campaign papers are filed today.
BERKES: Turmoil in Massachusetts politics made Romney's candidacy possible. But Salt Lake Olympic board member Ken Bullock found the timing suspicious. And he bristles at the credit Romney received and asserted since for rescuing the Salt Lake Olympics.
BULLOCK: Everyone had a role and everyone had a contribution to make and everyone deserves credit, including Mitt. But so does everyone else. And he vastly, greatly overstates his role in this.
BERKES: In his book about the Olympics, Romney gives credit to staff, board members, volunteers and others. But Fraser Bullock is unequivocal.
BULLOCK: Nobody on this planet is more capable of speaking about what Mitt did than me. I spent three years with him every day working through the Olympics. It is absolutely a credential that he should utilize. Because of his extraordinary leadership, we had the most successful Olympic Winter Games in history here in Salt Lake.
BERKES: In three weeks, celebrations are scheduled marking the 10th anniversary of the Olympics that launched a sainted Mitt Romney into new national prominence. It's not clear whether he'll pause from his presidential campaign to attend.
Howard Berkes, NPR News, Salt Lake City.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. Jane Donaldson may look like a middle-aged British matron, but she has a secret.
ALAN BENNETT: (Reading) Mrs. Donaldson's adventure had given her something of a boost. She imagined herself younger. She looked brighter. And ludicrous though she knew it to be, she felt she was still in the game.
RAZ: That's the voice of British author and humorist Alan Bennett reading from his new book of short stories. It's called "Smut," and it's our book today, so brace yourself because there's definitely some smut ahead. And Alan Bennett joins me now from our studios at the BBC in London. Alan Bennett, welcome to the program.
BENNETT: Hello.
RAZ: Let's look at the two women at the center of these stories: Mrs. Donaldson and Mrs. Forbes. They are perfectly respectable on the surface, right, but underneath, there is something quite different going on. Tell me about these two women.
BENNETT: Well, to put it, I'm always fascinated by people who want to break out and particularly people who break out late in life. My last story was about someone who had a passion for reading. She discovered a passion for reading quite late in life, and it took over her life. She happened to be the queen, so it made - it became rather complicated. But the situation is the same of some of these - to both these women diverge from the normal middle-age path, really.
RAZ: You called this book "Smut," but it strikes me that you could almost have called it secrets because almost everyone in these two stories is hiding something.
BENNETT: I suppose so, yes. Well, they then become more interesting as characters. If a character is all that you see, it's rather boring. But they - I didn't think of it when I was writing them. They - Mrs. Johnson, it should be said, becomes a member of a troop of not-really actors, but they're a troop of presenters who work in a hospital where they present cases for the benefit of medical students.
RAZ: She's basically an actress for medical students.
BENNETT: Yes. They present the symptoms of conditions and so on.
RAZ: She is 55 years old. She's a widow. And she actually gets quite into this role-playing. One day, she's a transvestite with knee trouble. The next day, she's someone's mother who has gone into a coma. Eventually, some of the medical students become borders. They come to live with her at her home. She needs the extra income. And soon enough, they can no longer pay the rent, so she cuts a deal with them, a very interesting deal.
BENNETT: Well, they then say we're used to watching you perform symptoms and so on. If we could, instead of paying the rent, which we can't do, if we could perform for you, and she doesn't immediately understand what this involves. And then she realizes, oh, you brought oral - the reader realizes when you actually get into the bedroom.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
RAZ: Yes. And Alan Bennett, you've written about sex before, shows up in "History Boys," which, of course, is your best-known play and several other works of yours. But "Smut" is - I think it's one of the most explicit things you've actually ever written. Why did you decide to go in that direction?
BENNETT: Well, I think I'm getting on now and I'm thought of in England as being rather cozy and gentile, I suppose, in a way, certainly in the stories that I write. And I think you have an inclination to outflank your readers to do something that they aren't expecting you to do, and I think that's one of the motives for writing these two stories. They aren't quite what people would expect of me.
RAZ: Another theme that seems to run throughout these stories, aside from secrets, is expectations, the way people expect each other to behave, at least publicly, what people think is expected of them.
BENNETT: Mm-hmm. I haven't thought of that, but hopefully that is the case. The fun is in diverging from that, thwarting that and suddenly swerving from it, I think. Like, for instance, in one of the incidents, you mention about her, you know, she suddenly announces that she's actually a transvestite, she's presenting a transvestite as one of the case histories, which is the last thing you're expecting. But it's the joy of writing prose that you can suddenly do something like this. If you were writing it on the stage or for a film, you'd have to prepare for this scene and ready yourself for it. But you can do it in a sentence when you're writing prose, and I find that very liberating.
RAZ: Mrs. Donaldson is a very sympathetic character. She's very easy to like. And yet, your other character in the other story, "The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes," Mrs. Forbes is not that easy to like. She is this adoring mother of a very narcissistic son, Graham, who also has a secret. Tell me about Mrs. Forbes.
BENNETT: Well, Mrs. Forbes is very outspoken, very downright and very full of herself. And she has a rather henpecked husband, who seldom speaks, really, except certainly not to her.
RAZ: And her son, Graham, he has a secret, which I don't think we'll spoil it. He's gay, we find out pretty early on...
BENNETT: Hmm. Hmm. No.
RAZ: ...and yet Mrs. Forbes and Graham's wife, Betty, they are trying to keep up appearances.
BENNETT: Everybody's trying to keep up appearances. Nobody knows that everybody else knows what the situation is. But everybody assumes that Mrs. Forbes has to be shielded from this knowledge that her son is gay. In the end, you find out that she knew all along. And I think that's quite true to life, really. One spends a lot of time considering other people's feelings, when in fact there's often no need for it. The habit of straight talking would - in every sense, would do better.
RAZ: Alan Bennett, you are known for your command of character voices, and I'm wondering how you get inside the mind of a middle-aged, you know, woman from England.
BENNETT: That comes from childhood, really. My father was quite shy, and he didn't speak very much. And my mother didn't talk a great deal, but she had two sisters did - who were very valuable. And when I was child, I used to hear them talking, as we say, endlessly, and it lays down a kind of seam, really, in the mind, which I found when I started to write, I could draw, and I could remember how they spoke and the kind of things that they said. And so one mined it, and I've been able to mine it for most of my writing life.
RAZ: So you know Mrs. Donaldson. You know Mrs. Forbes.
BENNETT: Well, I know people like that. But whether they have the rich and alarming secret lives I've wished on them, I don't know. I wouldn't like to say.
RAZ: How do you actually approach the language, the writing? I mean, there are so many moments in this book that - and words that I intend to use. You describe Betty's decision to marry Graham, you say: she wasn't wholly infatuated. Though she liked the way he looked, but so, too, did he and that unfatuated her a bit.
BENNETT: That just came to me as I was writing. That was just a similarity of infatuated and unfatuated. I don't think unfatuated is a word.
RAZ: No, it's not. It should be, though.
BENNETT: It ought to be. The way I write, I suppose, I never start at the beginning. I write the parts that I enjoy writing, and then I often start in the middle and go back and pick things up rather than start writing at A and end up at B. And that way, it still gives me a lot of pleasure.
RAZ: Now that you have written about smut, have you - is this a slippery slope? I mean, is there where you're headed?
BENNETT: I don't know. One or two people have said, oh, you can see I am loosening up, I think they put it kindly. Maybe that's what happens to old men. Maybe they all become, you know, dirty old men, really.
RAZ: That's the acclaimed playwright and author Alan Bennett. His newest book is a collection of short stories. It's called "Smut." He spoke to us from London. Alan Bennett, thank you so much.
BENNETT: Thank you.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Time now for music.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: The band Bombay Bicycle Club isn't from India, nor are any of its members necessarily into riding bikes, but the four British indie rockers are getting a lot of attention in the U.K. with some critics there counting them as the most exciting band in British rock in years. All four band members are still in their early 20s. They met in high school and cut their first record when they were all just 15. Bombay Bicycle Club's front man Jack Steadman said age was a problem when they started out, especially because the only gigs they could get were at bars.
JACK STEADMAN: Well, the trouble was we were all under 18 and all our friends were. So we had to sort of find the sort of emergency exits to all these bars so that our friends could actually come through the back door and watch us.
RAZ: Right, because, obviously, they wouldn't be allowed in. How did you guys come up with the name, Bombay Bicycle Club? It's a great name.
STEADMAN: Yes. Pretty much, we were just on our way to our first gig, and we didn't have a name yet. So we drove past this restaurant in the car that we were in, and it was called Bombay Bicycle Club.
RAZ: And that's it?
STEADMAN: And that was it, really.
RAZ: Have you eaten there?
STEADMAN: They actually, a year later, they said, do you want to come in and have dinner on us? And so we got a free curry out of it.
RAZ: That's not bad. I wanted to - I want to ask you about, obviously, the music on this record. It has an electronic sensibility, but it's also very layered record. And I want to hear a track that's called "Shuffle."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHUFFLE")
RAZ: This is just one of the catchiest songs I've heard in a long time, just grabbed me the first time I heard it, that piano, the upbeat, soaring vocals. Tell me about this song. What is it about?
STEADMAN: This is a song that actually started off as a song which I was doing as part of my solo project, which is all electronic. I was really just getting into sampling music instead of writing it on guitars. And it was the sort of writer's block that I had during this album, which made me go into that stuff and try and adapt it into a band.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHUFFLE")
RAZ: Tell me about the process of putting some of these songs together.
STEADMAN: It's usually just like a really small idea that I have. And I record in my bedroom, and I just send it to the band. And that's something that we just all work on together, because I'm really bad at finishing things. So I start a lot of songs, and they'll help me get it all finished.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: Once the band started to get more attention, you eventually won a contest to headline a pretty significant music festival, right? And that was sort of...
STEADMAN: Yeah.
RAZ: I mean, that was the beginning of where you would eventually land.
STEADMAN: Yeah. It was funny because we did that festival; we had to go back to school. I mean...
RAZ: After that (unintelligible)...
STEADMAN: Everyone was saying, you know, this is it. You've made it. This is the beginning. And then we were like, well, actually, I think, well, let's just calm down and make sure that we do it right.
RAZ: Did you - any of you guys, the four members of the band, ever think about going to university and putting the band on hold?
STEADMAN: Yeah. We all had places at university, actually, but that was just us being sensible, I think. I've always known that this is exactly what I want to do.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: I'm speaking with Jack Steadman. He's the front man for Bombay Bicycle Club. It's a British band, and they have a new record. It's called "A Different Kind of Fix." Do you write most of the lyrics?
STEADMAN: Yeah. I write the lyrics.
RAZ: The last lines of "Lights Out, Words Gone," you hear the words: When the light is out and the words have gone, let me be the one to try it on. What is that song about?
STEADMAN: I guess it's just about going to bed with someone. That makes it sound really creepy.
RAZ: No, no.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
RAZ: No, no. It's a classic theme in music.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LIGHTS OUT, WORDS GONE")
RAZ: And your earlier songs seem to have clearer stories, whereas the songs on this record are more penetrable, difficult to know exactly what they're about, almost like there are fragments of stories in these songs.
STEADMAN: Yeah, no. I definitely agree. I think I was just a lot less self-conscious when I was a teenager. When I listen to those early songs, I feel like an adult discovering, you know, that diary under your bed that you wrote when you were younger. And you're embarrassed by it, but at that time, you weren't ashamed to write all your feelings down in that way.
RAZ: And now you feel like you have to hide it a bit more?
STEADMAN: I think so, yeah. I think that's becoming a bit more abstract because you are just a bit more self-conscious.
RAZ: Because people are parsing your lyrics more now and sort of reading them more carefully?
STEADMAN: Yeah, that's probably it. It's something I'd like to try and work against, to be honest, on the next record. I think it's nice to just be unashamed and just - that definitely appeal to a lot of people anyway in the beginning.
RAZ: On this record, Jack, I hear a lot of really powerful influences, particularly British influences: Stone Roses from the late '80s, early '90s, Roni Size and the drum and bass sound. And this song, "Still," has an unmistakable Radiohead quality to it.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STILL")
RAZ: How do you sort of decide how far to go in the direction of the bands that influenced you versus kind of stepping back and try to create something completely new?
STEADMAN: Yes. I think I got so in love with a band that I just end up pretty much copying them. And I hope that the originality can come from the fact that you're in love with 1,000 bands and they're all completely different. So when you copy all of them at once, that's how you create something new.
RAZ: And is it fair to say that Radiohead's a band that you love?
STEADMAN: Oh, yeah. Of course, yeah. Definitely one of my all-time favorite bands.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STILL")
RAZ: You are all headed on a long tour, including your first headlining tour in the U.S., right, starting in - next month, I think.
STEADMAN: Yeah.
RAZ: Are you excited about that?
STEADMAN: Yeah. I mean, it's a mixture of excitement. And, like, that's going to be the longest tour we've ever done, so we're all sort of just, I guess, a bit nervous about it.
RAZ: Is it strange to go to places - I know you're going to be going to Asia - and people are singing the words that you've written, to see that in the audience?
STEADMAN: Yeah. It's really, really surreal. A couple of weeks ago, we played in Hong Kong, which is where I was born. So that was like one of the craziest moments of my life because I went back there 21 years later and there were all these people that were singing. And it was just a really, really surreal and a very, very cheesy, corny moment.
RAZ: That's Jack Steadman. He's the vocalist for the British band Bombay Bicycle Club. Their new record is called "A Different Kind of Fix." It's out now. Jack joined me from London. Thanks so much for being with us, Jack Steadman.
Thank you very much.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: And for Saturday, that's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. Check out our weekly podcast, the Best of WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. You can find it on iTunes or at npr.org/weekendatc. We post a new episode every Sunday night. Tomorrow on the program, we ask: If Ronald Reagan were running for president today, could he get the GOP nod? Until then, thanks for listening and have a great night.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
From NPR News, it's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz.
Wednesday morning, rush hour, North Tehran, 32-year-old nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan is on his way to work.
DAVID IGNATIUS: And along in traffic pulls a motorcycle with two young men on the motorcycle and the one sitting in the back attaches a magnetic bomb to the side of his car, speeds off, the bomb explodes. The young man and, I believe, his driver and bodyguard are both killed. This MO, this method of operations, we think has been used at least three other times in the last two years.
RAZ: That's The Washington Post's foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius. In one of his spy novels, "The Increment," an Iranian nuclear scientist gets tangled up with foreign intelligence agencies. Now, assassins have targeted five Iranian nuclear scientists for death in the past two years. In four of those attacks, they succeeded.
IGNATIUS: Who could conduct an operation like that? What would you need to be able to have people like that who not only could get in and attach the bomb but get away?
RAZ: Iran blames foreign intelligence agencies, including Israel's Mossad and the CIA for the attacks. The U.S. has categorically denied any responsibility. Either way, it's part of a series of events that have led to growing tensions between Iran and the West. That's our cover story today: Iran and the gathering storm.
(SOUNDBITE OF VARIOUS NEWS BROADCASTS)
RAZ: Later this month, a new round of talks between U.N. Security Council members and Iran resume. These are referred to by diplomats as the 5+1 talks. And some U.S. diplomats believe Iran is now posturing ahead of those talks.
About a fifth of the world's oil supply comes through the Strait of Hormuz. That's a narrow channel that connects the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea. And some officials in Iran have threatened to block it if the United States manages to convince other countries to stop buying Iranian oil.
Late this week, the Obama administration sent Iran a clear message, a blockade of the strait would be a red line. What does that mean? Here's Ambassador Dennis Ross, who until recently was the administration's top adviser on Iran.
DENNIS ROSS: When you talk about red lines, you're talking about lines that you will not allow to be crossed. It means that if someone transgresses that red line, you're going to react. And traditionally, that means a military response.
RAZ: Let me ask you about what is happening right now, because a series of events seemed to be leading to some kind of confrontation, whether it's diplomatic or military. Why are we at this point right now?
ROSS: Well, I think what's happened is that the Iranians have continued with their nuclear program, notwithstanding the weight of international pressure on them. You would now have multiple Security Council sanctions that have been adopted. And now, the talk of the Europeans being prepared to boycott buying of their oil is putting the Iranians under a real squeeze. You know, oil basically accounts for close to 90 percent of the government's revenue.
When you're looking at that from their standpoint, and you're under greater isolation than you've ever been before, it's not surprising that there is a strong rhetorical response by them. One can't dismiss and assume that the rhetoric is only going to be all they do, but I think by the same token, we should also put what they're saying in some perspective.
RAZ: You were, of course, a senior adviser on Iran. Describe what the lines of communication are between the administration and Iran at this point.
ROSS: It's a very good question. One of the reasons that this administration sought an engagement policy from the outset was precisely because we did not have direct lines of communication. If you look over at the history of the relationship or non-relationships and see Islamic Republic came into being in 1979, you really have seen us have to communicate through others, which means...
RAZ: Switzerland, for example.
ROSS: Yes, which means that, in effect, you always have somebody else interpreting us to them and them to us. We haven't succeeded very well in terms of being able to produce this kind of engagement, not because the administration didn't want it, but because the Iranians have been reluctant to embrace it.
RAZ: Is a regime of sanctions the best option that the administration has? I mean, as you know, Secretary Geithner has been in Asia trying to convince the Chinese, the South Koreans, the Japanese to boycott Iranian oil. Those three countries are the, by far, the biggest purchasers. What ultimately will these sanctions do?
ROSS: The sanctions represent one element of the policy. The policy has been designed to always give the Iranians a way out. Meaning, there's always been a readiness to talk to the Iranians from the first - from the beginning of the administration. The Iranians have not been responsive to the readiness to talk. The logic of the policy is to build pressure on the Iranians. So the Iranians understand that there's a consequence for what they're doing, and it's a consequence that matters to them.
What is clear, something has been created. You know, a year ago, the Iranian president said we sneeze at sanctions. Now, he says this is the most severe - represent the most severe economic onslaught that any country has ever experienced. So they're feeling very different pressure now than they were feeling before. And that does create a different context, and I think it does create a greater potential for diplomacy to succeed.
RAZ: That's Ambassador Dennis Ross. He was a special assistant to President Obama and the top adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Iran. Ambassador Ross, thanks for coming in.
ROSS: My pleasure, thank you.
RAZ: Now, there may be a reason why the tension between the U.S. and Iran is increasing right now. Here's Trita Parsi. He's an Iran scholar who heads the National Iranian American Alliance.
TRITA PARSI: The two sides have escaladed things right before upcoming negotiations in order to maximize their bargaining position in those talks.
RAZ: Those negotiations scheduled for?
PARSI: January 28th in Turkey.
RAZ: This is the 5+1.
PARSI: The 5+1 with Iran. A more pessimistic assessment is that even though this is just shocking for negotiation, strength, things may actually be getting out of control.
RAZ: Let me ask you about the Israel factor here. The Israelis have, for at least three years, talked about their red lines when it comes to Iran's nuclear program. They have never been explicit about what that means. What do you think it means?
PARSI: Whatever the red lines that the Israelis have been put forward on the nuclear issue at least, the Iranians have walked through these red lines and there's not been any consequences for them. Initially, the Israelis were saying that if the Iranians were to put gas into the centrifuge, that would be a red line and the Israelis would be forced to act. The Iranians did this, nothing happened.
Then the Israelis said when if they actually start spinning the centrifuge, starting the enrichment program again, that's the point of no return, is they will have no choice but to act. The Iranians did that in 2005, nothing happened. Then the argument was that what if the Iranians amass 3,000 centrifuge that gives them an opportunity to build a lot of low-enriched uranium, then Israel has to act, then it has to take it out militarily. That happened.
In fact, the one sitting that I had in Israel - I was sitting with a very senior Israeli official and we had a lengthy conversation about this. And at the end of the conversation when I was pressing him what Israel actually would do if the Iranians crossed the red line, he admitted, well, in that case, we'll just have to adopt a new red line.
RAZ: So essentially, you can understand why the Iranians may not entirely take Israeli threats seriously.
PARSI: I don't think they take them too seriously. I think that in and of itself is a little bit of a danger. I think they view the Israeli threats primarily being aimed at putting pressure on the United States to, on the one hand, adopt a more hawkish position and certainly not to agree with Iran on some sort of a compromise.
RAZ: Trita Parsi, let me ask you about the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist, several have been assassinated in recent years. I wonder if this is viewed in Iran as a failure of their intelligence capabilities. I mean, there are clearly people who have infiltrated the country and then they're killing scientists and top military officials who are involved in the nuclear program.
PARSI: It is very difficult to view this as anything else but a failure. Four assassinations, 18 suspicious explosions in 2011, major sanctions being imposed on them, the Stuxnet virus...
RAZ: The virus that setback the program, right.
PARSI: A lot of hits in the Iranian nuclear program. The interesting question with all of this is, why haven't the Iranians essentially acted out? One possible explanation as to why they haven't is because they view this potentially as a trap, that there is an effort by some state in the region, perhaps Israel, wanting the Iranians to retaliate, escalate. And by that, give a pretext for a larger war. And as a result, the Iranians are, in an odd way, perhaps showing a lot of restraint, because this is a lot of hits to take.
RAZ: Let me ask you about 2012. It's an election year in the United States. Are there elements in Iran that will seek to exploit that fact?
PARSI: I think what the Iranians are using - doing right now, they know very well that Obama is very, very vulnerable on the economy. He needs to create more jobs. So that's part of the reason, I think, we've seen a lot of threats about closing off the Strait of Hormuz, because what that does, the mere threat - they don't actually have to do it - it pushes oil prices up. When oil prices are pushed up, gas prices in the U.S. go up. When gas prices in the U.S. go up, job creation becomes much more difficult, and not only have a negative effect on the U.S., but you could actually put the global economic recovery in jeopardy. And it could reduce other country's inclination to collaborate with the U.S. in the sanctions efforts.
RAZ: Dennis Ross says Iran feels extremely isolated and vulnerable right now. Do you agree with that? Do you think Iran feels like it's back against the wall or that it has, you know, some cards up its sleeve?
PARSI: I think both of that is true. I think the Iranians are feeling a lot of pressure. I think the Iranians are also sensing that the level of sanctions that the U.S. is pursuing is becoming at a level in which there's a very blurry line between sanctions and war right now. I think the Iranians do have some cards, which they haven't fully played out yet, and I think that's something we should be aware of before we pat ourselves on the back too much about how much sanctions and pressure we've been able to put on them. We haven't seen much of the cause of that yet because they haven't really played those cards.
RAZ: That's Trita Parsi. He's the author of the new book "A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran." He's also the president of the National Iranian American Council. Trita Parsi, thank you so much.
PARSI: Thank you so much for having me.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD)
RAZ: That's part of an anti-Mitt Romney ad now running in South Carolina. The video is being distributed by pro-Newt Gingrich superPAC. And its message may be a sign of a growing philosophical split among the GOP candidates.
James Fallows of The Atlantic is with me now to talk more about that divide. Jim, this ad and others like it, are they perhaps an unanticipated consequence of the 2010 Supreme Court decision, Citizens United, which, of course, opened the floodgates for unlimited corporate money in elections?
JAMES FALLOWS: I think they are. And I think we're living through witnessing a really - a potentially very important change in the way that political campaigns are run. When the Citizens United ruling came down, most of the discussion involved the ways in which potentially magnify the impact of large institutional money in politics, whether corporations or perhaps labor unions were able to do more than in the past.
But so far, it seems as if the main effect in the Republican Party has been for a kind of chaos generation where more candidates are able to stay in the race longer and to wage these really damaging attacks on their opponents because they have money newly available to them, which would have been harder to obtain in the somewhat more organized circumstances of the pre-Citizens United ruling.
RAZ: In other words, in the old days, if a candidate was struggling in the primary, they would just quit, right? They wouldn't be able to raise the money.
FALLOWS: Yes. Indeed, in the olden days, the speed with which you could or could not raise money was an important factor. I think back to Gary Hart in 1984, when he actually won the New Hampshire primary over Walter Mondale but couldn't get enough new money quickly enough to stay in the race. And, of course, Mondale was the nominee.
But now, we find with the new superPACs relatively small amounts of money in the large sense of politics. Say, for example, the $5 million that the billionaire Sheldon Adelson has given to a Newt Gingrich supporting PAC could have enormous effects on, say, funding all the ads against Romney, like the ones you've described. The analogy, I think, of it - as if a ruling allowed everybody to walk around the street carrying bazooka, suddenly there's just a new level of pervasive potential for destruction that wasn't there before.
RAZ: Jim, what about the specific attacks on Romney by his fellow Republicans? I mean, this is supposed to be the party of free enterprise and yet Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry are sounding like anti-Wall Street populists. I mean, is there a split taking place in the party over this issue?
FALLOWS: This also is truly fascinating. From the time at least of Richard Nixon onward, the Republican Party has been very, very effective at using cultural similarities to meld together a coalition that has a lot of intrinsic economic differences. And so, in the last 30 or 40 years, we've gotten used to the Republican Party being pro-gun and pro-church and anti-media and anti sort of fancy, elite, political correctness.
And this created the problem or the situation that Thomas Frank described in his book "What's the Matter with Kansas?" where you had people who were economically disadvantaged to various ways by Republican policies who nonetheless were rock-ribbed Republicans because of this cultural alliance they felt with the Republican Party. So to have within the Republicans an attack on the economic policies that have been championed by the party over the last generation is very interesting, and we'll see how long the party allows this to go on.
RAZ: Finally, Jim, I want to play this ad for you. It's being released by the Gingrich campaign in South Carolina today.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD)
RAZ: He speaks French, Jim. Mitt Romney can't possibly be qualified to be president.
FALLOWS: (Foreign language spoken)
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FALLOWS: It's - there are times in American life where, number one, you're just overjoyed to be an American. And, number two, you wish that Mark Twain was still around. This is part of who we are. So as they say, (foreign language spoken).
RAZ: That's James Fallows. He's national correspondent for The Atlantic. You can find his blog at jamesfallows.theatlantic.com. Jim, (foreign language spoken).
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FALLOWS: I'll just say thank you, Guy.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
And as we mentioned, that pro-Gingrich superPAC has been hammering Mitt Romney all this week and specifically his actions as the head of Bain Capital, a private equity firm.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD)
RAZ: Now, after Congress, Wall Street is among the least trusted institutions in the United States. And private equity firms are now under the microscope. So how do they operate? With me now is Dan Primack. He's senior editor at Fortune Magazine, and he's here to explain all of that. Welcome to the program.
DAN PRIMACK: Thanks for having me.
RAZ: Before I ask you about the attacks on Mitt Romney when he was CEO of Bain Capital, explain, first of all, how a private equity firm works more or less.
PRIMACK: A private equity firm raises money from institutional investors, endowments, pensions, et cetera. So it gets a big pool of money. And then its primary business is to acquire companies and then later sell them, usually several years down the line. And the hope is that you're selling them for more than you bought them for, probably because you helped grow that business, and then you get that return and that profit. And most of that gets distributed back to your investors.
RAZ: In this video, this film, "When Romney Came to Town," that a pro-Newt Gingrich PAC has, of course, purchased in this airing, we hear from a man who worked for a company called UniMac that produced washing machines in Florida.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD)
PRIMACK: I think it was a bad example for the filmmakers to use. And here's why. They were acquired by Raytheon, which already had a laundry business and kind of rolled that Florida factory up into a larger company. And then Raytheon, four years later, sold it to Bain. And then Bain actually sells it to a Canadian pension fund. And it's them, one year later, who shuts the Florida factory. And as for would it have shut down anyway? It's so hard to say. It's eight years after Raytheon first buys them. Maybe it would have still been around, maybe it wouldn't be.
RAZ: Another example in this video is KB toy store claims that Bain basically took it over and eventually left more than 10,000 people without a job.
PRIMACK: It's an example of a terrible investment. Bain bought the company. The company does go bankrupt. From a Romney perspective, it's a little difficult because Romney actually left the firm in 1999. Bain didn't invest in KB Toys until the following year, 2000. And, look, sometimes in private equity, your investments go bad. You do a lousy job managing them, and the companies do go bankrupt.
RAZ: Everything as far as we know that Bain did was and is legal, right?
PRIMACK: Correct. There's no accusations of illegality whatsoever.
RAZ: The question is whether it was moral.
PRIMACK: That is entirely the question, and it really depends on who you speak to. A private equity firm's primary job isn't to create jobs. A private equity firm is supposed to make money for its investors. In fact, that's its fiduciary duty.
RAZ: So when Mitt Romney claims to have created 100,000 jobs, is there any way to verify that?
PRIMACK: Yes and no. Romney's original claim was that he created 100,000 jobs. That's not a claim Romney can make because Bain Capital isn't keeping its jobs information private. Bain Capital never kept track of these jobs. So the claim is very disingenuous, if not outright dishonest.
RAZ: Do analysts measure the success of a private equity firm by the amount of jobs it creates or by the amount of money it makes?
PRIMACK: Money. Money, money, money. That is all a private equity firm really gets judged on. And when you're going to invest or not invest in a private equity fund as a big institution, you're looking at their track record, what kind of returns are they generating for you. Now, you might have - some individual institutions might have some other criteria. But in general, it's returns.
RAZ: It's being called ultra-capitalism by Mitt Romney's opponents. Rick Perry used that term.
PRIMACK: Rick Perry is an interesting case, because Rick Perry is governor of Texas. And Texas teachers' retirement system - one of the largest public pensions in Texas - is an investor actually in Bain Capital. And all of the people on the board of trustees of that pension were appointed by Perry. There is no record that I've seen where Perry either said publicly or instructed people and said, you know what, we might want to take another look investing in private equity because we've got some concerns about it. In fact, that pension fund just committed $4 billion to private equity funds last month. So it's - there's a bit of hypocrisy going on on the part of Perry.
RAZ: There is a photo of Mitt Romney and his colleagues at Bain from the '90s, they're all standing, smiling clutching fistfuls of cash.
PRIMACK: Yes.
RAZ: Not an image he probably wants out there.
PRIMACK: Not at all. I'm sure it's something he regrets. The times that was taken, that was when they had raised their first ever fund, which was only $30 million in change. And for context, Bain's current funds are kind of an eight to $10 billion range. But that's what the picture is from. And now, look, in an era of Occupy Wall Street and people in general upset with what's happened in the financial sector, you don't want a picture of people who've got dollar bills in their mouths grinning.
RAZ: That's Dan Primack. He's a senior editor of Fortune Magazine. He's been speaking with me from member station WBUR in Boston. Dan Primack, thanks so much.
PRIMACK: Thank you.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Now, as the Romney campaign has been building momentum, religious conservatives remain deeply uncomfortable with him as the prospective Republican nominee. Today in Texas, evangelical leaders met. And as NPR's Joel Rose reports, they threw their support behind former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: More than 150 evangelical leaders met at a ranch outside Houston hoping to find one Republican presidential candidate they could rally around. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council says he was doubtful until it happened.
TONY PERKINS: What I did not think was possible appears to be possible. After a vigorous and passionate discussion, there emerged a strong consensus around Rick Santorum.
ROSE: Santorum earned the support of more than two-thirds of the attendees. Newt Gingrich finished a distant second. On a conference call with reporters, Perkins said evangelicals are hoping to avoid a replay of 2008 when social conservatives split their votes between several candidates allowing the more moderate Senator John McCain to win the Republican nomination. When asked if today's endorsement might come too late to stop Mitt Romney's momentum, Perkins said no. Still, Santorum has a lot of catching up to do if he's going to win next weekend's South Carolina primary. Recent polls show him trailing Romney there by more than 10 points. Joel Rose, NPR News.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
The captain of the Italian cruise ship which ran aground off the coast of Tuscany last night has been arrested on suspicion of involuntary manslaughter. The majority of the ship's 4,000 passengers reached land by lifeboat, but three people are confirmed dead. About 30 are reportedly injured and some 50 are still unaccounted for. It is still unclear what caused the ship to come so close to the rocky shore.
NPR's Sylvia Poggioli is with us from Porto Santo Stefano where many of the passengers were first evacuated. And, Sylvia, what do we know about the arrest?
SYLVIA POGGIOLI, BYLINE: Not much yet, just that the captain is 52 years old and a veteran of the Costa shipping line. According to nautical regulations, this cruise ship was not supposed to sail closer than three or five nautical miles from the coast but apparently was just two to 300 - 200 to 300 yards from the coast of the island of Giglio when it hit a rocky reef. The captain is said to have then tried to steer the ship even closer to the shore to make the rescue easier. Now, keep in mind that this ship is huge. It carried more than 4,000 passengers and crew. It weighs more 115,000 metric tons. Ships like these are called floating villages. So it's really incomprehensible why it was sailing so close to a shore that I, for one, know to be surrounded by rocky reef. Even an official of the Costa shipping line said it was an incomprehensible tragedy.
RAZ: Yeah. I mean, what are investigators going to be looking into as they try to figure out what caused this?
POGGIOLI: Well, they'll look at everything, of course. But the sailors and fishermen who really know these waters whom I spoke to today already issued their verdict. They say the cause was human error. They told me that the computerized equipment and instruments on board these kinds of ships are very sophisticated and able to alter course according to the slightest difficulty.
RAZ: And what do we know about the people who are unaccounted for at this moment?
POGGIOLI: Well, they're saying there's maybe some 40 or 50 people who are unaccounted for. Now, it's not clear whether they're dead or whether they are simply part of the people who were not counted. There was so much disorganization here when the rescue effort was under way, both the island of Giglio first and then here in the town of Porto Santo Stefano where the passengers were evacuated.
Local people came out in full force to help - to bring food, clothes and shoes for the survivors. But as far as the officials, no one seemed to be in charge. Several passengers have been hospitalized in the town of Grosseto, which is not far from here, and we understand that most of the passengers have been taken by bus to more comfortable hotels in Rome and Genoa.
RAZ: I mean, we hear about cruise liners running aground now and again, but sinking is so unusual, particularly for Western European ships, and this apparently was a relatively new boat, a luxury cruise liner. Is there anybody sort of saying this is unprecedented?
POGGIOLI: From my understanding is this is the biggest passenger ship to have run aground like this. This is what they're saying. And, you know, then there's the lure of the sea also. It's a relatively new ship, but they say that when it was christened, the champagne bottle, when it was smashed against the ship, did not break. And according to sea lore, that means it was unlucky.
RAZ: That's NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reporting from Porto Santo Stefano in Italy. Sylvia, thanks.
POGGIOLI: Thank you, Guy.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Later today, the temperature inside a giant spinning furnace in Tucson, Arizona will reach 2,140 degrees Fahrenheit. Twenty-one tons of glass will become molten and flow into a honeycomb frame. The goal is to make a giant mirror 27 feet across. It'll be one of the seven mirrors that make up the giant Magellan telescope. That's the telescope being built in the Andes Mountains in Chile.
NPR's Joe Palca is at the mirror lab at the University of Arizona, and he joins me on the line from there. Joe, describe where you're standing right now.
JOE PALCA, BYLINE: So now, I'm standing right over this spinning giant furnace. It's a - like a giant merry-go-round, and it's got this glass that's slowly being heated up, and it will begin to flow into this honeycomb mold. But I'm going to step away from here because it's really noisy.
RAZ: So, Joe, explain what will happen once this mirror is mounted. What will we be able to see in outer space that we cannot see right now?
PALCA: Well, the whole name of the game in astronomy is getting photons into your telescope. The larger the mirror, the more photons you get. And this is also going to get very high resolution. So they expect that they may actually be able to image planets going around stars with this telescope. And they also think they may be able to use it to look way back to the earliest things that formed in the universe and that will inform theories about how the universe was created in the first place.
RAZ: When will this all be ready?
PALCA: They're aiming for 2020.
RAZ: Oh, man.
PALCA: But telescopes tend to slip, and when money is short, things slow down. So 2020 is the optimistic start.
RAZ: So, Joe, we have to wait eight years before we can see some of these images.
PALCA: Yeah. It's - and this is only the second. They've got five more mirrors to make. So they're actually beginning to start what they hope will be a mirror here until they're finished, and then they'll begin shipping them down to Chile.
RAZ: All right. You promise to update us in 2020?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
PALCA: Absolutely.
RAZ: That's NPR's Joe Palca at the mirror lab at the University of Arizona. Joe, thanks.
PALCA: You bet.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. A few yeas ago, writer Cullen Murphy took a long, hard look at America's place in the modern world, and then he asked a simple question: Are we Rome? He went on to write a book with that very title, looking at the ancient world and the modern one and concluding not much has changed.
Well, Murphy's back on the case. This time, he takes on the Inquisition - or, rather, the Inquisitions with an S. The book is called "God's Jury," and in it, Murphy argues that the Inquisitions that began in the 12th century were actually a harbinger of the modern world.
CULLEN MURPHY: The temptation, I think, is to think of the Inquisition as a kind of throwback. Nothing quite says Medieval the way the word inquisition does. And my view is that you should actually adjust the lens fairly substantially. If you do, you begin to see that the Inquisition has a lot of characteristics that are not really medieval but in fact modern.
You know, there's always been persecution, there's always been hatred, but the Inquisition is something that is institutionalized. And institutions require a kind of infrastructure. You need to be able to keep records, to, you know, amass information, and then you need to be able to find it. And the fact is that in the late medieval world, these kinds of tools are finally coming into existence once again.
RAZ: Surveillance, data collecting.
MURPHY: Surveillance would be another. Keeping tabs on what people are doing, keeping tabs on what people are thinking. So finally, these tools emerge. We see them around us in our own day all the time. We take them for granted. But it's not very often that we ask when did governments, when did other institutions begin to have these tools. And the Inquisition is a good way to begin to answer that question because it relied on them, you know, essentially.
RAZ: What's fascinating is that certain techniques were so proscribed during the Inquisition. You talked about these Inquisition manuals, and you draw comparisons between those and modern manuals for interrogation.
MURPHY: It's uncanny. There's an inquisitor named Bernard Gui. He compiled an Inquisition manual, you know, for use by other inquisitors, and it became the basis of many such manuals. And if you look at that and then you look at modern manuals for, for instance, police forces or the military, you begin to see that there isn't a trick that is used nowadays that wasn't in use by the Inquisition, you know, the psychology of interrogation, the ruses that people would use when you're questioning. There's, you know, there's nothing new under the sun when it comes to interrogation.
RAZ: My guest is Cullen Murphy. He has written a new book. It's called "God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World." At one point in the book you draw a comparison between Guantanamo and the Spanish Inquisition. Can you explain that?
MURPHY: Guantanamo has been a symbol worldwide of many things, but one of them is interrogation gone wrong. And to me, it illustrates something that always happens when you try to put restrictions on a kind of behavior that is inherently problematic. The Inquisition tried to put restraints on torture. The problem was that in the moment when people are trying to get information, those boundaries keep being pushed.
People think, you know, one more turn of the screw will get us one more little piece of information, and that will justify this very messy procedure that, you know, we really wish we didn't have to resort to. So that happens again and again, and torture creeps and creeps and creeps. The same thing happened at Guantanamo.
If you look at the early history, the attempts to get information from detainees, you see the same kind of creep. So that is one thing that Guantanamo illustrates where I think the parallel with the way in which the Inquisition proceeded is very close.
RAZ: Towards the end of the book, you write that not only do all the ingredients for a modern day inquisition exist today but also that they are more prevalent than ever before. How so?
MURPHY: Well, this is a real worry of mine. There's one thing that every Inquisition needs, and that is a person, people, who are possessed of an idea. They think they're in the right about something that they want everyone else to toe the line. And you see this in religion, you see this in totalitarian regimes, but that moral certainty isn't enough.
You need to have something that sustains it that gives it life over time. And those things, like having a bureaucracy, having methods of surveillance, information technology, all of those things are much more advanced right now by an order of magnitude than they were centuries ago. And many of these things are, you know, more or less on cruise control.
You know, we know what bureaucracies are like. They don't shrink. They expand. We know what surveillance is like. Nowadays, it's done almost automatically every time you hit the keyboard on your computer or every time you walk by a camera on the street. And so my worry is what happens when you combine that idea of moral certainty with the kinds of tools that exist nowadays?
You know, it does seem to me that in the wrong hands, the tools of repression are just more available and dangerous than they have been for a long time.
RAZ: I should probably mention that you are a Catholic and a practicing Catholic. Is that fair to say?
MURPHY: Yes.
RAZ: And as you point out, many accounts of the Inquisition have been biased, either overly critical of the church or overly defensive. And understandably, the Church has been prickly about accounts of the Inquisition, but what does the Inquisition tell us about the modern day Catholic Church?
MURPHY: Well, the Church certainly has been prickly about the Inquisition, and there's a lot to be defensive about. There's no way that you can paint the Inquisition in a lovely light. I'm a Catholic who has, you know, long had issues with his church, and one of those issues has to do with a basic mindset.
And you can think of it this way: Is the Church and its teachings fundamentally about absolute certainty that brooks no discussion, or is it fundamentally about something else? It is about humility? Does it have a place for tolerance and for doubt in a constructive sense? And these two traditions fight with each other throughout the history of the church. And for a long time, the first tradition has been in the ascendant. And I think it's time for the second tradition to emerge.
RAZ: That's Vanity Fair editor-at-large Cullen Murphy. His new book is called "God's Jury: the Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World." Cullen Murphy, thank you so much.
MURPHY: Thank you, Guy.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRUM ROLL)
GUY RAZ, HOST:
The Golden Globe Awards are on tonight, but we're going to turn now to a part of Hollywood that doesn't get a lot of attention or flashy award shows, the modern movie trailer. Here's our producer Brent Baughman.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BRENT BAUGHMAN, BYLINE: This music you're hearing is one of the most common music cues in trailers today.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BAUGHMAN: This audio right here is from a trailer for the Golden Globe nominated film "The Artist," which is a silent movie, so no dialogue. But here it is again in a trailer for Steven Spielberg's "Munich."
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE TRAILER, "MUNICH")
CIARAN HINDS: (as Carl) You think you can outrun your fears, your doubts...
BAUGHMAN: And again in one for Gus Vanzant's "Milk."
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE TRAILER, "MILK")
SEAN PENN: (As Harvey Milk) You get the first bullet the minute you stand at the microphone.
BAUGHMAN: And again...
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE TRAILER, "THE IRON LADY")
MERYL STREEP: (As Margaret Thatcher) I have done battle every single day of my life.
BAUGHMAN: That's Meryl Streep in "The Iron Lady" also from this year.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
JOHN LONG: I think the point is it works every time.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BAUGHMAN: That's John Long. He and his business partner, Lee - go ahead, Lee...
LEE HARRY: I'm Lee Harry.
BAUGHMAN: ...did the trailers for "The Muppets" last year. They run a trailer production company in L.A. called Buddha Jones. And why is it called Buddha Jones again?
LONG: This is a question we get from everybody. And it was - it's our version of Pink Floyd.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BAUGHMAN: Anyway, back to that music. It's actually from the soundtrack of a not very successful 2003 film "The Life of David Gale." But it's so good at punching just the right emotional buttons Lee Harry says it's almost irresistible.
HARRY: Sometimes in the back of your mind, you know, I'm not going to use that cue. That cue's been used to death. But I want to evoke a feeling, and this piece does it perfectly.
BAUGHMAN: Aside from using reliable music cues, how do trailer producers do it? Where else can someone make you feel inspired or heartbroken, make you laugh or shriek, make you root for a protagonist or against a villain, do all that and convince you to spend $11 in a minute and 30 seconds? It wasn't always so complicated. It used to be getting an audience's attention was a lot easier.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE TRAILER, "A CHRISTMAS CAROL")
BAUGHMAN: This 1938 trailer for "A Christmas Carol" begins with a shot of the actor Lionel Barrymore, Drew Barrymore's great-uncle.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE TRAILER, "A CHRISTMAS CAROL")
LIONEL BARRYMORE: Hello, ladies and gentlemen.
BAUGHMAN: Fireplace? Check. Armchair? Check. Leather-bound book, pipe? Check, check. And he basically looks into the camera and recommends the movie.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE TRAILER, "A CHRISTMAS CAROL")
BARRYMORE: I'm going to introduce to you a character I've loved for many years.
BAUGHMAN: Et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, early trailers were very comfortable. Wheeler Winston Dixon is a film professor at the University of Nebraska. Compare this, he says, to a modern movie trailer like...
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE TRAILER, "THE DARK KNIGHT RISES")
BAUGHMAN: ...maybe the most buzzed-about trailer this past year for "The Dark Knight Rises." It set a record for online downloads.
WHEELER WINSTON DIXON: The shots are shorter and shorter and shorter and more and more fragmented. And in fact, there have been a number of studies that demonstrate that the average length of a shot in a film has been shrinking every single year because audiences absorb information faster and there's also this sense that you don't want to bore them.
BAUGHMAN: So that's one way to keep your attention: quick edits. Here's another tool trailer producers use. They call it the rise.
HARRY: There's going to be...
BAUGHMAN: That's the crescendo...
HARRY: ...rise....
BAUGHMAN: ...in the trailer that builds and builds and builds to a place where the sound stops and then...
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE TRAILER, "THE DARK KNIGHT RISES")
TOM HARDY: (As Bane) When Gotham is ashes...
BAUGHMAN: ...a single line.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE TRAILER, "THE DARK KNIGHT RISES")
HARDY: (As Bane) ...you have my permission to die.
BAUGHMAN: That's called the turn line. Lee Harry says...
HARRY: Oh, that's a good line. It kicks off a nice montage.
BAUGHMAN: And then at the end of the trailer, when you find out the title of the movie, that's called the main title reveal. And it usually comes with giant pounding drums.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE TRAILER, "DARK KNIGHT RISES")
BAUGHMAN: Those are called hits, John Long says, appropriately enough.
LONG: Yeah. That's all part of the vocabulary of trailer making.
BAUGHMAN: So the question is if you're just pulling all these tools out of a toolkit, is a trailer producer an artist or a craftsman?
ROB MYERS: It's always - well, how do I explain it without sounding bitter? No.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BAUGHMAN: Rob Myers. His trailer house, Workshop Creative, recently did the first "Men in Black III" trailer.
MYERS: Watching trailers in the theater for me is always a frustration because either I'm frustrated because I feel like I could've done a much better job, or I'm depressed because someone did something great that I never would've thought of.
BAUGHMAN: Sounds more like an artist, doesn't it?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BAUGHMAN: I spoke to a lot of professional trailer producers about a lot of different trailers. And by far, this one from last year for "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" inspired the most envy and admiration.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE TRAILER, "THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO")
BAUGHMAN: It's a minute and 39 seconds, shots cut on every beat of an updated version of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song," some 170 fugue state-inducing edits. The trailer producers I talked to say it's all the more impressive when you know it might have started as a four-hour version of the unfinished movie.
MYERS: They might not have music on it yet. They might have green screens all throughout.
BAUGHMAN: And it's not like they knock these things out in a week.
MYERS: You know, I was assigned two new projects just before Christmas, and one of them comes out in 2013.
BAUGHMAN: With this much time, a producer gets to know a film as well as its editor, its director, anyone who actually made it.
MYERS: We break it down scene by scene, then line by line, and sometimes shot by shot.
BAUGHMAN: Then there are test audiences...
MYERS: Focus groups that look at things. There are all kinds of people around the studios. There are managers and agents, and they have to look at something and improve it.
BAUGHMAN: And then, just when you think you're finally done, you get a phone call, like Lee Harry once did.
HARRY: This is not working. Start over. I want you guys to go back and come up with something new, different, out of the box, something that's never been seen before. Call me back in 15 minutes.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE TRAILER, "THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO")
BAUGHMAN: All that in the hopes that you'll turn to your seatmate after it's over, and in that green glow before the next trailer, say: Yeah. I guess I'd see that. Brent Baughman, NPR News.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Time now for music.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HALO")
RAZ: This song is "Halo." It was one of Beyonce's biggest singles ever.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HALO")
BEYONCE: (Singing) Remember those walls I built? Well, baby, they're tumbling down.
RAZ: The man who co-wrote and produced this song is Ryan Tedder. He's also the front man for his own band called OneRepublic. But Tedder is one of the most sought-after songwriters and producers for others in the industry right now. He's written hits for everyone from Kelly Clarkson to Adele, and this year, he's been nominated for a Grammy as Producer of the Year for his work on Adele's album "21."
Tedder's background is somewhat unusual in the world he now inhabits. He grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in a strict Pentecostal household.
RYAN TEDDER: Gosh, probably three-fourths of my aunts and uncles are missionaries. My grandfather was a pastor for many, many years.
RAZ: It was a Pentecostal home.
TEDDER: It was a Pentecostal home, yes. I kind of switched back and forth between public and Christian schools as I was growing up and went to a Pentecostal university as well.
RAZ: Oral Roberts.
TEDDER: Oral Roberts, yes.
RAZ: I can't imagine you meet too many Oral Roberts alums in the business that you're in now.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
TEDDER: No. In my field, very few and far between. But there are, you know, a handful of us, a lot of people in, you know, production, behind the scenes, that type of thing.
RAZ: Now, Ryan, you are the front man for a very successful band OneRepublic. Aside from that, you've received two Grammy nominations this year. One is for Album of the Year by Adele, "21." You have a major production credit on that. The second is as Producer of the Year. Tell me about Adele, about this song that you are nominated for, "Rumor Has It."
TEDDER: Well, I did two songs with Adele: "Turning Tables" and "Rumor Has It." And "Rumor Has It" came about in Los Angeles. It was our second time to get together with me and Adele. She walked in, and she was already pissed off from a conversation she had had the night before with her ex, and she came up with this phrase rumor has it because people were saying that this is why they broke up or this happened and that happened and she was sick of hearing all the rumors surrounding their breakup.
So that was kind of the catalyst for the song. And I started playing this kind of dirty Louisiana porch stomping blues riff on a guitar, and she just started singing. And about three hours later, we had the song.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "RUMOR HAS IT")
ADELE: (Singing) She is half your age, but I'm guessing that's the reason that you've stayed. I heard you been missing me. You've been telling people things you shouldn't be. Like when we creep out, she ain't around. Haven't you heard the rumors?
RAZ: You are one of the most in-demand songwriters out there. I want to ask you what the process of writing a hit song. Let's take the song "Bleeding Love" that you wrote for Leona Lewis.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BLEEDING LOVE")
LEONA LEWIS: (Singing) Closed off from love, I didn't need the pain. Once or twice was enough and it was all in vain. Time starts to pass before you know it you're frozen. Oh. But something happened for the...
RAZ: This is one of the most recognizable songs of the last five years, a huge international hit. You wrote this song.
TEDDER: Yes. Wrote and produced.
RAZ: Tell me. Walk me through the process of how you do it.
TEDDER: I sat down at my piano and turned on, like, an organ patch. And literally, I said to myself out loud, I was like, what would Prince do?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
TEDDER: What would Prince do right now in whatever year it was, 2008, 2009? And I started playing those chords, the opening organ patch of "Bleeding Love," and then I quickly threw the drums together, and I had the melody walking into the session.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BLEEDING LOVE")
LEWIS: (Singing) You cut me open and I keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love. I keep bleeding, I keep, keep bleeding love. Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love. You cut me open.
TEDDER: I thought it was the biggest hit I'd ever written and gave it to the record label, and I - they straight up told me, this is not a hit record. And I literally thought, well, then I need to pick a new career because my ears are telling me that this is a really, really important song. Long story short, I put the song on a five-song demo CD, handed it to another guy at a British record label that I had been working with for another artist.
He happened to be the A&R of Leona Lewis and played it for Simon Cowell. And Clive Davis heard it, I think, probably the same day, and they both just kind of went nuts over it, called me and said, you know, Simon was like, I don't know who you are, but we have to have this song. You have to record it immediately. And the rest is history.
RAZ: My guest is the producer and musician Ryan Tedder. He's nominated for a Grammy for his work on Adele's "21," which was the best-selling album of 2011. He's also the front man for the band OneRepublic. I want to ask about a song that you've written for your own band, for OneRepublic, called "All the Right Moves."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALL THE RIGHT MOVES")
ONEREPUBLIC: (Singing) All the right friends in all the right places. Oh, yeah, we're going down. They got all the right moves in all the right faces. So yeah, we're going down.
RAZ: Ryan Tedder, this song and all of your songs that have been hits, they have this, like, infectious hook, especially this song. Talk to me about how you make a good pop song. I mean, is there a formula?
TEDDER: There is a formula only to an extent. I can compare it to like building a house. If you're talking to an architect, he can look at a blank piece of paper, and once that initial design is there, then formula kicks in. You go, OK, well, each room should have something unique and different about it, much in the same way that with a song, every eight bars or so, a new piece of information should be introduced.
Like if you're producing, you know, the second verse comes in, you might want to introduce a tambourine or you might want to introduce a live bass. You want to be constantly building and taking away because it just keeps your ears interested, keeps your brain actively listening to it. So that's, quote, unquote "formula." That's figuring out the formula, OK, once you have a great idea, now I'm going to make sure I don't screw it up.
I'm going to make sure that it's got the right production. But the initial catalyst, the actual thought just kind of whipped out of thin air, I don't think there is a formula for that. If someone has it figured out, then they should let me know. I haven't figured out what that is.
RAZ: Phil Spector, of course, used to write music for others and perform as well.
TEDDER: Yup.
RAZ: Is it more difficult to write music for someone else's voice, or is it more difficult to write songs that you know you are going to perform?
TEDDER: It's considerably more difficult for me to write something for me. With my own band, it gets really personal. And that's the hardest thing in the world to do is to peel back the layers. And I'm like, wait, it's real easy for me to write a song for Adam Levine and, you know, let him sing the words. But when I have to sing them, all of a sudden, it gets really serious. It gets really personal.
RAZ: What happens, or has it ever happened, that you've written a song that you thought, this is so good, but you've actually written it for somebody else and you thought, I want to keep this for myself?
TEDDER: Probably the only song that I would say maybe, and I mean maybe, is "Already Gone" by Kelly Clarkson.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALREADY GONE")
KELLY CLARKSON: (Singing) I want you to know that it doesn't matter where we take this road, someone's got to go. And I want you to know you couldn't have loved me better but I want you to move on so I'm already gone. Looking at you makes it harder.
TEDDER: That song, to me, is still one of my absolute favorite lyrics and melodies I've ever been a part of. And in retrospect, I probably could have pushed that towards being a OneRepublic-sounding song for sure.
RAZ: Ryan, when you first tried to break into the business, were you a little bit self-conscious about your background? I mean, you're from Tulsa. You're a really nice guy and you seem very earnest. And it's a tough business. I mean, it's a business full of cynical and nasty people, and you grew up in a Christian household and went to Oral Roberts. I mean, did that ever work against you?
TEDDER: Well, I was acutely aware of how low my stock was in terms of, like, the cool factor, because when you're in the suburbs of Tulsa, you could not be further from Brooklyn if you tried.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
TEDDER: So my thing was I just knew that I needed to be in a band, and I knew that I could write songs. So I put so much energy into songwriting because I thought, well, if I don't have the coolest look, if I'm not covered in tattoos, then at the very least, I can put together some words and some melodies and we can, you know, have a career.
RAZ: And paradoxically, now that you are well-known, your background is almost exotic, right?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
TEDDER: Yeah. It is. No. What's funny is you can throw a rock and hit a, you know, (unintelligible) kid or a cool person but, you know, you would have to, like, bust out a magnifying glass to find a Pentecostal ORU grad with a degree in PR and advertising. You know, it's very, very weird. I'll just put it that way.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TURNING TABLES")
ADELE: (Singing) Close enough to start a war all that I have is on the floor.
RAZ: That's Ryan Tedder. He's the front man for the pop band OneRepublic. He's also the writer and producer behind dozens of hits for other artists, including the album "21" by Adele. You can hear some more of Ryan Tedder's greatest hits at npr.org. Ryan Tedder, thank you so much.
TEDDER: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TURNING TABLES")
ADELE: (Singing) I can't keep up with your turning tables. Under your thumb I can't breathe.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Sometimes a small simple act of kindness can change the world or, in the case of Bluffton, South Carolina, a community.
JOSH COOKE: My name is Josh Cooke, and I own the Corner Perk Café in Bluffton, South Carolina.
RAZ: Josh grew up in Bluffton, but he left to go to college and live in the big city for a while. It was Atlanta. Two years ago, he returned to Bluffton to open up Corner Perk Café.
COOKE: When you come into the coffee shop, you usually are going to recognize somebody there because it's a neighborhood place.
RAZ: In 2010, one of his regular customers did something out of the ordinary.
COOKE: And she comes in and says, here's $100. I just want to leave this for the next so and so people that come in and get drinks just to let them know, you know, that somebody was wanting them to have a great day and just to let them know to pay it forward.
RAZ: To pay it forward. A cup of coffee at Corner Perk costs $1.95, so that $100 lasted...
COOKE: You know, it lasted probably from, say, 10 in the morning till maybe three in the afternoon.
RAZ: Free coffee for everyone coming in.
COOKE: We got all kinds of reactions. Most people, we had to, like, take the time to explain the whole story of what actually took place because they're like, no, you're just trying to give me a cup of coffee to grow your business. And I had to constantly tell them, no, you know, the cash is sitting right here on the counter. Somebody literally walked in and left money to pay for your coffee.
And so it's really fun when you're the barista working because the tips just go up because everybody's feeling generous.
RAZ: Including that anonymous donor. She keeps coming back.
COOKE: She's done it probably seven or eight times in the past two years, but it had been quite a while that she had actually done it until just before the start of the new year this year.
RAZ: Josh posted the news of her most recent visit on his Facebook page and word spread quickly.
COOKE: Several other people in the community heard about it and someone who had been the recipient of her gift decided that they wanted to give $20 one morning, last Thursday. And then a few hours later, another guy comes in, which had been never been to the coffee shop as far as I know, and left another $100 and just asked, is this the place where they do that? And that he wanted to do the same. And he turned around and left. He didn't even buy a drink.
RAZ: That last act of kindness happened just a week ago.
COOKE: We just want people to continue to pay it forward in any way, whether that's helping somebody with their electric bill or, you know, filling up somebody's car with gas. You know, there's so much, sort of sadness and depression in the world today. It's really nice to have a kind thought or, you know, some sort of gesture to let people know that it's all going to be OK.
RAZ: That's Josh Cooke. He's the owner of Corner Perk Cafe in Bluffton, South Carolina.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
Across the Midwest and Northeast this weekend, ski resort towns are celebrating the arrival of winter for the first time all season. A woman named Terry Hill has been renting cabins for 30 years near Baxter State Park in Maine where yesterday...
TERRY HILL: We only got about four to five inches of snow, so it's pretty and white. Still not enough to get going yet, but it is a start.
RAZ: She usually rents her cabins to snowmobilers, but right now, they're empty. She says Maine needs a couple more big storms to make up for what's been a brown winter.
HILL: It doesn't feel right at all. This is - we normally would have good snow in December.
RAZ: Thirty-two hundred miles away in Homewood, California...
RACHEL WOODS: Today is sunny and cold. We had very cold temperatures overnight.
RAZ: Rachel Woods is the spokesperson at Homewood Mountain Ski Resort on Lake Tahoe. She says right now, only the beginner runs are open, and even then, only on the weekends.
WOODS: You know, it - we had some snowfall early in the season.
RAZ: Since then, it's been dry, but thankfully for the snowmaking team at Homewood, it's been cold.
WOODS: Yeah. They've definitely been taking advantage of every chance possible to make snow.
RAZ: And at Vail, one of the largest winter resorts in the country, CEO Rob Katz says they've been making artificial snow at an unprecedented pace this season.
ROB KATZ: We've invested huge dollars into the most efficient snowmaking equipment. And the good news is snowmaking equipment actually is getting more and more energy efficient, which is both good for the environment and lower costs.
RAZ: But why such a lack of snow this year? We called up meteorologist Paul Douglas, president of Broadcast Weather, to find out more.
PAUL DOUGLAS: First 10 days of January, warmest, driest in U.S. history.
RAZ: Wow.
DOUGLAS: Ninety-five percent of the country experiencing below average snow conditions.
RAZ: That's incredible.
DOUGLAS: So a lot of this is La Nina, the cooling phase of the Pacific, coupled with this nagging drought, and that drought is now expanding northward across the Plains towards the Upper Midwest.
RAZ: Hmm. You briefly mentioned La Nina. Can you explain that? Because I thought that La Nina was also responsible for last year's winter, which was, like, one of the snowiest on record.
DOUGLAS: Last year was probably the most extreme year in America's history.
RAZ: But 99 federal weather disasters in 2011.
DOUGLAS: Second only to 2010. I mean, I'm seeing things that I've never seen as a meteorologist. Just now, it looks like we're heading back into a more typical January pattern.
RAZ: If this was summertime and we were talking about such an absence of moisture - we would be talking about drought, of course - is there cause for concern? The fact that there has not been very much moisture in the country?
DOUGLAS: I think there's a lot of cause for concern. I think drought is going to be one of the big stories of 2012. And what happened in Texas last year - driest year on record, drier than the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s - that drought is now creeping northward across the Plains states. And if you don't have significant snow, you don't have any moisture to recharge the soil moisture for spring planting.
And so I'm very concerned if we don't get significant snow here in the next 60 days, we could be faced with a very significant drought in the nation's breadbasket.
RAZ: Well, that's my question: Where is the winter - I mean, should we expect a normal winter to come any time soon?
DOUGLAS: I think it would be premature to write off winter. There will be snow, there will be ice, there will be winter in February and March, but there's no question that even for the Northeast, the Great Lakes and the Upper Midwest, I still think this is going to wind up being one of the tamer Januarys in recent memory.
RAZ: That's meteorologist Paul Douglas. He's the founder of Broadcast Weather. It's a company with a new 24-hour weather channel. It's called Weather Nation. Paul, thanks so much.
DOUGLAS: Good to join you, Guy. Thank you.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
On Thursday, Haitians marked the second anniversary of the devastating earthquake that left around 300,000 people dead. NPR's Jason Beaubien covered the aftermath of that disaster. And this past week, he headed back to check in. He sent us this reporter's notebook about covering Haiti then and what he's seen since.
JASON BEAUBIEN, BYLINE: Haiti is a land haunted by ghosts. My translator, Jean Pierre, won't shut up about the ghosts. He points towards some men plodding up the dusty street. They're hauling huge bags of charcoal on their heads. Zombies, he declares. Dead dudes are everywhere.
Haiti makes you believe in spirits, in resurrection. Fallen presidents rise up, they return in waves. Baby Doc Duvalier, Jean Bertrand Aristide, ousted into exile but now home. When I first came to Haiti in 2008, the city of Gonaives was under water. Over the course of a month, Gonaives was hit by two hurricanes, two tropical storms, and it flooded twice. When I came back in 2010, Port au Prince was under piles of rubble. Entire hillside slums had slammed down onto their neighbors below. Grey powdery dust covered everything. Fires burned across the city.
Two years later, I still can't pull into the driveway of the Hotel Villa Creole without seeing the ghosts lying there. Right after the quake, the hotel driveway was covered with dying and injured Haitians. Children lay on sheets and blankets on the ground. A visiting gynecologist was sewing up a girl's head wound by flashlight.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: At least I'm closing the wound so that it doesn't get infected more than it already has.
BEAUBIEN: As a reporter, some quotes get burned into your mind. There isn't a family in Haiti that isn't crying right now, a woman told me in English. Maybe those words stuck with me because I'd been crying myself. That morning, my translator and I had been standing on a field of earthquake debris talking to an old woman. Tears streaked all of our faces as the woman recounted how the walls of her house had started to wobble and how her grandchildren didn't get out.
(SOUNDBITE OF BEEPING)
BEAUBIEN: And then there were the bodies, piles of bodies, stacked like cordwood beside the road, dumped at the morgue, burned in the streets, shoveled with front-end loaders into trucks and dropped into mass graves at an old gravel pit just outside the city. Some of the men clearing debris could have been zombies, ghosts who'd wormed their way up to the surface. They were everywhere, stoically pounding away with sledgehammers at what looked like insurmountable piles of rubble.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing in foreign language)
BEAUBIEN: Just days after the quake, people gathered in front of destroyed churches to sing, to pray, to praise a god that appeared to have abandoned them. Over the coming weeks and months, spaces cleared, tarps and tents went up, shacks were built. But like the double flooding of Gonaives, Haiti can't seem to get just one catastrophe at a time. A cholera outbreak spread across the entire island, sickening a half a million people and killing thousands. More dead. More ghosts.
There's a lot of bad news in Haiti. Five hundred thousand earthquake victims are still living in squalid camps. There are entire neighborhoods in Port au Prince with no toilets, no electricity, no clean water. Cholera is now endemic. But I left this time feeling like the country is at least moving forward. New universities, hospitals and hotels are being built. There's a government in place.
Haiti's ghosts seem to hang over the country, whispering about its long tragic history. But even so, the streets of Port au Prince fill every day with chaotic traffic jams and freewheeling commerce. It's reassuring that despite everything, people have somewhere to rush to. They have things they need to do, lives to live. Jason Beaubien, NPR News.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
From NPR News, it's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz.
It's no secret who the most popular Republican is in this year's GOP presidential race.
WALTER SHAPIRO: I almost bring a stopwatch to every Republican debate. Can they actually go five minutes without mentioning those two words: Ronald Reagan?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: That's veteran political reporter Walter Shapiro. In just one single debate last year, GOP candidates mentioned the former president 24 times.
NEWT GINGRICH: I served during the Reagan campaign...
MITT ROMNEY: President Reagan when he made his decision...
GINGRICH: The Reagan jobs program...
REPRESENTATIVE MICHELE BACHMANN: That would be Ronald Reagan.
ROMNEY: If President Reagan were here...
BACHMANN: Ronald Reagan made a deal...
RICK SANTORUM: Ronald Reagan was committed...
REPRESENTATIVE RON PAUL: I strongly supported Ronald Reagan. I was one of four in Texas.
RAZ: Each candidate is vying for the mantle of Reagan conservatism. But some historians and even some of the folks who worked for Ronald Reagan are now wondering whether Reagan himself was enough of a Reagan conservative, at least the way it's defined today. That's our cover story today: What's a Reagan conservative anyway? And if he were alive, could Reagan get the GOP nod?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PLAY THAT FUNKY MUSIC")
RAZ: Our story begins with Reagan biographer Craig Shirley.
CRAIG SHIRLEY: By the 1970s, you had rampant inflation, high interest rates. We were losing a Cold War. Americans had become rampant sheep consumers of the '70s, you know, whether it was disco music or pet rocks or leisure suits or all those things that really summed up what was really a very, very bad time for the American people.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC "PLAY THAT FUNKY MUSIC")
ROB PARISSI: (Singing) I never had no problems. Yeah.
RAZ: It was against this backdrop that a young former Nixon aide named John Sears...
JOHN SEARS: John Sears is my name.
RAZ: ...convinced Reagan he should run for president against the incumbent Gerald Ford.
SEARS: Not only in the Republican Party but, really, among the Democrats, too, there was an awfully negative feeling about politics, and actually that can only be changed by having a lively race.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
RAZ: And against huge odds, Reagan actually came close to winning that year, 1976.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVAL RECORDING)
PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: I'm going to say fellow Republicans here, but for those who are watching from a distance, all those millions of Democrats and independents who I know are looking for a cause around which to rally and which I believe we can give them.
SEARS: Reagan had a cultural appeal with these New Deal blue-collar urban, ethnic, lunch bucket voters that other Republicans didn't. Nixon had a little bit, but not the way Reagan did. And so this was the beginning of his reorganization of the two parties.
RAZ: The man who became the most important American conservative icon in the 20th century was, in many ways, a moderate, says historian Craig Shirley.
SHIRLEY: In 1978, there was a referendum on the ballot out in California called Proposition 6, which was being pushed by state Senator John Briggs. It was a referendum that would ban homosexuals from teaching in public schools or advocating a homosexual lifestyle. So it was very, very restrictive. It was being supported by the Christian right. Reagan campaigned against it.
And Briggs was asked the day after the election why it lost and he had one answer: Ronald Reagan.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SHIRLEY: You cannot take Reagan and make him into a god because then he becomes unassailable.
RAZ: Reagan's record is full of stories like these. In recent years, Senator Lindsey Graham, former Governor Mike Huckabee and Congressman Duncan Hunter Jr., all Republicans, have suggested Reagan would have a tough time winning the GOP nomination today. And to find out why, we called up Walter Shapiro. How are you?
SHAPIRO: How could I not be glorious? I came back from New Hampshire with a bad cold.
RAZ: Walter Shapiro is covering his ninth presidential campaign, now for Yahoo! News and the New Republic. And even with a cold, he agreed to talk to us.
SHAPIRO: I still rose from a sickbed, brave fellow that I am, to be here.
RAZ: He says there were plenty of Reagan era policies that wouldn't fit well with the GOP today like, for example, raising taxes.
JON HUNTSMAN: We're not going to raise taxes. This is the worst time to be raising taxes, and everybody knows that. We need to grow.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
ROMNEY: I don't want to raise taxes on the American people.
BACHMANN: I think you earned every dollar, you should get to keep every dollar.
GINGRICH: The question is, how would we generate revenue? The Ronald Reagan technique put three million...
RAZ: Walter Shapiro says in the early '80s...
SHAPIRO: There was a deficit problem in '82, '83. So after massively lowering taxes, there was an adjustment upwards.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVAL RECORDING)
REAGAN: Make no mistake about it, this whole package is a compromise. I had to swallow hard to agree to any revenue increase. But there are two sides to a compromise.
SHAPIRO: But his major tax thing, which also would be attacked, was tax reform of '86, which basically eliminated scads of deductions in order to lower rates. But in an attack ad today, you would say Ronald Reagan eliminated this deduction, eliminated that deduction. Who's side is he on?
RAZ: And he also granted amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants?
SHAPIRO: Yeah. That would put him - if Rick Perry got into trouble during these debates for merely offering instate tuition in Texas to illegal immigrants...
ROMNEY: First, we ought to have a fence. We've got 4.7 million people waiting in line legally.
SANTORUM: No more. We are going to secure the border first, and that's the most important thing to do.
SHAPIRO: The 1985, '86 immigration deal, which was half the citizenship, this is the immigration bill that the Republicans now are railing against when they say no more amnesties.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVAL RECORDING)
REAGAN: I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here, even though sometime back, they may have entered illegally.
SHAPIRO: And this was Ronald Reagan.
RAZ: We've heard a lot of GOP candidates point out that many Americans, almost half, don't pay federal income taxes.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
GOVERNOR RICK PERRY: We're dismayed. We're dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don't even pay any income tax.
SANTORUM: It's anybody that makes money and pays taxes and everybody who doesn't.
ROMNEY: I think it's a real problem when you have half of Americans that are - almost half of Americans that are not paying income tax.
RAZ: Now, these are mostly, obviously, poor Americans. Here's what President Reagan said about this issue in his 1985 State of the Union address.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVAL RECORDING)
REAGAN: To encourage opportunity and jobs rather than dependency and welfare, we will propose that individuals living at or near the poverty line be totally exempt from federal income tax.
RAZ: OK. So President Reagan was responsible for this.
SHAPIRO: Partially. Bill Clinton, as I believe, expanded this in the 1990s. But the truth is a lot of these Americans still pay a significant tax in terms of the regressive tax for Social Security on their wages. This is, again, the whole problem with this plaster saint iconography.
RAZ: He wasn't really a culture warrior, was he?
SHAPIRO: I mean, he - it is telling that every year, he addressed the National Right to Life anti-abortion march in Washington by telephone, even though they were half a mile from the White House, because he didn't want the visuals of being perceived as that much of a cultural warrior. And abortion was as legal when Ronald Reagan left office as it was when he came into office.
RAZ: Now, you covered nine presidential campaigns.
SHAPIRO: And one of these days, I'm going to get one right.
RAZ: Right. Got it. Do you think Ronald Reagan could win the GOP nomination today?
SHAPIRO: Well, it really depends who he's running against. I mean, certainly, his resoluteness about the Soviet threat was genuine and consistent. His breaking of the air traffic controllers strike had a symbolic importance in terms of labor versus management in this country. There are many ways in which Reagan was a genuine conservative, but he wasn't consistent. I am imagining the superPAC ads against him.
Former liberal Democrat Ronald Reagan, tax raiser Ronald Reagan. The truth is that political figures, particularly when viewed from the lens of history, are far more complicated creatures than they are when they're viewed through the lens of bumper stickers.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: So what about the modern definition of Reagan conservative? Is that who Reagan was? I put that question to Reagan's one-time budget director David Stockman.
DAVID STOCKMAN: No, I don't think so. Because even though he was highly negative about the role of government and said it's the problem, not the solution - and in some philosophical sense, he was right - he was also enough of a pragmatist to recognize facts. And as much as he disliked the idea of levying taxes, he supported many tax increases after the first cut, but somehow current Republicans have kind of whitewashed out of history. They pretend it never happened.
RAZ: What do you make of this kind of interpretation of who Reagan was? Is it just completely off base, or is it deliberate?
STOCKMAN: I think it's two things. One, it's a selective reading of history, as I've said. And secondly, they've adopted full-bore Reagan rhetoric, which they do like. Now, what the history books are going to show, I believe, is that the Reagan revolution never happened. It was a campaign slogan. Government wasn't reduced, taxes were cut marginally, but the basic functions of the federal government didn't change. What is left is a lot of slogans and campaign speeches. And the current crop of Republican politicians basically likes to repeat them over and over and over.
RAZ: Why do you think it matters either way if the Republican Party of today is different than the party under Reagan and before?
STOCKMAN: I think it matters a lot, because in any democracy, you cannot have fiscal stability, you cannot have discipline, unless you have one party that advocates discipline. And the Republican Party has given up the role that the conservative party needs to play in a democracy. And as a result of surrendering that role, we're in a very difficult and, I think, dangerous situation.
RAZ: That's former Reagan budget director David Stockman. By the way, this year, he's backing Ron Paul.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
It's time now for the latest entry in our series Three Books in which authors recommend three books on one theme. Today, three efforts from one much maligned genre: the confessional memoir. Here's author Marion Winik.
MARION WINIK: These days, memoirs are often the target of contempt. A scathing slam in The New York Times Book Review inveighed against over-sharing; and in The New Yorker, the memoirist was likened to a drunken guest at a wedding. But in the right hands, these stories can have unmatched immediacy and redemptive power. To read an author who speaks about the darker parts of experience honestly, beautifully or humorously, this is more than just titillating. It makes the world a less lonely place.
In "The Adderall Diaries," Stephen Elliott mingles the coverage of a San Francisco murder trial to which he was marginally connected with an unpacking of his own troubled past: an abusive dad who may have killed a man himself, a mother he cared for as she died of multiple sclerosis, a series of group homes. With friends overdosing and committing suicide all around him, he found refuge in drugs and violent sex, working as a stripper, a professor and a writer. The matter-of-fact, present-tense narration moves from Elliott's daily life to the unfolding courtroom drama to ruminations on the writing process.
In "A Chronology of Water," Lidia Yuknavitch carries on the transgressions of 80's feminism, gleefully breaking rules about storytelling as she looks for a way to write a book that is not an incest narrative or a recovery memoir or even the autobiography of an Olympic swimming hopeful, but is faithful to a life that has contained all of these elements. From her druggy college days in Lubbock, Texas, through a doomed early marriage and a stillbirth, through promiscuity of many flavors, an apprenticeship with Ken Kesey and a very bad DUI, the author hangs on and is rewarded with an amazingly normal happy ending.
"501 Minutes to Christ" by Poe Ballantine proves that there's still a member of the Beat Generation wandering among us. A ridiculously gifted writer who could tell a good story about nothing, Ballantine has made sure he doesn't have to by spending most of his adult life as an itinerant writer, cook, day laborer, gambler and moral philosopher. In this collection, he hangs out with the homeless in New Orleans and the speed freaks in San Diego, devises a plan to punch John Irving, loses a book contract with a New York publisher, and settles down to raise a family in Nebraska. Ballantine is unflappable, hilarious, and so observant of his fellow men and women that his half-cocked hobo lifestyle cannot be mistaken for anything but a spiritual path.
If you don't want to read about drugs, sex or unconventional lifestyles, you should avoid these memoirs. But if you do, then pick them up. They offer a Wild West of personal revelation, still open to pioneers, adventurers and those looking for gold.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: Marion Winik is the author of "The Glen Rock Book of the Dead."
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Time now for a winter song that's also a very chilly history lesson.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LORD FRANKLIN")
ANDREW REVKIN: (Singing) 'Twas homeward bound as we crossed the deep. Swinging in my hammock, I fell asleep. I dreamed a dream and I thought it true concerning Franklin and his gallant crew.
SIEGEL: The singer is Andrew Revkin, who writes the DotEarth blog for the New York Times. The song is "Lord Franklin." It is a lament for the 19th century British Arctic explorer, Sir John Franklin, who as I've learned only very recently, was many things, but not actually a lord. Andrew Revkin joins us now. Welcome to the program.
REVKIN: It's good to be with you.
SIEGEL: And explain to us first why there is a cold weather song about Franklin.
REVKIN: Well, he left on this mission in the merry month of May, but he was heading toward Baffin Bay, which is always frozen. And especially in the 19th century - that time in the 19th century, as one climate scientist told me, he probably picked the worst year in the worst decade in the worst millennium in the last 10,000 years to try to go through the northwest passage.
SIEGEL: And it didn't work out well?
REVKIN: It did not work out well. No. They all died.
SIEGEL: This earned Franklin one of the strangest sobriquets of anyone in history: The man who ate his boots.
REVKIN: He had already become kind of a hero for going to the Arctic twice, mostly in northern Canada, mostly terrestrial. And he survived a horrible excursion that almost no one survived. And that is where that leathery name came from.
SIEGEL: By having eaten his boots.
REVKIN: Yeah.
SIEGEL: It's a song you've known for a long time and you associate it with winter?
REVKIN: Yeah. I first learned it, I think, when I was first learning guitar in college. And I also was in love with folk music, generally, and I just was fascinated by the history of these kinds of tales.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LORD FRANKLIN")
REVKIN: (Singing) With 100 seamen, he sailed away, the frozen ocean in the month of May.
SIEGEL: Tell us about your experience in 2003 when you had occasion to introduce this great piece of music to several Russians.
REVKIN: Well, it was sort of a mixed band of - there were scientists and Russian crew. I was going along when I was a full-time reporter at the Times to the North Pole just to write more - as I had been writing a long time - about climate change. And we were going to be camped for several days out on the sea ice that was only eight feet thick and was moving 400 yards an hour. So it was a very sort of weird place to be hanging out.
And the Russians were going to take us in a helicopter from the spot where the plane that we were on had landed on the ice and they got delayed quite a bit. It was supposed to be like an hour, it became eight hours. So, we're sitting there. You can watch your breath. It's very cold. And to keep from getting stir crazy, I just figured I'd pull out that song, so I sang it there in the tent.
SIEGEL: You weren't yet - you and the climate scientists - you weren't yet reduced to eating your boots at that point?
REVKIN: No. But one of them, Jamie Morrison from the University of Massachusetts - he was wise enough to pack a sandwich that he'd made. It was salmon salad and it was frozen by that time, but we sort of all sort of nibbled at it. And, you know, when you compare this to eating your boots or to the extreme experiences that people who went to the Arctic in the 19th century had, it's mild. But it was feeling kind of like - where is that helicopter? The feeling of urgency was starting to rise a little bit.
SIEGEL: Yes. Well, Andrew Revkin, thank you very much for talking with us and for sending us your recording.
REVKIN: It's my pleasure.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LORD FRANKLIN")
SIEGEL: That's a new verse Andrew Revkin and his musical partner, David Rothenberg, added to the traditional ballad, "Lord Franklin." And you can see a video of Revkin with the scientists stranded at the North Pole singing the song at NPR.org.
If there's a winter song that you'd like to share, one that evokes the sense of the season, visit NPR.org and click on Contact Us at the bottom of the page. Make sure Winter Song is in the subject line.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LORD FRANKLIN")
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel. When it comes to law and order, Texas is a pretty tough place. It leads the country in executions and has the largest prison population of any state.
For decades, one group of Texans has been trying to make life just a little easier for those on the inside. They also want to change the public's perception of prisoners to remind us all that the people behind bars are husbands, fathers, sons and daughters.
Carrie Feibel of member station KUHF has our story.
CARRIE FEIBEL, BYLINE: Every Friday night, thousands of prisoners across east Texas settle into their bunks and pull out their hand-held radios and headphones. They're getting ready for the 9:00 p.m. broadcast of "The Prison Show."
DAVID BABB: Well, lo and behold, it is high time to holler down the pipe chase(ph) and rattle them bars because we're going to do "The Prison Show" for you right here on KPFT Houston, 90.1 on the FM dial, 89.5 in Galveston.
FEIBEL: "The Prison Show" is the country's only radio show that caters to prisoners and the families they've left behind in the free world. It broadcasts from a nonprofit radio station in an old house near downtown Houston. The first hour offers news and talk about Texas prisons and the courts, but it's perhaps most famous for the second hour when the relatives of prisoners can call in live.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Hi, Don. This is your wife and I wanted to call and tell you that at one minute past midnight it will be our anniversary date. Sixteen years and I would do it all over again. I meant it when I said I do, and I still mean it today. I love you. I'm glad...
FEIBEL: Most of the callers are women, women whose husbands, sons or boyfriends are locked up in Texas prisons for crimes ranging from auto theft to murder.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Take care, Baby. I love you so much. All right? I can't wait. I can not - can not - can not wait until you come out because it's going to go down. Know what I'm saying? Te amo. Take care. Be good and stop getting in trouble because you can't be having that. You're trying to get out in 2012.
FEIBEL: The show is run entirely by volunteers.
STORY JONES: KPFT. This is Story. OK. What's your first name? Stephanie?
FEIBEL: Story Jones helps screen the calls. She's married to a prisoner and is also in law school.
JONES: I am not soft on crime, but to them, you know, the show just shows that there's people out here supporting them, loving them, that they're not forgotten and that we do want them home. And they see that there are still connections and I think it gives them a little hope.
FEIBEL: When the radio show began in 1980, inmates in Texas weren't allowed to use the phone. For relatives who couldn't afford a prison visit, the show provided a way to get an immediate message to a prisoner. And for many families, that's still true today.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: This is for my son, Tommy, in the cell unit. Always remember, you are the love of my life and you are the best thing that's ever happened to me and I am so proud of you and what you're doing. Please keep it up so you can do well out here because that's not a place for you to be.
FEIBEL: For someone who's randomly scanning the dial on a Friday night, hearing these phone calls can be startling.
DOUG PETERSON: It was just so unique to me to kind of - to be immediately inside of these, what I think are really pretty personal conversations.
FEIBEL: Doug Peterson works for NASA in Houston. He has no personal connection to the prison world and yet he's eavesdropped on "The Prison Show" for years.
PETERSON: You tend to think that convicts in a prison really don't have much of a love life and yet, when the family members talk, it's all about love.
FEIBEL: In fact, "The Prison Show" regularly conducts live weddings on the air between free world women and imprisoned men.
BABB: As you place it on Don's hand, say into the microphone, with this ring...
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #4: With this ring...
BABB: ...I thee wed.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #4: ...I thee wed.
FEIBEL: While the groom in prison listens on the radio, his bride marries a stand-in known as a legal proxy. David Babb is the show's host and a former inmate himself. He says the weddings reflect the show's overall mission to keep prisoners connected to their wives, children and friends.
BABB: So many people go to prison and those relationships end. The families will write to them for a while. They'll go visit for a while and it becomes a burden. It just tends to fade away.
FEIBEL: But many prisoners do stay connected.
LAUREN: Hey, Dad. It's me, Lauren.
FEIBEL: The call-ins from their children are proof of that.
LAUREN: Well, school's going great. I don't have any classes with my friends, but I'm seeing that as a bright side to make new friends and I'm just loving school right now. So I hope you can wish me luck when it comes to all the tests I have to take this year. OK. Love you, Dad. See you soon, I hope.
FEIBEL: "The Prison Show" can be heard in 14 prisons across east Texas. One of them is the Eastham Unit north of Houston. The prison sits in the middle of vast fields where inmates raise cattle and grow cotton.
John Chris Hernandez is serving a life sentence here for a drug-related murder.
JOHN CHRIS HERNANDEZ: Every little bit counts. Every little bit of communication, every little bit.
FEIBEL: Hernandez is tall and clean-shaven. The dark edges of prison tattoos peek above the neckline of his rough white shirt. Hernandez has three teenage daughters who come on "The Prison Show" almost every single week.
HERNANDEZ: It keeps them going and it keeps me going. I'm not the only one doing time. They're doing time with me.
FEIBEL: Because of the show, he's up to date on even the littlest details of their lives, like whether Alexis won her soccer game or if Stacey got her learner's permit.
HERNANDEZ: Because this is a real dark, dark place, you know, and when the show comes on, even when it's dark, it brings a light into the cell.
FEIBEL: The Texas Department of Criminal Justice gets criticized a lot on "The Prison Show" for things like denying medical care or the lack of air conditioning, but department spokeswoman Michelle Lyons says the program is also quite helpful. She's asked the host to squelch prison rumors or tell families which prisons will be evacuated before a hurricane.
No one's ever studied "The Prison Show" in particular or its effect on inmates who listen, but research indicates prisoners who stay in touch with relatives while in prison do a better job of rebuilding their lives when they get out. Program host David Babb says even prisoners who have no family can be helped by listening to the show.
BABB: There's somebody that believes in them and there's somebody that doesn't look at them like the beast that the media does.
FEIBEL: The KPFT radio signal reaches just one-sixth of all state prisoners. Babb's dream is to somehow send that signal through the wall of every Texas prison, all 111 of them. And he wants people in other states to start their own shows. Currently, more than 2.2 million Americans are locked up, so Babb figures the market potential is huge.
For NPR News, I'm Carrie Feibel in Houston.
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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
A tax on tummy tucks and facelifts is itself under the knife in New Jersey. Lawmakers there have voted to phase out the so-called Botax, a 6 percent tax on cosmetic surgery and elective procedures like Botox.
As NPR's Joel Rose reports, New Jersey is one of just a few states with such a tax, a distinction that plastic surgeons have been working hard to erase.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: If you watch much TV, you probably know that the "Real Housewives of New Jersey" are no strangers to the surgeon's knife.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SERIES, "REAL HOUSEWIVES OF NEW JERSEY")
ROSE: Those housewives may be able to save a few dollars next season, if plastic surgeons in New Jersey get their way. They're urging state lawmakers to phase out a 6 percent tax on cosmetic surgery and similar elective procedures.
DR. CHRISTOPHER GODEK: Patients go into other states without the tax to have their procedures performed to save that 6 percent.
ROSE: Dr. Christopher Godek runs the Personal Enhancement Center in Toms River, near the Jersey Shore. He's also president of the New Jersey Society of Plastic Surgeons. The organization commissioned an economic study which suggests that New Jersey is actually losing revenues because of the tax on cosmetic surgery, not gaining them.
GODEK: When someone has plastic surgery, they're not only coming to a plastic surgeon, they're utilizing a hospital or a surgery center. They're staying in local hotels, their family is eating in local restaurants. They're utilizing pharmacies to fill their prescriptions, so all of that revenue is lost.
ROSE: This is not how New Jersey's tax on cosmetic surgery was supposed to work. Here's State Assemblyman Joseph Cryan explaining the rationale on CBS' "The Early Show" back in 2005.
ASSEMBLYMAN JOSEPH CRYAN: This is an income situation where people are able to afford elective surgery. They're not medical necessities. Clearly, reconstructive surgery would not be part of it. So, it's optional surgery designed to enhance someone's appearance, as opposed to the necessity or quality of one's life.
ROSE: Cosmetic surgery was a big quality of life improvement for Jennifer Farley, better known as JWoww on the show "Jersey Shore." She sounded like an advertisement for breast implants in this interview with "Access Hollywood."
(SOUNDBITE OF SHOW, "ACCESS HOLLYWOOD")
ROSE: Even with that endorsement, New Jersey's tax on cosmetic surgery is only bringing in about $10 million a year, less than half of what was projected. Lawmakers voted last week to phase it out completely over the next few years. But those revenues, however modest, go into a special fund that reimburses hospitals for charity care, where they're matched by federal dollars.
And that what makes Suzanne Ianni, at the Hospital Alliance of New Jersey, concerned.
SUZANNE IANNI: This is actually bringing in dollars to New Jersey that otherwise we won't be able to get. You know, reversing these assessments that draw down federal monies, I feel, is going in the wrong direction.
ROSE: So did former Governor Jon Corzine, a Democrat. In 2007, he vetoed a similar bill that would have snipped New Jersey's tax on cosmetic surgery. The current governor, Republican Chris Christie, has until tomorrow to decide if he'll do the same.
Joel Rose, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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The nation's law schools are facing growing pressure to be more upfront about their graduates' job prospects. Many former students say they were lured by juicy job numbers. But when they got out, all they ended up with was massive debt.
As NPR's Larry Abramson reports, the American Bar Association is cracking down, but too late for many.
LARRY ABRAMSON, BYLINE: Chloe Gilgan enrolled at New York Law School in 2005 with one thing in mind: Getting a good paying job. She says the school gave her every assurance that she was in the right place.
CHLOE GILGAN: A high majority of their graduates would find employment at least within nine months of graduating, and that they tended to have three-figure salaries.
ABRAMSON: Three years after graduation, Chloe Gilgan says the only three-figure number she's staring at is her student debt. The only job she found was doing work that did not require a law degree. Gilgan is convinced, New York Law twisted its job numbers.
GILGAN: Nobody can guarantee you'll have a job for sure. But what they can do is give you honest prospects.
ABRAMSON: So, Chloe Gilgan has joined a proposed class-action lawsuit against New York Law School, charging that it has deceived students. Attorney David Anziska is lining up plaintiffs who attended primarily lower tier law schools, paid more than $40,000 a year, and feel they got little in return.
DAVID ANZISKA: When you're taking on such staggering amount of debt, you want to make sure that you have a job at the end of the day, that you'll be able to pay back your loans and pay your bills.
ABRAMSON: New York Law School says it provides all the information required by the American Bar Association and more. Carol Buckler is interim dean. She says the school tries hard to counsel students about their employment prospects.
CAROL BUCKLER: We also break down the information based on the type of employer and the salaries that graduates might expect.
ABRAMSON: But in blogs like the Law School Scam, former students howl about high tuition and lousy job prospects. And there's Kyle McEntee, who started LawSchoolTransparency.com. McEntee says he was outraged to find that the employment data supplied by many lower-tier schools is really part of a recruiting strategy.
KYLE MCENTEE: And so a school might advertise a median salary of $160,000 and not disclose that only 10 percent of the class actually responded to the salary survey.
ABRAMSON: Or, McEntee says, schools don't disclose that some jobs are, in fact, funded by the law school. McEntee himself is a graduate of Vanderbilt Law, where he says he actually got good employment information when he enrolled.
Elizabeth Workman, assistant dean for career services at Vanderbilt, says she keeps a close eye on students' achievement and their debt.
ELIZABETH WORKMAN: And if they will incur six figures in terms of debt, we have a very serious discussion about employment outcomes.
ABRAMSON: Activists say more schools need to follow that path. They blame the American Bar Association, which accredits law schools for letting institutions decide what is accurate.
The ABA's John O'Brian admits this has been a problem.
JOHN O'BRIAN: The definition of accurate has largely been left to the schools.
ABRAMSON: So, recently, the ABA changed the rules. Starting next year, schools will have to report whether graduates are employed full time, whether the positions graduates get require a law degree. That will help applicants in the future decide if they're picking a law school that is turning out employable lawyers. But John O'Brian says it's still up to students to scrutinize that data because the ABA can only demand transparency.
O'BRIAN: The schools are simply required to report. We do not have minimum standards for employment.
ABRAMSON: Kyle McEntee of LawSchoolTransparency.com says the ABA changes are a good first step, but they won't help students already in school. And these measures don't address larger issues. Why is law school enrollment continuing to rise when the job market is shrinking in many areas? The legal sector shed 1,800 jobs in December, according to the Labor Department.
Kyle McEntee says the biggest challenge is battling a perception of invulnerability.
MCENTEE: There's a culturally embedded view about law school that it's this magic ticket to financial security. And as it turns out, this isn't the case and it hasn't been the case for quite some time.
ABRAMSON: When critics attack for-profit colleges for similar problems, the Department of Education tightened regulations on those schools. But the department says it has no authority to do the same to the vast majority of law programs.
Larry Abramson, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel. And it's now for All Tech Considered.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: The big auto show in Detroit is increasingly a consumer electronics show for the car. Automakers no longer simply introduce new models of cars and trucks. Now they're just as likely to rollout a new infotainment system or app.
But NPR's Sonari Glinton reports that some of these new high tech bells and whistles just aren't ready for primetime.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: It used to be that when you talk to car executives they're all about horsepower, styling, even fuel economy. Now it's all tech. Thomas Tetzlaff is with Volkswagen of Canada.
THOMAS TETZLAFF: As we've seen in the automotive industry, the growth in mechanical changes has now become incremental. Whereas the growth in the consumer electronics industry seems to be taking place at a rate that is, you know, almost unprecedented.
GLINTON: Tetzlaff says the average young driver doesn't want their car to be a rolling oasis. They want to be connected to social media like Facebook or Twitter.
TETZLAFF: We have realized that if we shut our customers out of that, they're going to shut us out of the equation. And the vehicles we're showing today - although we're touting the outside and the engines - we're cognizant of the fact that we need to bring the technology from the dashboard to the driver.
GLINTON: Almost all the car companies, including Volkswagen, are working with outside suppliers to bring consumer electronics to your dashboard. Cadillac, for instance, has what it calls CUE or Cadillac User Experience. This is the future - we're talking Jetsons. It has voice control and it projects information right onto the windshield in front of you; anything from a text message to a map. It also has a flat screen on the center console that can interact with your smartphone, the radio and the Internet.
Matt Highstrom helped design the CUE system.
MATT HIGHSTROM: So, the central console essentially has - there's an eight-inch touch screen. So, like your iPhone or your smartphone device where you can swipe things - swipe to different screens. You're able to...
GLINTON: Which didn't work right now.
HIGHSTROM: Which didn't work right now. Jason, what did you do to this?
JASON: What did I do?
HIGHSTROM: This light been working on here?
GLINTON: Now, to be fair to the folks at Cadillac, that was not a working car but an auto show demo. But that glitch on the flat screen gets to the heart of the problem with consumer electronics - they're prone to bugs, which can be a problem when you're driving 65 miles an hour.
DAVID CHAMPION: I'm an engineer and I hate to knock on engineers, but engineers want to give the system the capabilities of doing anything and everything that you could ever want to do.
GLINTON: David Champion is with Consumer Reports. He's been a critic of many car infotainment systems, especially ones using flat-panel screens.
CHAMPION: If you're working an iPad or an iPhone, you're actually looking down and your eyes are following where you're hands are going. And that's your primary focus. So, if you're putting a touch screen into a car, therefore your primary focus when operating that touch screen, your eyes have to be on the screen. And that's what makes it distracting.
GLINTON: Champion says that's why your car has knobs and buttons you can feel without seeing.
Jeremy Anwyl is with Edmunds.com.
JEREMY ANWYL: The driving experience is so fundamentally different than, say, the desktop experience. And getting a bunch of guys in a room that used to, you know, write programs for Microsoft or whoever is probably not the right way to be thinking about this human-machine interface.
GLINTON: Anwyl says companies like GM and Honda aren't Apple or Microsoft, certainly not yet.
Sonari Glinton, NPR News, Detroit.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
The violinist Joshua Bell's new album is called "French Impressions." Bell and pianist Jeremy Denk play three sonatas: one by Camille Saint-Saens, one by Maurice Ravel and this one by Cesar Franck, who is actually Belgian but spent his life working in Paris.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SONATA FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO IN A MAJOR, M.8")
SIEGEL: The Cesar Franck Sonata for Violin and Piano evidently has a very special meaning for Joshua Bell who joins us from New York. Welcome to the program once again.
JOSHUA BELL: Thank you.
SIEGEL: I'd like you to describe your connection to this 1886 composition of Cesar Franck's.
BELL: Well, it's - the Franck Sonata is one of the great pillars of the repertoire for violin and piano. Any violinist or pianist would say it's their piece, you know, but I do feel particularly close to it because I've been, well, first of all, playing it my whole life since I was 13 years old. But my first experience with it was through the eyes and filter of my teacher Josef Gingold. And Josef Gingold was a student of Eugene Ysaye. And Franck actually wrote the sonata for Ysaye who was a fellow Belgian.
And it was pretty awesome to take lessons with Gingold where he would describe how exactly he would play the Franck Sonata that was written for him, and especially considering that it was written in the 1880s. I had this direct link. I'm not claiming I had - that that means I play it better than anyone else, but it - but for me, it's a personal connection that I treasure.
SIEGEL: It's a pretty direct line of descent, actually, from the late 19th century to today.
BELL: Yeah. I call Ysaye my musical grandfather, so to speak. So...
SIEGEL: And did - you say Gingold talked to you about how, you say, he played the piece.
BELL: He did. And he would describe Ysaye his - the nuance of sound. He would imitate - well, Gingold himself had probably the most beautiful violin sound I have ever heard close up and - but he imitated the way Ysaye would express himself and almost cry through the instrument. And it was something very special. And it must have been incredibly touching to be in the room with Ysaye.
SIEGEL: As you say, you've been playing this piece almost your whole life. There was a recording you made of it back in 1989 that I owned a tape cassette of. You remember tape cassettes.
BELL: I vaguely remember those types of things.
SIEGEL: So I listened to that for years, and now I've listened to the two piece. The first recording, you must have made when you were 21, or if you made it in December, maybe you were 22. Today, you're 44. So differences between those two recordings? Do you hear the same violinist playing, or are you remarkably different to your own ear?
BELL: Personally, I haven't actually heard it for many, many, many years. It's hard to listen to one's self, you know, recordings, especially the piece that you grow with over the years, and then you think, oh, my God, why did I do that? So I think if I were to hear it, I would hear quite, well, a lot of basic things. I'm still the same human being, and a lot of things I feel the same way about. But I feel I know the piece so much better. I've internalized it so much more and the way it's paced and the way I - hopefully, I'm bringing out much more nuance and more color and things that I've discovered in the piece since.
SIEGEL: I'm going to play you a bit of the recording you made in 1989 of the Franck Sonata, and you tell me what you're hearing that isn't the way you play today.
BELL: Oh, OK.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, " SONATA FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO IN A MAJOR, M.8")
SIEGEL: Well, that's you at 21.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: Sounds pretty good to me.
BELL: Oh, thank you. Well, it's not as bad as I thought it was. And then my next impression was, hmm, you know, I could have done a lot more here and this harmony could have done really - followed some of the instructions in the score a little bit better.
SIEGEL: Really? You can hear real differences between them?
BELL: Oh, yeah. I mean, this music is very subtle, and you have to choose - I think there are so many beautiful harmonies that if you indulge in every one, you would lose the scope. And yet French music - some of the beauty of the French music is that there are moments where you don't think about the overall structure. And that is just - you enjoy that sheer beauty of that moment.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SONATA FOR VIOLIN & PIANO IN A MAJOR, M.8")
BELL: Thanks for playing that. It's interesting to hear, for me, at least.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: You're saying you've learned to pick your fights more artfully now with the music (unintelligible)?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BELL: With the music, well, you're always making choice. It's all about choices. And jazzers are always used to choices, you know, in their improvisation, but it's the same in classical music. Like actors as well, you know, where to dwell, you know? To be or not to be, you got to figure out which word is the one you accent, and, you know, it's the same thing in music.
SIEGEL: The connection from Eugene Ysaye through your teacher Josef Gingold is, I mean, remarkable to be taught by a man who learned from the person for whom this was written. On the other hand, it could also be pretty intimidating to be a kid and saying, well, here's a century of greatness, passing this piece of music on to me right now. I mean, as a mature adult, do you feel that you're more in control of playing it and able to take more liberties with it as you play?
BELL: Well, I don't remember ever feeling intimidated for some reason. I think when you're performing, you have to have a certain amount of confidence and just - and on that certain point, you have to own it, the piece. And Gingold was one that really allowed me to be myself. He was not one that said, well, this is the way I did it, or this is the way you should do it. Never spoon-fed me things. He always asked what I thought. He would ask me questions rather than tell me the answers, you know, and so that gave me a kind of confidence in my own choices.
SIEGEL: The relationship between you, the artist, and the piece of music that you've performed over decades, is it something constant and steady, or are there moments of evolution when you decide after some performance, I'm going to do this differently now, I mean, I'm going to rethink that particular movement? Or does it just change very naturally without being so self-conscious about it?
BELL: Well, a lot of what happens in - and as a - we're basically evolving and learning. You're a constant student as a musician. So - and a lot of that, it just evolves naturally. But there are also moments where the light bulb goes off in your head and quantum jumps in understanding that those happen as well, and those are wonderful moments. You know, those often come after times where you feel a little bit stagnant or frustrated.
But I believe in things happening naturally. I think if you try to do something artificially or try to change your style or - very self-consciously, I think it won't be honest.
SIEGEL: But even trying that hard, it'll change because you're growing as an artist.
BELL: It does change. We all - I mean, we change anyway. I mean, as human beings, we change. We - the more experience we have in life, it all informs and is reflected in everything we do artistically.
SIEGEL: Well, Joshua Bell, thank you very much for talking with us.
BELL: Thank you for having me.
SIEGEL: And the album we were talking about is by Joshua Bell and pianist Jeremy Denk. It's called "French Impressions."
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
The Republican candidates meet again for a debate tonight in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. That state holds its primary this Saturday. But the field will be smaller by one as former Utah governor Jon Huntsman brought his campaign to an end.
JON HUNTSMAN: Today, I am suspending my campaign for the presidency. I believe it is now time for our party to unite around the candidate best equipped to defeat Barack Obama.
SIEGEL: On his way out, Huntsman endorsed former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, which may add at least some votes to Romney's lead in South Carolina. In tonight's debate, some of the other candidates may face some sharp questions about their attacks on Romney and his business history.
NPR's national political correspondent Don Gonyea is following the race in South Carolina and he joins us now from Myrtle Beach. Don, less than a week after his rather disappointing third place finish in New Hampshire, Jon Huntsman has ended his pursuit of the nomination, but I gather not before offering some advice to his former rivals. What did he say?
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: Right. He did say that the party - those who will be voting in South Carolina and elsewhere down the road - need to pull together behind Mitt Romney, in part, to be able to beat President Obama in November. He says he is the most electable one. But he also sent this message about the general tone of the campaign to the other candidates. Here he is.
HUNTSMAN: This race has degenerated into an onslaught of negative and personal attacks not worthy of the American people and not worthy of this critical time in our nation's history.
SIEGEL: Well, there's another debate this evening in South Carolina. And Mitt Romney, I assume, will still be the target of the remaining four other rivals in the race for the nomination.
GONYEA: He will be, except there's no reason to think that anybody will emerge unscathed. There could be very tough questions for Newt Gingrich and for Ron Paul about the attacks they have made against Mitt Romney and Mitt Romney's career at Bain Capital. Rick Santorum has been rising a bit in the polls here and hopes to consolidate the conservative Christian vote so they could go after him as well. It seems everybody has an incentive to attack somebody else standing on that stage tonight and they'll be fewer of them.
SIEGEL: Don, one other point, all of those attacks against Mitt Romney - either Rick Perry calling him a vulture capitalist or the 28-minute online documentary that attacks his career at Bain - is there any evidence that's actually diminishing his support in South Carolina?
GONYEA: He's still ahead by a wide margin here. There are certainly people you talk to here anecdotally who are glad to see these kinds of attacks and they know it's something he would face in the fall, so they're happy to see the attacks now. But there's also the potential for some sympathy being created for Mitt Romney. I was at a Tea Party convention today and a guy there told me, he said, there are plenty of things to attack Mitt Romney on. This is not one of them. This is not where the attacks should be.
SIEGEL: And we should note that Rick Santorum does have a feather in his cap right now in South Carolina. He won the endorsement of an evangelical group over the weekend.
GONYEA: Right. That has the potential to be important. We'll still have to see how it plays out over the course of the week. But at this stage of the game, with two contests, Iowa and New Hampshire already, complete, the evangelicals met in Texas and did give their vote of support for Santorum.
He has been working it hard, as many as 60 percent of those who will vote in the South Carolina primary this weekend self-identify as evangelical. So that's a big block of voters. But again, no indication yet that they are starting to coalesce behind anyone, let alone Rick Santorum.
SIEGEL: That's NPR national political correspondent Don Gonyea in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Thanks, Don.
GONYEA: Thank you.
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For all the attention that South Carolina is getting, at stake next weekend are just 25 delegates to the GOP nominating convention. Ultimately, the winning candidate will need more than 1,100. Republican Party officials have adopted new rules to try to prolong the battle for those delegates.
NPR's David Welna was at the GOP's winter meeting in New Orleans and sent us this report.
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: It's been years since Republicans have had a long, drawn-out fight the way Democrats have had before settling on their party's presidential nominee. That's because Democrats were delegates only on a proportional basis in each state. In GOP elections, though, it's been winner take all, making it easier for a frontrunner to quickly build up an insurmountable lead. That is until this year.
The Republican National Committee has drawn up new guidelines stipulating that any state holding a contest before April 1st has to reward its delegates on a proportional basis. Adherence to that new rule or rather the failure by some states to do so proved a sore spot at the RNC's winter meeting last week in New Orleans.
BRUCE ASH: There are visitors in the room and there are press here, so if we conduct ourselves today, we need to be cognizant of that.
WELNA: That's RNC Rules Committee chairman Bruce Ash of Arizona convening a meeting to deal with rules breakers. At the top of the list is Florida, its decision to hold its primary January 31st forced Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina to go earlier as well. The price Florida pays for doing so is losing half its delegates. But Florida is also holding a winner-take-all primary, essentially ignoring the rule, that any contest before April 1st has to proportional.
Tennessee committeeman John Ryder rose at the rules meeting to demand additional sanctions for Florida.
JOHN RYDER: Our feeling is that, look, if we go to the state of Florida for the convention this summer, the state legislators in Florida will expect us to follow the laws of the state of Florida. When they come to our convention in Tampa, we expect them to follow the rules of the Republican National Committee for our convention. They have not followed the rules. I think they should receive the penalty.
WELNA: And so, Florida will be punished by giving its delegates to the Tampa National Convention inferior seating and housing and taking away their guest passes. Still, Florida is getting what its state legislators wanted, a potentially decisive role in the outcome of the nomination fight. Lenny Curry is Florida's Republican state chairman.
LENNY CURRY: I see the winner of Florida ultimately likely becoming our nominee.
WELNA: And if Mitt Romney comes out on top in South Carolina and then prevails in Florida, Romney's supporter and Michigan committeeman Saul Anuzis says that could be the turning point.
SAUL ANUZIS: I think most people will see it as being pretty much over. He won't have the delegates, but the momentum and the, you know, infrastructure that is out there will basically have moved forward to the point of deciding he's our nominee.
WELNA: But others at the RNC winter meeting said it's too soon to say whether Florida will amount to a coronation. Ryan Call is the state GOP chairman for Colorado which holds its caucuses the week after Florida's contest.
RYAN CALL: Even after Florida, only 5 percent of the delegates will have been awarded or allocated. And certainly, while this is often a game of momentum, it's also a long process where the candidates need to win the confidence of voters throughout the country.
WELNA: And New York State GOP chairman Ed Cox pointed out that 11 states are holding their nominating contests the first Tuesday in March.
EDWARD COX: And all those Super Tuesday states which pour 135 out of the 1,140 that you need in order to get the nomination, all those are proportional. So, there may be an incentive for - regardless of what happens in South Carolina - for people to go on to stay in it and to see what happens.
WELNA: Because building up a decisive lead this year will be harder than ever for a GOP frontrunner. Some party officials say Republicans could end up with what Democrats had four years ago, a contest lasting until the final primary in June.
David Welna, NPR News, New Orleans.
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To a new trend now in high tech hiring. Hands-on computer skills are an important assets for many, but not most jobseekers in today's economy.
But Harvest Public Media's Clay Masters reports that some companies are starting to look a bit broader, filling IT jobs with some unlikely college grads.
CLAY MASTERS, BYLINE: Remember that old joke about how a liberal arts major says hello? You know, you want fries with that? Well, that joke might be turning on those who still use it.
Consider that Healthy Choice frozen meal you toss into the microwave. There's a lot that goes on behind it. I'm not talking about the physical production of that convenient lunch, but just the way you even know about it, how it gets to the aisle of your local grocery store in the first place.
GERRIT SCHUTTE: Think of what it takes to produce a product, what it takes to run a factory, what it takes to run a payroll. All of these business processes ultimately are reduced to some form of computer logic.
MASTERS: That's Gerrit Schutte. He's chief information officer at Omaha-based food company ConAgra. It's the giant behind brands like Healthy Choice and Slim Jim. And like in any company, behind all of its business operations, is its information technology department, which is recruiting more employees off the beaten path.
The IT department here is huge, about 700 employees. There are no assigned workspaces. One day a week, employees work remotely from home. In 2008, the company revamped its IT internship program to include those who didn't climb the traditional techie ladder, like Eric Fasse who majored in communications studies.
ERIC FASSE: That initial interview that I had was just going over the skills. And so, you know, they're trying to get a bead on what is your IT background. So they're asking me do you know how to do JavaScript. Do you know how to - and I had to say no to everything.
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FASSE: I thought I'm sunk, like there's no way. I was like, I'm not going to get a call back.
MASTERS: Fasse didn't just get a call back, he eventually got an IT job at ConAgra. So did Holly Barber, even though on paper her resume may have seemed a bit thin.
HOLLY BARBER: So, all throughout high school, I was definitely kind of a geek and a gamer. So, I was kind of naturally leaning towards computer science. But I didn't like math, so that was kind of the stumbling block for me, eventually. So I became a computer science major but then switched to journalism.
MASTERS: The company partners with nearby colleges to grow their own local talent - like Fasse and Barber, right here in Omaha - while still hiring those students who take the normal computer science route.
Again, ConAgra chief information officer Gerrit Schutte.
SCHUTTE: We look for them to have more than a single dimension in terms of what they bring to the table. Just technical talent is not enough.
MASTERS: Debra Humphreys is with the Association of American Colleges and Universities, an organization that acts as an intermediary between colleges and businesses, making sure graduates are prepared for the demands of the rapidly changing workplace. Humphreys also names Siemens and Hewlett Packard as companies open to nontraditional hiring.
DEBRA HUMPHREYS: The big message for today's college students is to remember that they're preparing now for a lifetime of work, not just for that first job they're going to get right as they graduate. And what we're hearing from employers over and over again is that students really need a combination of broad skills and abilities that you get from a really good college education.
MASTERS: So, while no one is saying computer science majors won't still be in high demand, it does appear that having some - dare I say - liberal arts training while embracing your inner computer geek, might just be the key to getting your foot in the door.
For NPR News, I'm Clay Masters in Omaha.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
The death toll now stands at six after a cruise ship ran aground off Italy's Tuscan coast on Friday. Some 29 passengers and crew are still unaccounted for, including two Americans. Today, rough seas forced the suspension of rescue operations.
And NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports that the ship's Italian owner blames the accident on the captain, who's now under arrest.
SYLVIA POGGIOLI BYLINE: By mid-morning the Costa Concordia, which weighs some 115,000 tons, had slipped four inches vertically and half an inch horizontally. The ship is resting on a reef, but rough seas could detach it from the rocks and it could sink to the seabed.
Investigators say the 900-foot-long luxury liner, with 4,200 people on board, was just 150 yards off the rocky coast of Giglio Island when it hit a reef and started taking in water. It's believed that steering the ship so close to Giglio was part of a maritime practice, the equivalent of a fly-by. With sirens blasting, it's a salute to show off the brightly lit luxury liner to the islanders.
At a press conference today at Costa shipping company headquarters in Genoa, the grim-faced CEO, Pier Lugi Foschi, said Captain Francesco Schettino took an initiative contrary to company guidelines.
PIER LUGI FOSCHI: (Through translator) We disassociate ourselves from this behavior, which caused the accident by making the ship veer off its established course. This maneuver was unapproved, unauthorized and unknown to the shipping company.
BYLINE: Captain Schettino is under arrest on suspicion of multiple manslaughter, shipwreck, tampering with evidence and abandoning ship. The captain did not send a mayday distress call until a full hour after the collision. But passengers had already alerted the Coast Guard with calls from their cell phones. Before he was detained Saturday evening, Schettino was interviewed by the Mediaset TV network.
FRANCESCO SCHETTINO: (Through translator) In such a particular moment, you need to be able to decide and to understand clearly what the best alternative is. In fact, I believe almost all the passengers were rescued.
BYLINE: Schettino said the ship hit rocks not marked on nautical maps, a claim dismissed by islanders and sailors with knowledge of the area. The reporter asked the captain about claims he had left the ship before all passengers had been evacuated.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: There were more than 4,000 people. The captain is usually the last to abandon ship. What happened, captain?
SCHETTINO: (Through translator) We were the last to leave the ship.
BYLINE: This claim was firmly dismissed by prosecutor Francesco Verusio, who was asked by a reporter what has struck him most about the investigation so far.
FRANCESCO VERUSIO: (Through translator) It's the brazenness of the captain's maneuver which is really inexcusable.
BYLINE: Carlo Rienzi, president of a consumer protection association, has announced plans to file a class-action suit against the Costa shipping company on behalf of everyone who was on board the ship.
CARLO RIENZI: (Through translator) It's scandalous that Costa pins all the blame solely on the captain for the accident and what happened afterwards. If the crew was unprepared for an emergency, it's because they are low-skilled and paid low wages and not sufficiently trained. It's the shipping company's responsibility to fully reimburse everyone.
BYLINE: The Costa company could also be liable if the shipwreck triggers an environmental disaster, in what is said to be Europe's biggest marine nature reserve.
Sylvia Poggioli, NPR News, Rome.
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To Spain now and a tiny hamlet south of Madrid. People there are cheering plans to turn their backyard into a nuclear waste dump. That's because unemployment is painfully high, so villagers lobbied for and won the waste site and the much-needed jobs it's expected to create.
Reporter Lauren Frayer traveled to the village and sent us this report.
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LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: This is the land of Don Quixote, parched plains, merciless sun and wind. The old windmills are gone and its nuclear energy, or rather the radioactive waste that comes from it, that will determine the future of this tiny village, Villar de Canas. It's about an hour and half south of Madrid, in the land of La Mancha, where the jobless rate tops 30 percent.
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FRAYER: In the town's only bar, I ask how many people have work.
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FRAYER: The regulars count on their fingers. There's Antonio, Juan and the mayor, they're the ones who have jobs. Ricardo Fernandez used to work in construction. He nods toward some half-built condos, left over from the housing bubble.
RICARDO FERNANDEZ: (Foreign language spoken)
FRAYER: Me now? No, I'm unemployed, he says. I collect unemployment benefits from the government. I've been searching here, there and everywhere. His benefits dry up next month. But behold, Spain's first nuclear waste dump is coming to town, and with it up to 500 construction jobs.
For 30 years, spent uranium has been stored in cooling pools at eight reactors around the country, but they're filling up. Spain has even had to send some nuclear waste to France, to the tune of almost $80,000 a day - something Spain definitely cannot afford these days.
So, the plan now is to bury radioactive waste deep under abandoned barley fields in this village. Instead of cries of not in my backyard, everyone here is ecstatic. The bartender, Antonio Velda, explains.
ANTONIO VELDA: (Foreign language spoken)
FRAYER: That moment, when they announced the nuclear waste would come here, it gave us all hope, he says. There are no jobs here anymore. There's hardly any fear of contamination. The bigger fear is of unemployment.
The nearly $1 billion dollar project breaks ground within months. And resumes are already piling up at city hall. The one frazzled clerk there tells me where to find the mayor: Walk down that dirt road, he says, hang a left, and ask for Jose in the metal workshop.
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FRAYER: Sure enough, here is the mayor at his day job in the family business with a blow torch.
MAYOR JOSE MARIA SAIZ: (Through translator) When they gave me the news that the nuclear facility was coming to Villar de Canas, imagine it, the joy.
FRAYER: Mayor Jose Maria Saiz grew up here and remembers when the village was full of people. But agriculture requires fewer bodies these days. And the construction bubble was short-lived.
SAIZ: (Through translator) When I was young, in the 1970s and '80s, there was a load of people here, with so many children in the local school. I've been mayor for 18 years. And in that time, I've seen the loss of the population. As mayor, I felt impotent to prevent my village from dying.
FRAYER: So he applied for the nuclear waste site two years ago and went door to door, answering questions about safety. Cooling pools no longer seem like a great idea after what happened at Fukushima in Japan. Here, radioactive material will be buried for 60 years. The mayor says he has no doubts about safety, and is fixated instead on the jobs that could transform his town.
SAIZ: (Through translator) Half the houses here are boarded up. I want all the houses opened. I want young married couples to move here and have children. To be able to work in your own village, for me, it's a source of pride.
FRAYER: That nuclear waste might be what brings children back. Well, the mayor gets the irony there.
SAIZ: (Foreign language spoken)
FRAYER: They've started calling it the buried savior, he says.
For NPR News, I'm Lauren Frayer in Villar de Canas, Spain.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
The firearms industry is booming in Montana. Throughout the economic downturn, the state's gun manufacturers have added jobs. Part of the reason is a pro-gun political climate.
As Montana Public Radio's Katrin Frye reports, gun makers say they'd be hiring even more if they could find the right workers.
KATRIN FRYE, BYLINE: Montana Rifleman produces 1,000 rifle barrels per day in its Flathead Valley shop in northwest Montana. It sells the barrels to gun manufacturers like Remington and Winchester. President Brian Sipe founded the company more than two decades ago.
BRIAN SIPE: I started with $200. My father-in-law had a dairy farm up on Whitefish Stage. And I cleaned out the milk house and started gun-smithing and making barrels in that milk house.
FRYE: In the late 1990s, he expanded his business and created another company selling custom rifles to consumers. The two companies combined employ about 100 people. With the unemployment rate here stubbornly hovering around 10 percent, Sipe says there are plenty of workers, but he still struggles to fill certain jobs.
SIPE: Finding skilled machinists is one of the hardest things for us right now. I've had to bring guys in from outside because they really had offers in job service for months and never got a call.
FRYE: The Montana Firearms Institute is aiming to build off the existing firearms industry in the Flathead Valley and push the area and the state as a whole as a hub for gun manufacturing. Statewide, manufacturing as a whole has grown just under 5 percent from 2010 to 2011. The gun manufacturing industry has grown a whopping 82 percent during the same period.
Republican State Senator Ryan Zinke also works as a director for the institute and says they're trying to tackle the problem of unqualified machinists.
STATE SENATOR RYAN ZINKE: What we've done is we've entered an agreement with the Flathead Valley Community College in college technologies to look at developing the curriculum that meets the industry's requirements.
SUSIE BURCH: We're hoping this will be something that will employ a number of people locally.
FRYE: Flathead Valley Community College's Susie Burch says she sees potential for the gun industry to create good jobs. And when she says good jobs, she means year-round employment with decent wages and benefits.
Burch says the college is tweaking an existing program to suit the industry's needs. She says the industry fits well with the area.
BURCH: We have sportsmen. My brother-in-law - I mean, he has real reverence for his equipment, as well as the animals that he's hunting. And so, I think that to have these guns manufactured here, it would be pretty cool. It would just be a good character fit.
FRYE: Burch says that training program should be in place within the year.
MIKE BUSH: Every rifle we make is 100 percent handmade.
FRYE: Mike Bush is president and founder of BlackOps Technologies. His gun manufacturing company has four people working, including himself. Right now, they're producing about a dozen rifles per month, but he wants to more than double the workforce and the output in the coming year. Bush's company is relatively new in the Flathead. He moved up from Arizona in 2009.
BUSH: Politicians on both sides of the aisles have guns, and they promote it and they're in favor of it. And when you don't have that political bickering back and forth, generally speaking, there's going to be legislature that supports the gun industry as a whole.
FRYE: The Montana Firearms Institute is hoping to capitalize on this idea, seeing growth in the gun industry as a way to cut the high unemployment rate.
For NPR News, I'm Katrin Frye in Big Fork, Montana.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel. On this day celebrating the life of Martin Luther King Jr., we're going to look back now to the events leading up to his death. King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968. He was there to support striking sanitation workers who were trying to unionize.
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SIEGEL: Memphis television and radio stations covered the sanitation workers' strike.
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SIEGEL: And they covered the events of April 4th, when Martin Luther King was shot at the Lorraine Motel.
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SIEGEL: Filmmaker Tom Jennings has taken local television and radio sound and images from that time, as well as that police radio sound, to piece together a documentary about King in Memphis. Much of the material was either never broadcast or broadcast once and never shown again. There are no new interviews and no narration, and the result is a film that tells its story as if you were changing channels back in 1968. It's called "MLK: The Assassination Tapes." And, Tom Jennings, welcome to the program.
TOM JENNINGS: Thank you for having me.
SIEGEL: First, how hard or easy was it to find all the sound and pictures you used in this documentary?
JENNINGS: Well, it was hard at first because the idea was to find local television and radio footage from the time that would help tell this story. And we called the local stations down there, and it turned out that most of them do not have an archive from the time. And next, I checked with the National Civil Rights Museum, which is at the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was assassinated. And they directed me to the University of Memphis, which, it turns out, in 1968 several professors there had seen the sanitation workers' strike as a seminal moment in the civil rights movement, and they had begun collecting both television footage and audio/radio footage from the time. So at the university, there is an amazing treasure trove of footage that most of which has not been seen before.
SIEGEL: The image of King that I must say is very impressive after watching the film is that he is the voice of civil disobedience, of peaceful protest, and there also is a rage in the streets. And there are young people who are beyond his control. He is not the voice that is listened to by every black person in Memphis by any means. He is trying to steer a peaceful middle course.
JENNINGS: Yeah. He was in a very tough spot because the civil rights movement had been going on for several years, and many people felt frustrated that his message of non-violence wasn't working. And there were youth in Memphis that decided we're going to do it our way. And what he wanted to do was address the root of the problem, not to get someone to stop throwing a rock through a window, but why they would want to do that in the first place.
SIEGEL: At one point, Dr. King tells a crowd in the - speaking in support of the sanitation workers' strike that it was unfair for them to do full-time work for part-time pay. But you never actually - perhaps this is the format you're working in - we never actually hear numbers. We never actually are told how little the black sanitation workers of Memphis were getting paid and how that compared to white people's wages. Do you know, and was it simply impossible to find any archival source that would have said it?
JENNINGS: We didn't find archival sources that would give us exact numbers. However, there were some examples of how they were paid less. For example, when it would rain in Memphis and the sanitation workers could not go out to collect the garbage, they would be given the day off because of the rain. The people who were white, for whatever reason, were paid for those rain days while their African-American counterparts did not receive pay.
SIEGEL: As you were searching through archives of film from Memphis in 1968, was there any particular aha moment that stands out when you saw something that you hadn't expected?
JENNINGS: There definitely was an aha moment for me, and that was the day after Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. The following day, about 100 ministers from the Memphis area showed up on the steps of Memphis City Hall demanding to see the mayor, Mayor Henry Loeb at the time. And they literally congregated on the steps with a cross in hand and marched into Memphis City Hall and marched into the mayor's office.
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JENNINGS: They felt as if Dr. King's blood was on the city of Memphis' hands, and that if the mayor had behaved, in their opinion, more responsibly in the first place that King would have never had to come.
SIEGEL: Producer Tom Jennings, his documentary is called "MLK: The Assassination Tapes." It will air on the Smithsonian Channel next month. Tom Jennings, thanks for talking with us.
JENNINGS: Thank you very much.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
For teachers, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday poses some difficult challenges - for one, how to make an annual holiday fresh each year, especially one loaded with the potentially uncomfortable issues of race and class. Beth Fertig of member station WNYC sat down with six teachers from different types of schools in New York City to hear how they make the holiday meaningful.
BETH FERTIG, BYLINE: As a history buff, Luciano D'Orazio loves teaching about Martin Luther King Jr. But as an elementary school teacher, he says the holiday can get a little formulaic, with too many references to the famous quotes like: I have a dream So to get his students to understand segregation, D'Orazio has them experience it.
LUCIANO D'ORAZIO: I would take some of the darker skinned children and move them to another table. And with the remainder of the children, I would tell them, good, congratulations. You guys are all going to receive - will be like an A or a level four in social studies and you don't have to do any more work for the rest of the year.
FERTIG: For the darker skinned kids, the message is different.
D'ORAZIO: Now, all of you have double the homework that you used to have, and whatever you do, you're going to get a level two, which is basically a C or a D.
FERTIG: D'Orazio is the social studies coordinator at P.S. 150 in the South Bronx, an elementary school that's mostly poor and Hispanic. He admits this lesson can get a little upsetting for the kids because some of them might take it as too real.
D'ORAZIO: So the minute I see someone, you know, start to cry or start to get angry, I start to pull them back. I say, OK. Was I being fair in treating you this way? And they get it right away.
FERTIG: That type of in-your-face teaching was debated by the six educators. They spoke candidly about how hard it can be to make a good lesson about an American icon, especially for teenagers.
DUANE WILLIAMSON: We don't have to introduce them to King at this age. All we have to do is open up their understanding.
FERTIG: High school kids think they've heard it all before, says Duane Williamson, who teaches English at a new public school in Brooklyn called Pathways for Technology. He uses King's 1968 "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech to explore the literary device of foreshadowing.
WILLIAMSON: Because as we know, or most of us know, less than 24 hours later, he was cut down by an assassin's bullet when he ended the speech saying, you know, I don't know what's going to happen to me and longevity has its place. And - but he's been to the mountaintop.
KEITH CHRISTIANSEN: If there's any danger in teaching about MLK as a hero, it's - a colleague of mine put it this way: That he was a very big tree in forest of people who were acting at the time.
FERTIG: Keith Christiansen, who teaches middle school in Brooklyn, says it's important for kids to know there were other civil rights leaders. Karen Zaidberg, who teaches at the private Manhattan Country Day School, suggests ways to make this relevant throughout the year.
KAREN ZAIDBERG: If you're talking about American history, why not talk about the underlying themes constantly of activism and resistance throughout and not have it live in this â so there's one day with this one man and he is this emblem of all of these things. I feel like that's a current that goes through everything.
FERTIG: Making time to teach about civil rights also requires a good deal of thought about what's appropriate for children of different ages and some self-reflection.
In our panel of six teachers, four were white. Elementary school teacher Romero Ross, who is black, threw out this statement.
ROMERO ROSS: I do believe that white teachers can not teach the issue of race or Dr. King or any other type civil rights movement as well, as relatable as an African-American teacher.
WILLIAMSON: If I were white, I would say something.
CHRISTIANSEN: I'm sorry. I'd say that'd depend on the teacher, for starters, but...
FERTIG: Although Duane Williamson and Keith Christiansen disagreed with Ross, they acknowledged there is a challenge when white educators teach minorities about civil rights.
Katie Ulrich, who's white, teaches first grade at a Brooklyn charter school that's mostly black and Hispanic.
KATIE ULRICH: My own education surrounding Black History Month, surrounding MLK Day, is lacking, so I had to go back and read what Malcolm X said, read what he's - you know, really start to do a little bit of self-discovery around holes in my own education.
FERTIG: By confronting personal limitations, she said teachers can only get better at educating their students about MLK Day and throughout the school year.
For NPR News, I'm Beth Fertig in New York.
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It's time for your letters, and first, we heard from several listeners about a story last week about some of Paul Revere's handiwork. The silversmith famous for his midnight ride also crafted the bell that now adorns the clock tower of the old South Meeting House in Boston.
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SIEGEL: Well, we brought you the story of that bell and how it made its way last week to the tower, which has not had a bell of its own since 1876, but a few of you with keen ears and a keener sense of metallurgy wanted to set us straight on one detail.
William Mayhew(ph) of Fairfax, Virginia writes this. Your reporter said, a crane gently lifted the 876 pounds of cast iron into the clock tower. Really? Large bells such as this one were and are invariably made of cast bronze. Cast iron would quickly rust and bronze gives a better, sweeter tone, anyway.
Well, as it turns out, Mr. Mayhew's skepticism was well placed. Paul Revere opened a foundry in 1788 in Boston's North End. It made stove parts and other items out of iron, but the bell was, indeed, made of bronze.
Also last week, in a story about presidential memorials, reporter Elizabeth Blair mentioned a historic tussle over how to commemorate President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt's family firmly rejected plans for an expansive walk-through memorial, saying it was too colossal for a man who once said he didn't want any landmark larger than his desk.
In the 1990s, a sprawling memorial was built in Washington, D.C., anyway, but listener Lawrence Burke(ph) of Pittsburgh points out that that is Washington's second memorial to FDR. The first one, erected in 1965, stayed true to FDR's wishes. It is a simple, rectangular desk-sized piece of stone near the northwest corner of the National Archives Building.
Thanks for your letters and please keep them coming. You can write to us by going to NPR.org and clicking on Contact Us at the bottom of the page.
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This time every year, people gather at the state capital in Columbia, South Carolina, for a rally to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. At this year's event, sponsored by the NAACP, Attorney General Eric Holder was among them. in his speech, Holder focused on one of Dr. King's greatest accomplishments, helping to pass the Voting Rights Act and a current effort in South Carolina to pass a voter identification law. NPR's Kathy Lohr was at today's rally.
KATHY LOHR, BYLINE: It was overcast and a bit chilly in this part of the South as hundreds gathered to sing, pray and celebrate.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LOHR: Civil rights groups are upset about laws that require voters to show a photo ID before casting a ballot. William Barber with the North Carolina NAACP praised the Justice Department for rejecting such a law in South Carolina last year.
REVEREND WILLIAM BARBER: In South Carolina, we got to always tell them no first, and then hell no second. And the next time they try to take my right to vote, Mr. Holder, I want you to able to tell them, hell no, you ain't going to take his right to vote.
LOHR: Those who oppose voter ID law say the target minorities, the poor and the elderly. They liken it to the infamous poll tax of another era. Holder called the right to vote the lifeblood of our democracy and said history is on the side of encouraging people to vote.
ERIC HOLDER: We must ensure that this continues, and this is my pledge to you today.
LOHR: Tuesday, Georgia and Indiana have won court battles and are now enforcing their voter ID laws. At least half a dozen other states are trying to get them approved. State officials say the laws prevent voter fraud. But Holder says creating barriers to voting is not the answer.
HOLDER: We need, and the American people deserve, election systems that are free from discrimination, free from partisan influence and free from fraud. And we must do everything within our power to make certain that these systems are more, not less, accessible to the citizens of this country.
LOHR: The attorney general says he's committed to upholding the 1965 Voting Rights law and told the crowd that the Justice Department had opened 100 new investigations into possible discrimination in the last fiscal year.
Holder says he is also committed to enforcing the requirement that states found guilty of discrimination in the past, must get federal approval for any changes to their current voting laws. States continue to challenge that provision as out of date. But Holder said discrimination still remains all too common, and Eric Pinkett(ph) of Greenwood, South Carolina, agrees with that assessment.
ERIC PINKETT: And we're not just talking about race. We're talking about people, OK? Many senior citizens, elderly folks just don't have the necessary means.
LOHR: Civil rights groups say there is no better way to commemorate the King holiday than by defending the voting rights he and others fought to win. Kathy Lohr, NPR News, Columbia, South Carolina.
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William Henry Harrison won the presidential election of 1840. When he was sworn in, the old Indian fighter was 68 years old. One month later, he died. Legend has it he became ill when he chose to give a two-hour inaugural address to disprove claims that he wasn't, in the words of one opposition newspaper, superannuated and pitiable.
Harrison was the first president who represented the Whig Party. He was the first U.S. president whose campaign made much of the log cabin that he supposedly lived in--he actually didn't--and he was the first president to die in office, having spent by far the shortest tenure of any chief executive. In the Times book series of short biographies of the American presidents, you might think that Harrison's story would be the short straw of presidential lives.
But New York Times columnist Gail Collins, who joins us now from New York, says she volunteered for the task.
Welcome to the program. And why? Why did you want to write about William Henry Harrison?
GAIL COLLINS: Well, many good reasons, one of which is you know, there's not going to be any discussion of monetary policy whatsoever.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
COLLINS: It's such a definite plus. And the other was personal actually. He's from Cincinnati, which is where I'm from. And I was in Cincinnati years ago doing a tour for another book I'd done, in which he briefly was mentioned, and I was telling my parents about how everybody, during the campaigns, said he was from a log cabin but he really wasn't, and he had this really good house and my father sitting there and said, yes, that was a good house.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
COLLINS: And so I said, how do you know? And he said, I tore it down.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: This was for the utility. He was...
COLLINS: Yeah, he worked for the power company, and it was on the power company. It was actually the - one of the other houses that the family had lived in. But anyway, my father was said to tear it down so they could landmark it. And I thought, well, I owe William Henry Harrison something after all.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: You owe him something. And the log cabin business, this is a man who grew up actually in a landed rich family in Virginia, who...
COLLINS: His father signed the Declaration of Independence, for lord's sake.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: And somehow he managed to be reinvented as this roughhewn man from the frontier.
COLLINS: Yeah. Well, he made his career in Ohio, which was definitely the far West at that time. And then when the campaign started, he was totally unknown. He'd been the clerk of ports at the time that he was nominated. So the opposition started making fun of him as this old (unintelligible), you know, the guy didn't know anything, sitting around in a log cabin drinking hard cider.
And it was supposed to be a joke against him, but the Whigs picked up on it and then turned it into this huge campaign, in which there was nothing but log cabins and hard cider.
The important thing about all that was at that time, the people, especially the people in the West lived very simple lives with no fun attached to them whatsoever. And suddenly, you had these campaigns coming in with raising of poles and rolling of large balls down the road for miles and miles and miles and drinking and all that stuff. And people loved it. This is the dumbest campaign in American history.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
COLLINS: And you had the highest turnout ever. More than 80 percent of the eligible voters went out to vote in this campaign.
SIEGEL: By the way, rolling large balls down the road, this is where the expression of keep the ball rolling comes from.
COLLINS: I think you're right.
SIEGEL: Now, 1840 is during this - I find fascinating period of American history after the country is independent and independence is confirmed by the War of 1812. But the country hasn't yet come to grips with slavery, which will be addressed in the Civil War.
Harrison, so far as I can tell, if you ask where did he stand on slavery, there's no clear answer.
COLLINS: Hopped around quite a bit.
SIEGEL: Hopped around.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
COLLINS: Well, he came from a slave-owning family. And he clearly had great emotional connection to Southern slave-owning families. And he kept saying some things along the line of it was good enough for the Madison and Jefferson, it was good enough for me. But he was nominated because he jumped around a lot.
He was not a distinguished politician. And that was perfect because the other Whig candidates were all strongly identified with the one side or the other. And this was the guy who didn't drive anybody crazy on that critical subject. That's basically why there aren't really any good presidents for about 50 years here.
It's - there's a very long - between Jackson and Abraham Lincoln - a kind of a drought going on.
SIEGEL: I, by the way, found it very interesting that when Harrison was in the White House very briefly, he went out to buy a Bible because he found there was none in the White House.
COLLINS: Yeah. He was going out a lot. That was sort of a fascinating thing. And this was, by the status of the day, an old guy. He was 68. And it was terrible weather, but he was having a wonderful time. He was so happy. This is basically a guy, all he wanted was a job.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
COLLINS: And then suddenly, he had this great job, and he's so happy. And he's sort of bounding about doing all this. And meanwhile, 10 billion people are trying to get jobs out of him. And I think after he got exhausted, then he went out and made the longest inaugural speech in the history of inaugural speeches. And he, you know, finishes that and catches pneumonia. And then the doctors, of course, came in and did the doctory things they did back then.
You know, they bled him, and they blistered him, and they gave him all kinds of terrible potions. And then he died.
SIEGEL: That's Gail Collins who's new book in the Times books series of the American presidents is a biography of William Henry Harrison. Gail Collins, thanks for talking with us.
COLLINS: A pleasure.
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The nation's obesity epidemic appears to have leveled off. After increasing for decades, the proportion of Americans who are obese may have finally peaked, according to new federal statistics. That could mark a significant turning point for one of the nation's biggest health problems. But NPR's Rob Stein reports, no one is celebrating quite yet.
ROB STEIN, BYLINE: During the 1980s and 1990s, obesity skyrocketed in this country, doubling among adults and tripling among children. That trend was alarming because obese people are more likely to develop diabetes, have heart attacks, get cancer - just to name a few of the serious health problems. And for a long time, it didn't look like there was any end in sight until now.
DR. CYNTHIA OGDEN: These data basically show that we haven't seen any change in probably since about 2003-4 in obesity in any group.
STEIN: That's Cynthia Ogden of the National Center for Health Statistics. She and others analyzed 12 years of federal data. She won't speculate about why obesity might be stalling. But other experts say at least part of it is all the attention the problem has been getting. Here's Penny Gordon-Larsen of the University of North Carolina.
DR. PENNY GORDON-LARSEN: We've seen some very effective changes that are occurring in schools and at the societal level in terms of food labeling, economic incentives, behavioral strategies.
STEIN: It's also possible that we've reached a kind of new normal. David Ludwig at Harvard says we simply may have hit the biological saturation point.
DR. DAVID LUDWIG: Obesity can't keep going up year after year indefinitely. Ultimately, we'll reach a state where those individuals who are susceptible to becoming obese for genetic reasons have already developed obesity.
STEIN: But no one's declaring victory by any means. If you just look around, you can see that more than one-third of adults and almost one out of every six children are obese. That translates into 78 million obese adults and more than 12 million obese children. And that's not even counting people who are not technically obese but are still overweight.
LUDWIG: We may have peaked, but we're peaked at levels that have never before occurred for humans.
STEIN: And minorities are still being hit the hardest. Ludwig is among those who want the government to take some big steps: Rein in junk food advertising to kids, mandate both healthier lunches and more exercise in schools, and even cut off some farm subsidies.
LUDWIG: We, so far, lack anything resembling a comprehensive national strategy. The airwaves are full of marketing of junk food and fast-food to children. And we continue to have farm subsidies legislation that pump in billions of dollars into the highest-calorie, poorest-quality commodities.
STEIN: But Justin Wilson of the Center for Consumer Freedom, a libertarian group that gets money from food, restaurant and other industries, objects to anything he says smacks of nanny state.
JUSTIN WILSON: The notion that the government can save us from ourselves I reject from both a good government perspective but also from the perspective of actually trying to stem the tide of obesity.
STEIN: Others question the whole idea of an obesity epidemic. Take Glenn Gaesser of Arizona State University. He argues we should be focusing much more on getting people to eat better and exercise more rather than just focusing on their weight.
DR. GLENN GAESSER: Most people who lose weight will ultimately regain it. If they do this over and over and over again, you develop a nation of weight cyclers, a yo-yo dieting society. And there are risks associated with yo-yo dieting that are every bit as hazardous as the risks associated with just being fat.
STEIN: So despite the good news about the trends in obesity, it's clear the debate over what to do about the problem is far from over. Rob Stein, NPR News.
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The Little Willies is the name of the country music side project from singer Norah Jones. The group has just released its second album called "For the Good Times."
Critic Meredith Ochs has our review.
MEREDITH OCHS: For an album called "For the Good Times," Little Willies fill it up with some heart-wrenching material. These five friends started getting together in 2003 on a casual basis to play honky-tonk, outlaw country and Western swing favorites. But on this new release, they often veer toward themes of unrelenting dissatisfaction and cheating hearts, portrayed in songs like this one by the Stanley Brothers.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I WORSHIP YOU")
OCHS: A large part of The Little Willies' magic is their chemistry as a band. Richard Julian's voice provides a nice counterpoint to Norah Jones' jazzy inflection. And guitarist Jim Campilongo's string-bending wizardry crests spectacularly before diving back into the ensemble.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WIDE OPEN ROAD")
OCHS: The Little Willies clearly have a great love for all sorts of country music, but their approach doesn't always work. Some of these songs left me pining for a less pretty and more gritty interpretation. They're most successful when they tackle upbeat Western swing, or ballads that compliment the gentle beauty of Norah Jones' voice.
But the band members' impressive creativity also lends itself well to obscure cover tunes, like this oddball pick, written by Quincy Jones for the 1967 film "In the Heat of the Night."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FOWL ON THE PROWL")
OCHS: So, the Little Willies don't ache like Hank Williams, or possess Loretta Lynn's feisty nature, though they cover both artists on this CD. What they bring to these classic tunes is an extraordinary marriage of relaxed camaraderie and technical excellence. They're all incredible players, but they're also just a bunch of friends who are in it for each other, and for the sake of the songs.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JOLENE")
CORNISH: The new album from The Little Willies is called "For the Good Times." You can hear two songs from the album at NPRMusic.org.
Reviewer Meredith Ochs is a DJ and talk show host with Sirius XM Radio.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JOLENE")
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When you get your cholesterol or your blood sugar checked, or maybe a test measuring vitamin D, chances are your doctor ordered those tests. But with insurance companies passing more of the cost of lab work onto the consumer, storefront labs are on the rise. They claim to save you money by cutting out the middleman, that's your doctor. Gigi Douban reports from Birmingham, Alabama, that the storefront phenomenon has some health care experts worried.
GIGI DOUBAN, BYLINE: You could call Michael Brooks a supplement junkie. He pops exactly six pills a day, three times a day, not to mention powders and shakes and chews.
MICHAEL BROOKS: I'm taking a multivitamin, vitamin C, omega-3s, taking some alpha lipoic acid. I'm taking a digestive enzyme.
DOUBAN: Brooks is a personal trainer in Birmingham. He's healthy and fit, but he almost obsessively wants to know more, which is why we find him here, a few doors down from a sandwich shop and a nail salon, at a storefront lab called Any Lab Test Now.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: All right. Just pop your fist for me one at a time.
DOUBAN: He's having a micronutrient test done to tell him where he's deficient. The test costs $399. But Brooks figures his nutritional supplements aren't cheap either.
BROOKS: So even though there's a cost to this test, I feel like if I can maybe find a few things that I don't need to be taking, in the long run, I'll save money.
DOUBAN: Labs where folks can just walk in and order tests on themselves are popping up in retail centers across the country. Any Lab Test Now, for example, has 100 stores in almost three dozen states. And the company says it's opening five new labs a month. And there are at least three other national chains that are expanding.
At Any Lab Test Now, co-owner Anthony Richey pulls out a long sheet of paper with all the different tests his lab offers. There's everything from an HIV screening to a fatigue panel. It looks like a sushi menu.
ANTHONY RICHEY: You say, well, I want to check my diabetes, I want to get a hemoglobin A1C, and maybe I'll check my lipid panel. And I'm a male over 40, I should probably get my PSA checked.
DOUBAN: That's a prostate cancer screening. But why would anyone walk in and have these tests done on their own? Richey says it's convenient: There's no hospital parking, no wait time, no co-pay. And some people just want their results confidential.
But franchises like this one send the tests off to a lab, so the storefront lab is like a middleman, with a little extra tacked onto the cost of the test to make a profit. At Any Lab Test Now, a doctor reviews the results but won't give medical advice beyond see your own physician.
Even though labs are heavily regulated, a few states like New York and Rhode Island prohibit what's called direct access testing. But Kevin Hein, a lawyer who represents lab franchisees, says these walk-in clinics will prosper anyway.
KEVIN HEIN: It's another way for people to take control of their own health and monitor stuff that they feel like is important to monitor without always having to have a doctor involved.
DOUBAN: And that's what's dangerous, says Michael Wilkes, professor of medicine at the University of California, Davis. He says false positives and false negatives, for that matter, come with the turf.
MICHAEL WILKES: If you order enough tests, something will eventually come back positive.
DOUBAN: And without a doctor's input, Wilkes says, that can send someone into a panic. What's more, ordering tests can drive up health care costs, because a positive result, Wilkes says, is usually followed by a doctor's visit.
WILKES: And now, a doctor has to most likely repeat the test. And then there's a whole cascade of new tests that need to be done.
DOUBAN: But the main issue, critics say, is that lab franchises are in the business of selling tests, tests that doctors might never have ordered, based on profit. Rodney Forsman is president of the Clinical Laboratory Management Association.
RODNEY FORSMAN: It's a very desirable marketing position to be in where you create a new service, and you build a demand around it. And, you know, you think of Starbucks or bottled water, and it's a consumable.
DOUBAN: Forsman says he worries about the motives of those turning medical tests into a commodity. But as insurance companies ask patients to swallow a bigger chunk of lab costs, the lab franchise industry could grow even more in the coming years. For NPR News, I'm Gigi Douban in Birmingham.
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I'm Audie Cornish. And we begin this hour in Afghanistan. A U.S.-sponsored mortality survey released late last year announced huge improvements in health across the country. Among the headlines, life expectancy in Afghanistan has increased by 20 years, just since 2004. USAID funded the study with a contribution from the United Nations Children's Fund. Officials say it provides the most accurate snapshot ever of health in Afghanistan.
But the scale of improvement is so remarkable that experts, including several involved in the survey, worry the results are too good to be true. NPR's Quil Lawrence reports on the debate about the data.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: During three decades of war, Afghanistan remained a black hole of health information. A few studies looked at a small slice of the population and then extrapolated. The numbers horrified the world. Life expectancy in 2004 was measured at just 42 years, 25 percent of children did not survive until the age of 5. For every 100,000 deliveries, a staggering 1,600 women died in childbirth, the second-worst rate in the world.
But last year's survey delivered shockingly good news. Afghan surveyors in all 34 provinces brought back data suggesting that life expectancy at birth is now 62 years. Child mortality under 5 dropped to 10 percent. Of 100,000 live births, the maternal mortality rate was down to 327.
SUSAN BROCK: We were all surprised. That's what led to additional review and much more analysis.
LAWRENCE: Susan Brock, health adviser with USAID in Kabul, says it was such an improvement that they delayed the release to crunch the numbers again. Last November, USAID confirmed the findings. But some experts who worked on the survey still think the data is too good to be true, like Dr. Kenneth Hill, a Harvard University demographer.
KENNETH HILL: Because there are question marks still hanging over the estimates, I'm not sure that there is an enormous value in the data.
LAWRENCE: Hill says many Afghans simply don't discuss family matters with strangers.
HILL: Conditions for data collection in Afghanistan is desperately difficult. Knocking on someone's door and asking them details about their children and their household is not something most people would want to do.
LAWRENCE: USAID says their statisticians adjusted the findings for many anomalies which are all explained honestly in the survey. But three of the six experts on the survey's technical advisory group told NPR they still have doubts, like Julia Hussein of Aberdeen University, who has worked on maternal mortality in Afghanistan since the 1990s.
JULIA HUSSEIN: You've got to match what you know in terms of evidence with what you see with your eyes, virtually. And I suppose - so my instinctive reaction to figures like this, that have been reported in the survey, is that I just find them unbelievable, knowing what sort of care is available in Afghanistan.
LAWRENCE: But defenders of the study say people can't believe the numbers because they've gotten used to thinking that Afghanistan is hopeless. Dr. Mohammad Rasooly says health is improving in many different ways. He was lead technician from the Afghan side on the survey.
MOHAMMAD RASOOLY: For instance, if we consider only the example of midwife, 10 years back we had only 400 midwife at the national level. So today, we have more than 3,000. So this is very important for maternal care.
LAWRENCE: Also, new paved roads mean a journey to the clinic takes hours instead of days, says Rasooly. Widespread mobile phones help people call for assistance. Dr. Rasooly says the survey's margin of error is pretty big, but he has no doubt health is much better now than 10 years ago. It's not about knowing the exact number, says Ken Yamashita, USAID mission director in Afghanistan.
KEN YAMASHITA: We're quite confident of the numbers. In the end, it's a survey, and so, any survey has an error margin.
LAWRENCE: Yamashita says the new mortality survey is the best ever done here, but it will take more studies like this one some years down the road to do a comparison and establish a trend.
YAMASHITA: What it represents is a more representative survey on the one hand, and two, a very real improvement in health.
LAWRENCE: So while the experts debate whether life expectancy could have really jumped 20 years since 2004, doctors now have a better baseline. And even the most optimistic numbers still show that Afghanistan will need help for many years to improve the health of its people. On that, at least, all the experts agree.
Quil Lawrence, NPR News.
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Over the past few years, a lot of states have found themselves contending with huge budget deficits. They've responded by firing workers and raising fees and taxes. Today, we begin a series of reports on state finances with an overview.
While the fiscal picture across the country is brightening, NPR's Jim Zarroli reports on some of the remaining challenges.
JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: Arizona was hit hard by the real estate meltdown. And at the height of the recession, the state's finances got so weak that Arizona's leaders took an unprecedented step: They sold off most of the buildings in the capitol complex, then leased them back.
This year, in her State of the State address, Republican Governor Jan Brewer told legislators it was time to buy the buildings back.
GOVERNOR JAN BREWER: I'm asking that you send me a bill, by Statehood Day that allows me to buy back the capitol complex.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
BREWER: And together, we can celebrate the burning of that mortgage.
ZARROLI: Brewer says Arizona can afford to buy the buildings back because its fiscal picture has stabilized.
Sue Urahn, of the Pew Center on the States, says after struggling for years with huge budget deficits, many states are seeing light at the end of the tunnel.
SUE URAHN: We are seeing improvements, meaningful improvements on the revenue side and states have cut costs significantly. So the fiscal situation is better in many cases.
ZARROLI: Of course, states like California and New York still have sizable deficits to plug. And states have achieved their new fiscal balance at a painful cost: Nearly 700,000 state and local government jobs have been lost since the recession.
And there have also been big cuts in spending for education, health care and law enforcement, says Nick Johnson of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
NICK JOHNSON: But some of the things that states are doing are things that really once would have been kind of unimaginable. The depth of cuts in funding for K-12 education, for instance, have been very significant and I think a lot of governors are recognizing it.
ZARROLI: In states like Idaho and Virginia, Republican governors are calling for increases in funding for schools. Last year, Florida Governor Rick Scott tried to push through a corporate tax cut. This year, he wants a billion dollars in new education spending. Scott says Florida may have nice weather and great beaches...
GOVERNOR RICK SCOTT: But if Florida doesn't provide the intellectual talent to make our businesses competitive, we will become a footnote when this century's history is written.
ZARROLI: Florida can afford to spend more money on education because its high unemployment rate has ticked down. Sue Urahn says that as local economies improve, state tax revenues tend to increase. But Urahn warns that most states aren't out of the woods yet.
URAHN: On average, states are still six percent below the amount of revenue that they were bringing in before the recession. So, yes, things are improving, but they're still at a considerably lower level than they have been for several years.
ZARROLI: And there are big challenges looming. States get a quarter of their revenue from the federal government, which has budget problems of its own. After the debt ceiling standoff last year, Congress formed a committee to try to reduce the deficit. But it was unable to agree on a plan, triggering automatic spending cuts.
Nick Johnson says that will hurt states.
JOHNSON: The federal government is scheduled to make another round of very deep budget cuts in January of 2013. If those were to go forward, a very large chunk of those would directly hit state budgets in the form of cuts in grant programs.
ZARROLI: And because states pass a lot of money on to county and local governments, the impact of the federal cuts are likely to be felt throughout the economy. The hope is that the U.S. economy continues to improve and that the days of crippling budget deficits are at an end.
Jim Zarroli, NPR News.
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Call it Muppet diplomacy. There are about two dozen versions of "Sesame Street" around the world, and one of them is now on pause. A U.S. lawmaker has frozen funding for Palestinian "Sesame Street," along with other projects in the West Bank and Gaza, despite objections from the Obama administration. The freeze is meant to protest the Palestinians' bid for statehood recognition at the United Nations. From Ramallah, Daniel Estrin reports that Palestinian producers are hoping sunny days will sweep the politics away.
DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: This used to be a busy time of year for "Shara'a Simsim," the Palestinian version of "Sesame Street." Producers and educators will be choosing the words of the day for the upcoming season. Writers would be brainstorming ideas around a large conference table. Project director Laila Sayegh says everyone would be working long days.
LAILA SAYEGH: From the morning, like 8 until 6 o'clock in the evening, usually. And now, as you see, it's empty. We have nothing.
ESTRIN: The U.S. government was set to donate $2.5 million for three more seasons of the show. But in October, the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee placed a hold on about $190 million earmarked for projects in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. That means no money to produce "Shara'a Simsim."
SAYEGH: Nobody believes that the reason is logical. You're working on education, on fun stuff, on kids; educating kids and families. So it was very sad for everybody.
ESTRIN: Today, the writing workshop room is bare. The Muppets have been sent to New York for repairs. Saed Andoni, the show's line producer, sits in a small office, staring at a laptop. So what are you doing now that there's no funding for a new show? What are you - what do you do every day?
SAED ANDONI: Actually, we don't do anything.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
ANDONI: Yeah. Surfing the Net, reading news, keeping the hope that we can stay together because, otherwise, everybody will have to go in his own way.
ESTRIN: Saed is keeping the staff on half salaries and reduced hours. They have some leftover funding to work on projects like making jigsaw puzzles for preschoolers. Palestinian TV is airing reruns, but kids are getting sick of the same old programming, says puppeteer Rajai Sandouka, as he slouched in an office chair, fingering prayer beads.
RAJAI SANDOUKA: For example, my daughter, she told me, when are you going to make a new one? I've - always, I see it, and I remember everything. I want to see something new. I don't know what I tell her.
ESTRIN: The lawmaker who ordered the hold on funding is Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican from Florida. She told lawmakers that the U.S. should not support Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who decided to ask the United Nations to recognize an independent state of Palestine. She said Abbas should be negotiating the matter with Israel instead.
REPRESENTATIVE ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN: By providing the Palestinians with $2.5 billion over the last five years, the U.S. has only rewarded and reinforced their bad behavior.
ESTRIN: The U.S. did give $200 million in direct aid to the Palestinian Authority last year; it's the funding for local NGOs that's on hold. Last month, Congress released $40 million of those funds. But with infrastructure and health care programs waiting for money, it's doubtful Palestinian "Sesame Street" will get a piece of the pie.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Three, two and action.
ESTRIN: While Congress has turned off the tap for Palestinian "Sesame Street," the U.S. is helping support a new season of Israeli "Sesame Street." The State Department awarded $750,000 to a local nonprofit to team up with the Israeli show and develop classroom activities. A spokeswoman for the State Department says the grant is unrelated to funding for the Palestinian show. The cast includes an Arab Muppet, a wheelchair-bound Muppet and one familiar red character.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: (as Israeli Elmo) Hello, American radio.
ESTRIN: Hi. Who are you?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: (as Israeli Elmo) I'm Israeli Elmo.
ESTRIN: Palestinian producers are saying it's not fair that Israeli kids get to see new "Sesame Street" programming while Palestinian kids don't. Danny Labin, an executive at the Israeli TV channel that co-produces the show, agrees "Sesame Street" shouldn't be politicized.
DANNY LABIN: Children, no matter who they are, no matter where they're from, should not be penalized because of the politicians over which children have no control.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: (as Israeli Elmo) (Foreign language spoken)
ESTRIN: Palestinian producers, like Sayegh, say they're optimistic funding will somehow return.
SAYEGH: We will continue, and we will survive.
ESTRIN: For NPR News, I'm Daniel Estrin.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. In an election year, nasty rhetoric is par for the course, but what if all that toxic language was - well, toxic? And what if the perpetrators of that toxic speech were the last people you'd expect, your own kids?
That's the central premise of the new novel by Ben Marcus. The book is called "The Flame Alphabet" and Ben Marcus joins us now from our New York bureau to talk more about it.
Welcome, Ben.
BEN MARCUS: Thanks.
CORNISH: So when we say that children's speech in your novel is toxic, we mean literally.
MARCUS: Yes.
CORNISH: Kind of expand on what that looks like.
MARCUS: The book opens with the narrator Sam and his wife feeling sick and they're not sure why. They're trying to figure it out. They have a teenage daughter who rants and raves at them, as teenagers might. When she goes away for a few days, they start to feel better and it dawns on them that possibly she is making them sick. And soon it becomes clear that the speech of children is literally unbearable to be around.
So the story is about what a father does in the face of that. There's a daughter he loves desperately, but she very well might be killing him and his wife. What does he do? Does he stay with her and die or does he try to flee, even though - to me, it's impossible to imagine ever abandoning one of my own kids.
CORNISH: Ben, one of the fascinating things about the book is the way you make sort of mundane interactions between parents and their kids, especially teens, pretty sinister. And there is a great example in that, I think page 11, in a passage where Sam is describing what it's like to live with their teenaged daughter, Esther.
MARCUS: Sure. (reading) In the months before our departure, most of what sickened us came from our sweet daughter's mouth. Some of it she said and some of it she whispered and some of it she shouted. She scribbled and wrote it and then read it aloud. She found it in books and in the mail and she made it up in her head. It was soaked into the cursive script she perfected at school, letters ballooning with heart-dotted I's, vowels defaced into animal drawings. Each piece of the alphabet that she wrote looked like a fat molecule engorged on air, ready to burst. How so very dear.
The sickness washed over us when we saw it, when we heard it, when we thought of it later. We feasted on the putrid material because our daughter made it. We gorged on it and inside us, it steamed, rotted, turned rank.
CORNISH: And the line there that grabs me is - because our daughter made it.
MARCUS: Yeah. Well, there's that incredible loyalty you have as a parent and it's a loyalty that, to me, is almost biological, which allows us to love our children unconditionally. And I was interested in that conflict. The cause of your sickness is there in your home, but it's also the cause of your greatest love.
CORNISH: And do you mind me asking how old your children are?
MARCUS: They're three and seven.
CORNISH: Because you captured the teen years pretty accurately. It doesn't look like you're looking forward to them.
MARCUS: Well, you know, what's nice is I'm not writing, really, about my life. I tend to try to write a bad dream version of what I go through to explore a little bit of the darker shades of what might be possible.
My daughter is, thankfully, nothing like Esther in the book.
CORNISH: We're talking with Ben Marcus, author of the new novel, "The Flame Alphabet." Ben, this isn't your first work where - in which people fall mute or essentially find that they can't communicate with each other or that their communication is poisonous.
What fascinates you about the power of speech?
MARCUS: Language has always interested me and I've always wondered about it as a physical thing. And I think, in this book, I wanted to exaggerate that and see what we'd be like if we didn't have it. Of course, it's so crucial to us, but on the other hand, I did a lot of research into Christian and Jewish mysticism, which is very much, in some sense, opposed to language or it sees religious experience as being above or beyond language.
Language can't reach that ineffable feeling we might have in the religious sense, so I wanted to wonder what we'd be like if we couldn't communicate with each other. Is it a desperately lonely experience or is there something possibly religious to it?
CORNISH: And, strangely, in the book, there's a lot of - for lack of a better term - I guess, communal isolation.
MARCUS: Yeah.
CORNISH: Why Sam and Claire, the couple in the book - they belong to a religious sect in which they worship essentially by themselves, but then later, when everybody else is silent in the world as the virus, the toxic speech, has spread past children - children are immune, but it spread to everyone else - we're all together in our silence.
MARCUS: Being alone together. Yeah. It was interesting to write scenes in which people couldn't talk or even look each other in the eye. Even the television that they watch has been censored so the faces of the characters have been smeared over.
I'm not sure I can entirely account for why this interested me, but I think I wanted to explore - where are we from? What are we here for? What should we really be doing with each other? And if something terrible happens, how can love really - for lack of a better word - help us overcome it? In other words, the love between a father and a child.
CORNISH: Because it sort of comes back to that. I don't think I'm...
MARCUS: Yeah.
CORNISH: ...giving away anything about the book...
MARCUS: No, no.
CORNISH: ...to say that Sam, the father of this family, in effect, kind of turns back to salvage his family more than anything else about his world.
MARCUS: He does try to and he can no longer use language himself, but of course, we have access to his thoughts and he, at one point, says he feels closer than ever to his family now that he doesn't think in words anymore.
CORNISH: Ben, your kids are young now, but do you imagine that they might read this book some day and what they would think of it?
MARCUS: Yes. I've thought about that a little bit. It's dedicated to them and I adore them to bits and, interestingly, my daughter, at seven, already loves to invent stories and seems to understand that sometimes we exercise our imaginations in order to console ourselves against the worst possibilities, that telling a scary story has a kind of thrill to it precisely because it's not happening.
And I hope my kids will understand that, for me, writing fiction isn't about trying to describe them or scare them and â yeah, I'm not the man in the book.
CORNISH: Novelist Ben Marcus. His latest book is called "The Flame Alphabet." He spoke to us from our New York bureau. Ben, thank you so much.
MARCUS: Thank you.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. The voice mail hacking scandal that has shaken the British newspaper industry has also led to calls for government regulation of the press. But NPR's David Folkenflik found on a recent trip to London that the boisterous British press already operates under far more constraints than the American press.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Until this serious crisis, British papers were largely celebrated for being salacious. They were cheeky, bare-knuckled, sometimes even bare-breasted. And they're known for serving up gossipy scoops about political figures, celebrities and sports stars, along with more serious coverage.
In fact, at a major judicial inquiry this winter, the press's salaciousness has been among the very virtues stoutly defended by journalists, such as Paul Dacre, long time editor of the tabloid Daily Mail.
PAUL DACRE: The courts must not ignore the fact that if newspapers do not publish information which the public are interested in then there will be fewer newspapers published, which will not be in the public interest.
FOLKENFLIK: There, Dacre was citing a ruling by a senior British judge in a case involving a professional soccer player's romantic involvement with a lap dancer. But Dacre argues that newspapers play a central role in British society.
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp has a strangle hold on commercial satellite TV in the UK through its controlling stakes in Sky News and BSkyB, Dacre says. And he added that the BBC can be intimidated by powerful politicians because much of its funding is determined by the government.
DACRE: Indeed, I would argue that Britain's commercially liable free press, because it's in hock to nobody, is the only real free media in this country. Over-regulate that press and you put democracy itself in peril.
FOLKENFLIK: But Alan Rusbridger says some systemic changes are probably needed. He's editor-in-chief of The Guardian. The paper helped to reveal that voice mail hacking and police bribery were rife at the Sunday tabloid News of the World in its quest for scoops.
ALAN RUSBRIDGER: We've arrived at a situation where the lawmakers say we have to have some boundaries and that's why we have this perpetual discussion and it's been held for 40 years about whether the press can police themselves.
FOLKENFLIK: Press meaning specifically newspapers, and indeed, News of the World was shut down by its parent company, again Murdoch's News Corp, after the extent of the wrongdoing became clear. Yet, oddly enough, British newspapers already labor under much greater formal constraints than their American counterparts.
Laws are on the whole much friendlier to plaintiffs who want to sue papers for liable. Judges sometimes issue prior restraint orders barring papers from publishing damaging stories.
In the U.S., that's limited to restriction of articles about imminent national security threats. And there's also a British Press Complaints Commission designed to determine whether coverage has been fair. But at key moments the commission has proven toothless. Participation is voluntary and it's dominated by newspaper executives.
Mark Lewis is one of the leading attorneys for hacking plaintiffs suing News Corp's British arm. He told me papers are seeking to deflect accountability by hiding behind the Complaints Commission.
MARK LEWIS: We don't have any regulation. It's not the state regulation. It's not free regulation. It's not self-regulation. It's no regulation. There is no regulation to the press.
FOLKENFLIK: And the calls for new laws and regulations are heartfelt and angry. Take Gerry McCann. After his young daughter's disappearance in Portugal, McCann and his wife were barraged with blanket paparazzi coverage and subject to accusing stories. The couple won a series of libel awards and now, as he testified last year, he wants journalists to be subject to stiffer restrictions.
GERRY MCCANN: Information is being written and lives are being harmed by these stories and something has to change. A commercial imperative is not acceptable.
FOLKENFLIK: The Guardian's Alan Rusbridger says this crisis offers an opportunity for the British press.
RUSBRIDGER: Americans are much more ready to admit their own mistakes and we have come very late to that party. So it's almost as if we have a culture in this country where we're less willing to take personal responsibility and we wait for it to be imposed externally.
FOLKENFLIK: Lord Justice Leveson, the senior judge leading the inquiry, is expected to make his policy recommendations to Prime Minister David Cameron later in the spring.
David Folkenflik, NPR News.
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When we talk about our mothers, we sometimes get emotional. Commentator Brian Unger is going to try to control his emotions as he tells us about his mom. He's not ashamed to say there's been some drama lately.
BRIAN UNGER, BYLINE: My mom's not sick. No, she beat cancer. It's worse than that: My mom is looking for a man. Yeah, she's on the market. She's down in Florida right now, prowling the beaches, looking for a retired astronaut - like a hormonal Snooki but with an artificial knee. About 1 million retirees invade Florida each year and stay, on average, five months. It's a senior tsunami, producing a giant tidal wave of Old Spice and prune juice, leaving behind a shoreline strewn with empty pill bottles of Viagra.
My mom is bare-armed and dangerous. She has a whole new body, and she's lost weight. She looks terrific. This Christmas, she showed up in a form-fitting workout ensemble from the store Lululemon. I wanted to tell her to go back to her room and change.
I tried to head off all these developments. I told my mom if it's warm weather she wants, she has an open invitation to join me in Southern California. She declined, claiming she's afraid of my dog.
Yeah, he's quite large, but the most ferocious thing that my Great Dane does is lie on your feet to keep them warm, which only confirms my mom's looking for a different kind of warmth - and not just on a beach. My mom's hitting the scene online: eHarmony, Match.com, Senior FriendFinder. A recent crisis occurred when my mom's caps lock button was on, and she couldn't access her favorite dating sites. I had to talk her off that ledge. Now, my mom claims her ideal man is handsome, loves the arts, but isn't crazy.
And she's not picky, but most of the guys sound like dumb high school boys. She's attracted a few suitors, but more of the Craigslist caliber: 40-somethings who find the post-65 set attractive - and their retirement accounts even more so. One cyber swordsman offered to give my mom a ride on his Harley. That's when I shed my first tear. I shed the second tear when my mom said she might hook up with a retired naval officer she met online. That might sound nice, but this guy is hardly Richard Gere. I get the sense he's only looking to dock his boat for the night.
And my mom's not one for a short pleasure cruise. She's the kind of gal you stay with for the long haul. My mom was married for five decades to my dad, who died a few years ago. And she worked for 31 years in Ohio's public schools. In fact, she was my high school guidance counselor. Now, I'm giving her a lecture on chlamydia, and how it's spreading twice as fast among her peers than it is mine. Oy - moms these days. They're going to do what they want to do. But if mine doesn't listen to me, I may have to take her car away.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CORNISH: Brian Unger, a writer and a host on The History Channel. And believe it or not, his mother approves this message.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, Mullah Mohammad Omar was the de facto head of state. He'd been a fighter in the war against the Soviet Union before that and he wore an unmistakable battle scar from that war, shrapnel claimed his right eye. Mullah Omar was the Taliban leader who, after 9/11, refused demands that he surrender Osama bin Laden. His regime was then ousted and he has been a hunted man ever since.
Steve Coll has written a penetrating profile of him for the current issue of The New Yorker. It's titled, "Looking For Mullah Omar: Will The United States Be Able To Negotiate With A Man It Has Hunted For A Decade?" Steve Coll, welcome back to the program.
STEVE COLL: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Like Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar is widely believed to have fled to Pakistan. Does he enjoy the protection of the Pakistani Intelligence Services?
COLL: I think a lot of the Taliban leaders who report to him believe that he is effectively under house arrest in Pakistan and overseen by the ISI. That's part of what the reporting produced. And I don't think anybody knows for certain where he is, certainly not in the United States government. But it would make sense, given the long historical relationship that ISI has had with the Taliban leadership and the interest that they have now.
SIEGEL: Under house arrest, meaning he still has control over some Taliban fighters in Afghanistan or he's really no longer effective as a leader?
COLL: Well, he certainly is effective in the sense of being the moral leader and the political leader of the Taliban. It's striking that there's very little dissent about his authority within the Taliban movement. But the assessment is that his day to day control over fighters is loosening as a result of his exile and the fact that a new generation has grown up on the battlefield. And there's not really a lot of clarity about his own circumstances, so some of his followers aren't sure whether he is a free man and issuing orders on his own will.
SIEGEL: Is the United States today trying to kill Mullah Omar or trying to negotiate with him or both?
COLL: Both, I think, yeah. So far as anyone can tell, he remains subject to targeting under the laws of war and at the same time, the administration has been very busy over the last year trying to figure out how to establish a channel to credible interlocutors for him for the purpose of carrying out a negotiation that he might ultimately endorse. So right now, we are both fighting him and trying to talk to him.
SIEGEL: Well, from what you've been able to figure out about Mullah Omar, does he have a strong pragmatic streak that would permit him to say the days of our alliance with al-Qaida are long in the past, that's no longer germane and now it's time to cut the deal?
COLL: Well, there are some in the administration who believe that he does. I don't see the evidence for it in the historical record. In the historical record, he is a stubborn man who, under great pressure, sticks to his principles even past the point where his closest advisors believe it makes any sense to do so. So if he were to endorse a pragmatic arrangement in which the Taliban, for example, left the battlefield and entered peaceful politics, it would be a departure from the kinds of decisions he's made in the past.
Having said that, there are clearly people around him who are in such a mood. And one purpose of the negotiation might be to separate them from their leader or to persuade their leader to let them pursue the political path that they have identified.
SIEGEL: As for his future, you write that advocates of a settlement don't foresee Omar's return to major office and you quote a former Taliban official as saying, we could send him to Mecca and he could participate each year in the Hajj. I gather his return to power in Afghanistan would be, to say, unpopular with non-Taliban Afghans is a great understatement.
COLL: Yeah. I think it's implausible to imagine him returning to office. But, you know, his career is very interesting and it was interesting to be reminded that he was an accidental leader. He was essentially chosen without any political reputation or ambition precisely because he had no baggage, no profile. So it's not as if he has spent his whole life wishing to hold political office.
COLL: A return to quietude, to preaching, to teaching, to essentially dignity of exile and family might appeal to him if it involved a return to Afghanistan. I don't see Saudi Arabia as being particularly appealing to him.
SIEGEL: Recently, Vice President Biden said, in Afghanistan, the Taliban per se are not our enemies; meaning that going after al-Qaida initially. Do the Taliban - does he regard the United States, Mullah Omar, as their enemy, per se?
COLL: Well, he issues these two statements each year which are his sort of declaration about issues of that type. And he's very careful to say that the Taliban do not see themselves at war with Western countries, except in the circumstances where those countries invade Afghanistan.
But they're attempting to signal that they would not carry out or allow others to carry out international terrorist attacks of the sort that brought the NATO forces to Afghanistan in the first place, after September 11th. However, they've been unwilling to break with al-Qaida openly, despite American demands again and again that they do so.
SIEGEL: Steve Coll, thank you very much.
COLL: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: Steve Coll's article in The New Yorker is titled "Looking for Mullah Omar: Will The United States Be Able To Negotiate With The Man It Has Hunted For A Decade?"
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The House of Representatives began its 2012 session today. To mark the occasion, protest groups from more than a dozen different cities gathered on the Capitol lawn for the first ever Occupy Congress demonstration.
NPR's Andrea Seabrook has our story.
ANDREA SEABROOK, BYLINE: Protesters half-filled the West Lawn of the Capitol. Banners announced campaign money and taunted the, quote, "McCongress."
(SOUNDBITE OF CHANTING PROTESTERS)
SEABROOK: Police officers watched the crowd. On the other end of the lawn people mingled, eating free bagels and fruit. And there was another free service at a folding table stuck in the mud.
TRAVIS MACARTHUR: We're helping people connect with their members of Congress. So we have information sheets on their voting records, the top campaign contributors, and information about how they can go meet them now.
SEABROOK: Travis MacArthur leafs through stacks of packets. He'd already sparked Mike Schachter of New Bern, North Carolina, to go see his representative, Republican Walter B. Jones. Schachter walked right into his office.
MIKE SCHACHTER: We do agree on ending the wars, on taking money out of politics, and that corporations were not people. And I asked him to remain independent even though I know his own party is pushing against it.
SEABROOK: Another protester, Roxana Marroquin, approached MacArthur's table. She hesitated.
ROXANNA MARROQUIN: What are you trying to get people to realize?
MACARTHUR: Well, for instance, the information on how their representatives voted isn't necessarily that accessible. So we want to let people know so they can hold them accountable...
MARROQUIN: Are they're listening to us? I don't think they're listening to us.
SEABROOK: Marroquin came down from Occupy Jersey City. She said the old political model is broken.
MARROQUIN: We could talk and talk but they're just going to brush us away.
SEABROOK: So what do you do? If not go to talk to your congressman, how do you change anything?
MARROQUIN: I don't know what the answer to that is but we need to come up with it quick, âcause something is broken.
SEABROOK: At least that idea, that something is broken, is one most Americans seem to agree with.
Andrea Seabrook, NPR News, the Capitol.
(SOUNDBITE OF A SONG)
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
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And I'm Robert Siegel.
If you visit one of Wikipedia's nearly four million content pages tomorrow, you likely won't find much content. The Web's popular free encyclopedia is expected to go dark for the day. It's part of a protest against legislation percolating here in Washington to fight online piracy.
As NPR's Ari Shapiro reports, the bill pits two groups against each other that have both had a lot of political clout: Hollywood versus Silicon Valley.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Given how partisan and acrimonious Congress has been lately, what happened last May was kind of amazing, says Mark Lemley. He directs Stanford's Program in Law, Science and Technology.
PROFESSOR MARK LEMLEY: It's quite remarkable. The bill in the Senate, the Protect IP Act, passed out of committee unanimously less than two weeks after it was introduced. It had the backing of Hollywood and it was pitched to the senators as, well, this is a bill against piracy and piracy is bad.
SHAPIRO: When he says it had the backing of Hollywood, he's talking about people like former Senator Chris Dodd, who now runs the Motion Picture Association of America. Dodd says if online pirates don't stop stealing American movies and TV shows, hard-working Americans will lose their jobs; not just the folks on the red carpet, but the people whose names roll by in the credits who you've never heard of.
CHRIS DODD: All of those jobs you're looking at, by and large, are blue-collar jobs; hard-working people who pay mortgages, raise their families, put food on the table. And we're now told, and the numbers vary, but anywhere in the thousands of jobs in this country and elsewhere are at risk because the product that they make is being stolen.
SHAPIRO: That pitch was enough to persuade all of the Republicans and the Democrats on the committee to vote for the online piracy bill. But then the Internet did what the Internet does so well, says Professor Lemley. It spread information about this proposal - misinformation, says Hollywood - and people got agitated.
LEMLEY: There's been a truly unprecedented outpouring of opposition to these bills.
SHAPIRO: That opposition pitted Northern California against Southern California, Internet platforms providers against content providers, Silicon Valley against Hollywood.
Jay Walsh is head of communications for the organization that runs Wikipedia.
JAY WALSH: There are millions and millions of links up on Wikipedia. And one of the options that this bill sort of presents is that you have to be aggressively pleasing (unintelligible). And for an organization like Wikipedia that's just not scalable, it's not the way that we work.
SHAPIRO: Walsh fears of the way these laws are written, Wikipedia could be held in violation if someone posts a link on a Wikipedia page to another site that includes pirated material among millions of files.
The protests seem to be working. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was on "Meet the Press" Sunday.
SENATOR HARRY REID: In recent weeks, organizations like Google and Facebook and others have said, well, there's some problems this could create. And I think they're right.
SHAPIRO: The White House weighed in over the weekend to. The administration said it was responding to a We the People Petition on the White House website. The conclusion: President Obama wants to end online piracy, but these proposals don't strike the right balance, said spokesman Jay Carney at today's White House briefing.
JAY CARNEY: It's a serious problem that requires serious legislative responses. But we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cyber security risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.
SHAPIRO: This argument sticks the White House between two groups that support President Obama. He regularly does town hall meetings with the likes of Facebook and Twitter. He also regularly attends $35,000 a plate fundraisers with Hollywood.
Dodd, of the Motion Picture Association, says Hollywood does not feel betrayed by the president's position on this.
DODD: Their major point in the bill, that we should work together to pass legislation - legislation necessary to stop online content thievery - is a part of their statement which we agree with.
SHAPIRO: Dodd and the bills other supporters say tomorrow's protest by Wikipedia, Google and others is little more than a publicity stunt. And if there's one thing Hollywood knows, it's publicity.
Ari Shapiro, NPR News, the White House.
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Speaking of crippling deficits, the ubiquitous Suze Orman is trying to tackle debt of a personal nature. The financial advisor and popular CNBC host recently jumped into the prepaid debit card business. It's an industry littered with celebrity brands, cards endorsed by the likes of Kim Kardashian and Russell Simmons. The general idea is this: You load up the card with money and then you can only spend what's already there. Of course, there are fees.
Suze Orman's prepaid debit card is issued by MasterCard. It's officially called the Approved Card by Suze Orman. And in her typically energetic style, she told us it is different from the rest.
SUZE ORMAN: The main purpose of this card is for the first time in history, a prepaid card - a debit card - is going to be sharing information with TransUnion, a major credit bureau, so that over the next 18 to 24 months a major credit bureau - and I hope the other two join me - will be able to evaluate this information and determine if activity on a debit card can create a FICO score, or a credit score for you.
And I think this is essential thing that we need to do for the 150 million people today in the United States of America, either in poverty are very close to it.
CORNISH: And, as you mentioned, TransUnion is the one credit bureau that did respond to this. And they're doing it in a pilot program essentially, trying to collect around 24 months of data.
What's important about their involvement? Because I think most people may be a little bit nervous about credit bureaus in general. And I wonder if they should be fearful of their credit activity on this card being used against them in some way.
ORMAN: Yeah, what's interesting to know is that all of the information on this card that we're going to be sharing will be aggregated, number one. It will be anonymous, number two. And number three, if you have to opt in if you want to be part of the credit project that I'm calling it.
The only people that can really evaluate if, in fact, debit card activity can create a score, happens to be the credit bureaus. So, I would like the other two credit bureaus, as I said, to join me in this. I would like the other prepaid cards, the other debit cards, to join me in this. Because today, people don't want to carry around credit cards. Today, people feel like they have been burned by the system. They want to have a way that they can spend their own money and be able to be given credit for having done so.
CORNISH: At the same time, because they're only doing it as a pilot, how likely is this really to change things in the industry? I mean, it seems like they're kind of - not a reluctant partner - but certainly only giving this a try. And how do we know it's really going to help customers or do much of the industry?
ORMAN: It is obvious that the credit scoring techniques used today are really out of date. There is no way that FICO can understand where is the money coming from that is paying your credit bills on time? Are you taking a payday loan? Are you taking it from your 401(k)? What are you doing?
So, today we have to change how FICO scores are created. Now, this might not ever happen. But I can tell you, over the next 18 to 24 months, I'm going to give it everything I have.
CORNISH: I mean, essentially, it seems like somehow this would go against the advice I hear from the Suze Orman in my head, you know, of like you shouldn't be using credit in this way, right?
ORMAN: Except that remember this isn't credit, this is debit. In the olden days, I would have said something different. The reason why I am changing and I'm bringing out a prepaid card is there are also 70 million un-banked and under-banked people that are using these cards, and they are not going to stop using them. And they need an alternative for the cards that are out there that are charging them a fortune.
It is my word: You will never see the fees on this card go up. And if anything, they will go down. And it is my intention to take that $3 a month fee - or 75 cents a month if you get four cards everybody in your family - that it eventually goes away.
CORNISH: Suze Orman, thank you so much for speaking with us.
ORMAN: Thanks for having me.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The death toll from the grounding of a cruise ship off the Italian coast rose to 11 today. Twenty-four people are still missing after Friday's shipwreck. As rescue efforts continued, the website of an Italian daily carried the dramatic audio of what it said were radio exchanges between the captain and the Coast Guard. And the captain's lawyer said today that his client is now under house arrest.
NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports.
SYLVIA POGGIOLI BYLINE: At the preliminary hearing today, Captain Francesco Schettino denied all wrongdoing. He insisted his actions after the luxury cruise ship collided with a reef off the island of Giglio helped save hundreds and perhaps thousands of lives.
Schettino was arrested Saturday on suspicion of multiple manslaughter, shipwreck, and abandoning ship when there were thousands of people still to be evacuated.
SYLVIA POGGIOLI, BYLINE: The captain's position appeared further undermined by the release of audio of radio exchanges after the collision. The most shocking conversation is between Schettino and Livorno Coast Guard Commander Gregorio De Falco. De Falco orders the captain to return onboard.
GREGORIO DE FALCO: (Through Translator) You've abandoned ship. I'm in charge now. Go back and board and report to me how many passengers there are and what they need. Tell me if there are children, women or people in need of assistance and you tell me exactly how many they are. Is that clear?
POGGIOLI: The Coast Guard was first alerted by various Italian police departments. They had received calls from Italian passengers terrified by a big bang and violent impact that blew out power throughout the floating palace.
When first contacted by the Coast Guard, Captain Schettino said, there's nothing to worry about. We just have a technical problem with the electrical system. Pressed by officers, Schettino finally issued the May Day distress call a full hour after the collision.
As chaos and panic broke out as the massive ship started tilting sideways, many passengers started jumping overboard. In their exchange, Commander De Falco becomes increasingly enraged with the captain.
FALCO: (Through Translator) Come on. There are already dead bodies.
FRANCESCO SCHETTINO: (Through Translator) How many bodies?
FALCO: (Through Translator) I don't know. I know of one body, at least. You're the one who should tell me how many bodies there are.
POGGIOLI: The recording is full of the background noise of confusion, radio static, people shouting. Someone can be heard saying the word, Titanic. Throughout the conversation, Captain Schettino mostly mumbles, gives vague answers and makes contradictory statements.
Infuriated, the Coast Guard Commander raises the stakes.
FALCO: (Through Translator) Listen, Schettino. Perhaps you saved yourself from the sea, but I'll make you look very bad. I will make you pay for this. Go back onboard.
POGGIOLI: The captain then objects.
SCHETTINO: (Through Translator) You don't understand. It's dark here. Can't see anything.
FALCO: (Through Translator) What's this? You want to go home, Schettino? It's dark and you want to go home? Go to the bow of the ship where the ladder is and tell me what needs to be done, how many people there are and what they need - now.
POGGIOLI: At one point, Schettino can be heard agreeing to go back onboard, but until now, there's no indication that he did so. While investigations continue, rescue workers are racing against time and salvage experts against weather forecasts.
A 30-person team of a Dutch salvage company that will siphon off the ship's 500,000 gallons of fuel is onsite with equipment. They're ready to start operating tomorrow and predict the entire job will take at least a few weeks.
The pristine waters around Giglio have been calm for days, but local sailors warn against the approaching (unintelligible), the northwesterly wind that can churn up waves three to five meters high.
Sylvia Poggioli, NPR News, Rome.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Mitt Romney and his Republican rivals crisscrossed South Carolina today. The four men not named Romney are running out of time to make the case that one of them should be the GOP standard bearer in November. South Carolina hosts the first Southern primary on Saturday. And NPR's Scott Horsley reports that if the former Massachusetts governor wins there, it could all but seal the nomination for him.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Mitt Romney held an early morning rally in Florence, South Carolina. Aides had curtained off half the Civic Center ballroom, but the reduced space still seemed too large for the crowd that showed up. Unfazed, Romney stuck to his usual script, looking past the primary to the November race against President Obama. He paints that race in the starkest of terms, calling it a battle for the soul of America.
MITT ROMNEY: I am so distressed as I watch our president try and replace ambition with envy, and poison the American spirit with class warfare. We are one nation under God.
HORSLEY: Mathen Thomas(ph), who runs a marketing company, hadn't known exactly what to expect from the former Massachusetts governor. He came away impressed by what he heard from Romney.
MATHEN THOMAS: More freedom, less government, I'm definitely interested in, and Romney seems like he has a plan to shrink the deficit and he doesn't want to shrink our military. So all those things, as an entrepreneur, are important to me.
HORSLEY: With just four days to go before the primary, though, Thomas is not completely sold. After listening to Romney, he headed across town to where Newt Gingrich's supporters had gathered in a crowded art gallery.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
HORSLEY: During a televised debate last night, Fox News analyst Juan Williams had accused Gingrich of belittling poor people by saying they need paychecks rather than food stamps. The debate audience took Gingrich's side, giving the former House speaker a standing ovation. Gingrich was still glowing this morning.
NEWT GINGRICH: We have been fed so much baloney by our liberal elites, and we are so sick of people who don't get it that I think people are just grateful to have somebody with the courage to tell the truth.
HORSLEY: South Carolina voters seem to enjoy a good political fight, and Gingrich's aggressive style has won him a lot of fans, including this man.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: What I've been looking for in my candidate is fire in the belly. We've got to bloody Obama's nose.
GINGRICH: Well, let me say, first of all, I don't want to argue with you about the analogy. I don't want to bloody his nose. I want to knock him out.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
HORSLEY: But Gingrich won't get that opportunity if Romney wins the GOP nomination. He warned that if South Carolina helps choose a moderate as the Republican nominee, it'll be that much harder to topple Mr. Obama. Gingrich said the only way to avoid that is for conservative voters in the state to unite behind him, not split their votes among the other contenders.
GINGRICH: Any vote for Santorum or Perry, in effect, is a vote to allow Romney to become the nominee because we've got to bring conservatives together in order to stop him.
HORSLEY: Rick Santorum, meanwhile, is arguing he should be the conservative choice. So far, there's little evidence that conservatives are banding together, and that leaves a big opening for Romney. Gingrich today criticized Romney for failing to release his tax returns, and for his tortured answer in the debate last night that he would probably do so at some point in the future. Romney acknowledged today his effective tax rate is well below that of many middle class families.
ROMNEY: What's the effective rate I've been paying? It's probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything because my last 10 years, I've - my income comes overwhelmingly from investments made in the past rather than ordinary income.
HORSLEY: Investment income is taxed at a lower rate. President Obama argues millionaires like Romney should pay at least the same tax rate as those in the middle class, a debate we're likely to hear more of. Romney now says he will release his 2011 tax return once it's completed sometime in April. Of course by that time the primary contest may be effectively over.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, Florence, South Carolina.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Our co-host Melissa Block is also in South Carolina this week, and she watched last night's debate with a small group of Republican voters in Greenville.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD)
MELISSA BLOCK, BYLINE: They describe themselves as fiscally conservatives, but they are not the social evangelical conservatives that make up so much of the Republican electorate here. As it happens, none of the five are native to South Carolina, and they've all done pretty well in this economy. Nate Lipscomb is 64. He is senior vice president with Greenville's minor league baseball team, the Drive, and a Mitt Romney supporter.
NATE LIPSCOMB: Now I tell you, I'd give up some minimal assurances of, you know, acid test deliverables just to make sure that we can replace the current administration with a more limited government, conservative sort of president.
BLOCK: Dee Kivett is 41. She's a Tea Party supporter with four kids, who runs her own aerospace automotive consulting business. Going into the debate, she liked Ron Paul.
DEE KIVETT: He doesn't necessarily present himself in the most professional manner in the debate. But if you look at the man's heart, I mean, where is he coming from? What does he really want to do? Who wants to be the servant? Who wants to help the company - I mean, the country? Ron Paul appears to have the bigger heart.
BLOCK: 73-year-old Diane Cochran(ph) considers herself independent. Not a pro-lifer, she says. She's a housewife and wavering between Romney and Newt Gingrich.
DIANE COCHRAN: I really listen for integrity and intelligence and the ability to understand how complex our government is and our world is. We really need to concentrate on our economic recovery and the ability of people in the federal government to work together.
BLOCK: And finally, Matt and Liz Cotner. They're both 37. She's a stay-at-home mom with two young kids. He's a commercial banker who served in the military. Liz is undecided. Matt has already voted absentee for Mitt Romney.
MATT COTNER: I think he's done things with the Olympics that were extremely impressive from a management's capacity. I think he was a good governor. I think he is a moral person. I think he is focused on making things work. You know, like Diane, I'm looking for some grownups.
(SOUNDBITE OF REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE)
BLOCK: As the debate started, some things became clear very quickly. The question of whether Mitt Romney should release his tax records doesn't register.
LIPSCOMB: I think it's a non-issue.
COTNER: Tell me why that's important. I don't know how that's anyone's business.
BLOCK: And the challengers' attacks on Romney's record at Bain Capital, they're not taking a bite.
COTNER: I don't think he gets up every morning or any businessperson gets up and says, how can I destroy the lives of people? You know, that is psychopath. I mean, that, you know, but unfortunately, not every investment goes well.
LIPSCOMB: There's - as Matt said, you're going to have some winners and some losers like that, but being able to clean out the waste is part of what we're looking for our government to do at this point in history.
BLOCK: Rick Perry doesn't register at all with these voters; Rick Santorum, barely. The questions in the debate about foreign policy, gun ownership don't seem to engage them. Liz Cotner sees those as a distraction.
LIZ COTNER: I think there's a lot of challenges ahead of us, and I don't feel like the challenges are gun control. I don't feel like the challenges are abortion. I don't feel like those are the things that are going to give the everyday citizen confidence in their government or confidence in their country that may be a little shaky right now.
BLOCK: But taxes, the role of government, the future of Medicare and Social Security, those are front and center on everyone's mind here. Matt Cotner, the banker, is thinking about his young kids' future.
COTNER: The thing that I would like to see is someone to come out with a plan to say there's going to be shared sacrifice from everybody. You know, Matt, you thought you're going to retire at 65 or 67 or whatever. You know what, you're living longer. You're going to have to retire at 72. You know, Matt, if you do become a millionaire, you're not going to be collecting what you are collecting with Social Security. It just - we can't do it.
(SOUNDBITE OF REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE)
BLOCK: At the end of the two hour debate, no minds were changed. Dee Kivett, the Ron Paul supporter, felt a bit disenchanted.
KIVETT: I don't think that anyone helped me get further down the road as to understanding where they really stand on an issue than what I already came into it thinking.
BLOCK: Diane, you came in thinking maybe Mitt Romney, maybe...
COCHRAN: I'm still as undecided as ever.
BLOCK: Liz Cotner found herself liking Newt Gingrich's ideas, but she worries he's too polarizing.
COTNER: I feel like people either really like him or they really don't. They've already made up their mind and whether he comes in with great ideas or not, he's going to have a battle wherever he goes and it's unfortunate. Even if he might, in the end, be the best candidate, he may not be the best person for the job.
BLOCK: Baseball executive Nate Lipscomb's appraisal: Santorum's too testy. Gingrich is smart, but yes, polarizing. Ron Paul, too extreme.
LIPSCOMB: So I'm back to Romney and hot unhappily so. I think he's got the right skill set and the right experience that - I like what he did in the private sector. That gives me a great deal of confidence.
BLOCK: And Mitt Romney supporter Matt Cotner ends with this thought.
COTNER: We're much more common than different, and right now, collectively as a nation, I think we're all hurting. And I think that's what we're looking for is someone who will work together to solve the financial problems, to make it better for all Americans.
BLOCK: And on that note of comity, our group of five headed home from the debate back to the torrent of bitterly negative ads that are saturating the airwaves here.
I'm Melissa Block in Greenville, South Carolina.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Nearly 60 year ago, a 14 year old African-American boy named Emmett Till left Chicago for Mississippi. He traveled to a town called Money to visit family. Till was murdered there for allegedly flirting with a white woman. The town of Money, Mississippi, is now the setting of a new novel by Bernice McFadden. It's called "Gathering of Waters" and our reviewer Alan Cheuse tells us the town is not only a setting, but a character.
ALAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: Yes. The town literally has a voice and narrates this novel, inviting us to plunge into a deep and powerful story of love, hate, race, demons and desire with the lynching of Emmett Till at its center.
I have been many things, the voice of Money, Mississippi, tells us. I have been figments of imaginations, shadows and sudden movements seen out of the corner of your eye. For a time, I lived as a beating heart. Once, I was a language that died.
McFadden works her own language. It's hot and alive and effectively sketches characters' hopes and fears in the time before the lynching of young Emmett Till puts Money, Mississippi, on the map.
Till, visiting from Chicago, begins a serious flirtation with Tass, a local black girl, a flirtation that continues on after his death. Long after Tass grows up, moves to Detroit and raises a family, she and Emmett meet again on the muddy earth of Money, Mississippi. Sounds unbelievable? Not when you read it.
Read it aloud. Hire a chorus to chant it to you and anyone else interested in hearing about civil rights and uncivil desires, about the dark heat of hate, about the force of forgiveness.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: The novel is "Gathering of Waters" by Bernice McFadden. Our reviewer is Alan Cheuse.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Chicago is getting ready for a close-up on the world stage. In May, it will host overlapping summits of both NATO and the G8, the first city to do so in more than three decades. The meetings are expected to draw thousands of delegates from 80 countries and hordes of protesters.
To prepare, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is pushing ordinances that would give the city more power to deal with demonstrators. As Alex Keefe of WBEZ in Chicago reports, that has sparked a debate about security and free speech.
ALEX KEEFE, BYLINE: The first foreign dignitaries won't touch down in Chicago for more than four months, but activists have already been out in force to protest about, well, protesting.
EVELYN DE HAYES: To attack these freedoms is to attack the Constitution and the heart of our democracy.
KEEFE: Evelyn De Hayes(ph) is one of dozens of activists who showed up at City Hall to speak out against measures Mayor Rahm Emanuel says are necessary to preserve order at the world summits. Emanuel wants sweeping new powers, like the authority to spend money for the summits without City Council approval, the ability for Chicago police to deputize out-of-state law enforcement and some new restrictions on when and where people can protest.
Activists like De Hayes aren't having it.
HAYES: Mayor Rahm is using fear-mongering to pass this ordinance when it is the mayor himself who is bringing this undemocratic summit to the streets of Chicago.
MAYOR RAHM EMANUEL: People have the right to express themselves and they will. I also have the responsibility to enforce the law, which we will.
KEEFE: Emanuel's law and order message didn't play out entirely as planned, especially in a city that still remembers the violent clashes between police and protesters at the 1968 Democratic convention. He had been pushing for dramatically higher fines for demonstrators who resist arrest, but he backed away from that after an outcry from some aldermen.
The mayor also faced a cycle of bad press after it was discovered that most of the changes he'd said would be temporary would actually be permanent. But, after a bit of lobbying, city council members at today's meeting seem like they're finally coming around to Emanuel's plans, though some, like Alderman Tom Tunney, still have lingering constitutional concerns.
TOM TUNNEY: The more we pressure the First Amendment rights, the more people are going to react in a negative way.
KEEFE: Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy says the ordinances would help in a worst-case scenario.
GARRY MCCARTHY: In planning for these events, we need to be prudent and foresee as many scenarios as possible.
KEEFE: But foreseeing every constitutional contingency is probably impossible. David Franklin is a law professor at DePaul University in Chicago. He's thinking about how the city will handle unplanned actions, perhaps by anarchists who aren't inclined to fill out the proper paperwork.
DAVID FRANKLIN: What if something occurs and the protesters say, there's just no way we can ignore this. We're going to march tomorrow morning.
KEEFE: And that, Franklin says, could be the true test of whether the world will remember a historic meeting of world leaders in Chicago or the historic protests that disrupted them.
For NPR News, I'm Alex Keefe in Chicago.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Now, we look into the future - the not-so-distant future - at cars without drivers. Cars do all sorts of things automatically these days: parallel park, sense when you're tired, and sound an alarm. And cars exist - albeit not yet on the market - that can operate entirely free of a human driver.
Already, at least two states - Nevada and Florida - are considering regulating the operation and safety of driverless cars. So we reached out to Bryant Walker Smith, a legal scholar at Stanford. He monitors developments in driverless car technology and policy. Bryant Walker Smith, thanks for joining us.
BRYANT WALKER SMITH: It's delightful to be here.
CORNISH: So Bryant, to start, where is driverless car technology at this point?
SMITH: It's on the horizon. The engineers in industry that I talk with say that the technical obstacles, while there still are some, are on their way to being solved. Now, predictions for when we might actually be able to buy that technology - I've heard in the order of 10 years as being the most optimistic.
CORNISH: Describe a little what Nevada and Florida are trying to do, in terms of their regulations.
SMITH: So Nevada is much further along in the process, which is to say that the two houses have passed, and the governor has signed, a law. And their Department of Motor Vehicles is currently developing draft regulations implementing that law. What those regulations will do when they're ultimately finalized is, say explicitly, under certain conditions, driverless vehicles are legal in the state.
Before we get to that stage, though, the legislation and the regulations also set up a regime for testing so that automobile manufacturers and others can come into the state, and actually test these vehicles on the road.
CORNISH: And can you describe what you think is the biggest legal question that's going to face this technology as it moves forward?
SMITH: One of the big questions is: At what point does the driver become the machine? If you think about autonomous technology as a spectrum, on one hand, we have basic cruise control in most cars today. On the other hand, we have the visions that we've been talking about - of a vehicle without anybody in it, or with everybody who's in it asleep or completely distracted. At what point can we say, as a legal matter, the driver does not need to pay attention, the driver is not responsible for what the car does? When we reach that point, then we reach some real value judgments.
CORNISH: In the end, why would we want to take the human driver out of the equation?
SMITH: So I can sleep on my way to work.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SMITH: No. There are...
CORNISH: Seriously. I mean, driving is a complicated thing, when you think about all the things that you have to make happen, you know, in your brain to like, back out of your driveway. And a lot of it is subjective judgment.
SMITH: It absolutely is. And a lot of times, those subjective judgments are impaired - or they're wrong. In the United States, over 30,000 people die on the road. Of those collisions, about 95 percent are attributable, at least in part, to human error. So at the very basic level, if we can get this right, we can save a lot of lives, and that's worth quite a lot.
CORNISH: Bryant Walker Smith works at Stanford, at both the Center for Automotive Research and the Center for Internet and Society. He studies developments in driverless car technology. Bryant Walker Smith, thanks for speaking with us.
SMITH: Thank you, Audie.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Our final story this hour is also about travel, but there's no tragedy, just a lot of pork. Last fall, 23-year-old Molly Baz traded in her job as a chef at a Michelin-starred French restaurant for a - three-week road trip. She set out to learn all she could about American barbecue and she brought her father along for the ride, professional photographer Doug Baz.
The two of them documented their travels on a blog called Adventures in BBQ and they both joined us to explain why they took the journey.
MOLLY BAZ: I've always been, I guess you could say, ferociously obsessed with pork. I find the pig to be an incredible animal in terms of its versatility in the cooking world and that's the world that I live in.
CORNISH: And, Doug, what made you want to basically drop everything and go on this little adventure? I mean, I don't know if you even like barbecue.
DOUG BAZ: Oh, I do. I do share her interest in pork and, although I have to say that I think, up until that point, barbecue wasn't something that I was intensely interested in, but when your 23-year-old chef daughter asks you to go on a road trip with her, I think it took me maybe three or four seconds to answer, yes, I'm there.
CORNISH: So you guys decide that not only are you going to go on a little food tour, but this isn't just any foodie tour, right? You planned on learning from the experts, from the pit masters.
Molly, tell us, what is a pit master?
BAZ: So, a pit master is the man who tends the fire, generally speaking, in the back of the barbecue shack. He will be there from 2:00 in the morning 'til 2:00 in the afternoon, shoveling coals into a fire and tending to whole hogs and pork shoulders all night.
CORNISH: And, Doug, Molly got to work some of these pits and I was wondering, since you've got the photographer's eye, if you could describe some of them, what they look like or one that struck you in particular.
BAZ: In North Carolina, we went to Allen and Son's and were invited to come at whatever hour we wanted to, so we arrived at around 6:30 in the morning and Keith Allen's pit is very dark. I think the only light in that room was the light of the fire itself. He would open the exterior doors in order to control the draft in order to pull a lot of smoke out of the room or to allow it to collect. It was a very smoky environment.
CORNISH: Now, people feel pretty strongly about barbecue and I'm wondering, by the end of the trip, what you learned about the different regions and what was your favorite, if you would deign to come down on a particular side.
BAZ: Personally - and I think I speak for myself and my father - I think that we pretty much hit the jackpot in Texas.
BAZ: Without a doubt.
BAZ: Truly, Texas blew our minds. I have never tasted a more delicious piece of unadulterated meat in my life.
CORNISH: And what are some of the regional differences, like what makes Texas barbecue Texas barbecue?
BAZ: Well, because Texas is cattle land, you see the appearance of beef in Texas as opposed to in North Carolina and South Carolina, where it's primarily pork. So, beef brisket, beef sausage, also pork sausage, massive beef ribs. That's the kind of food that you find down there.
And we went to one small town in Texas called Lockhart, which is supposedly the barbecue capital of Texas. And we ordered one sausage known as a hot ring and bit into the sausage, which was so juicy inside that, as soon as you bit into it, it literally popped and fat and juices from the meat were actually dripping down my arm. And it was so bursting with flavor and with moisture, I have never tasted a sausage like this before.
BAZ: And the texture was unusual. It was coarsely ground.
BAZ: Coarsely ground. Yeah.
BAZ: Yeah.
CORNISH: Now, forgive the pun, but of course I have a bone to pick with you guys. My favorite barbecue place is Rondezvous in Memphis. And I see you did not go to Kansas City, which some would think would render the whole trip moot.
BAZ: Well, that's going to have to wait, I suppose, to part two.
BAZ: We do plan on picking this trip up where we left off and hitting up all the spots that we weren't able to make it to, so fear not, Kansas City is in the near future.
CORNISH: Molly and Doug, thank you so much for talking with us.
BAZ: Thank you.
BAZ: Our pleasure.
CORNISH: That's chef Molly Baz and her father, photographer Doug Baz. They spoke to us from NPR New York. They traveled more than 4,000 miles by car from New York to Texas and back to learn about regional variations in American barbecue. They documented their journey on the blog, Adventures in BBQ. You can find a link to that blog and see photos from their trip on our website, NPR.org.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
This month, we've reported on Detroit's Auto Show, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and now in Denver, the single largest cattle show in the U.S.
From member station KUNC, Kirk Siegler reports from the National Western Stock Show now underway in the Mile High City.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: Fans roar overhead keeping the air cool and the odors at bay, as Jeanette Fuller spiffs-up her Black Angus with product.
JEANETTE FULLER: High-strength hairspray, basically, just trying to get the hair to accentuate the good things about her and kind of cover up the bad things about her.
SIEGLER: Think of this barn like a dressing room backstage at the Oscars, except it is the country's premier Angus show. Fuller, who raises certified Angus beef near Twin Falls, Idaho, styles the tail meticulously. I spend less time on my faux-hawk. She then buffs up its coat so it shines.
FULLER: And so, we want them to look their best.
SIEGLER: After all, pretty much everyone in audience out on the show floor is a prominent cattle breeder or buyer.
John McCurry of Burton, Kansa, herds his senior heifer calf out of the arena.
JOHN MCCURRY: This event, the history, I mean that, you know, this show has been going over a hundred years and just the nostalgia...
SIEGLER: McCurry is modest and matter-of-fact, what you would expect of a cowboy. But beneath the brim of his tan hat, a subtle smile forms as he clutches a big blue ribbon. Winning here at the Super Bowl for the cattle industry is prestigious, and great for business.
MCCURRY: This is the toughest show in the world, in terms of quality Angus cattle.
SIEGLER: If cows aren't your thing, never fear.
(SOUNDBITE OF COWS)
SIEGLER: There are also sheep and goats pleading for their dinner here in the small livestock barn. There are also hogs and chickens, horse shows and rodeos. And this is America after all, so there's plenty to buy in row after row of vendor stalls.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: A lot of leather, I can smell the leather belts from here. A little bit further on here, you can buy longhorns - your very own longhorn for $224.95.
CHASE MURRAY: We are a semen sales business from Great Falls, Montana.
SIEGLER: You heard that right, there's even bull semen for sale. It's actually a lucrative market, according to salesman Chase Murray.
MURRAY: You don't have to spend a whole bunch of money to get one of these good bulls. You can just breed, you know, buy some semen breed to get better replacement heifers.
SIEGLER: The bull semen and cattle business in general is booming right now. So, Reece Aglin didn't think twice about gassing up his truck and trailer to drive the 700 miles from his ranch in Circle, Montana.
Outside, in the sunny stockyards, he's tending to his prized purebred shorthorn.
REECE AGLIN: Probably around 1,800 pounds.
SIEGLER: He's like literally the size of my car.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
AGLIN: Yeah. He's just a pretty outstanding show bull. He's got lots of power, lots of hip, good thick muscle - overall a pretty amazing bull.
SIEGLER: Now, unlike the smaller cows inside, this shorthorn won't be competing. Aglin is just here to show him off and network. The National Western Stock Show runs through Sunday.
For NPR News, I'm Kirk Siegler...
(SOUNDBITE OF COWS)
SIEGLER: ...in Denver.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Elections are won through expensive TV ads, through candidates' commanding debate performances and through the sweat of legions of volunteers who bring their passion and muscle to the grassroots campaign. Our co-host Melissa Block is in South Carolina this week. And today, she introduces us to one of those foot soldiers.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Walk into Newt Gingrich headquarters in Greenville, under the blue sign that says: Rebuilding the America We Love, and meet Sondra Ziegler making herself useful any way she can.
SONDRA ZIEGLER: OK. So right now, we're boxing up phones to send to Florida for the phone bank there.
BLOCK: She is a long way from home.
ZIEGLER: I am a home school mom of three. We're from Lubbock, Texas.
BLOCK: And those three kids, ages 5, 9 and 10, they're here with her too.
ZIEGLER: We have an SUV that's pretty trashed out at this point from living in it all the way here.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
ZIEGLER: We drove 22 hours.
BLOCK: Oh, and Sondra got her mom, Carolyn Ball, to come volunteer too. She drove in from Lexington, Kentucky.
CAROLYN BALL: So I said, go where and do what?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BALL: But my second thought was, yeah, I'm ready to go. Let's do it.
BLOCK: Sondra Ziegler is 39. She tells me she's never been involved in a primary campaign before. And at first, she didn't think Newt Gingrich had a chance. But his early debate performances won her over big time.
ZIEGLER: It's what really tugged at my heart to make me think this is the guy. This is the candidate that we need to take our message and to win that argument with Barack Obama. You know, I'm here because I feel like it's put up or shut up time, really.
BLOCK: So right after Thanksgiving, she had an epiphany and a conversation with her husband.
ZIEGLER: It's kind of funny. He actually had gone deer hunting. He came home, and I said, I want to go to Iowa and can I go? And he said, well, can I take a minute to process this? And I said no. You have to say yes right now. You know I've been wanting to do this. So he did. And we were gone at the end of week.
BLOCK: She was gone with the three children heading to Gingrich headquarters in Des Moines with a simple message: Put us to work.
ZIEGLER: We'll clean toilets. We'll set up tables and chairs. We'll do anything.
BLOCK: And they did do just about everything, except clean toilets. Now, they're all here in South Carolina - mom, kids and grandma - all five of them in one room at the Holiday Inn.
ZIEGLER: What I said to the kids was if there's campaign work to be done, you can do campaign work. But otherwise, you have to get your schoolwork done. So of course, they're hoping for campaign work every day.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Thank you so much.
SONDRA ZIEGLER VOLUNTEER, GINGRICH CAMPAIGN: (Unintelligible).
UNIDENTIFIED KID: (Unintelligible).
ZIEGLER: All right. Have fun. Thanks for taking care of them.
Oh, OK. I mother hen them. Don't worry.
CAMPAIGN: OK.
BLOCK: Yesterday afternoon, Sondra Ziegler's two daughters piled into a minivan, and off they went to knock on doors.
ALEXANDRA GRACE ZIEGLER: My name is Alexandra Grace Ziegler, and I am from Lubbock, Texas.
BLOCK: And how old are you?
ZIEGLER: I'm years old.
BLOCK: So, Allie, what do you about Newt Gingrich?
ZIEGLER: Well, not really much. I do know one thing, that he is a strong man for a big job.
BLOCK: Allie and her 10-year-old sister, Abigail, march from house to house, blond ponytails bobbing. They press 21st Century Contract with America leaflets into doorways. And if someone comes to the door, they make a personal appeal - because really, who can resist an angelic 10-year-old?
ABIGAIL ZIEGLER: Hi. My name is Abigail. And I'm volunteering on behalf of Newt Gingrich.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Uh-huh.
ZIEGLER: And I was just hoping that you could tune in and watch the debate. It's on Thursday night at 9:00 and it's on CNN.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONVERSATIONS)
BLOCK: Back at Gingrich headquarters, Sondra Ziegler steps into the kitchen to talk about her commitment as a conservative evangelical Christian to Newt Gingrich. After all, he's the candidate who, if you believe the negative ads, carries more baggage than the airlines. And she says his admitted infidelities and multiple marriages did give her pause.
ZIEGLER: You know, I think his is a story of redemption. And if he's asked forgiveness from God - and I believe he has - and if he's made peace with the people in his life that were hurt by that, then I don't know what more I can ask.
BLOCK: What do you think the kids are getting out of being here?
ZIEGLER: I think they're going to have a different view of what's possible when they see something that needs to change or they need to make a difference or a candidate that needs help, they're going to think, I can go. I can do that. You know, I can go knock on the door and engage a complete stranger in why need to vote for whoever it may be. They're going to have a whole another world of possibility because of being here.
BLOCK: A few minutes later, Sondra Ziegler, her daughters and her mother listen closely as Newt Gingrich calls in to thank the volunteers around the state for all their work.
NEWT GINGRICH: And your work, your enthusiasm, your attitude really helps me. Thank you all very, very much.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
BLOCK: It's a strong jolt of energy for these Boots for Newt. And I notice that Sondra Ziegler's eyes get teary as she listens. It's exhausting to be here, she tells me later, but it's a good tired.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Give a hoot for Newt.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: Sondra Ziegler and her kids will stay in South Carolina through Saturday, then it's back home 22 hours to Lubbock, Texas. I'm Melissa Block in Greenville, South Carolina.
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And I'm Robert Siegel. Italian authorities suspended rescue operations today at the Costa Concordia shipwreck. That's because of safety concerns after the cruise liner shifted on its rocky bed. The wreck has become a metaphor in Italy for economic and moral decline.
As NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports, the country is gripped by the contrasting profiles of two men who played roles in the incident.
SYLVIA POGGIOLI, BYLINE: Francesco Schettino, captain of the 1,000-foot long floating palace, Costa Concordia, is under house arrest on suspicion of multiple manslaughter, shipwreck and abandoning ship.
Italians are now mesmerized by the audio of a heated conversation between him and Coast Guard Captain Gregorio De Falco. During the four-minute conversation hours after the collision, an increasingly enraged De Falco orders Captain Schettino to return to the ship and help coordinate the many remaining passengers' evacuation.
"Go back onboard, damn it." Although De Falco's Italian expletive is much harsher than damn it, the line has become Italy's top trending hash tag. Minutes after the audio was posted online, Italians had a new hero. By this morning, his imperative phrase was the new national slogan. T-shirts were being sold online with the words, Go Back Onboard, Damn It.
De Falco is an unlikely idol, 48 years old and balding. He tried to avoid reporters as he entered a magistrate's office to give testimony for the investigation, insisting he's no hero. But judging from comments posted on Twitter, Facebook and newspaper websites, many Italians disagree.
One tweet from Sofia Rosada said, it's men like De Falco who should be governing. Instead, we are full of men like Schettino. A boy named Salvatore Garzillo wrote, the next time someone asks me what I want to be when I grow up, I'm going to say a man like De Falco.
But several Twitter comments wondered how low have we fallen that we make a hero of a person who simply did his duty? Go Back Onboard, Damn It has exploded into a howl of indignation against the incompetence, greed and corruption that have pervaded Italian society over the last two decades.
By steering his ship with 4,200 people onboard too close to a rocky coastline, Captain Schettino's nautical bravura was all too reminiscent of what many commentators call Berlusconismo. They're referring to a lifestyle associated with former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, known for flashiness and cutting corners.
New Prime Minister Mario Monti has to deal with a potentially bigger shipwreck, the eurozone debt crisis. He has yielded the spotlight to his environment minister. He is closely monitoring the risk of an ecological disaster should fuel leak out from the stricken cruise ship into the Tuscan marine sanctuary.
Sylvia Poggioli, NPR News, Rome.
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Our next headline comes from a sports bra - literally. The words not your business were written in black ink on the sports bra of Slovenian skier Tina Maze. On Sunday, while waiting to compete in the World Cup Super-G Race, Maze dropped her suit to reveal that message. It came in response to an uproar in the world of international competitive skiing over Maze's choice of underwear. Specifically, she had been accused of wearing a sort of full-body sheath with plastic parts that her accusers say might give her an unfair advantage on the slopes.
For more on the flap, we're joined by Greg Ditrinco, editor in chief of SKI Magazine. And, Greg, let's start with the underwear. It's now been tested. What is it exactly?
GREG DITRINCO: Well, apparently, it is a full-body stocking. And in all competitive sports, there are regulations on equipment, and in competitive skiing, what you wear is a piece of equipment. So essentially, she's being accused of something no different than doping. It's about clothing. It's not as intrusive as doping, but she is accused of having an unfair advantage because of what she's wearing.
SIEGEL: But she's wearing this under other garments. How could she benefit from what's underneath her pants and her top?
DITRINCO: Sure. Good question. In competitive skiing, the difference between first place and fifth place can be a matter of hundredths of a second. In a downhill course, the racers can hit 70, 80 miles an hour, so you can imagine the advantage of even a little bit of wind resistance can do. It can literally move you up the ranks from a - someone off the podium to someone on the podium winning a medal.
SIEGEL: Even though the wind in question would have to first go through her outer clothing for her inner clothing or underwear to be an issue in terms of how much resistance there would be.
DITRINCO: Sure. I think the best way to think about this is remember the suit - swimsuit controversy back at the Beijing Olympics.
SIEGEL: Yes.
DITRINCO: There was a big huff about that - pretty much the same thing. You can almost consider a skier's undergarments to be like a swimsuit, and the effect is exactly the same, whether you're going through wind or whether you're going through the water. It's all about going faster, less resistance, faster you go and more frequently you win.
SIEGEL: Well, for now, it seems that Tina Maze was not in violation of any rule when she wore this. That's been established. But what can we expect in the future?
DITRINCO: You have to realize in competitive skiing, the ruling group, which is called the FIS - Swiss based - has regulations on absolutely everything - what you're skiing on, your skis, your boots, your bindings, the clothes you wear. And I expect the FIS fairly quickly will make a general rule on undergarments - how big they can be, full suits, not full suits and, more importantly, exactly the material that can - they can be made of. It does give a true competitor advantage with these wind-resistant undergarments. So the FIS will take this seriously, will get themselves together around a big table, and they probably will make a ruling fairly shortly.
SIEGEL: One way to go would be to say everybody could buy wind-resistant undergarments. So make it legal for everyone.
DITRINCO: They tend more than to allow everyone to do it. FIS is a fairly conservative group. What they tend to do is they tend restrict rather than expand. They have a history of that. It doesn't mean they will do that, but in general, I would be guessing that they tend to restrict things rather than open it up to more open interpretations.
SIEGEL: Now, I visited the very entertaining website of Energiapura, the Italian firm that evidently makes the controversial garment. I would think they have a lot riding on this.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
DITRINCO: I say it's a safe bet that there will be a bunch of European magazines with comely ladies modeling these shortly in spreads - no question about it.
SIEGEL: OK. That's Greg Ditrinco, the editor in chief of Ski magazine, speaking to us from Boulder, Colorado. Greg, thanks a lot for talking with us.
DITRINCO: Thank you again.
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Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have made their feelings clear about government aid under President Obama.
NEWT GINGRICH: More people are on food stamps today because of Obama's policies than ever in history.
MITT ROMNEY: The new entitlement battlefield of this president is over the size of the check you can get from Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
RICK SANTORUM: He is systematically destroying the work ethic. How? By the narcotic of government dependency.
CORNISH: Republicans argue people will get back on their feet more quickly if assistance is limited. But in areas hit hardest by the economic downturn, those getting aid say they have no choice and that it's the only thing keeping their heads above water.
NPR's Pam Fessler has the story of one such community.
PAM FESSLER, BYLINE: As a young congressman, Rick Santorum opened an office in the economic development building in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. He predicted, with a little help, that the city would recover from the devastating loss of thousands of steel mill jobs. That office building 20 years later?
(SOUNDBITE OF A ROADWAY)
FESSLER: Its shut down, abandoned. There's trash in the front foyer, I can see through the glass door. This entire area, almost every store and business is shut down.
McKeesport today is a shadow of its former self. The population, once more than 55,000, is now 19,000. Many here are unemployed. The poverty level is almost twice the national average.
LAURIE MACDONALD: What's mostly left in town are human services organizations and government organizations like, you know, Department of Welfare and things like that.
FESSLER: Laurie Macdonald runs Womansplace, a center for victims of domestic violence. She says many here rely on government support, not because they want to but because they're kind of stuck. Too poor to move, but earning too little to stay.
MACDONALD: Can you imagine making $25,000 a year and you have a family, you have kids, you have a home, you have heating bills. How are you going to make ends meet?
SHERRIE SMITH: They've never lived it, obviously.
FESSLER: Sherri Smith works part-time at Womansplace. She bristles at Santorum calling the help she gets the narcotic of government dependency. Two years ago, Smith fled an abusive and drug-using husband with the clothes on her back and a young son.
SMITH: They don't understand how normal everyday people have to live; how people have to break a penny in half and decide, OK, are we going to have lights this month or are we going to eat? You know, and that's what you have to do.
FESSLER: Smith brings home less than a thousand dollars a month and says without food stamps and medical help, she couldn't keep a roof over her head and go to college.
SMITH: I need the assistance so I can get away from it.
FESSLER: And that, in many ways, is the debate: Is government aid a tool or a crutch? Romney, Santorum and other Republicans say the current system isn't working. They think there should be deadlines and that states should craft their own programs. But that worries people here. Last week, Pennsylvania said it wants to end food stamps for those with more than $2,000 in the bank.
(SOUNDBITE OF MACHINERY)
STATE SENATOR JIM BREWSTER: This is about a $9 million project to get traffic over the railroad tracks onto the U.S. Steel site.
FESSLER: Jim Brewster, former mayor and now a state senator, says the city is trying to turn things a round. He shows me a new overpass built with federal funds. He says there's been some success. U.S. Steel just opened a new facility here and the city is preparing to drill for natural gas. But Brewster says until more businesses come, what are residents to do?
BREWSTER: We're in a foxhole. We got 19,000 people. We're obligated, by law and by oath, to take care of them and that requires in some cases entitlements. That's not anybody's preference.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Singing) Not for your house, not for your car.
FESSLER: Parishioners gather at the Bethlehem Baptist Church downtown for Bible study. People here are frustrated with the tone of the political debate, which seems to them more about pointing fingers than finding an answer.
Parishioner Jamaica Bray is an unemployed, single mother of four who gets food stamps and Medicaid, and lives in public housing.
JAMAICA BRAY: It's like dead ends everywhere you turn.
FESSLER: Right now, she says, she'd take any job. But she also thinks that some people stay on government assistance because there's a disincentive to leave it behind.
BRAY: People look at it like, well, if I'm working and only getting 325 and they done cut my food stamps, they raised my rent. I still got to take care of my kids. I ain't even get on my feet yet, then people say, then I'm not going to work. I may as well stay on welfare. I was getting more while I was on there.
FESSLER: Her pastor, Earline Coleman, thinks people need some help as they're weaned off government aid. She agrees with what Gingrich, Santorum, and the other Republicans say - some people are too dependent and there should be deadlines.
REVEREND EARLINE COLEMAN: You have to have moved on beyond where you are by this date. But I'm also going to walk with you and I'm going to teach you how to get from here to there.
FESSLER: Republicans say ending government aid should be tied to programs, such as job training. But people here want to see specifics. They say they've been abandoned before.
Pam Fessler, NPR News.
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And I'm Robert Siegel. The Obama administration announced today that it is rejecting a permit for a controversial pipeline to carry Canadian oil to the Gulf of Mexico. Just before Christmas, Congress set a tight deadline for the White House to make its decision. NPR correspondent Elizabeth Shogren joins us to explain why this won't be the last that we hear of the Keystone XL pipeline. Elizabeth, why did the Obama administration reject the permit?
ELIZABETH SHOGREN, BYLINE: Well, President Obama said in a statement that the rushed and arbitrary deadline set by Congress didn't give his administration any other choice. This is a $7 billion project that's been years in the making and there was a hitch last year when Nebraska said it didn't want the pipeline to go through an important aquifer. The company agreed to find another route through that state and it hasn't done that yet, so the administration can't finish its review of the project.
If the administration had approved the permit in its unfinished state, the decision would have been vulnerable to legal challenges.
SIEGEL: So if today's announcement by the Obama administration is rejecting the pipeline more on procedural than substantive grounds, that would not be the kind of firm ideological rejection that, say, the environmental movement was hoping for.
SHOGREN: That's right. The administration said they weren't rejecting the permit on its merits. The State Department said the Canadian company can reapply or other companies can apply for a pipeline. TransCanada has been saying that it is - TransCanada is the company that's behind this pipeline - they've been saying it's very committed to this project. They've sunk a lot of money into it and I can't imagine that they're going to be easily deterred.
The company wasn't ready to go ahead with the project now anyways since it's still looking for a route through Nebraska and it doesn't expect to have that new route until the fall.
SIEGEL: How might this decision affect the president politically?
SHOGREN: Well, it's a mixed bag. Environmentalists were elated. They felt that the president hasn't done enough for them on global warming and this is a big - they consider it a huge gift for them. On the other hand, labor unions are furious, some at least, because they thought that this project did include the prospect for lots of jobs, especially for laborers and construction workers and so they're disappointed and they call it a job killer.
SIEGEL: And the reaction from the oil industry?
SHOGREN: Well, even before the announcement officially came out, representatives from the oil industry were bashing the president, saying that he was chasing away jobs and chasing away a massive investment in the economy at a time when we need it so badly. The industry also says that this will stand in the way of America weaning itself from imports of oil from unfriendly and unstable countries.
SIEGEL: So the president has announced that unable to make a decision within the timeframe imposed by Congress, he must reject a permit now for the pipeline. What is likely to happen next?
SHOGREN: Well, congressional Republicans are meeting to come up with their strategy. They say they're going to keep pushing for this pipeline to become a reality and to try to make it - try to fast-track it anyway they can. And they're also surely going to continue to use this issue as a way to attack the president for not doing enough to create jobs in the country.
SIEGEL: Okay. Thank you, Elizabeth. That's NPR correspondent Elizabeth Shogren.
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The Supreme Court has given an Alabama death row inmate another chance to fight his execution by a seven-to-two vote. The court ruled that convicted murderer Cory Maples, through no fault of his own, was denied the right to appeal because he had been abandoned by his lawyers. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Cory Maples was convicted of murdering two friends and sentenced to death. There's no doubt that he committed the crime. The doubt is whether he could have avoided the death penalty if he'd been properly represented at trial. Today, the Supreme Court ruled that he had been denied the right to make that case when his appellate lawyers quite literally abandoned him. Alabama, almost alone among the states, does not provide post-conviction appeals lawyers for indigent defendants in capital cases.
The gap is filled almost entirely by public interest organizations or large out-of-state law firms that take on these cases on a pro-bono basis. This case involves one of those firms, New York Sullivan and Cromwell, which prides itself on its pro-bono work, but here committed a stunning series of mistakes that until today denied Maples the right to challenge the fairness of his trial.
In 2001, Sullivan and Cromwell took on the Maples appeal. In 2002, the two junior associates working on the case left the firm for government jobs that barred them from further work on the case. The lawyers did not tell Maples of their departure, nor did they advise the Alabama courts and Sullivan and Cromwell did not seek to substitute other lawyers in their place. In 2003, the Alabama trial court, without holding a hearing, denied Maples claim that his trial lawyers had failed to provide a minimally acceptable defense.
That started the appeals clock ticking. Sullivan and Cromwell had 42 days in which to file an appeal. But when the clerk at the court sent the notice to the New York firm, the two lawyers were long gone and the mailroom sent the envelopes back unopened with the words return to sender, left firm, prominently written on the outside. Back in Alabama, the court clerk simply filed the unopened envelopes and did not seek to contact the lawyers at the home addresses she had for them.
Up to this point, Maples was blissfully unaware of his own predicament, but in August of 2003, the state attorney general's office sent him a letter in prison notifying him that he'd missed the deadline for his appeal. Maples then called his mother. She called Sullivan and Cromwell and the law firm embarked on a mad scramble to correct its error. But all the state and federal appeals courts said too bad, Maples was out of luck. He defaulted on his right to appeal by missing the deadline.
Today, though, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Maples is entitled to his appeal because he was abandoned by his lawyers. Writing for a seven justice majority, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that while a lawyer's failure to meet a deadline is not usually grounds for giving a defendant a second chance to file, this case is different. In these circumstances, she said, no just system would lay the default at Maples' death cell door.
Dissenting were justices Scalia and Thomas. Ginsburg, in her majority opinion, tracked the progress of the Maples case from the start. She noted that although death penalty cases are time intensive, taking on average about 1,500 hours pre-trial preparation, Alabama, at the time of the trial, capped at $1,000, the fee for work out of court. The Sullivan and Cromwell lawyers had prepared an appeal claiming, among other things, that because Maples court-appointed trial lawyers were so underfunded and inexperienced, they failed to take advantage of the state's evidence of Maples extreme intoxication.
And clearly, if used properly, would have been mitigating evidence that might have prevented a death sentence. After today's ruling, appellate lawyers will have the chance to make that case. Such claims are tough to win, but experts said today Maples at least has a shot at it now. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
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Back in July of last year, news from the brand new country of South Sudan was optimistic.
(SOUNDBITE OF SINGING)
CORNISH: People came together to sing their national anthem as the country gained its independence. Now, stories from South Sudan tell of massacres and burned villages. Tribes that appeared to transcend their differences over the summer have seen peace talks falter and a return to the raids and violence that crippled the country for years. Jeffrey Gettleman is the East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times and he travelled recently to South Sudan. He joins us now from just outside Nairobi, Kenya. Hello there, Jeffrey.
JEFFREY GETTLEMAN: Hi there.
CORNISH: So Jeffrey, to begin, tell us about this most recent cycle of violence. It's between two tribes, the Nuer and the Murle.
GETTLEMAN: That's right. I just got back from a very interesting, but disturbing trip to South Sudan where I was covering a large massacre that had just happened. Thousands of fighters from one ethnic group, the Lou Nuer, stormed a town in South Sudan and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of people from another ethnic group, the Murle. This connects to a longstanding tradition that has been going on for generations, where different groups in South Sudan steal each other's cattle; sometimes abduct children, sometimes burn villages.
However, recently we've seen the introduction of high-powered assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and instead of just having a few casualties connected to these cattle raids, we're now seeing body counts in the hundreds if not the thousands.
CORNISH: Jeffrey, can you describe to us what you saw in Pibor after this violence?
GETTLEMAN: Sure. I arrived about a week and a half after the violence had ended. And there were many, many people coming out of the bush with gunshot wounds and other injuries. There was many children who had been shot, some just six-month-old babies with bullet wounds through their legs and their arms. I saw people that had trudged through the savanna and through swamps and waded through rivers for days to get medical help.
I also saw a number of bodies spread out in the bush. And this is what happened is these raiders came to the town, civilians fled into the bush, and then these raiders methodically hunted them down.
CORNISH: One chilling part of your story was that they U.N. peacekeepers in South Sudan, they never fired a shot - even though there were roughly 400 peacekeepers nearby. What happened there?
GETTLEMAN: Well, this is a serious problem. No one seems to be able to stop this violence. In this case, for the past couple weeks, the United Nations was carefully watching this one group, the Nuer, mass several thousand fighters. And it was pretty clear what they were going to do. They started up in a little town by burning it to the ground, and then the stream of fighters began walking for dozens of miles down to another town.
And this took about a week and the U.N. rushed in a few hundred peacekeepers to defend this town, but they didn't fire a shot. They said they were outnumbered. And later, some U.N. officials told me that they were really worried that these peacekeepers might get massacred themselves.
CORNISH: Where is the South Sudan government in this dispute? Are they likely to step in?
GETTLEMAN: The government of South Sudan is a very fragile entity right now; it's only six months old. And it has been very reluctant to wade into these communal fights, even though they're now involving thousands of fighters on each side. Because they're worried that if they take a side they might alienate one ethnic group or start to provoke enemies within the government and there could be a split in the security forces. And that could lead, some fear, to a civil war in the south.
CORNISH: So, Jeffrey, give us a sense of context here. There was a lot of optimism when South Sudan declared independence. Where things bound to turn violent?
GETTLEMAN: I was in South Sudan in July when it finally achieved independence, after decades of guerrilla struggle. And people were ecstatic. So it's sad to see what's happening. These ethnic tensions being expressed violently are not new. And that's what scares people in the south, is they are seeing a cycle of violence again that they thought they had overcome by independence. And it looks like they haven't.
CORNISH: Jeffrey Gettleman, he's the East Africa bureau chief for The New York Times. He spoke to us about his reporting in South Sudan.
Jeffrey, thank you so much for talking with us.
GETTLEMAN: Glad to help.
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Mitt Romney is not the first very rich man to seek public office. The Kennedys were rich. Nelson Rockefeller was rich. Michael Bloomberg is very rich. Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz was very rich. And when his widow married John Kerry, he became rich.
But unlike those men, Mitt Romney seems to have stubbed his toe verbally, time after time, when the subject was money, wealth or work.
MITT ROMNEY: Rick, I'll tell you what...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
ROMNEY: Ten thousand bucks?
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
ROMNEY: Ten thousand dollar bet?
I was happy that he had to take a mortgage out on his house to ultimately defeat me.
Corporations are people, my friend.
The country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy.
I think it's fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms.
I know what it's like to worry whether you're going to get fired. There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip.
I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.
What's the effective rate I've been paying? Well, it's probably closer to the 15 percent rate. And then I get speaker's fees from time to time, but not very much.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: Those speaking fees actually amount to more than $370,000.
All this has made me wonder: Is Mitt Romney unusually awkward in the matter of being extremely rich and incredibly public or are the questions tougher these days for multi-millionaires who seek public office?
Well, Robert Frank covers wealth for The Wall Street Journal. He's written two books about the very rich: "Richistan" and now "The High-Beta Rich."
Robert Frank, welcome to the program.
ROBERT FRANK: Thanks for having me.
SIEGEL: And what do you think is going on here? What do you make of the statements?
FRANK: Well, I think the problem is not necessarily a that he's very wealthy - he can overcome that. The problem is that his comments about money remind everyone how out of touch he is with the American people and their daily struggles. I mean, the comments yesterday where he said his speaking fees were quote, "not very much," and they were over $370,000.
It kind of recalls this time when McCain was talking about he can't remember how many homes he owns or when George Bush, Sr. in 1992, was talking about how amazed he was to discover the supermarket scanner. I mean, these are issues that remind voters that these very privileged politicians are out of touch with the rest of America.
SIEGEL: And yet, no one assumed that Nelson Rockefeller, who was the governor of New York State for many years, and John F. Kennedy, very popular president, nobody thought that they were having troubles make ends meet every month.
FRANK: No, we've had wealthy candidates in the past. The issue is that times have changed for wealthy candidates. The Occupy Wall Street movement, the Wall Street bailouts, the growing awareness of inequality has made the wealthy a real target. And in 2010, where there were congressional and gubernatorial elections, of the 58 wealthy candidates who helped finance their own campaigns, 80 percent lost those races.
And I think that a lot of the reasons were those candidates responding a lot of the campaigns defending their wealth or their yachts or their mansions, and not being able to focus on the real issues.
SIEGEL: But here's what seems novel about the wealth of Mitt Romney and how he must talk about it. He was raised to wealth and comfort. His father was a rich auto executive and then the governor of Michigan. But he made this fortune at Bain Capital. He actually made it. He could say this is the result of what I did. The problem is what he did, how he made that money.
FRANK: Exactly. And I think what's changed in America is that Americans are focusing more on how the wealthy made their money. You know, we have a narrative of wealth that we like in America, which is you start out with nothing and you make a fortune by creating a popular product, like the iPad or, in Herman Cain's case, a pizza chain. And they respect that wealth.
Romney started out with some wealth and got wealthier through private equity, which is difficult to understand and easy to compare to corporate raiding. So, unfortunately he's attracting more comparisons now to Gordon Gekko than to Steve Jobs. And it's really because his wealth is a result more of what people see as financial engineering rather than creating something of value to the economy.
SIEGEL: So, if you had made $200 million in private equity and you were running for president, and people were always asking you about inequality and there were issues about raising taxes on the rich, what would you say? How would you handle that?
FRANK: He needs to come out and give a speech. I call it the I'm Rich and I'm Proud Speech. And he needs to come out and say, look. I was really lucky to be born in this country when I was and have a set of skills that was hugely rewarded in the marketplace. And he needs to say, what I want to do now is to make sure those opportunities are available to even more Americans and really focus on growth and how he can use his business experience to sort of turn around the government.
I think the reason there's so much focus on his wealth is that he's really been trying to duck the issue and hide it.
SIEGEL: And not very gracefully.
FRANK: Exactly.
SIEGEL: Well, Robert Frank, thanks a lot for talking with us.
FRANK: Thanks for having me.
SIEGEL: Robert Frank covers wealth for the Wall Street Journal and he's the author of the books, "Richistan" and "The High Beta Rich."
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It's time for your Letters and first, this correction.
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As we reported Monday, New Jersey is getting rid of its so-called Bo-Tax. That's a six percent tax on cosmetic surgery. In our story, some of you heard us say that New Jersey is the only state with such a tax and that was true until last year, when Connecticut approved a tax, as well.
CORNISH: On to your letters about our segment on a notable president. William Henry Harrison's presidency was notable for how incredibly short it was. He served a mere month in 1841 before dying.
SIEGEL: Well, that didn't stop New York Times columnist, Gail Collins, from writing a Harrison biography. I talked with Collins on Monday and we began with the myth of Harrison, the man whose campaign erroneously insisted that he lived in a log cabin.
CORNISH: Well, Alan Gabis(ph) of Indianapolis sent us this description about the home William Henry Harrison did live in in Vincennes, Indiana. He says this. Harrison came to Vincennes in 1801 after being appointed governor of the Indiana territory which, at the time, included all of present day Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as southern Minnesota. He built a 26-room Georgian style mansion on 300 acres and named the property Grouseland.
SIEGEL: It was far from a log cabin. Well, Gail Collins also said this about presidential leadership during Harrison's time.
GAIL COLLINS: There aren't really any good presidents for about 50 years here. There's a very long - between Jackson and Abraham Lincoln - a kind of a drought going on.
SIEGEL: Not so, says Andy Baylosh(ph) of Grand Prairie, Texas. He writes this. One of my favorite presidents, James K. Polk, was pretty important considering he was responsible for adding one-third more land to the U.S. He only served one term, yet he was able to accomplish his four goals and Mr. Baylosh explains those goals are...
CORNISH: Taking the Oregon territory from the British.
SIEGEL: Winning California from Mexico.
CORNISH: Lowering tariffs.
SIEGEL: And establishing an independent treasury.
CORNISH: Well, for all that, the band, They Might Be Giants, wrote a song about President James K. Polk.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JAMES K. POLK")
SIEGEL: We appreciate your letters. You can write to us at NPR.org. Just click on Contact Us.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JAMES K. POLK")
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If you tried to visit a Wikipedia content page today, you were likely disappointed. The online encyclopedia joined dozens of other websites in a blackout to protest legislation pending in Congress that critics say will censure the Internet. That legislation appears to be losing support on Capitol Hill, more on that in a moment. But first, NPR's Laura Sydell reports on the blackout.
LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE: It was a hard day for Patrice James. She does social media for a marketing firm and her job involves a lot of research about people and companies. Today, she understood the importance of Wikipedia in her life.
PATRICE JAMES: I didn't realize how much I use it until it's gone, and that's usually the case with most things. And I'm like, wow. I have to - it adds extra work.
SYDELL: But the one entry that was visible on Wikipedia today told its readers that Congress was considering legislation that would block access to any foreign site that offered unauthorized files of movies, music and TV shows and other intellectual property. James got the message.
JAMES: I'm all for them trying to lower piracy, but to censor people, their thoughts, that's - it's reminding me of "1984," actually.
SYDELL: Though James lives in Canada, she says she's upset because the legislation will target websites outside of the U.S. as well as block search engines from offering links to those sites.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Stop SOPA, pass on PIPA.
SYDELL: Hundreds of protesters were in front of the New York City offices of Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. Both co-sponsored legislation known as the Protect Intellectual Property Act, or PIPA. The acronym for the House legislation is SOPA, or Stop Online Piracy Act.
Among the speakers at the demonstration was NYU professor and author Clay Shirky. He pointed out that Hollywood and traditional media companies have spent millions of dollars lobbying for the bills because, Shirky contends, they don't want to spend money suing websites.
CLAY SHIRKY: You have to accuse them of something and then you're going to have to prove the accusation, and that takes a long time, and that takes a lot of money. And you can see why traditional media industries wouldn't want to take on that hassle.
SYDELL: But those same industries do have a long history of lobbying Congress. Rey Ramsey, the president and CEO of TechNet, a nonpartisan lobbying group for the tech industry in D.C., says Silicon Valley techies have generally tried to avoid Washington.
REY RAMSEY: They're cut off of a cloth which is very entrepreneurial, sometimes individual, sometimes libertarian. It's not a regulated industry like many other industries, and it is learning how to play in Washington.
SYDELL: Today's protest surely shows an awakening of the industry as to how it can flex its muscles. Along with Wikipedia, such other smaller but popular sites like Reddit and Boing Boing also blacked out.
Former Senator Christopher Dodd, who now heads the Motion Picture Association of America, called today's demonstration childish.
CHRISTOPHER DODD: It sorts of reminds me of kids who can't get their way hold their breath and start screaming, instead of engaging with the debate and providing information, encouraging a discussion on how this can be improved. It just seems petulant to me.
SYDELL: Dodd says people should be talking about all the jobs being lost in the entertainment industry because of piracy. For her part, Wikipedia user Patrice James says she's getting the point, though she's going to need a drink by the end of the day.
JAMES: I'm going to need a couple of them to get me through this day.
SYDELL: Laura Sydell, NPR News.
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: I'm David Welna at the Capitol. Many websites taking part in the online blackouts today are urging frustrated visitors to complain to their lawmakers about the proposed anti-piracy legislation, and they've had a big response. Heavy traffic caused more than half the official websites of senators to crash today. And in their Capitol Hill offices, irate callers kept the phone lines swamped.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Senator, are you (unintelligible)? (Unintelligible) how are you sir?
WELNA: Nearly all of the hundreds of calls to Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy's Senate office today were against the anti-piracy bill he's sponsoring, known as the Protect IP Act, or PIPA. Leahy, who was back in his home state of Vermont, was not available for comment. Oregon's Ron Wyden is also a Senate Democrat, but he opposes the PIPA bill. He says lawmakers, who earlier were lobbied heavily by the entertainment industry to support the legislation, today heard from the other side, the users of the Internet.
SENATOR RON WYDEN: People think it's just folks between 18 and 35, but senators are hearing from small business people, from senior citizens, from farmers.
WELNA: And some lawmakers themselves joined the fray today. Oregon Democrat Peter DeFazio railed on the House floor against that chamber's version of the anti-piracy legislation, known as SOPA.
REPRESENTATIVE PETER DEFAZIO: This legislation could threaten the existence of an entire domain because of one, one blog entry, one user link. The whole domain would be taken down. Wow. That's pretty incredible.
WELNA: The House bill is still stuck in the Judiciary Committee in a move apparently aimed at shoring up support. That panel's Republican chairman, Lamar Smith, announced last week that he was removing an especially controversial provision that could block domain names. But in an interview today, Smith insisted he still plans to move forward on his bill next month.
REPRESENTATIVE LAMAR SMITH: There's a lot of spreading of fear rather than facts. And there's a lot of willing engagement to misrepresent the bill. If people would look at the language, I'm convinced that we have a good product, and we will keep support for it.
WELNA: But House Republican leaders seemed to be putting the brakes on their chamber's bill. Here's House Speaker John Boehner earlier today.
REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER: It's pretty clear to many of us that there's a lack of consensus at this point, and I would expect that the committee would continue to work to try to build a consensus before this bill moves.
WELNA: In the Senate, it's a different story. Majority leader Harry Reid intends to go ahead with plans to hold a key test vote on the PIPA anti-piracy bill next Tuesday. Bill opponent Wyden says that's following a script that aims to get the legislation passed this year.
WYDEN: The strategy has always been to bull PIPA through the United States Senate. If you could get it through the Senate, you'd be in a good position to have a conference at some point between the House and the Senate, and that's why it's so important to stop this effort dead in its tracks.
WELNA: And that just might happen. Nearly half the Senate bill's 40 sponsors are Republicans, but many of them have withdrawn their support in the past few days. If this controversial legislation is to get past Tuesday's vote, it may first have to be altered to allay some of the many concerns lawmakers heard a lot about today. David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.
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Well it may be difficult to access Wikipedia today, but it's not impossible. Here with some Wikipedia workarounds is Brian Cooley, the editor at CNET. Welcome back, Brian.
BRIAN COOLEY: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: And first, I want you tell us some different ways to get around the Wikipedia blackout today.
COOLEY: Well, one of the easiest ways is to go search for the Wikipedia page you want on Google and look for the result on Google that says Wikipedia and then the subject you're looking for. It's usually one of the first few results. And then, if you mouse over that or just put your cursor over it, you're going to find a little double-arrow box opens just to the right of the search result. And then just to the right of that, you're going to see a little mini version of the Wikipedia page you're trying to get to.
Right above that is a little text link that says cached copy, or cached, and you go to that, and that's one that Google has. So you're not actually going to Wikipedia, but you're finding a fairly fresh copy of that same page from Wikipedia that Google has squirreled away on their servers because that's just kind of how Google runs. They cache things so they can more easily serve them to you. Now, if you're concerned that that page is stale, which it might be, that cached copy on Google is going to have a freshness date at the top, if you will, that will say when they captured it, when Google captured that copy of it. And so you can see if it's a day old, a few days old, a few hours old and make a judgment that way.
SIEGEL: Now, that's a much more elegant work-around than mine, which was to go to a foreign language site of Wikipedia, preferably a language I understand, but I tried Danish just for fun, which I don't understand. I searched for Mitt Romney in the Danish Wikipedia, then copied the answer into Google Translate from Danish to English, and there, you know, minus some odd bits of grammar, there it is.
COOLEY: Yes. It could make for either a Mad Lib or kind of a laborious end around, if you will, but that is another way to do it. It's important to point out that the Wikipedia version that is down has been the English version, not the others, because this is very much about getting in front of the U.S. Internet audience and getting them to realize what's happening in their legislature that could affect our relationship with Internet media around the world.
SIEGEL: Other sites have also shown solidarity and shut down their sites today. Have they had more luck fully blocking their content than Wikipedia has?
COOLEY: Yeah. Wikipedia's kind of a tough one to block because of this Google caching, because of the different language versions that you point out. It's a very broadly distributed site. Also down today are Reddit, which is a popular webpage recommendation service. You'll often see their buttons on webpages so you can let folks know: I read this and I recommend it.
Also the Cheezburger network, which does the I Can Has Cheezburger cat photos. So everything from the rather robust, like Wikipedia, down to the silly, but notice that all of these have one thing in common: They're all highly trafficked. But Wikipedia's been the one that I think is getting the most attention because people are hungry for a workaround. I mean, you can just imagine millions of students out there today having to actually find another place to get their research.
SIEGEL: Well, Brian Cooley, thanks a lot for talking with us about it today.
COOLEY: Thanks, Robert. Appreciate it.
SIEGEL: Brian Cooley, editor-at-large for the tech news site CNET.
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There are developments today in the federal government's investigation into insider trading on Wall Street. Seven more people have been charged. They include analysts and traders at some of Wall Street's most prominent hedge funds.
NPR's Jim Zarroli has the story.
JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: U.S. officials said the seven people charged made up a stunning portrait of organized corruption on a grand scale. At the center of the scheme was an unnamed employee at the computer company Dell. That employee allegedly passed on inside information about earnings to an investment analyst named Sandeep Goyal, who is cooperating with the government.
Goyal gave the information to an analyst at the hedge fund company Diamondback Capital Management, for a fee of $175,000. That analyst passed it on to other hedge funds.
Assistant FBI Director Janice Fedarcyk says the fact that they had access to Dell's earnings before the market as a whole enabled them to earn millions in elicit profits.
JANICE FEDARCYK: When you have the answer sheet beforehand, it's pretty hard not to ace the test, but cheating on the test and getting away with it are two different things.
ZARROLI: Of the seven people charged, three pleaded guilty. The others include Anthony Chiasson, a cofounder of the hedge fund company Level Global Investors. Also named were Todd Newman of Diamondback and John Horvath of Sigman Capital Management, which is part of one of the most prominent hedge fund companies on Wall Street, SAC Capital. Another defendant, technology fund manager Danny Kuo is accused of passing on inside information to the others about the technology company NVIDIA.
None of those charged was available to comment today. U.S. attorney Preet Bharara said the arrests say something that should disturb people.
PREET BHARARA: They show that insider trading activity in recent times has, indeed, become rampant and routine and that this criminal behavior was known, encouraged and exploited by authority figures in several investment funds.
ZARROLI: With today's arrests, the government's investigation into insider trading has grown wider. Sixty-three people have now been charged. Fifty-six of those have been convicted.
Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.
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And I'm Robert Siegel. John Timoney spent nearly three decades with the New York City Police Department before becoming police chief in Philadelphia and then in Miami. He won praise for fighting crime and for curbing police shootings of civilians. He was also criticized for the way he handled a 2003 protest in Miami, but Timoney's latest assignment may be his greatest challenge yet. He has been hired to train police in Bahrain, a Persian Gulf kingdom of just over a million people.
CORNISH: A challenge because after Arab Spring revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, Bahrain crushed similar uprisings earlier last year. About three dozen people were reported killed. Perhaps to avoid unfavorable comparisons to the brutal ongoing crackdown in Syria, the Bahraini government is now trying to play good cop. It commissioned an outside report to investigate its handling of the protests and insists it is committed to sweeping reform.
SIEGEL: The job of reforming the police will fall, at least in part, to John Timoney. He joined us earlier today from Bahrain and I asked if it's even possible to have respectful policing that minds the rights of the people in a country where the government is not accountable constitutionally to the people.
JOHN TIMONEY: Well, that remains to be seen. I know there are some efforts â and I'm not involved in the politics - but clearly, there are some efforts towards political reform. There were recommendations made even by the king, but in the Bassiouni Report, there were also recommendations made regarding parliament, parliament getting more power.
I know that the king, last week at a press conference, had a speech regarding parliament getting additional power. In any event, my focus really is on the policing end of the business and what happened here just in the last three weeks, a new chief has taken over and is looking to do the right thing, looking to embrace reform.
And so I think there are good vibes here. There are people with good intentions and so we'll have to see where it takes us all, but at least there's definitely a willingness as best as I can tell. And I'm not shilling for the administration here.
SIEGEL: But the question that I'm curious about is can a professional, respectful, restrained policing, is that something that can be implemented in any situation, regardless of what the relationship between the citizens and the authority is? Or does it require, ultimately, some kind of accountability?
Say, (unintelligible) when there were accusations of abuse during the 2003 free trade protests, a civilian investigative panel was called in, it reported, it made recommendations. I read them. You came away with passing grades, but there were remarks about - police should know their rights. They should assist in the first amendment rights of the demonstrators. What if those rights don't exist?
TIMONEY: Yeah. By the way, that's an excellent point. You know, one of the things I've been working on for the last two or three weeks is not just the new policies going forward, but we've created a new police code of conduct. So now the question becomes, can you institute an accountability system? And one of the recommendations is to create the equivalent of an IG or an ombudsman similar to the internal affairs, for example, in the NYPD or Miami or Philadelphia here to take it a step further and bring it outside the police department itself and make it completely independent as an outside body. And so that's another recommendation that's being worked on.
SIEGEL: Is it acknowledged in Bahrain that people do have the right to have a protest?
TIMONEY: Well, there's a couple of issues here. On a daily basis, they absolutely have the right to protest, to demonstrate. Here's where the problem comes in. It's a small city. It reminds me more of lower Manhattan than the rest of Manhattan, where you've got these narrow streets.
And, clearly, if you have unauthorized protests that are happening during the daytime, I mean, the traffic comes to a standstill. But you know, when you saw Occupy Wall Street, when people begin to engage in unauthorized marches that begin to cripple traffic and emergency vehicles, the rest of the city - you know, there's a reason why you have to go to the police department. It's not that they say, yea or nay regarding your right to speech, but can this be handled that it doesn't dramatically and drastically impact the rest of society?
SIEGEL: But an American police force confronted with protesters who would be blocking traffic would obviously attempt to remove protesters from that position, ask them to disperse and not come at them with clubs, let's say. Are you finding that there's a need for training in the degree of force that should be used against protesters?
TIMONEY: Absolutely. Clearly, there was - going back last February, March, there was a lot of ugliness. Thirty-five people wound up dead. By the way, four of those were police officers. One was a soldier. There were about four or five ex-pats that were attacked by crowds.
The protests that I have seen since I have been here, the police, you know, make sure they give proper notice, try and keep distance between themselves and the crowd. These are one of the many things we're going to work on, but there's no disagreement on the part of the people at the top of what needs to be done, how to get done.
SIEGEL: You know, I was struck by a recommendation from the civilian investigative panel that looked into the Miami police under your command, how they handled the 2003 protests and they said - I'm quoting now. They said, additionally, the overwhelming presence of police dressed in riot gear intimidated demonstrators and deterred them from exercising their first amendment rights.
The idea was that to wear riot gear is a form - it's not a kinetic restraint, but it's a form of restraint to protest. Can you apply an idea like that in Bahrain?
TIMONEY: Well, I'll give you my ideal because my rule regarding the Miami Police Department - my rule of engagement is that the officers wear soft clothes and then, if there's going to be trouble, if they're attacked, then they put on the so-called riot gear. That's exactly what happened in Miami.
SIEGEL: Let me ask you about another difference between what you've done in the past and what you're doing now - at least, it would seem to be a difference. At worst, if things had really gone badly in Miami or if, you know, years before you went to Philadelphia when you were still in New York, the police force famously dropped a bomb on a house in Philadelphia. I mean, the worst that happens is there is political discord in the city and tourism goes away for a year. The stakes in a kingdom of a million could be the stability of the regime. That could be what's at stake when there's a huge protest out in the streets. Does it make it different as to what police do in that instance?
TIMONEY: Oh, I think so. You know, I've spoken - and including to the king - and there's clearly an awareness, if you will, an attitude to get this thing right. Bahrain is - it's a beautiful place and I think the events of last February and March really kind of shocked the kingdom itself, the people that run it, the legislature. I don't think they've experienced that type of tumult in the past.
SIEGEL: This has been a major shock to them.
TIMONEY: Without a doubt.
SIEGEL: Well, John Timoney, thanks a lot for talking with us and...
TIMONEY: Robert, thank you very much.
SIEGEL: Thanks for talking with us about what you're doing in Bahrain.
TIMONEY: Thank you.
SIEGEL: John Timoney, long time New York City police officer, later became chief of police in Philadelphia and in Miami, is now advising the police in Bahrain and helping to train them.
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South Carolina holds its presidential primary Saturday. And polls released today show that Mitt Romney continues to run ahead of the Republican pack, but his lead is narrowing, and Newt Gingrich appears to gaining ground.
NPR's Scott Horsley has been following Romney as he travels around South Carolina. And he joins us now from Rock Hill. Hello, Scott. Can you tell us is Romney hearing footsteps behind him?
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Well, Audie, he may be. You know, Romney typically keeps his eyes on the finish line and leaves it to surrogates to go after his primary rivals. But today in South Carolina, some of the attacks on Newt Gingrich came out of Romney's own mouth. He mocked Gingrich for saying during a debate here the other night that as a congressman, Gingrich had helped lay the groundwork for millions of new jobs in America.
Government doesn't create jobs. It's the private sector that creates jobs.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
MITT ROMNEY: Congressman taking responsibility or taking credit for helping create jobs is like Al Gore taking credit for the Internet.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
HORSLEY: The Romney campaign has also been aggressive today with emails and conference calls attacking the former House speaker. So even though polls suggest he still has the lead here, it seems Romney is trying to close off any last-minute surge by Gingrich.
CORNISH: And, of course, Newt Gingrich has been pretty aggressive in knocking Mitt Romney. Is it actually having any effect?
HORSLEY: That's right. Gingrich has been trying to rally conservative voters behind him, saying if Romney is the nominee, he won't be able to draw the same kind of contrast with President Obama.
The polling suggests Gingrich may have taken a little support away from Rick Santorum. But in general conservatives still seem to be splitting their votes. And I have to say, Romney drew a respectable crowd today in Spartanburg, a fairly conservative part of the state, so he may be winning folks over. While I was there, a supporter gave me a bag of Grits for Mitt...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
HORSLEY: ...which is a, I guess one sign of Southern acceptance. On the other hand, when I got back to my car after that rally, I found a flyer on the windshield saying: Romney is not a trusted conservative. An unsigned flier, I should say. So that's the bare-knuckle politics we come to expect here in South Carolina.
CORNISH: So how much of what you're hearing in South Carolina is intra-party squabbling? I mean, are Republicans managing to keep an eye on President Obama?
HORSLEY: Yes. Even as they duke it out amongst themselves, the Republicans tend to reserve most of their punches for the incumbent. That's certainly true of Mitt Romney. And President Obama gave the GOP another opening today when his administration formally rejected that controversial Keystone pipeline that would've linked Canada to the Gulf Coast.
In a written statement, Romney said that decision showed a lack of seriousness about bringing down unemployment, and he accused the president of kowtowing to environmentalists in his political base. Now, of course, in its own defense, the White House says it was congressional Republicans who put such a tight timeline on the Keystone decision that there was really no way for the State Department to conduct a thorough environmental review.
CORNISH: NPR's Scott Horsley. He's traveling with Mitt Romney in South Carolina. Thanks so much, Scott.
HORSLEY: You're welcome, Audie.
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It's been a tough year for many who live and work in Camden, New Jersey. A year ago today, Camden's mayor grappled with a $26.5 million budget deficit by laying off hundreds of city workers. Included in the layoff, 168 police officers, nearly half the city's force.
From member station WHYY in Philadelphia, Elizabeth Fiedler reports on life in Camden one year later.
ELIZABETH FIEDLER, BYLINE: William Roman was sitting in his house watching TV when the owner of the bodega across the street was killed in early December.
WILLIAM ROMAN: Sitting on my sofa. So that's about what? Fifty feet, 60 feet from the store. But all I heard was a couple, like, pops, and basically, that was it. The next thing I realized there was a lot of sirens and lights and everything else going on, you know?
FIEDLER: The bodega store owner's death was just one small piece of the city's crime problem since the layoffs. According to the mayor's office, in 2011, there were 47 homicides in Camden - up from 37 the year before. Meanwhile, aggravated assaults with a firearm increased 35 percent compared to 2010.
WARREN FAULK: Initially, after the layoffs, things remained pretty steady.
FIEDLER: That's Camden County Prosecutor Warren Faulk. Faulk thinks criminals realized police did not have sufficient officers on the streets and took advantage of it.
FAULK: We saw robberies particularly tick up in October and November. We saw homicides tick up in October and November. In December, because of those tick-ups, the state police sent in a force of about 40 troopers, and they were able to quell things.
FIEDLER: Camden Fraternal Order of Police President John Williamson says it was a very challenging year for police.
JOHN WILLIAMSON: A lot of the criminals or a lot of the bad people were very brazen, challenging, actually more combative than they normally, you know, would have been.
FIEDLER: Williamson says it's impossible to make such drastic cuts and expect the remaining officers to cover the same amount of ground. But he thinks the remaining officers did a good job of holding the city together. In April, the city started using grant money to bring officers back. It returned just over 100 but at the same time lost about 50 because of officers who went to other jobs or retired. But Williamson says the answer to lowering Camden's crime numbers is no secret: more police.
WILLIAMSON: Every study that's been done on the Camden Police Department over the last 18 years has said that we need to be between 450 and 500 officers.
FIEDLER: Since the layoffs a year ago, Camden County Prosecutor Warren Faulk says Camden police have been pushed from detective work out onto patrol.
FAULK: Those detectives continued to do work on crimes committed in the city, but the follow-ups, they were unable to do, and consequently, our office then in order to sustain the charges would have to do the follow-up work.
FIEDLER: And he says the layoffs have hurt police efforts to keep the streets safe in another big way: They're unable to make as many arrests as before because of the simple lack of manpower. Back at his house across from the bodega, William Roman says his wife is tired of the crime.
ROMAN: My wife, who has been here for 35 years, who has seen this area decline decade after decade, she has some thoughts about the possibility of maybe it's time to move.
FIEDLER: Roman says when a shooting happens so close to home, it's hard not to worry about your own family. For NPR News, I'm Elizabeth Fiedler.
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Long underwear - plastic or otherwise - is in order in the Pacific Northwest today. A major snowstorm is moving through the region, piling up to a foot of snow in places where rain is the winter norm. Many roads are closed, and some flights have been canceled in Seattle and Portland. Seattle itself was spared the worst of the storm, but as NPR's Martin Kaste reports, even a few inches of snow for Northwesterners is enough to put everyday life on hold.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: The theme of Seattle is it doesn't have that many snowplows. The few plows they have, they use on the main arterials. But if you live on a residential street, you don't have a lot of options. You can try chains on your tires. You can walk. Or you can do what these people are doing.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Oh, we're - ah - cross-country skiing.
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KASTE: And there are few other options. Snow shoes, huh?
STEVE GUSTAVSON: Yeah.
KASTE: It's not that deep.
GUSTAVSON: Yeah. You know, it's the best we're going to get in Seattle, so I thought I got to try. Cool.
KASTE: What's your name?
GUSTAVSON: Steve Gustavson.
KASTE: I'm assuming you've seen deeper snow. Why do you think the city paralyzes like this when they get four inches or three or whatever this is?
GUSTAVSON: Oh, it's a combination of our complete inability to drive in it, and I think anticipation that it'll be worse than it really is because we get everything from 15 inches to two inches, warning some people just stop everything.
KASTE: It's just this wild range and who knows?
GUSTAVSON: Right. And, of course, we do have hills.
KASTE: The hills really are a challenge here - imagine four inches of snow and say San Francisco. So even chains are not that much of a help as this mail truck is finding out right now, trying to get up this hill.
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KASTE: But if you don't have to drive anywhere, these same hills mean the whole city is a sledding paradise.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING)
KASTE: Can I get your name and ask you kind of what you're doing today?
KELLY BRANCH: Yeah. Yeah. Kelly Branch.
KASTE: Branch?
BRANCH: Yeah.
KASTE: And not working today?
BRANCH: What's that? Well, we were supposed to work today, but somehow, we just didn't quite make it in.
KASTE: Strange. How does that works?
BRANCH: This is - we used to live in Michigan, and that, to be honest with you, this was nothing. This is what we call (unintelligible), so not a big deal. But around here, it shuts everything down, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
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KASTE: So for the time being, it's a snow day in Seattle, but it won't last too long. The forecast says the temperature will rise again in the next day or so, and this snow will turn into rain. And rain, we know how to deal with. Martin Kaste, NPR News, Seattle.
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Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich is perhaps as well-known among peace activists nationwide as he is among his constituents in Cleveland. But Kucinich now finds himself in unfamiliar territory. For the first time since he came to Congress 15 years ago, he is fighting to keep his job. Ohio's new Republican-drawn congressional map pits Kucinich against longtime Democrat Marcy Kaptur of Toledo. The new district they're battling over stretches 120 miles along the Lake Erie shoreline.
Bill Rice, of member station WCPN in Cleveland, has our story.
BILL RICE, BYLINE: Dennis Kucinich is most in his element when he's fighting against social injustice. Wherever he sees an outrage against the little guy, you'll find Kucinich railing against it - like at this recent public meeting about a new trash- to-energy facility the city of Cleveland wants to install in a west side neighborhood.
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: This is about our community, where we live. And we're not going to live in a place where there's a garbage incinerator that's ruining our community. So I'm going to take a strong stand on this. We'll use the full power that we can summon from Congress on this...
RICE: That's typical Kucinich, whether he's protesting the war or running for president, as he's done twice.
KUCINICH: My approach is well-known: fearless, willing to take a stand when maybe others wouldn't, and not worried about rocking the boat.
RICE: And it's what probably most sets him apart from congresswoman Marcy Kaptur. When Ohio lost two congressional seats after the last census count, many saw Kucinich's seat as a ripe for elimination. His reputation as a liberal purist, and penchant for the national spotlight, made him a favorite Republican punching bag.
Dave Cohen teaches political science at the University of Akron. He says by contrast, Kaptur, while close to Kucinich in ideology, is much more comfortable as part of the Democratic power structure in Congress.
DAVE COHEN: Kaptur strikes me very much as a coalition builder and someone that, you know, is an inside player and will work and strike deals. Kucinich strikes me as more of an outsider.
RICE: Kaptur's long experience in the House - nearly 30 years - is her biggest selling point. It's earned her a coveted spot on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, which she says has helped send millions of dollars to her district.
REP. MARCY KAPTUR: That is a very important committee in the Congress. And I have risen now to the number two position. That seniority doesn't belong to me; that belongs to Ohio.
RICE: Kaptur's biggest challenge is attracting Kucinich supporters in the new district over to her side. Only registered party members can vote in Ohio's primaries, and there are about 60 percent more registered Democrats in Kucinich's home turf than in Kaptur's. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: In Ohio, on the day of a primary election, voters may request a ballot to vote in any one party's primary.]
But there's a swath of the new district not currently represented by either candidate, and both are trying to win those voters.
At this labor-sponsored, meet-the-candidates event in Lorain, about 30 miles west of Cleveland, Joel Arredondo, who sits on the Lorain City Council, says Kaptur will get his vote.
JOEL ARREDONDO: I firmly believe that, you know, she brings a lot more to the table with her experience and her expertise. So that's who I'm supporting.
RICE: Others like that Kaptur is a woman who wields considerable clout. But Kucinich has his supporters, too, like Lorain resident Jim Ward.
JIM WARD: It's his passion for the issues; that he doesn't waver on the issues. He says what he stands for. And whatever else might play into it, he'll stand by what he says.
RICE: Any edge Kucinich may have in popularity or name recognition is countered by Kaptur's clear advantage in fundraising. As of September 30th, Kucinich's campaign had under $100,000 on hand, while Kaptur's had more than 600,000 - enough to pay for lots of TV ads in Kucinich's home territory.
For NPR News, I'm Bill Rice in Cleveland.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
Now, our series Three Books in which writers talk about three books on one theme. Today, we hear from someone who is both a writer and a doctor, Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa.
DR. ALFREDO QUINONES-HINOJOSA: As a boy in a tiny village in Mexico, I loved climbing up to the roof of my family's small home so I could study the sky and dream of becoming an astronaut. Then I discovered Kaliman, a comic book hero who was fond of saying: He who masters the mind, masters everything. With that as my mantra, I immersed myself in a new type of literature: true stories by and about scientific pioneers. They convinced me that I really could go from being a migrant farm worker to a Harvard-educated neuroscientist and beyond.
Prior to Dr. Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the scientific community viewed the nervous system as a continuous strand. Not so, theorized this future father of neuroscience, who argue that any attempt to operate on one part of the brain would disable the rest of it, like pulling out a bulb from a strand of Christmas tree lights. How did he reach such a radical finding? In "Advice for a Young Investigator," Cajal provides insight into his unconventional investigative process. He calls it a modest booklet intended to inspire more students to embrace laboratory research.
Born in New York City the same year as Cajal, William Stewart Halsted didn't decide to study medicine until he was a senior at Yale. It was a choice that profoundly impacted the surgical field, as Gerald Imber describes in his masterful biography, "Genius on the Edge." Imber realistically portrays the agony of operations a century ago when the mortality rate was as high as 99 percent. Today, it's 1 percent, in part because of Halsted, whose genius often came from common sense like washing hands and wearing a special clothing in the operating room.
Without the influence of Cajal and Halsted, the career of Harvey Cushing may not have been possible. And without Cushing, many careers of brain surgeons, including my own, would not exist. In this marvelous biography, "Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery," Michael Bliss examines both the icon and the person. Cushing was a mentor and a tormentor, a perfectionist who often forgot the line between confidence and arrogance, yet, ultimately, he was a healer who once said that brain surgery amounts to 20 percent science, 75 percent artistry and 5 percent community benefit.
All three of these books made me wonder if all pioneers of science are dreamers, eccentric, on the edge, or just plain crazy.
SIEGEL: Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa is the author of "Becoming Dr. Q: My Journey from Migrant Farm Worker to Brain Surgeon."
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
When Roya Hakakian emigrated from Iran to the U.S., she didn't think any poet in her new country could top the ones she grew up with. Then she discovered Theodore Roethke. For our series You Must Read This, she tells us her story about Roethke's poem "My Papa's Waltz."
ROYA HAKAKIAN: An immigrant's arrival in America has a distinct physical beginning, marked by the landing of one's plane. But there's another arrival: the cultural one. Of the latter sort, the most memorable for me occurred nearly 20 years ago. I was still a new refugee, my heart's gaze fixed upon all that I'd left behind, upon Iran and the beloved language which, to the fledgling poet in me, meant everything.
My encounter with America had dwarfed me. Everything here was bigger, better or, as displayed on every shampoo bottle, at least 20 percent more. Except - and this was my sole consolation - for the treasury of poetry I carried in my head. Persian literature, with its ancient tradition of verse, was how I cured homesickness.
When feelings of inadequacy arose, I fought them, knowing that America, however great, could not match my country's peerless poetry. I'd rested in that certainty when a poem by Theodore Roethke unsettled me. It was called "My Papa's Waltz." It's a short poem, all of four stanzas. The first begins: The whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy, but I hung on like death. Such waltzing was not easy.
The verse is spare and simple, as if the urgency of their meaning makes the use of every trope and device a hindrance. It is the absence of the ornate that lets the tragedy at the core of the poem shine so brilliantly. The effect of a great work of literature is often to unhinge its reader, to strip her of all previously cherished beliefs down to discomfiting nakedness.
Roethke's "Waltz" did just that. It abruptly unveiled to me everything that centuries of Persian poetry had not, to shift the focus from the outward life to the life at home. To portray the father, the most revered figure in the culture I knew, in a negative light - in essence, to question his credibility, his authority - Roethke had pulled the pedestal from beneath the taboo.
To me, someone whose most formative adolescent experience had been the Iranian Revolution of 1979, what Roethke had done was to conduct a revolution on the page, something that generations of Persian poets, who had elegantly written against the tyranny of their rulers, had never challenged.
Once, I arrived in America on an airplane. Later, I arrived deeper yet on the wings of Roethke's verse. Suddenly, I knew freedom in its most tangible and consequential way.
SIEGEL: The poem is "My Papa's Waltz." Roya Hakakian is the author of the book "Assassins of the Turquoise Palace."
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
And I'm Audie Cornish.
In the modern history of East Asia, college students have played a leading role in pushing for political reform and challenging authoritarian regimes. Those regimes, of course, have ways to keep students in line.
From Kuala Lumpur, NPR's Anthony Kuhn has the story of one student activist and his fight to abolish a 40-year-old law that bars Malaysian college students from participating in politics.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTESTERS CHANTING)
ANTHONY KUHN, BYLINE: Reformasi, or reform, chants the crowd of thousands rallying outside Malaysia's high court. It's January 9th and the crowds are awaiting the verdict in the trial of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim. The government had charged him with sodomy, his supporters believe, in an attempt to end his political career.
ADAM ADLI: (Foreign language spoken)
KUHN: Students, sons of fishermen and farmers, rise up, shouts a mop-haired college student in a Beatles T-shirt. He's a rising political star named Adam Adli.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING)
KUHN: Just as he's speaking, news comes that Anwar has unexpectedly been acquitted of the sodomy charges. The crowd erupts in celebration.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING)
KUHN: Adam has made headlines by demanding the abolition of the University and University Colleges Act. That act bans students from joining or even speaking in support of political parties. Adam slams the act as an attempt by the education authorities to stifle free speech and impose conformity on students.
ADLI: They centralize everything. They even centralize how you think, how you learn. So the graduates will become people with no passion, people with no interest in social and political issues.
KUHN: The act was born out of Malaysia's race riots of 1969. Student protests followed, led by Anwar Ibrahim, who was then a student firebrand. The protests shook the government which responded by drafting the Universities Act in 1971.
University of Malaya political economist Terence Gomez says the government fears Adam Adli now, much as it feared Anwar Ibrahim four decades ago
PROFESSOR TERENCE GOMEZ: The Adli case is a case of the spark that has ignited a fire. And the government is extremely worried that this movement is going to spread and become a movement that can overthrow this government.
KUHN: Gomez says the current government has failed to deliver on its promise of democratic reforms. Recent protests against laws which limits civil liberties, such as the Internal Security Act of 1960, have produced what critics say are mostly cosmetic changes.
Gomez argues that by limiting academic freedom, the Universities Act has hurt Malaysian higher education. This has sent disaffected youth flocking to the opposition, led by Anwar Ibrahim. Anwar has pledged to oust the current government in elections expected this year.
GOMEZ: The youth are being left behind because of public policies. Look at the kind of education that they're getting. They are now unemployable because of the poor quality of education that they're getting. They've got a lot to be upset about.
KUHN: Hours after the High Court acquitted Anwar Ibrahim, university authorities suspended Adam Adli for three semesters. His offense: Pulling down a picture of Prime Minister Najib Razak during a protest march. The authorities declined to be interviewed.
Adam emerges from the school's gates to find fellow students hemmed in by police with shields and truncheons.
ADLI: (Foreign language spoken)
KUHN: The struggle is not mine alone, he tells his classmates, we're all in this together.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTESTERS)
KUHN: Law student Abdullah Aziz agrees. He says that Adam and other students are paying a high price just for exercising their legal rights.
ABDULLAH AZIZ: The ruling party labeled us as the opposition. We don't want that kind of label. We are not opposition. We are not paid by any political party to be in politics. We are students, we have our own idealism and that is what we are fighting for.
KUHN: Adam Adli is visibly shaken by his punishment but still defiant.
ADLI: This is so unconstitutional. Where is the students' right? Where's the human right in here? They say I give a bad image to the university and also brought chaos to the country.
KUHN: In a quiet moment before his hearing, though, Adam confided that he's already gotten offers from other universities willing to take him in if he's expelled. He says he's content to be a student activist. And he shudders at the idea of a career in the stuffy, stodgy arena of elite politics.
ADLI: It's so not for young people like me.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
ADLI: You see, I'd rather be Che Guevara than Fidel Castro.
KUHN: Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Kuala Lumpur.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The new album by Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards is filled with heartache and self-doubt. It makes sense - much of the album was written around the time of her divorce.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PINK CHAMPAGNE")
CORNISH: White carnations, a mother's clutch - in this song, "Pink Champagne," Edwards begins with an image of a wedding day. And if you listen to the lyrics, you can tell things are not going to end well.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PINK CHAMPAGNE")
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PINK CHAMPAGNE")
CORNISH: Can you tell us how the chorus came together?
: The referencing pink champagne came from my own, brief love affair with pink champagne where one, particular night as things were not going very well, I drank too much pink champagne. And afterwards, I reflected about how, you know, pink champagne tastes the same and - than - regular champagne. And all I could think of was that it still gave me the same hangover. And I kind of thought how it was funny that that translates in a lot of things in life.
CORNISH: Especially in the context of this, where even though we're talking about the song, about being at a wedding, it's really - it seems to be more about failed expectations.
: It is about failed expectations. There was a time in my life where I remember thinking to myself hey, you know, you're doing OK. You're not even 30 and you're married, you own a home and you have this career. And you really have your (beep) together and you've really sorted some things out, and you should be really proud of yourself.
And then I remember thinking that a house does not make you a better person, or a more complete person. It's just a house. And it's the things that you do in that home, and who you do it with and all that stuff, that's far, far more important.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PINK CHAMPAGNE")
CORNISH: Well, we appreciate you doing it on this song ,and on this album.
: Thank you. I - part of me hates you for picking the most raw song on this record to talk about, and I guess maybe it's inevitable. I don't care - of course, I don't hate you. I love you.
CORNISH: I love this song. Kathleen Edwards - her new album is called "Voyageur." Kathleen, thanks so much for talking with us.
: Thank you.
CORNISH: You can hear "Pink Champagne," and the other songs from "Voyageur," at NPRMusic.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PINK CHAMPAGNE")
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Another branch of the Murdoch media empire is increasing its reach in a notoriously un-lucrative business: foreign films. The movie "Sarah's Key" was last year's highest-grossing foreign-language film here in the U.S., and it made less than $8 million. NPR's Neda Ulaby reports on the new studio, called Fox International, and its remarkably simple business model: Think local.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: How does Rupert Murdoch expect to make money given the tiny audiences for foreign movies? Well, it turns out Fox is making them for their own local markets.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "LOVE IN SPACE")
ULABY: A Chinese film called "Love in Space" earned $10 million in China.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "LOVE IN SPACE")
ULABY: A German hit called "What a Man" made $12 million in Germany.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "WHAT A MAN")
ULABY: And a hugely scaled Russian epic about the Bolshevik Revolution pulled in a very aristocratic $50 million in Russia.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE)
ULABY: None of these hit local films saw a real release in the United States. All were co-produced by Fox International and local partners. Sanford Panitch runs the division from Los Angeles. He says if you want to make money selling films internationally, you might assume you do it by exporting big Hollywood blockbusters. But overlooking local movies is overlooking significant markets.
SANFORD PANITCH: China is the second or third biggest market in the world, at 50 percent local; India, the fourth biggest market in the world, at 90 percent local; France, at 40 percent local; Germany, at 30 percent local; Korea - billion-dollar market, 50 percent local; Japan - actually, Japan, the biggest international market in the world, 64 percent local.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE)
ULABY: Fox International Productions actually started off about three years ago with a Japanese version of the movie "Sideways," the one about two guys touring wine country.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE)
PANITCH: When we originally got into the business, we thought, well, we have this great library; let's take advantage of it. And ironically, the local markets don't really want recycled Hollywood content.
ULABY: And really, why would they? Bollywood hardly needs old American ideas. And "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" has refreshed Hollywood's interest in stories from abroad. That's not a Fox picture. But Panitch says his division is introducing foreign books, scripts and directors to the larger Fox ecosystem.
PANITCH: There's a new aesthetic that's coming out of people that weren't schooled in traditional Hollywood ways. And I think there's an incestuousness - creatively - here, where we're all reading the same publications and listening to the same music.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "MISS BALA")
ULABY: One of Fox International's latest successes comes from Mexico. "Miss Bala" is an arthouse film that crossed over to find wide audiences in Mexico. It's about a naive beauty queen who falls in with a drug cartel. It opens in the U.S. on Friday.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "MISS BALA")
PANITCH: This guy is really talented - this director, Gerardo Naranjo.
GERARDO NARANJO: I said, I won't change anything - that was my first reaction.
ULABY: Director Gerardo Naranjo was suspicious when he first got a call from Fox. At that point, he'd basically finished the movie, but he needed money to reshoot a few key scenes. Naranjo says he was not sure how much Fox would interfere.
NARANJO: What we felt the first moment was that we had to protect the film. I guess I was very concerned about, you know, not changing the content, or not changing the movie, for it to be a Fox film.
ULABY: By which Naranjo means he did not want John Williams music or a sentimental ending. And he was surprised that a Fox News sister company would support a Mexican film critical of America's role in the drug trade.
NARANJO: To my surprise, they were great people. They were very supportive of us.
ULABY: Fox International found "Miss Bala" through a Fox executive in Mexico.
PANITCH: Fox has 28 offices around the world.
ULABY: And, says Sanford Panitch, a global network of executives managing Fox-owned TV stations, and distributing Fox movies. That gives them an edge in finding and working with local talent. Many of these movies will be available to Americans through video on demand and DVD, but their success really does not depend on audiences here.
PANITCH: I think that's a shift that is a little scary sometimes because it means, well, wait a minute, it means - you mean Hollywood movies, American movies aren't the only thing people want to see? And thank goodness.
ULABY: Movie audiences are on the rise in the important emerging economies known as BRIC in business circles: Brazil, Russia, India, China. Here, they're dropping like a brick. Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The nation's top military officer, General Martin Dempsey, is in Israel today. The visit is being closely watched for clues that might explain how the U.S. and Israel will manage growing tensions with Iran over its nuclear program.
As NPR's Tom Bowman reports, General Dempsey is expected to deliver a firm message to the Israelis, give tough sanctions time to work and, above all, don't attack Iran.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: General Dempsey's first trip to Israel comes at a particularly tense time. Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, the key route for oil shipments. It has held naval war games. An Iranian nuclear scientist was killed by a drive-by assassin. Iran blames Israel and the United States.
JON ALTERMAN: This is getting very dangerous.
BOWMAN: Jon Alterman is a former State Department official who runs the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
ALTERMAN: All of the senior people I know in the U.S. government are starting to lose sleep over where this all might go.
BOWMAN: Where this all might go. The greatest concern for U.S. officials is an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, which Iran insists are only for peaceful purposes. An Israeli attack, said one Pentagon official, could lead to Iranian agents striking U.S. military and diplomatic personnel throughout the Middle East.
Some U.S. officials believe that an Israeli attack is more likely now because Iran is moving forward on its nuclear program, even hiding portions of it deep inside a mountain, and because the U.S. military has left Iraq. Israeli war planes could fly directly across Iraq, even without Iraq's permission, to bomb Iranian nuclear sites.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has downplayed any imminent attack. Here he is this week in an interview with Israeli army radio.
EHUD BARAK: (Through Translator) We haven't made any decision to do this. The entire thing is very far off.
BOWMAN: Maybe far off, but still possible. Gawdat Bahgat is a Middle East expert at National Defense University. He says Israel will mount an attack if it sees Iran's nuclear program progressing past a certain point.
GAWDAT BAHGAT: I believe Israel has its own red lines, and if Iran crosses these red lines, Israel will attack.
BOWMAN: The sense among experts is that Israeli officials are debating where that red line is. There is disagreement about what milestones would warrant air strikes by Israel. Again, Jon Alterman, the former State Department official.
ALTERMAN: I don't think the Israelis know what their intention is. I think they genuinely haven't made a decision. I think when they do make a decision it's not going to be a decision they're going to share widely.
BOWMAN: Would they have to tell the U.S., though, do you think?
ALTERMAN: My guess is the Israelis would have to give the United States at least some number of minutes warning, but probably not much more than that.
BOWMAN: Alterman says, at least for the time being, Israel will wait and see if tougher sanctions work. American officials, for their part, are continuing to push for such non-military pressure on Iran's nuclear program.
Here's Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on CBS's "Face the Nation" earlier this month.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FACE THE NATION")
BOWMAN: Still, even Panetta says that no option is off the table, even a military one to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb. On the same program, General Dempsey was asked if the U.S. could destroy Iran's nuclear program.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FACE THE NATION")
BOWMAN: Dempsey would only say that his job is to plan for all military options, but the case General Dempsey is making in Israel is to hold off on any military action.
Tom Bowman, NPR News, Washington.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Now, to presidential politics and a question of taxes. A couple days ago, Mitt Romney said this about the income tax rate he pays:
MITT ROMNEY: What's the effective rate I've been paying? It's probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything, 'cause my last 10 years, I've - my income comes overwhelmingly from investments.
CORNISH: So why does a multimillionaire pay a rate of just 15 percent on his income? After all, the top income tax rate is 35 percent. Many middle-class people pay over 20 percent.
We asked NPR's John Ydstie to explain. Hello there, John.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: Hi, Audie.
CORNISH: So what's the deal? Why does Mr. Romney get such a low rate?
YDSTIE: Well, as Mr. Romney said, most of his income came from investments. So it came in the form of dividends or capital gains - that is, the increase in the value of his investments. They're both taxed at a lower rate than what's called ordinary income, the salaries most of us make going to the office, or going to the factory.
CORNISH: And what's the rationale behind that?
YDSTIE: Well, the theory has been that if you tax investment income at too high a rate, you'll discourage investment, and you'll crimp economic growth and job creation. But it is somewhat controversial - and not in the least because most of the people who pay that lower rate are well off.
In fact, 70 percent of the benefit goes to the top 1 percent of income earners. It's the rate paid by hedge fund managers and private equity managers - like Mr. Romney when he was at Bain Capital - and big investors like Warren Buffet.
Of course, Buffet is quite famously appalled by this situation. He says it's not fair that he pays a lower rate on his massive income than his secretary pays on her middle-class income.
CORNISH: And, of course, I mean, Warren Buffet says it's not fair, but does a 15 percent rate actually benefit the economy enough to justify this?
YDSTIE: Well, I've been told by a number of economists that there are no studies that prove that this is the case. It's essentially an argument that a lower capital gains rate boosts growth. And they say it makes some good sense when it comes, especially, to venture capital.
CORNISH: Right. Venture capital is the kind of money that helped create companies like Microsoft and Apple. Venture capitalists helped back Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, right?
YDSTIE: Right. And they created huge numbers of jobs and boosted the economy, and we want to encourage that. But the problem is, Congress hasn't been able to limit the tax break to that group. And it turns out that venture capital income represents less than one-tenth of the income that enjoys this low, 15 percent rate.
If you sell stock in Ford or General Mills and make a profit, you get the lower rate. If you sell real estate and make a profit, you get the lower rate. But basically, that's just a change of ownership and doesn't make much contribution to economic growth or job creation.
CORNISH: So it sounds like economists are saying that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that this kind of income - investment income - is taxed at a lower rate than regular wages and salaries.
YDSTIE: That's right. And in fact, the difference between the 15 percent capital gains rate and the top 35 percent for ordinary income, encourages people to create tax shelters that actually allow them to claim their income as capital gains. And those tax shelters produce a huge amount of inefficient economic activity. In the past, things like investing in office buildings that stand empty, or city people buying tractors - not to mention you have very smart people creating tax dodges, and they could be inventing more useful things that actually do create jobs.
CORNISH: And it's become a hot button issue on the campaign trail, but is there any interest politically in changing the tax provisions?
YDSTIE: Well, I don't think we have any critical mass, politically, but there's a good deal of agreement that the tax rate on investment income should be the same as for ordinary income. The president's bipartisan deficit reduction panel suggests that as part of its budget reforms. Of course, there's also a lot of interest in keeping this rate low by some very powerful people, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
CORNISH: NPR's economics correspondent, John Ydstie. John, thank you for talking with us.
YDSTIE: You're welcome, Audie.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
One of America's oldest and best-known companies filed for bankruptcy today. The demise of Eastman Kodak is a blow to the country, of course, but especially to the Snow Belt city that Kodak has long called home - Rochester, New York. The company was once the top employer there but it has, in recent years, shed tens of thousands of jobs.
Commentator Adam Frank has lived in Rochester for 16 years, and teaches at the University of Rochester. He has this reflection on what Kodak's decline means for his beloved city.
ADAM FRANK: Like many winter days in upstate New York, it's cold and gray in Rochester. But today feels darker than usual because when we woke up this morning, we learned that Eastman Kodak was filing for bankruptcy. We could all feel it coming, but it was still a shock. There is no conversation in Rochester today that won't include the decline of Kodak. Even in line at the coffee shop, everyone was talking about it.
But behind the headlines, there's something else going on in this town. And it's going on in small cities all over the country. Much of the role that industry used to play in innovation has shifted to the universities.
Kodak used to be the largest employer in this town, with more than 60,000 workers in 1982. Today, that title goes to the University of Rochester, with more than 20,000 employees. In the past 10 years, the school and its medical research center have grown remarkably. It's come not only from new students, but from a dramatic expansion of funded research. Some of that research has found its way into new patents, new companies and new economic activity.
Every time I turn around, it seems like there's a new building going up in the medical center. There are gleaming spaces full of people in lab coats. From new medicines to new computer chips, it feels like it's all being invented here. People mill about with their heads down in deep discussions. They have the tools they need, and you can just feel that they're going places no one's ever gone before.
Now, there was a time when large companies maintained these kinds of research efforts. In the 1950s and 1960s, Bell Labs invented everything from transistors to satellite communications. They even helped discover the Big Bang. But those days are pretty much gone. Bio-tech companies still have labs, but the free-flowing, open-ended exploration of ideas is really coming from universities now.
For cities like mine, these transitions are painful. Jobs are being lost as the old industrial players decline. Everyone is looking for something new to drive the economy, and the place they're looking are the schools.
The news from Kodak today makes this a really sad day for Rochester. Friends of mine have lost their jobs, and I can see how hard it is for them every day. But I have hope.
From the vantage point of my hometown, I can see that we are all in the midst of a profound transition. For better or worse, our universities are no longer the ivy-covered cloisters of sheltered learning. Instead, they have become dynamos - spinning out new knowledge, new technologies, new jobs, and a new hope for the future.
SIEGEL: Adam Frank teaches physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester. He's the author of the book "About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang."
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
A pioneer of rhythm and blues has died. Johnny Otis was 90 years old and died at his home near Los Angeles. Otis was many things: band leader, composer, radio and TV host.
As NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports, he also launched the careers of some of R&B's finest singers.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: Johnny Otis could write and sing his own songs and he had several hits, like "Willie and The Hand Jive."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WILLIE AND THE HAND JIVE")
BLAIR: But Otis spent as much or more time developing the talents of others. Otis once said he could see something before anyone else. And he saw that something in a long list of great singers.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONGS, "HOUND DOG," "ROLL WITH ME, HENRY," "HIGHER AND HIGHER")
BLAIR: Jackie Wilson, Etta James, Big Mama Thornton, to name a fraction of the artists Johnny Otis either discovered or nurtured.
Johnny Veloites grew up during the Depression. The son of Greek immigrants in a working-class neighborhood in Berkeley, California, he changed his name to Otis and played mostly in black clubs.
In 1989, Terry Gross of WHYY's FRESH AIR, asked Otis about his loyalty to black culture.
: I could not veer away because that's where I wanted to be. Those were my friends. That's what I loved. It wasn't the music that brought me to the black community. It was the way of life. I felt I was black.
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
What was it about the way of life?
: Everything about it.
BLAIR: And he defended it as a civil rights activist. He went to demonstrations and wrote protest songs.
George Lipsitz, author of a biography of Johnny Otis, says the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in Otis' yard. But that didn't stop Otis from later writing a book about the Watts riots, arguing they were a logical reaction to police brutality and slumlords in the ghetto. Lipsitz thinks that's why Johnny Otis isn't better known today.
GEORGE LIPSITZ: It's as if he took a match and lit the rest of his career on fire. Because once you took public stands like that, you weren't going to be the curator of rock 'n' roll, like Dick Clark or Casey Kasem. You were somebody who was going to be outside commercial culture in this society.
BLAIR: Johnny Otis died on Tuesday at his home near Los Angeles. As Bob Dylan once put it: Johnny's career just dazzles the mind.
Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Well, now to Egypt, which is forming a new parliament. The recent elections there were declared largely free and fair, and Islamists won big. The vote delivered a stunning setback, however, to one group - women. Only about 1 percent of the new legislature will be female.
As NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports from Cairo, activists are deeply disappointed.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, BYLINE: Not only was there a dearth of women seeking office in the recent elections here, but the problem was no one voted for the ones who did. Although the final numbers haven't been announced, out of 508 seats, only about eight will be filled by women.
Dalia Abdel Hamid is the gender officer at the Egyptian Initiative for Human Rights.
DALIA ABDEL HAMID: I think it's a disastrous parliament. It doesn't reflect the society. It doesn't represent the society. And after the revolution, everybody wanted to be represented and to have their voices heard. But women, they're just being marginalized and - by all the parties.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Usually, in nascent democracies, a quota system is put in place in elections, to ensure that all groups get adequate representation. But here in Egypt, having a quota for women was viewed with suspicion. Many thought it might be used - as it was in Mubarak's time - to stack the parliament unfairly.
Also, the women who ran on party lists were placed far down on those lists, meaning they had virtually no chance of getting into office. And that was true of all parties, Islamist as well as liberal.
DALIA ZIADA: It really hurts so much when you see the same people whom you were with in that square that day, fighting against this regime, are now turning against you - like betrayal from our companions.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Dalia Ziada is an activist here. Like many Egyptian women, she was a victim of female genital mutilation as a child, and that led her to become an advocate of women's rights. She also ran for parliament. She says people's attitudes need to change in Egypt.
ZIADA: I tried to test how the society is thinking about women after the revolution. We went to three locations, and we did a survey that's composed of only one question, which is: Would you accept to see your president as a woman? One hundred percent of them said no. So this is how people think. It's OK to have democracy, but women - is not in the equation of democracy.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The roots of discrimination against women are deep here. Sexual harassment is not only pervasive, but it's used as a tool of political oppression.
(SOUNDBITE OF A YOUTUBE VIDEO)
(SOUNDBITE OF YELLING AND SCREAMING)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: This is YouTube video of an attack last night on a female activist who'd been publicly critical of the ruling military junta. Thugs surrounded and beat Nawara Negm, some screaming you whore, you sold your country. It's only the latest in a stream of assaults against women that have provoked shock and outrage.
And women's groups worry the situation may only get worse. Islamist parties including hard-line Salafis, who believe in forcing women to cover themselves, will be the majority in the new parliament, and will have a role in crafting the new constitution.
Dalia Zaida, who wears a headscarf herself and is an observant Muslim, says it's a grave concern.
ZIADA: These people see women as evil, as the source of all vices. So they will try to suppress her in every way possible.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Not so, says Dr. Omaima Kamel. She says those are dangerous stereotypes. She is a professor of public health at a university here, and also ran as a candidate for the Muslim Brotherhood's political party. You can be Islamist and also empowered as a woman, she says. She says the men voted into parliament can safeguard women's rights through compromise.
DR. OMAIMA KAMEL: You will find voices against hijab, and voices against bikini.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
KAMEL: And all the time, we accept the diversity, we accept the difference. But who can decide the path of Egypt? The moderates, those can make consensus.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But Kamel was herself placed so far down on the party's electoral list that she probably won't be given a seat in the new parliament. And when asked if a woman should be president, she answers...
KAMEL: Oh, I don't think so. Egypt is a very large country, and its problems is very, very deeply rooted. And I think it will be difficult for her to carry this responsibility. Let men do the difficult job...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
KAMEL: ...and we can support.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: She says maybe the next generation of women will think differently. But this, she adds, is what I believe.
Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, Cairo.
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It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Audie Cornish.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
I'm Robert Siegel. And we begin this hour with some head-spinning events on the Republican campaign trail. For one, Texas Governor Rick Perry dropped out of the race. And today also brought a new result from the Iowa caucuses, and a possible bombshell for the Gingrich campaign.
Joining us from South Carolina, where Republicans will vote in Saturday's primary, is NPR's Mara Liasson. And Mara, there are now only four candidates. They'll meet to debate tonight, in Charleston. Will Rick Perry's departure, and his endorsement of New Gingrich today, make much of a difference?
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Well, it will if it is the beginning of the long-awaited consolidation of the conservative vote, if Newt Gingrich can turn this - finally - into a two-man race, him against Mitt Romney. But he still has to get past Rick Santorum and Ron Paul, who are not getting out of the race. Gingrich has been enjoying a surge in the polls, especially after his performance in the debates, and the Romney campaign is clearly worried about this.
They've rolled out new attacks ads against Gingrich. They've had some of their biggest surrogates, Jim Talent and John Sununu, holding conference calls about Newt's chaotic, unreliable leadership. And Romney himself departed from his habit, and actually mentioned Gingrich by name personally - today and yesterday - on the stump.
SIEGEL: But despite this surge for Gingrich in the polls, there is this possible bombshell for the Gingrich campaign, which comes in the form of former Mrs. Gingrich, Marianne Gingrich - wife number two - who is featured in a piece tonight on ABC's "Nightline." What else do we know about that piece?
LIASSON: Right. Marianne Gingrich, who was married to Newt while he had his affair with Callista, who is now his third wife, gave an interview to ABC where she talked about her marriage. And here is a little bit of what she said:
MARIANNE GINGRICH: I said to him, Newt, we've been married a long time. And he said yes, but you want me all to yourself. Callista doesn't care what I do.
BRIAN ROSS: What was he saying to you, do you think?
GINGRICH: He - oh, he was asking to have an open marriage, and I refused.
LIASSON: The question is, is this kind of thing already factored into Newt Gingrich's stock price? I mean, this - it's widely known that he was unfaithful. His whole campaign is based on redemption and a second chance. He said he's asked God for forgiveness. Now, he's a Catholic. He's happily married. He's a grandfather. So we'll see if this does any damage to Newt Gingrich or not.
SIEGEL: Let's move on to Rick Santorum. He's been stuck in third place in the South Carolina polls, but he got this strange boost today in the form of news from Iowa. Tell us about what happened.
LIASSON: Iowa officials have released the final tally from the caucuses and lo and behold, Rick Santorum is actually 34 votes ahead of Mitt Romney instead of eight votes behind. Now, Iowa officials say there are still eight precincts where they can't find the ballots, so they'll never know the exact number. The question is, now that Rick Santorum can say he won - or got more votes than Romney - is it too late? Is it too little? He hasn't been able to get traction here in South Carolina, despite the endorsement of some prominent evangelicals.
SIEGEL: So where does all this leave Mitt Romney, Mara? He was - just a day ago, before we learned about Iowa - seemed to be cruising toward an unprecedented, third-in-a-row victory, and had an unimpeded path to the nomination. Not so clear today.
LIASSON: Not so clear. It would be bad for Romney if Newt Gingrich can pull off an upset in South Carolina. Not because Newt can beat Romney for the nomination - Romney is still very well-positioned; he has lots of money for Florida and beyond - but because South Carolina is a red state. This is the first Republican state that's voting. And if Romney can't win in a red state, there will be questions raised about his hold on the base of his party.
Now, on the other hand, if he can win, even Newt Gingrich says the race will be over if Romney wins South Carolina. So the stakes are very high here.
SIEGEL: Finally, tonight is the last debate before the South Carolina primary. You're going to be there. What do you expect?
LIASSON: I expect lots of questions about Mitt Romney's business practices and taxes. We've learned since the last debate that he has bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. He pays a 15 percent tax rate. He said that he made $375,000 in speaking fees, which he described as not very much. The question is why Romney hasn't had a better answer for all of these things, which his campaign certainly could have anticipated. He's been the model of preparation and discipline, except for in this area.
Even Chris Christie, one of his most prominent supporters, is telling him: Release your tax returns; that's what I would do. That's not the kind of headline Romney wants, and he certainly will be asked about these things tonight.
SIEGEL: OK. Thanks, Mara.
LIASSON: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's Mara Liasson in Charleston, South Carolina.
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Rick Santorum is hoping his reversal in the Iowa caucus results will translate into momentum going into this weekend's primary. Santorum also has the backing of some leading social conservatives. But NPR's Scott Horsley reports that Republican rivals are skeptical that the former Pennsylvania senator can go the distance.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Republican Party leaders in Iowa are officially calling their final caucus tally a tie because some of the precinct results have been lost. But to Rick Santorum, being ahead by 34 votes is still a clear victory. At a waterfront news conference in Charleston, South Carolina, today, Santorum noted the last Iowa tally shows him with more than four times the winning margin that Mitt Romney enjoyed on caucus night.
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS CONFERENCE)
RICK SANTORUM: As we've said from day one, this is a marathon, not a sprint. You know, there have been two primaries held now. We've won one and...
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERS, APPLAUSE)
HORSLEY: Leading social conservatives, like Focus On The Family founder James Dobson, have been urging their followers in South Carolina to get behind Santorum. Here, as in Iowa, evangelicals make up more than half the Republican base. Santorum's been hampered by a lack of money and organization, but he points to his showing in Iowa as evidence that faith in his campaign is not misplaced.
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS CONFERENCE)
SANTORUM: It's says that we can win elections. We can organize. We can put together an effort to pull the resources together to be able to be successful in being the person that can defeat Mitt Romney because guess what? We defeated Mitt Romney in Iowa.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERS, APPLAUSE)
HORSLEY: So far, polling suggests voters here in South Carolina are choosing former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as the leading alternative to Romney. But Santorum argues Gingrich won't fight hard enough on controversial social issues, such as abortion or same-sex marriage.
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS CONFERENCE)
SANTORUM: One thing I'd say to undecided value voters: Look for core convictions. Look for someone who walks the walk, talks the talk, and is not afraid to lead.
HORSLEY: Santorum supporter Judy Biggie(ph) suspects Gingrich will be undone by his personal baggage, including two divorces and extramarital affairs - concerns that are likely to be amplified by an ABC interview with Gingrich's second wife. It's set to air nationally tonight, just two days before the primary. Biggie says that will bring the issue to the forefront.
JUDY BIGGIE: It was always there. It was like the elephant in the room and now it's just - everybody's recognizing that it's - the elephant is there, you know. But I think that'll help sort it out for the best candidate.
HORSLEY: For his part, Gingrich has voiced doubts that Santorum has the experience or know-how to run a national campaign. If Santorum couldn't carry his home state of Pennsylvania as an incumbent senator in 2006, Gingrich asks, how can he defeat President Obama in November?
NEWT GINGRICH: He lost his state for re-election by the largest margin in the history of Pennsylvania. Now, there's no evidence that he could put together a national majority.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
HORSLEY: The Iowa results will change at least one thing - Romney will have to drop this laugh line from his stump speech, in which he likes to quote from "America The Beautiful."
MITT ROMNEY: Amber waves of grain - when I was in Iowa, I used to try and convince them that corn qualified as an amber wave of grain. I think that accounted for my eight-vote, landslide margin there in Iowa.
HORSLEY: Romney, a consummate number-cruncher, seems far more worried about a late surge by Gingrich in South Carolina, than a late surge for Santorum in Iowa. The former Massachusetts governor is known for his analytical skill. That's part of what appeals to South Carolina Romney supporter John Snyder(ph).
JOHN SNYDER: You've heard the term ready, aim, fire - of course. Some people are ready, fire, aim. And he is ready, aim, aim, aim, fire. And I think that's what qualifies him, in my opinion, to be a great president.
HORSLEY: And for now, Romney's aiming all of his political fire at the man he perceives as his biggest threat - Gingrich. Romney cares far less about who won the first contest weeks ago than about who will win the next one on Saturday.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, Charleston, North Carolina.
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Today, Arab League monitors sent to Syria completed the initial stage of their mission. The group was assessing a plan for Syria to withdraw its army from city streets and end the violent crackdown on protesters.
The Arab League meets this weekend to review the monitors' report and determine what to do next. In a moment, we'll hear more about that from NPR's Peter Kenyon.
CORNISH: First, the Arab League's mission in Syria has been controversial. Earlier today, we reached a former observer who quit and left Syria last week. He's an Algerian writer, based in Paris, named Anwar Malek. And he told us what he saw in the city of Homs.
ANWAR MALEK: (Through Translator) The signs of blood on the walls, on the ground. On every street there are signs of blood that show there have been a lot of people killed and wounded. The humanitarian situation is totally disastrous - no electricity, no water, no food, no medicine.
CORNISH: Malek says he and other monitors were threatened by Syrian authorities, and he's critical of the Arab League as well.
MALEK: (Through Translator) I refuse to be part of this charade that is full of lies. This was nonstop; the tanks were shelling, people were getting jailed. It's all lies and lies and more lies. The regime was lying to us. I realize the Arab League is actually in bed with the Syrian regime on this. They did not want to make it work.
CORNISH: NPR's Peter Kenyon has been following the situation in Syria. He joins us now.
Peter, do we know if the other Arab League monitors agree with Anwar Malek?
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: We don't know that, Audie. And they're not making public statements, and nor is that their job. I mean, Anwar Malek only spoke after quitting the mission. And yet, to be fair, the monitors are in a difficult position. They've been coming under steady criticism from opposition activists for failing to stem the violence of pro-regime forces against demonstrators. And, of course, that's not their mission.
They were assigned to monitor Syria's compliance with an Arab League plan. The plan calls for an end to shooting and the withdrawal of Syrian security forces; some forces have pulled back, others have not. The violence certainly has continued by all accounts.
The monitors, in any case, have neither the authority nor the capacity to stop what they're witnessing. The question now is what will they report to their superiors and how will that we treat their observations? What were hearing at the moment - and this won't happen for a couple of days yet - but we're hearing that the league is prepared to deliver a fairly cautious report that won't come down to harshly on the regime, perhaps may speak to levels of violence on both sides.
And this is a reflection of the fact that they're caught in between the activists, which includes a now free Syrian army, which is made up of defectors which is shooting back - sometimes in defense, sometimes on attack - and the regime itself which says it's fighting armed gangs. So they're really caught in between the violence that they can't control. And it's possible that the Arab League report will reflect that.
CORNISH: And is it likely that the Arab League observers will remain in Syria?
KENYON: Well, that is one of the big questions. The opposition activists have been saying - some of them have been saying - no, they should leave. They're not doing anything except providing cover for the regime. And yet you have to ask the question: If not these Arab League monitors than what.
CORNISH: And, Peter, lastly, what's at stake for the Arab League here? This is the first mission of its kind for them.
KENYON: Well, it is new ground. You're absolutely right. And these monitors, to be fair to them, have not had any practice doing this. There has been talk of training from the U.N. In terms of the Arab League's image and its reputation, just the fact that they're in there is a rather big step forward.
They have been known for years as a group that thrives on consensus and really doesn't take too many chances. So, they're in kind of an uncharted territory and where they go from here will be very interesting.
CORNISH: NPR's Peter Kenyon, thanks for speaking with us.
KENYON: You're welcome, Audie.
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And I'm Robert Siegel. Noted novelist, essayist and biographer, Edmund White, has written a new work of fiction. It's called "Jack Holmes and His Friend." It's a love story between two men and it spans a period of American history that saw a huge change in society's attitudes toward homosexuality.
Alan Cheuse has this review.
ALAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: When young Midwesterner Jack Holmes arrives in New York City in the early '60s, he finds a job at a Manhattan culture magazine and he finds that he's muscularly homosexual. His deep and unrequited desire for fellow magazine writer Will Wright, a shy, upper class guy fresh up out of Virginia, becomes the mulch for a deep and requited friendship that spans a decade and more.
That decade being the '60s, there's a whole lot of desiring going on, Jack for scores and scores of men, Will for the rich girl introduced to him by Jack, the girl he marries, and then for a shallow but attractive woman who becomes his mistress, also introduced to him by Jack.
For nearly half the book, we witness this story from Jack's point of view and from Will's point of view for much of the other half. Taken together, their stories form a deep and powerful picture of love, desire, affection, rejection and despair in a great American city about to become writhen with AIDS.
In passage after passage, which I won't quote here, novelist White proves himself to be the finest practitioner of making explicit and deliciously accurate sentences about sexual coupling, straight and gay. Thus, I give this book a double-X rating. In chapter after chapter, White proves himself to be one of the finest practitioners of angst-ridden scene making about people in love with desire and desirous for real love.
SIEGEL: "Jack Holmes and His Friend" from Edmund White. Alan Cheuse teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
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Texas Governor Rick Perry ended his run for president today. He threw his support behind former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Perry made his announcement in South Carolina, the same state where he launched his campaign last August. Ben Philpott, of member station KUT, has this report.
BEN PHILPOTT, BYLINE: After his fifth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, Governor Perry said he would take time to re-assess his campaign and see if there was a way forward. He found one the next morning, deciding to skip New Hampshire and make his last stand in South Carolina. But after two weeks of campaigning here without gaining support in the polls, the path ended today.
GOV. RICK PERRY: As I've contemplated the future of this campaign, I have come to the conclusion that there is no viable path forward for me in this 2012 campaign. Therefore, today I am suspending my campaign, and endorsing Newt Gingrich for president of the United States.
PHILPOTT: The Gingrich endorsement comes as the former speaker has gained momentum here in South Carolina. Several polls show him slightly ahead of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, but the nod from Perry also comes just hours before a broadcast of an ABC News interview with one of Gingrich's ex-wives. Marianne Gingrich gives intimate details of their marriage and break-up. Perry seemed to acknowledge the coming criticism in his endorsement.
PERRY: We've had our differences, which campaigns will inevitably have. And Newt is not perfect, but who among us is? The fact is, there is forgiveness for those who seek God.
PHILPOTT: Gingrich acknowledged Perry's endorsement at a campaign stop in South Carolina, saying he was honored and humbled by the support.
NEWT GINGRICH: Callista and I are both very fond of Rick and Anita Perry. They are terrific people. He has been a great patriot. He understands exactly the mission of defending and expanding freedom, and he understands that every citizen has different ways to participate.
PHILPOTT: So what's next for Perry? He flew back to Texas this afternoon and will take some time deciding if he'll campaign for Gingrich. Even if he doesn't hit the road, the former speaker has asked Perry to head up something called the 10th Amendment Enforcement Project. Gingrich says the group will come up with a party platform plank and bill defending states' rights. Beyond that - well, Texas doesn't have term limits. And campaign spokesman Ray Sullivan said the governor hasn't ruled out another re-election bid, in 2014.
RAY SULLIVAN: That is certainly a strong option, as would be - maybe doing this again in four years, if the president wins.
PHILPOTT: Sullivan says the GOP typically picks nominees who've run before. And despite the way this campaign ended - with stumbles, poor debates and dreadful election results - Perry's South Carolina chairman, Katon Dawson, said he would be ready to do it all over again.
KATON DAWSON: We want our nominee to beat President Obama. There's no question. We want our nominee to beat President Obama, but all I'm doing is putting the stickers in my top closet and changing the date if we're not successful.
PHILPOTT: Dawson says Perry made real connections with people on the campaign trail, but that there wasn't time left to shake enough hands to turn the campaign around.
For NPR News, I'm Ben Philpott in North Charleston, South Carolina.
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This primary season marks the advent of presidential super PACs: funding groups that can raise unlimited funds and advertise in support of a candidate so long as it's not coordinating with the candidate's campaign. Sheldon Adelson has acknowledged giving millions to a super PAC that supports Newt Gingrich. Jon Huntsman Sr. is reported to have supported the super PAC that backed his son. And Foster Friess, whom we're going to hear from now, is the main benefactor of a super PAC called the Red, White and Blue Fund, which has bought advertising on behalf of former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. Mr. Friess joins us from Scottsdale, Arizona. Welcome to the program.
FOSTER FRIESS: Well, I'm glad to be with you, Robert. It's a nice sunny day here, and I hope you're enjoying a good weather day as well.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: Not as good weather as you're getting. Here's the big question about super PACs: Should billionaires have the ability to single-handedly, if need be, keep a presidential campaign afloat?
FRIESS: It's interesting hardly any people raised these questions back when George Soros put in 20 million and Peter Lewis put in 14 million to bring down George Bush. I think you also want to make the point that CNN, for example, is a corporation. So when they put on a TV show which maybe could show favoritism towards a given candidate or against a given candidate, that certainly could be considered as a political contribution as well in terms of millions and millions and millions of dollars of the media that goes out. So I think...
SIEGEL: But do you, Mr. Friess, do you really see no difference between contributions to a super PAC and paying for coverage of the presidential race at CNN or MSNBC, Fox News or NPR?
FRIESS: Yeah. I see it quite - as very similar in, for instance, if CNN does a program or you do a program, National Public Radio, which could reflect your particular favoritism towards a given candidate, you, National Public Radio, is a corporation. So to give me a chance to compete with you, I think, is a very good thing.
SIEGEL: I'll set aside your characterization. I don't think that would describe any NPR program I can think of. But as an individual, don't I have the same freedom of speech that you have, and why should you have 1,000 times more ability to express yourself than I have?
FRIESS: Well, if you look at how that plays out, Meg Whitman certainly didn't see that made a lot of difference, did it? You know, the Senate is controlled by Democrats. The White House is controlled by the Democrats. We barely have the House. So it looks like we who could be considered wealthy are at a distinct disadvantage when we're competing against all the money from the Service Employees International Union and from all the money where Barack Obama - I think he's going to have about a billion dollars and...
SIEGEL: Well, we do know that all candidates need money when they run for office. Money is obviously important to them. Is it fair to require people to disclose who's backing them and who's backing the groups that back them? So that - and that could include unions. It can include millionaires. It can include people who give 100 bucks. But is it reasonable to say I'd like to know if there's a candidate in a race who has the super PAC that is essentially laundering his allowance that I should know that, that's who's keeping him in the race?
FRIESS: If the way that we can make our whole system more honest and straightforward is that you or I could give whatever amounts we want directly to the campaign, then you don't get this whole notion, well, I can't control the people that put up ads for me. And I think that's the fairest way, and so I think you and I would be joined at the hip on that proposal. I think letting people...
SIEGEL: Well, I'm not making that proposal, but I'm saying it's often advocated that there should be disclosure. And if there were, you're saying that these institutions, like super PACs and 527s, these are the results of attempts to prevent people from just being able to give as much money as they want to?
FRIESS: Well, it's exactly what's happened with - under McCain-Feingold, where people were limited to $2,500, and so I would say that you could - anybody could give whatever amount they want directly to the candidate fully disclosed, period. Then, you don't have all the legal hoops you have to jump through. You know, it's a nightmare figuring out, you know, who can I say to what? And every time I want to call someone, I have to call up my lawyer, and I say, you know, can I say this and say that? Because, as you know, the super PACs and the candidates' campaigns have to be completely at arm's length.
SIEGEL: Well, let me ask you about the arm's length that's required between the super PACs and the candidates. I've heard critics of the super PACs say that, yeah, sure, the activists that say the Red, White and Blue Fund that you've been involved with can't talk to the Santorum campaign, but you could look at his schedule and see where he'll be in Florida on which day and decide whether to buy advertising time in Miami or in Orlando, when to do it. You can hear what he's saying in speeches and figure out what arguments to amplify in advertising. The argument is it's arm's length, but it's a very short arm.
FRIESS: Well, I don't know what you're suggesting you do about that.
SIEGEL: I guess, your solution to that is just let me give me to the campaign, change the law so I can give directly to them.
FRIESS: Yeah. Well, that would be very straightforward, and everybody would be on the same page. There would not be any of this comment, well, I can't control my super PAC. You'd get rid of all that back and forth, and it would be very straightforward, clean and honest.
SIEGEL: Well, Foster Friess, Mr. Friess, thank you very much for talking with us today.
FRIESS: Bye-bye, Robert.
SIEGEL: Billionaire Foster Friess is the main benefactor of a super PAC that supports Rick Santorum.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. Apple today launched a big initiative to update an old standby, the school textbook. In a splashy announcement, the company released new tools to help publishers create digital content for students. As NPR's Larry Abramson reports, Apple is trying to capitalize on enthusiasm for the iPad in schools and colleges.
LARRY ABRAMSON, BYLINE: Rather than staging this launch in Silicon Valley, Apple chose New York City, home to the publishing industry. Apple's Phil Schiller paid tribute to the school textbooks that millions of students have schlepped to school and to college, but he said they are obsolete.
PHILIP SCHILLER: And if you're a school district that's had a - your budget has been squeezed and you've had to make them last five or six years and hand them from child to child, they get dog-eared and written in and worn. They're just not the ideal modern teaching tool.
ABRAMSON: If you've heard all this before, it's because publishers have been talking about digitizing cumbersome textbooks for years, but Apple says the iPad has changed the equation. The company says there are already 1.5 million iPads in educational settings. That makes this tablet the ideal springboard for getting rid of paper.
SCHILLER: The iPad, on the other hand, is imminently portable. It's a lot more durable than paper and binding. Of course, it's interactive.
ABRAMSON: So Apple today released iBooks Author, a new tool meant to lure publishers into creating new content specifically for the iPad education user. In a glitzy show at New York's Guggenheim Museum, Apple's Roger Rosner showed off the magic that makes it easier to include animation and lots of high tech toys into textbooks and then publish them instantly.
ROGER ROSNER: I just think that's totally awesome. Right?
ABRAMSON: The crowd of publishers and tech gurus went wild. That's because the industry is hoping Apple's involvement will lead more businesses into what has been a relatively small pond.
Forrester research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps says, up until now, publishers have been mostly focused on adapting existing texts to computers.
SARAH ROTMAN EPPS: But they're not new content created specifically for the platform. That content exists also, but in much smaller numbers.
ABRAMSON: Apple's publishing tool is available today for free. The books that result from this effort will be sold in a new and improved iBook store. The company also announced upgrades to iTunes University, which already holds thousands of college lectures.
Truth is, a lot of companies already offer some of the features Apple is rolling out, such as the ability to build flashcards or take notes digitally. Osman Rashid is founder of a startup called Kno, spelled K-N-O. Rashid says, despite Apple's heft, the new initiative will help his business by making e-textbooks more common.
OSMAN RASHID: So we, as a startup, don't have to spend as many marketing dollars trying to educate the market. We can now spend our funds telling people why Kno is the best place to go.
ABRAMSON: At the same time, many in the industry think Apple's entry could prompt an industry shakeout. Apple's publishing initiative may also create a painful dilemma for school districts and colleges. Many students have been sharing iPads. That's harder to do when textbooks are involved. If schools want to jump onto this bandwagon, they will also have to buy a bunch of iPads at $500 a pop.
Larry Abramson, NPR News, New York.
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A couple of months ago, we heard on this program about the proliferation of buy here, pay here used-car dealerships. Ken Bensinger, of the Los Angeles Times, reported on dealerships that don't just sell cars; they also make the loans to pay for them. They're often the only dealers where people with bad credit can get a car. Interest rates are high, repossessions are common, and a single used car can be a cash cow once it's sold multiple times.
Recently, Bensinger did a follow-up to that investigation - how buy here, pay here dealers handle used-car leasing. And he joins us now from Los Angeles. Welcome back to the program.
KEN BENSINGER: Thanks for having me, Robert.
SIEGEL: And first, what have you found about how common it is for these dealerships to get into leasing used cars, either in addition to or instead of selling them?
BENSINGER: It's a much newer business model. It's probably only about five or 10 years old in most parts of the country, and the numbers aren't very specific. But the largest company that offers insurance to these dealers told me they have about 2,500 dealers, I think, operating now. And that's up almost double in the last three years.
SIEGEL: Well, from the dealer's standpoint, what's in it to lease a car to me? Let's say I'm a buyer. What's in it to lease to me as opposed to sell it to me?
BENSINGER: Well, dealers sort of invented this idea of leasing used cars. And I should add that new cars have been leased for decades, but no one ever wanted to touch used cars until some of these low-end, used-car dealers figured out that by leasing rather than selling cars, they gained all kinds of advantages over the consumer.
They found it was easier to repossess them. The rules protecting assets in bankruptcy did not apply to these. Rules capping interest rates in different states also did not apply. And they found that there was tax advantages on both on state and federal income taxes, and sales taxes.
SIEGEL: You mean, the difference being here that title doesn't actually change hands, and the amount of the lease is not technically an interest rate?
BENSINGER: That's exactly right. And if you do the math on these leases - there's no interest rate stated on the contract. But if you do the math, you'll see interest rates typically around 35 to 45 percent.
SIEGEL: Thirty-five to 45 percent?
BENSINGER: That's about right.
SIEGEL: Well, let's assume that I'm a buyer. I have no money, no credit, and I want to buy a car. Would I have to make a down payment, typically, to buy - an old Toyota, let's say?
BENSINGER: To buy an old Toyota, you'd have to make a down payment. To lease it, you'd have to make what they might call an origination fee, or an application fee, or a security deposit. And the difference is that that doesn't go towards your ownership of the car. That's simply a fee that the dealer can pocket.
SIEGEL: I've always thought that one advantage of leasing - which I have never done with a new car - is that you lease it during the period of the early years of the car's life. It's less likely to need big repairs than if you leased, say, a 5-year-old car. The company you're taking the lease from would be responsible for servicing it. Is that the case here?
BENSINGER: No. These cars - there's no guarantees as to their condition. And many contracts actually require the customer to maintain it themselves, and frequently require them to do the maintenance at the maintenance operation owned by the dealership.
SIEGEL: Well, trying to look at this from the consumer's standpoint, does the consumer who leases - as opposed to buys - from one of these dealerships, is there any advantage at all?
BENSINGER: Well, the consumer who's attracted to these typically is interested because it's easy to get off the lot with not a lot of up-front money. The down payments tend to be slightly lower than buy here, pay here down payments. And so they think, simply, how much cash do I have in my pocket today, and what can I drive off the lot with?
They think that way because they desperately need a car to get to work. Let's remember that this is an industry that looks for people who need a car. They aren't luxury items; these are tools that are utterly important for getting and holding down a job. The monthly payments in these leases tend to be the same or higher than in buy here, pay here loans. That's at contrast with new car leasing, where leasing tends to be cheaper on a monthly basis.
And the worst part is, at the end, you still don't own the car. You have to make a huge balloon payment if you actually want to own it.
SIEGEL: Ken Bensinger, thanks for talking with us once again.
BENSINGER: It's been a great pleasure.
SIEGEL: That's business reporter Ken Bensinger, of the Los Angeles Times.
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Our co-host Melissa Block is in Charleston today, where she talked about the reshaped Republican field with South Carolina Congressman Tim Scott. He is a freshman, a Tea Party favorite, considered a rising star within the Republican Party. And the presidential candidates have been doggedly seeking his endorsement, though he hasn't yet tipped his hand.
MELISSA BLOCK, BYLINE: Tim Scott is getting used to being a trailblazer. When we was elected to the Charleston County Council in 1995, he became the first African-American Republican elected to any office in South Carolina since 1902. Then he became the only black Republican in the South Carolina House of Representatives. And in 2010, he won his seat in Congress, triumphing over the sons of two South Carolina political titans: Senator Strom Thurmond and former Governor Carroll Campbell.
Now, Tim Scott is one of just two black Republicans elected to Congress from former Confederate States in more than a century. I sat down with Representative Scott in Charleston to talk about the newly shrunken Republican field and the tone of the campaign. Congressman Scott, welcome to the program.
Yeah. Thank you very much. Good to be with you.
I want to get your reaction, first of all, to the news today of Governor Rick Perry's decision to drop out of the race, throw his support behind Newt Gingrich. Do you think that shift the scales here in South Carolina?
REPRESENTATIVE TIM SCOTT: I think it can. I'm not sure that it does, but it certainly can. I think Saturday, we're shaping up for a photo finish. It's going close the margin. I think when you see the intensity of the vote that Gingrich has, and then you add in the intensity - whoever was still with Perry was there because they really believed in his message, believed in the person. So that four or five points could literally all slide to Gingrich. That would make it a very tight race within the margins of error.
BLOCK: You think those Perry voters could be enough to put Newt Gingrich over the top here?
SCOTT: I think they're going to draw them very close. You know, the question everybody says: What about Santorum? He'll pick up some of those votes too. Well, it's starting to look like people are making a decision on which candidate they think can win. Even the anti-Romney folks are now choosing a candidate they think can win. And that candidate seems to be Newt Gingrich.
BLOCK: And it's interesting because polls out today show the race tightening even before Governor Perry's announcement. Do you see Mitt Romney's support in your state slipping away? Why is it that he's had a hard time galvanizing more support beyond the 30, 33 percent that he's been getting?
SCOTT: Well, you know, in November they were talking about how - why it was so difficult for him to get beyond the 24 to 25 range. And now he's about 10 points higher. So I would say that based on the statistics themselves, that he is actually improving in our state. And when we look at the race in the areas of the most conservative parts of our state - Greenville and Spartanburg - you see that the race between he and Newt Gingrich down to a two-point difference. So there's no question that in the most conservative parts of the state, Romney is very competitive.
BLOCK: I want to ask you about the interview that Newt Gingrich's second wife, Marianne, has given. It'll be running tonight on ABC's "Nightline." She says that Newt Gingrich requested an open marriage so that he could continue his admitted affair with Callista, who's now his third wife. You have a lot of conservative evangelical voters in your state.
SCOTT: Absolutely.
BLOCK: Should this disturb them?
SCOTT: It probably will disturb them. There's no doubt about that. The impact of it, hard to measure at this point, but there's no doubt that it will have impact.
BLOCK: Does it disturb you?
SCOTT: Well, of course. I mean, I don't know all the details. I haven't spoken with him. But if it is as clear as it is, it is disturbing.
BLOCK: Congressman Scott, there has been some strong talk in this campaign about work and about entitlement programs. I wanted to ask you about that. We heard Newt Gingrich call President Obama the food stamp president. He said he would tell the African-American community that they should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps. And he was questioned about that very sharply by Juan Williams during Monday's debate. Juan Williams called those statements insulting and belittling to black Americans.
SCOTT: What did Newt say?
BLOCK: He said he didn't see it that way.
SCOTT: Yeah.
BLOCK: Well, how did you see it? You're an African-American. You're a member of Congress. Are you troubled by that? Do you hear a racial code there?
I think Newt Gingrich has done more outreach in the African-American community and the Latino community than probably anyone else on stage. So I think if taken out of context, you can make something into something that it was never intended to be. What I heard Newt say was that all Americans should have a work ethic that matches the global, competitive nature that we are going into. And if, in fact, we're going to be globally competitive, we're going to have to have a strong work ethic. And we cannot exclude anybody from having that strong work ethic.
SCOTT: And if there's a way to give a kid who's living in poverty a paycheck while he's in school, whether he's working in the library, the front office, the cafeteria, or if he's doing light janitorial work, that may help to birth a strong work ethic. I don't find that offensive.
BLOCK: I'm curious if your own family's personal story comes to bear on how you think about this. I've read that you're the son of a single mother who worked 16-hour days as a nurse's...
SCOTT: Absolutely. Nurse assistant, yeah.
BLOCK: ...assistant in a hospital.
SCOTT: Yup.
BLOCK: Have you talked with her about this, this discussion going on and the debate about exactly this, about entitlement and working and...
SCOTT: Yeah. My grandfather, who's 91 years old, who has a third grade education, would tell you without any question that one of the biggest problems that we have in this nation is people have lost their work ethic, that when you drive around and you see people sitting around able to work and not going to work, that you find those folks as a drain on the system. And this is a guy who went through the worst of times, from my perspective, in this nation.
And yet, he still sees that this is a place where people come to dream. You don't build a raft and go to Cuba to see your dreams come true. You come to America. And because of that, you know, we find ourselves in the same position, saying, yeah, we need to shore up ourselves from a work standpoint. We need to dream big dreams, but work really hard to make sure that they come to pass. So we are of the same opinion that, in fact, America's best and brightest days are ahead of us because we can restore our work ethic, because we can compete, because we can dream, and we can work and we will evolve.
BLOCK: Congressman Tim Scott represents South Carolina's 1st Congressional District. Representative Scott, thanks so much.
SCOTT: Absolutely. Good to be back with you all.
SIEGEL: Our co-host Melissa Block reporting from Charleston.
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More now on that controversial interview Melissa mentioned with Newt Gingrich's former wife Marianne. She has told ABC News that the former speaker wanted an open marriage so he could have both a mistress and a wife. The interview is set to run on ABC's "Nightline" this evening. Excerpts were released this morning, just two days before the South Carolina primary.
NPR's Kathy Lohr has that story.
KATHY LOHR, BYLINE: In the interview, Marianne Gingrich says Newt admitted to an affair with a congressional staffer, Callista Bisek, for six years. She told ABC's Brian Ross that he wanted to continue this relationship with the woman who became his third wife.
(SOUNDBITE OF ABC'S "NIGHTLINE")
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And I'm Audie Cornish. The British arm of Rupert Murdoch's media empire reached an out-of-court settlement today. More than three dozen people will receive payments, including celebrities, politicians and crime victims. Their phones were illegally hacked by the News of the World tabloid. Despite the settlement, as Vicki Barker reports from London, this is not the end of the scandal.
VICKI BARKER, BYLINE: Among those accepting civil damages today were Britain's former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and actor Jude Law. In a statement issued after the hearing, Law described for the first time a campaign of phone hacking and round-the-clock surveillance that lasted three years. No corner of his, his family's or his friends' private lives had been out of bounds to the hackers, he said. Law settled for $200,000. Chris Bryant, a lawmaker for the opposition Labour Party, accepted 45,000. Like Law, the member of parliament insisted this was never about the money.
CHRIS BRYANT: The most important thing is that finally News International are beginning to let us see the hem of the truth. We don't know the full truth yet. We won't know that until people are up in court before another judge for criminal proceedings.
BARKER: If the Murdoch company's lawyers were hoping to avoid a trial, they failed: 10 of the victims refused to settle, including singer Charlotte Church. And the information gleaned from those who did settle has proved invaluable, says lawyer Tamsin Allen.
TAMSIN ALLEN: The impact of these claims has been to uncover the nature and scale of the conspiracy to hack phones at the News of the World.
BARKER: A police investigation into the phone hacking scandal is still under way. A criminal trial may yet follow the civil one. Also under way, the official inquiry led by Lord Justice Leveson. It's been exploring the privacy and regulatory issues raised by the scandal as well as whether the police got too cozy with the tabloids. The damages announced today run to about a million dollars. But the Murdoch empire's final bill will be much higher because by admitting liability, it's now also liable for the victims' legal costs.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs say the company effectively acknowledged that senior employees and directors knew about the wrongdoing. News International apologized in court, but the company said it would have no further comment on today's settlements. For NPR News, I'm Vicki Barker in London.
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And finally, this hour, music legend Etta James has died. The 73-year-old singer was known as the Matriarch of the Blues, but her unmistakable voice defied genre. Blues, R&B, rock, jazz, she could do it all. Her career spanned more than half a century and influenced countless singers. NPR's Neda Ulaby has this remembrance.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: Etta James had grit in her voice that could rub like salt in a wound or melt like sugar.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AT LAST")
ULABY: She was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles in 1938. Her first manager and promoter cut up Jamesetta's name and reversed it. Etta James. She was discovered when she was 14, the same age her mother was when Etta James was born. Within three years, the foster home runaway had her first hit with the girl group The Peaches.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ROLL WITH ME HENRY")
ULABY: "Roll With Me Henry" was deemed too racy for radio because roll was a euphemism for sex. Etta James was still a minor when she toured with Little Richard. Then she signed with leading blues label Chess Records and dyed her hair platinum blonde.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
ULABY: That's James on WHYY's FRESH AIR in 1994.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
ULABY: Between 1960 and 1963, James had 10 records on the R&B charts.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SOMETHING'S GOT A HOLD ON ME")
ULABY: A darkness runs beneath that joy and an anger, says David Ritz. He wrote a biography of Etta James.
DAVID RITZ: It isn't like she sings the song. Sometimes you kind of feel like she's going to war with the song.
ULABY: By the mid-1960s, Etta James was using hard drugs. She bounced checks, forged prescriptions and stole from her friends. A judge finally gave her a choice: prison or rehab. In 1974, she spent months in recovery at a psychiatric hospital.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'D RATHER GO BLIND")
ULABY: Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones sent James a letter in rehab and invited her to tour with the band if she stayed clean. In 1978, she joined the Stones on tour. By the 1990s, she'd reached a new generation of fans and won a Grammy. The next challenge was jazz.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GOOD MORNING HEARTACHE")
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
ULABY: Etta James went to extremes and owned them in her life and in her music. Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SUNDAY KIND OF LOVE")
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When we read fiction, we read for many reasons: to be inspired, to be swept away, but also to see just a bit of ourselves - our tastes, passions, and imperfections - reflected back in our favorite characters.
Well, author Lev Grossman is a self-professed nerd. And he recommends three books for readers who prefer their heroes with some serious brain power.
LEV GROSSMAN: If you're seriously into reading, then chances are if you're not a nerd, then you've at least got some nerdy DNA somewhere in your intellectual genome. I know I do. But as a reader, I sometimes feel like I'm being asked to identify with a hero who isn't nearly geeky enough, a hero with uncorrected vision, and excellent orthodontics and really good hair. Sure, he's nice, but I doubt I would have wanted to sit at his table in the cafeteria in high school.
Aren't nerds sexy enough to be heroes? They certainly can be. Here are three novels featuring protagonists with above-average SAT scores, who would get your "Star Wars" references, and who would never beat you up and take your lunch money. Although they might, if provoked, correct your grammar. Anybody who's seen an English professor at work knows that it can involve a lot of dry, dusty research. At least, the characters in "Possession" by A.S. Byatt look good doing it.
In one corner, we have flustered, tweedy Roland Michell, a minor scholar of the fictional Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash. In the other is icy, reserved Maud Bailey, who studies Ash's contemporary. Roland and Maud make an odd pair, but together, they unlock a textual puzzle that binds their two poets together through an unexpected romantic connection. It won't surprise you to learn that it also leads to some hot present-day action between Roland and Maud.
"Snow Crash" is the novel that announced Neal Stephenson's arrival as a major science fiction writer with a stylistic flair that would, or should, be the envy of any literary novelist. It's a searingly intelligent and very funny vision of a disassembled future America divided into warring franchises strung out along an unending neon strip mall. Prowling the strip is our main character, the memorably named Hiro Protagonist, a clever programmer who's also handy with a pair of Japanese swords. He'll need those skills and more to fight off a rampaging computer virus that starts to infect people's brains as well.
Finally, meet Dunstan Ramsay: schoolteacher, scholar, war hero, nerd. Robertson Davies' novel, "Fifth Business," follows him and two other boys from the rural Canadian town of Deptford as they make their way out into the wider world. Even as they find love, wealth and fame in measures far beyond their small-town origins, the men can never escape the deep mythological structures that control their lives. Only Ramsay, as an expert on the lives of saints, is properly equipped to read and understand their destinies as the archetypal stories that they are.
Nerdy adventures are a challenge for any author. They're action-packed, but it's intellectual action rather than the exploding cars variety. It involves people sitting around typing and reading and thinking, and it takes a special talent to make those particular activities exciting. And it takes a special reader to be excited by them too.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CORNISH: Lev Grossman's most recent book is "The Magician King." He's also a book critic for Time magazine.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. Carol Channing, who created iconic roles on Broadway in "Hello, Dolly!" and "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," isn't touring quite as much as she once did. But in the words of a song she sang more than 5,000 times, she's still going strong. At least, that's the impression critic Bob Mondello got from the new documentary "Carol Channing: Larger Than Life."
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "CAROL CHANNING: LARGER THAN LIFE")
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Whenever New York Times caricaturist Al Hirschfeld sketched Carol Channing, he always made her appear a creature composed entirely of lipstick, mascara and hairspray. It says something about both his artistry and hers, that Channing has generally come across that way in real life too, as a fabulous but insubstantial cartoon. Channing was one of the few stars who could live up to those drawings, and as if to prove that, Dori Berinstein's documentary animates a couple and sets them right next to the star, who's pretty animated too, considering her advanced years.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "CAROL CHANNING: LARGER THAN LIFE")
MONDELLO: Channing is definitely performing Carol Channing for the camera, but she's pretty canny about the impression she's making. She's shown being a tireless trouper, practically taking TV interviewers hostage. In one clip, she reduces Gene Shalit to helpless cackling. Elsewhere, the film shows her playing gamely off her stage roles in a montage of sitcom appearances.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "CAROL CHANNING: LARGER THAN LIFE")
MONDELLO: Though she never clicked in the movies, she does recount a film memory or two of her first on-screen smooch, for instance, with a kid named Clint Eastwood. But "Carol Channing: Larger Than Life" mostly concentrates on career highlights and personal moments. A happy reunion after seven decades with a childhood sweetheart gets lots of time, as does nostalgia for a brand of entertaining practiced by very few stars these days. I'm Bob Mondello.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "CAROL CHANNING: LARGER THAN LIFE")
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China just reported its economy is growing at an impressive pace, nine percent a year. As remarkable as that number is, it's not new. China has been growing at about that rate for more than 30 years. But how did this boom first get started?
SIEGEL: Well, the answer, it seems, is pretty simple. It began with a secret document hidden in the roof of a mud hut. The people who signed it back in 1978, were afraid that the document and the idea behind it might get them executed. Instead, it transformed China.
David Kestenbaum and Jacob Goldstein, with our Planet Money Team, brought this story back from the rural village of Xiogang.
DAVID KESTENBAUM, BYLINE: Today, Xiogang has paved roads and new factories. In 1978, there were just muddy paths and oxen, houses made of dirt and straw.
JACOB GOLDSTEIN, BYLINE: This is the height of communism in China. Everyone here worked on the village's collective farm. The idea was people would work together for the common good.
KESTENBAUM: Yen Jingchang was a farmer back then. In this world, as he describes it, nobody owned anything.
YEN JINGCHANG: (Through Translator) I used oxen to farm but they weren't mine. They belonged to the group.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
JINGCHANG: (Through Translator) Back then even a piece of straw belong to the group. Individuals didn't own anything.
GOLDSTEIN: At one meeting with Communist Party officials, a farmer asked: What about the teeth in my head? Do I own those? No, was the answer. Your teeth belong to the collective.
KESTENBAUM: There was no incentive to work hard, to get up early and pull weeds.
JINGCHANG: (Through Translator) Work hard and don't work hard, everyone gets the same, so people don't want to work.
GOLDSTEIN: In Xiogang there was never enough food. Yen Jingchang says he and the other farmers had to knock on doors and beg for food.
JINGCHANG: (Through Translator) We were farmers. We were supposed to produce food. To beg for food was not honorable. My face was burning.
KESTENBAUM: This is the way things were all over China, the way the entire economy was set up. So, in the winter of 1978, after another terrible harvest, the farmers in Xiogang came up with an idea. But the idea they had was so dangerous, they had to call a secret meeting to discuss it.
This is Yen Hongchang, another farmer who was there.
YEN HONGCHANG: (Through Translator) That day, it was about five in the afternoon. We made it to Yen Lihua's home. This was a secret meeting. And we snuck in one by one.
GOLDSTEIN: Eighteen farmers gathered in this small dirt-floored room. Yen Jingchang was one of them.
KESTENBAUM: Were there enough chairs for all of you?
JINGCHANG: (Through Translator) There were no chairs back then. How could there be chairs? Some of us crouched. Some sat on the floor. There were some little tiny stools. But we had no chairs back then.
KESTENBAUM: Here's the idea they discussed. Rather than farm as a collective, each family would get to farm its own plot of land. And if a family grew a lot of food, that family could keep some of that food. You own what you grow.
GOLDSTEIN: This is a very old idea. But in communist China in 1978, it's also a very dangerous idea.
JINGCHANG: (Through Translator) Most people said, yes, we want to do it. But there were others who said, I don't think this will work. This is like high voltage wire. Back then, farmers had never seen electricity but they had heard about it. They knew if you touched it, you would die.
KESTENBAUM: They decide they have to try this and they decide to write it down, as a formal contract so everyone is bound to it. Someone gets a piece of paper. And by the light of an oil lamp, Yen Hongchang writes this historic thing down.
GOLDSTEIN: It says they're going to secretly divide up the land among the families. And it ends with this: If any of us are put in prison or executed, the others in the group will raise our children until they're 18 years old.
KESTENBAUM: With this document, they become, in a sense, the first capitalists of modern China. Yen Hongchang ends up hiding it in a piece of bamboo in the roof of his house.
GOLDSTEIN: Yen Jingchang remembers the first day he went out to farm after signing the contract.
Did you work harder than before?
JINGCHANG: (Through Translator) Of course I work harder. We all did because whatever I produce was mine. If you didn't work hard that's your loss. And we all secretly competed.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
HONGCHANG: (Through Translator) Everyone wanted to produce more than the next person. That got people working hard.
GOLDSTEIN: So it's the same land, the same tools, the same people. But just by changing the economic rules, by saying you get to keep some of what you grow, everything changes.
KESTENBAUM: The farmers are terrified of being found out. But by the end of the season it becomes impossible to keep things secret anymore, because they've had an enormous harvest. More food, Yen Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined.
GOLDSTEIN: Word of what had happened in Xiaogang makes its way up the Communist Party chain of command. Fortunately for the farmers, at this moment in history, there are powerful people in the Communist Party who want to change China's economy. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who creates China's modern economy, is just coming to power. So instead of executing the Xiaogang farmers, the Chinese leaders hold them up as a model.
KESTENBAUM: Within a few years, farms all over China adopt the principles in that secret document: People can own what they grow. The government launches other economic reforms and China's economy starts to grow like crazy. Since 1978, something like 500 million people have risen out of poverty in China.
GOLDSTEIN: The Communist Party is clearly proud of what happened in Xiaogang. That contract, it's now in a museum. And what happened in the village has become this origin story in China that kids learn about in school.
KESTENBAUM: But what's happened to the guys who started it all, the country's first capitalists? Here things get complicated. Our first day in Xiaogang, we asked to talk to Yen Hongchang, the farmer you heard from who actually wrote this contract. But the local Communist Party officials told us he was out of town.
GOLDSTEIN: It turns out, that wasn't true. We found him the next day.
Were you here yesterday?
HONGCHANG: (Through Translator) I was here yesterday.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
KESTENBAUM: We were told you were not here yesterday.
HONGCHANG: (Through Translator) I was here yesterday.
GOLDSTEIN: Yen Hongchang, and the government officials. They tell two very different stories about Xiogang today.
KESTENBAUM: Yen Hongchang says he started a couple businesses over the years, but the local Communist Party took them away from him once they became profitable. He says those new factories springing up around town, they're largely empty and haven't created many jobs.
GOLDSTEIN: Local officials say none of this is true. They say everything in Xiaogang is going great.
KESTENBAUM: I'm David Kestenbaum.
GOLDSTEIN: And I'm Jacob Goldstein, NPR News.
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In a presidential election that most expect will be all about the economy, economic issues are front and center in South Carolina. It hosts the first Southern primary of 2012 tomorrow. The state's unemployment rate is just under 10 percent, well above the national average. But even that number is deceptive. There are pockets around the state where the conditions are far worse.
NPR's Tamara Keith takes us to one county where the rate is more than 12 percent.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: When Spring Industries packed up and left Lancaster County, it took thousands of textile jobs with it. Then, before most had a chance to recover, the recession hit hard.
Sandra Geiger says life in Lancaster hasn't been the same since.
SANDRA GEIGER: So now, everybody's struggling trying to find what they need to be doing and how to make enough money to support your family and keep your stuff going.
KEITH: Geiger lost her job as a designer at Springs, as everyone calls it, back in 2007. It was a position she had worked up to, something she thought she'd spend the rest of her working life doing. She's found work as a home health aid, but since her main client moved into a nursing home, she's back at the local unemployment office.
GEIGER: I mean, I'm 47 years old, you know, it's just like starting over, so what are you supposed to do? So it's hard, but you know, you just keep going.
KEITH: Geiger is a Republican and she's decided to support Ron Paul when she votes tomorrow. She's looking to all the candidates, whoever wins the nomination, to make a difference.
GEIGER: You just hope that somebody can get up there and turn things around so we can all do better than we're doing now.
KEITH: The South Carolina Works office on White Street where Geiger filed her claim this week is a busy place with a full parking lot. Clifford Ledford, Jr. stopped in to apply for another extension. He's been unemployed since June of 2010 when the greenhouse company where he had worked for a few years went out of business.
CLIFFORD LEDFORD, JR.: Just really haven't found anything, you know, that pays anything.
KEITH: He's in his early 60s and gets the feeling employers are passing him by because of his age. Like so many people in Lancaster, Ledford spent most of his life working for Springs. He started in the bleaching department when he was a teenager, worked there 40 years, never went to college. At the end, he was operating a huge multimillion dollar machine that he thought was going to be the future of Springs.
JR.: We felt like we had job security. It was all computerized. It was a high-tech job and it's now in Brazil. When they laid me off, they took it and dismantled it and put it on a ship and sent it to Brazil because a company bought us. So someone else is doing my job today, as we speak, so...
KEITH: Ledford voted by mail and picked Rick Santorum, though now he says he wishes he had voted for Newt Gingrich. But, in reality, Ledford isn't convinced any of them are really speaking to his economic concerns.
JR.: It's hard to think of any of them having our interests in their best interests because all of them are so rich and they don't have to worry about where their next meal's coming from.
KEITH: From where Ledford stands, even if the candidates are talking about jobs and the economy, he isn't sure it will amount to much because he thinks the government is in a rut. Politicians won't work together to get things done.
Keith Tunnell has a similar complaint.
KEITH TUNNELL: They're all here, but they do a lot of talking and they don't do much listening and that's the problem I have with most politicians.
KEITH: Tunnell is president of the Lancaster County Economic Development Corporation. He says there are 4,000 unemployed people in his county, but a year ago, it was 5,000, so things are improving. Some major businesses have come in and he's hoping to attract more with a rail project, new business parks and worker retraining. He's been trying to get federal funds for three years, but to no avail and he doesn't expect all the current focus on South Carolina's economic travails as part of the primary will change that.
TUNNELL: These folks fly into South Carolina every four years and they promise us the world and they talk about our problems and they say they understand and they know our problems and they're going to go back and fix it and we don't see them again until four years later.
KEITH: So even if the winner of Saturday's primary doesn't ultimately help Lancaster County, Tunnell says he'll keep fighting to bring back the jobs.
Tamara Keith, NPR News, Columbia, South Carolina.
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South Carolina's governor, Nikki Haley, is one of Mitt Romney's most visible supporters. That includes campaigning with him today. Haley was one of the superstars of the Tea Party. But after just one year in office, her approval ratings are slipping. And as NPR's Kathy Lohr reports, some of her core supporters are baffled by her endorsement of Romney.
KATHY LOHR, BYLINE: Haley campaigned in 2010 as a true fiscal conservative and won the endorsement of Sarah Palin, who said Haley is willing to challenge the good old boys.
SARAH PALIN: Well, maybe they don't like her too much, but it's because she stands up for what is right. She has that stiff spine, and she's doing it for you, South Carolina.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
LOHR: Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants addressed a Tea Party convention here this week. She said her biggest achievements have been tort reform, Medicaid reform, and a law requiring legislators to cast many votes on the record. But perhaps the biggest draw for this conservative audience is her reputation as a fighter.
GOVERNOR NIKKI HALEY: If you just judge me on this past year, judge me on my lawsuits because I've been sued by the unions...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
HALEY: ...I've been sued by the ACLU, the Department of Justice, and Jesse Jackson was talking smack last week. So it's really a good track record, I will tell you that.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
LOHR: Haley thrust herself into the national spotlight with a battle over an effort by the National Labor Relations Board to punish Boeing for its decision to build a new plant here. South Carolina is also fighting with the federal government over a new immigration law and a new voter ID measure. Both have been blocked.
HALEY: What they don't know is you don't mess with us in South Carolina.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
LOHR: The governor talks like she is at war with the federal government.
HALEY: We're going to fight. And as much as President Obama has decided to continue with his assaults on South Carolina, we're going to continue to fight back.
LOHR: But Haley isn't getting the kind of strong support she did when she was elected. And Tea Party supporters couldn't have been more shocked with her choice to back Mitt Romney, a decision she announced on Fox News last month.
HALEY: What I want is someone who is not part of the chaos that is Washington. What I wanted was someone who knew what it was like to turn broken companies around.
LOHR: Even before the endorsement, the governor's approval ratings had been dropping. A recent Winthrop University poll shows just 35 percent of voters approve of the job she's doing. Haley dismissed the poll. But she can't quiet critics of her endorsement, like Talbert Black.
TALBERT BLACK: It's disappointing, disappointing to a lot of people in the state. She could have picked anybody and at least had some of her base say, yeah, that was a good pick. Except Romney. I haven't heard anybody say, you know, that was a great pick for her.
LOHR: Black is a libertarian who worked for Haley's gubernatorial campaign but now doesn't speak to her. He's upset that Haley hasn't pushed through the budget reform and school choice bills she promised. And he's angry that Haley supported the deepening of the Savannah Harbor in neighboring Georgia. It's a decision that many say hurts the Port of Charleston in her own state. Black says Haley, who came to office fighting the establishment seems to have joined it.
BLACK: She didn't do what she said she was going to do. And I think the folks who helped get her to where she is, she's not going to have their support, you know, if she runs again, which I assume she will.
MARK TOMPKINS: There is a continuing pattern of declining support for the governor over the last several months. And it's exacerbated by each one of these little controversies.
LOHR: That's Mark Tompkins, a political science professor at the University of South Carolina.
TOMPKINS: She finishes one controversy, and then a few weeks later there's another one. And you have to think that affects public support.
LOHR: In Columbia, out in his front yard, which is mostly dirt, Tea Party member Allen Olson teaches his 7-year-old son to hit a golf ball.
ALLEN OLSON: Hole in one. Good job.
LOHR: Olson is a carpenter and the former head of the Columbia Tea Party. He says he still strongly supports the governor.
OLSON: She knows that a lot of the times a lot of positions she takes are controversial, but she takes them anyways because she's doing what's in the best interest of South Carolina, I believe.
LOHR: Olson is not a Romney fan. He's campaigning for Newt Gingrich, but says Haley backed Romney because the former Massachusetts governor supported her campaign in 2010. Disappointing, yes, but...
OLSON: As long as she doesn't try to tie it to the Tea Party, I have absolutely no problem with her doing what she did. I know there are some people that have misgivings about that. And, as of right now, I'm still 100 percent in Nikki Haley's corner.
LOHR: It's not clear whether Nikki Haley's endorsement of Mitt Romney will hurt her future in this state or help Romney in Saturday's primary.
Kathy Lohr, NPR News, Columbia, South Carolina.
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I'm Robert Siegel. And we begin this hour in South Carolina. Voters head to the polls there tomorrow for the first Southern primary. Every election year since 1980, the winner of that state's Republican primary has gone on to capture the presidential nomination and that's no accident, as NPR's Mara Liasson explains from Charleston.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: South Carolina Republicans do seem to have an unerring ability to pick the eventual Republican nominee, and one reason is pretty simple. South Carolina is a red state, a deep-dyed red state, with more Republican voters than Iowa and New Hampshire combined. So by definition, it's more representative of Republican preferences than the other early primary states.
Dave Woodard is a Clemson University professor and former Republican consultant.
DAVE WOODARD: We've got Iowa, New Hampshire and Florida, all voted for Barack Obama in 2008. South Carolina hasn't voted for a Democrat since 1976. I mean, we're a red state, we're a base Southern state, we're more in the base, really, under the bell curve, of what mainline Republicans are than some of those, shall we say, different states.
LIASSON: South Carolina Republicans don't have an activist culture or as many single-issue voters as those different states. That's one reason moderate Republicans have done well here, despite the state's large number of conservative and evangelical voters. South Carolina Republicans have a history of not only picking the eventual winner, but also of choosing the candidate who came in second nationally the last time. Think John McCain or George H.W. Bush or Bob Dole or maybe Romney, who lost the GOP nomination to McCain in 2008.
Republican strategist Ed Rogers.
ED ROGERS: Republicans generally, and Southerners specifically, are hierarchical and we appreciate someone coming up through the ranks. I worked for a long time for Lee Atwater. South Carolina, for all its reputation for rough politics, has actually showed a lot of maturity and a lot of seriousness in who they end up electing.
LIASSON: All the Republican nominees, starting with Ronald Reagan in 1980, certainly would agree that South Carolina Republicans are very discerning.
GEORGE H. W. BUSH: Thank you so very much. Victory has 100 fathers and this victory in South Carolina truly did. Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Thank you, South Carolina.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Thank you all very much.
GEORGE W. BUSH: Tonight in this great state of South Carolina, we have ignited our cause.
SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: Thank you, South Carolina, for bringing us across the finish line first in the first in the South primary.
LIASSON: That last victorious candidate, of course, was John McCain, whose victory in South Carolina in 2008 is a model Mitt Romney would like to follow. McCain won with 33 percent of the vote in South Carolina four years ago because Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee split the conservative vote. The same dynamic could still work for Romney this year, says South Carolina Republican Senator Jim DeMint.
SENATOR JIM DEMINT: What happens a lot, and it happened in the last presidential primary, could happen here, is that the conservatives divide their vote among a number of conservative candidates, and sometimes the more moderate establishment candidate wins. That's not all together bad.
LIASSON: Bad or good, it's why moderate, establishment Republicans, like Romney, have in the past been able to win this deep red state with so many populists and religious conservatives. But this year might be different, if conservatives in South Carolina can finally unite behind one candidate. Texas Governor Rick Perry dropped out of the race yesterday and endorsed Newt Gingrich, the man on the right who has been surging in the polls here.
But Rick Santorum and Ron Paul are still in the race today, competing with Gingrich for the same pool of conservative voters. South Carolina's Republicans pride themselves on picking a winner every time. This year, we'll find out if that historical pattern is a predictor or merely a precedent.
Mara Liasson, NPR News, Charleston.
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The Republican presidential candidates have been hammering on what they call activist judges, and they've been preaching the gospel of states' rights. But those ideologies were stood on their head recently when most of the candidates failed to get on the primary ballot in Virginia.
NPR's Teresa Tomassoni explains.
TERESA TOMASSONI, BYLINE: Rick Santorum has joked about banishing liberal federal judges to Guam. Rick Perry has been a longtime advocate for states' rights, calling himself a 10th Amendment-believing governor. And Newt Gingrich has repeatedly criticized the country's judicial system, targeting what he calls, quote, "activist judges." He's even suggested that Congress subpoena and arrest judges who make controversial rulings.
NEWT GINGRICH: Because I was, frankly, just fed up with elitist judges imposing secularism on the country and basically, fundamentally changing the American Constitution.
The courts have become grotesquely dictatorial, far too powerful, and now - and I think, frankly, arrogant in their misreading of the American people.
TOMASSONI: So when the candidates showed up to a federal courtroom in Richmond to complain about Virginia's ballot access law, the irony did not escape District Judge John Gibney. As the hearing began, Gibney smiled and asked Gingrich's lawyer what consequences he might face if he overturned a state law that's been on the books for decades. He said he wanted to make sure he wasn't going to be labeled an activist judge.
Gingrich's lawyer, Christian Adams, returned the smile and said he certainly wouldn't suggest the judge was an activist by taking on this case. This case, he said, could be solved well within the confines of the Constitution. His client failed to collect the required 10,000 signatures to get on the Virginia Ballot. Santorum, Perry and Jon Huntsman also failed.
In December, Perry filed a lawsuit against the Virginia State Board of Elections, arguing the state's strict ballot access laws were unconstitutional. He said they violated his freedoms of speech and association. Soon after, Gingrich and the others joined Perry's suit, asking that the state law be overturned so that they could all get on the ballot.
Gibney denied the request, saying the candidates should have filed their lawsuit months ago. By filing in December, he said, quote, "They played the game, lost, and then complained the rules were unfair." Perry and Gingrich promptly filed emergency appeals to get on the primary ballot. Yet within days, Perry was back to advocating for states' rights.
GOVERNOR RICK PERRY: And when I'm the president of the United States, the states are going to have substantially more rights to take care of their business and not be forced by the EPA - or by the Justice Department, for that matter - to do things that are against the will of the people.
TOMASSONI: Perry's spokesman, Ray Sullivan, said he saw no contradiction between Perry's words and actions.
RAY SULLIVAN: There are serious constitutional conflicts in our view with Virginia law. And we believe the courts should review those and take steps to protect the rights of Virginia citizens, as well as the presidential candidates, to access the ballot and give voters the choice that they deserve.
TOMASSONI: Gingrich's campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment, and the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals quickly shot down his and Perry's request. In the end, states' rights seem to have won after all. As per Virginia law, only Mitt Romney and Ron Paul will be on the state's primary ballot, March 6th. They're the only two candidates who managed to collect the required 10,000 signatures.
Teresa Tomassoni, NPR News.
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An online battle is raging between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian hackers. Each group has revealed credit card information, and private account data, for thousand of citizens. Both have also temporarily disabled high-profile websites. Some downplayed the news, blaming bored young people venting frustration.
But as Sheera Frenkel reports, others worry that a larger cyberwar is looming.
SHEERA FRENKEL, BYLINE: The hacking attacks that hit Israel recently had a variety of targets, one of which was the Israeli airline company El Al. But even as the website for the company was down, El Al tour operators here in Tel Aviv were doing a brisk business. The company said its flights and schedules were unaffected.
Turning online hacking into real-life turmoil is rare, says Gabriel Weimann, a professor at Haifa University and author of "Terror on the Internet." He says the recent attacks are relatively simple, and commonplace in the world of hacking.
PROFESSOR GABRIEL WEIMANN: I would argue this is a very low-level type of attack. In terms of the potential for cyberterrorism, this is a very low-key type of attack, done by individuals.
FRENKEL: The first attack came earlier this month from a Saudi hacker called OxOmar. By breaking into an Israeli sports website, OxOmar managed to release the credit card and personal information of thousands of Israeli nationals. The response, from a group of Israeli hackers calling themselves Israel Defenders, was swift - the release of personal information of more than 50,000 Arab nationals.
(SOUNDBITE OF TYPING)
FRENKEL: An Israeli hacker who goes by the moniker of ExOmer â a Hebrew version of OxOmar â says he is part of the group that stole the Saudi credit card details.
(SOUNDBITE OF TYPING)
FRENKEL: He agreed to speak to NPR recently, in a series of online chats. He says he decided to launch Israel Defenders with a group of six friends because he wanted to take revenge. He says: I saw no one was doing anything, and I knew I had to get them back. Attacks - he says - are just the beginning. He claims he found a bug in the website of the Saudi government yesterday that he hopes to take advantage of.
But taking credit card details, and crashing websites, is not enough, says ExOmer. He wants to be able to enter and tamper with government services.
That kind of hacking, says professor Weimann, is more complex - and more dangerous.
WEIMANN: The recent attacks on Israel were hacking, not cyberterrorism - at least, so far. They involved an individual. I guess he's not a Saudi, and I guess his name is not Omar. And I guess he is not alone.
FRENKEL: Cyberterrorism, says Weimann, involves a politically motivated group - possibly with government backing - that launches attacks that destabilize, or cause extensive damage.
The Stuxnet virus, largely seen as the largest and most complex act of cyberwarfare to date, was discovered in June 2010. Experts estimate the virus infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide - with the biggest damage in Iran, where it caused the centrifuges in the Natanz nuclear facility to spin wildly out of control and destroy themselves. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: Only some of the centrifuges were destroyed.]
Stuxnet, says Weimann, is an example of targeted cyberwarfare carried out in the most sophisticated manner to date. For terrorists, he says, cyberwarfare is an attractive alternative that's cheap and requires little equipment.
WEIMANN: Somebody will not hijack planes, but sabotage the control system of airports like JFK or - just imagine what can happen. This is the case of cyberterrorism.
FRENKEL: Yaakov Lappin, a national security reporter for the Jerusalem Post and author of "Virtual Caliphate: Exposing the Islamist State on the Internet," says that Israeli officials are concerned about exactly those types of attacks.
He points to the recent targets of the hackers â the El Al airlines website, the Israeli stock exchange and credit cards - and asks what would happen if they took down the websites of emergency services or health care.
YAAKOV LAPPIN: If you look at the fact that Hamas issued a statement this week saying that this is a new form of resistance, and they've jumped on the bandwagon, that in itself is going to act as a recruiting call for hackers across the Arab world to join in this constant attacks on Israeli websites.
FRENKEL: For now, he adds, the attacks are limited to a small group of hackers. But he says the jump from cybercrime to cyberterrorism is short.
For NPR News, I'm Sheera Frenkel.
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In Colombia, that nation's intelligence agency has been mired in scandal. Agents illegally wire-tapped government critics. Some sold classified information to drug lords and the former director was convicted of plotting assassinations. The U.S. backed the agency for decades, but cut off aid in 2010 and now the Colombian government, Washington's closest ally in Latin America, is scrapping the agency and starting over.
NPR's Juan Forero reports from Bogota.
JUAN FORERO, BYLINE: Late last year, President Juan Manuel Santos announced he was liquidating the troubled agency called the Administrative Department of Security, or DOS.
PRESIDENT JUAN MANUEL SANTOS: (Foreign language spoken).
FORERO: The country, he said, very well knew why. The DOS was huge and had too many roles, not just intelligence gathering, but evidence collection at crime scenes. It also provided security for high officials and oversaw immigration control, says the national security advisor, Sergio Jaramillo.
SERGIO JARAMILLO: So, structurally, it had big problems. It just wasn't up to the task of what a modern intelligence agency in a liberal democracy should do.
FORERO: Even worse was that the intelligence agents were engaged in serious crimes. A handful of agency managers are now serving time. Dozens more agents are under investigation or facing charges of having compiled illegal dossiers on opposition figures for former President Alvaro Uribe.
Here in the archival rooms on the 10th floor of the intelligence service are boxes filled with secret papers from one of the world's longest running armed conflicts: the U.S.-backed defensive against drug gangs and Marxist guerrillas.
ORLANDO DIAZ: (Foreign language spoken).
FORERO: On a recent day, as part of the mothballing, the documents were sealed under the gaze of the agency's archives director, Orlando Diaz. To show Colombians that the documents were secure and not being used for illegal purposes, Diaz explains how boxes are shut tight behind lock and key.
The man overseeing the whole process is a bankruptcy lawyer named Ricardo Giraldo.
RICARDO GIRALDO: (Foreign language spoken).
FORERO: We want to guarantee that the archive will not disappear nor be manipulated, Giraldo says. Once sorted, the useful classified documents will go to other agencies, including what will be the new intelligence service: the National Intelligence Directorate.
The question for Santos's government now is what to do with the rest of the material held by the DOS: reams of documents, photographs and tapes that were illegally gathered.
Jaramillo, the national security director, says one option the government is considering is to make the files available to those who were illegally targeted for surveillance.
JARAMILLO: You purge the archive, and also you set up a system so that its citizens can come forward and ask if they've found their way into the DOS archive and ask for their own information.
FORERO: There is a precedent, Jaramillo says: the former East Germany, where citizens can now retrieve their once secret files. But some have their doubts, such as Gustavo Gallon, a human rights activist and target of the intelligence service. Prosecutors have the DOS orders that were handed down to agents to tail Gallon and his family.
GUSTAVO GALLON: (Foreign language spoken).
FORERO: Yet Gallon says the daily surveillance reports are now missing. Another critic is former Attorney General Alfonso Gomez, who questions how far the reforms truly go in the new intelligence agency.
ALFONSO GOMEZ: (Foreign language spoken).
FORERO: As in the other scandals in other state agencies in our history, Gomez says, the solution has been to simply change the name. And he wonders how many of those agents involved in questionable activities will somehow remain active, perhaps in the new agency.
Jaramillo, the national security director, counters that the new agency will be tightly managed.
JARAMILLO: The new intelligence service will have almost nothing to do with DOS as it exists today. It will not be in the same building. It will not do the same things.
FORERO: Jaramillo also says it won't have the same people. Thousands are being transferred to the national police, the prosecutor's office and other state agencies. He says the new agency will be focused solely on intelligence gathering and that those accused of crimes at the old agency are out.
Juan Forero, NPR News, Bogota.
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South Carolina isn't just known for picking winners. It's been called the firewall for its ability to halt candidates on a roll. And there is, of course, a lot at stake for the candidates who are looking to push Mitt Romney off the path to the nomination. Here to talk more about it, our regular Friday political commentators David Brooks of the New York Times and E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post. Gentlemen, welcome back.
DAVID BROOKS: Good to be with you.
E.J. DIONNE: Good to be with you.
CORNISH: So let's briefly start with Rick Perry. It seems like every election season there's sort of a super hyped candidate who doesn't quite catch and this time it was him. We said goodbye to him this week. Does his exit even matter?
DIONNE: Well, his exit will matter in South Carolina, not only because whatever pieces of the conservative vote he was getting are now free to go presumably to Newt Gingrich. All his ads that he was running against Gingrich and Santorum are now off the air. That also helps Gingrich. I think, on paper, he's the guy we should be talking about as the nominee. He occupied the perfect place in the Republican Party to unite the Tea Party elements and the religious right, but there are times when he seemed intent on making President Bush look like a combination of Albert Einstein and Hubert Humphrey.
I mean, he couldn't get his act together in those early debates. He was very conservative.
CORNISH: David, any parting words for Perry?
BROOKS: Yeah, my 12-year-old son asked for his autograph and he wrote, do you homework. And I wish Rick Perry had done his homework. It exacts a lesson against coming in late. It helps to come in early when nobody's paying attention so you can practice your routines.
CORNISH: Another thing that was talked about a lot this week was wealth among the GOP candidates. Mitt Romney, of course, has been the standout, talk about his tax return, the tax rate and everything, but is this really a conversation about how much money these guys have or whether they can identify with, like, blue collar voters?
BROOKS: Right. I think it's a question of personality. In the fall, both Obama and Romney, assuming they both get there, want to talk about success and their different versions of it. My view of Romney is very different from most people. Most people look at the guy's face and think he's the bad guy in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. I look at his family history, which is really a story of struggle, of his family moving from Illinois, to Utah, to Arizona, to Mexico, to California, constantly being knocked down, constantly struggling.
And I look at him less as sort of a lost scion and more as a relentlessly driven immigrant kid. And his experience is not sort of the George H.W. Bush experience. So to me, what's remarkable about him is not his wealth, but his ferocious and relentless drive and the desire to be accepted in America.
DIONNE: David may be entirely right about that family history, but I can't recall any candidate more awkward in talking about issues related to his personal wealth and making gaffes like saying he didn't get much money from speeches and it turned out it was 350, $370,000 and just not getting people's reactions when he says these things. And so, I think a lot of these were self-inflicted wounds. And then he has just been terrible on this issue of releasing his taxes.
A campaign ought to figure out where it wants to be on that, have a position and stick with it. And he has really hurt himself just on the issue of releasing his income taxes.
CORNISH: And, of course, David, some of that personal back story goes into some Mormon history in Romney's family that maybe he doesn't want to talk about on the trail.
BROOKS: Right. It's a disadvantage for his campaign that he can't about his back-story because of the Mormonism. I'd love to have sat in the meeting when his staff said to him, hey, what are you gonna say about your tax reform? I suspect he told them, hey, I've got it under control because it's a subject he didn't want to talk about, even with them, and they didn't want to press him about. 'Cause it's their job to press him and get a script.
CORNISH: One of - or the bombshell of the week involves something that I know I didn't expect to talk about this season, open marriage. Discuss. Marianne Gingrich talking about her ex-husband. What happened here?
DIONNE: Very ugly marriage. Former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is thinking, what did I resign for? Apparently, my voters like this. Because it has not hurt him at all. He, you know, he was having an affair while he was attacking Bill Clinton for having an affair with somebody on his staff. I think it's a perfectly legitimate character issue to talk about. But he used it in the debate to trounce the media, which is, for a lot of Republicans, the unifying emotion, the desire to trounce the media and it's worked fabulously.
CORNISH: And before we go further, we actually have a clip of that at the debate. Here is Gingrich talking with debate moderator, John King, who has just asked this question about his ex-wife's comments.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
NEWT GINGRICH: I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
CORNISH: Guys, I mean, maybe the question was ill-timed. But, I mean, it seems like Gingrich only can win off of these things.
DIONNE: Who knew that a candidate could turn open marriage into a winning issue at South Carolina? This campaign is constantly surprising us. But you knew that Gingrich was going to come out and try to blame this all on the media and attack the media, because it's worked for him before. He's been running against the media in all of the debates.
And, you know, some of his surge in South Carolina began when he attacked Juan Williams. And that attack - this one I sort of think of as normal politics, that one was very disturbing 'cause there were racial overtones there. Juan was challenging - Juan Williams was challenging him directly on this. And there was a kind of almost, I thought, a little bit of an ugly kind of glee in the crowd in response to that.
But in this case, he did what he had to do on the open marriage issue. And I think for now, he's pushed it aside.
CORNISH: And it's interesting because, I mean, basically Gingrich has put his personal redemption and his background out there. So, I'm wondering even if he gets a bump now, is this going to kind of have residual effects further down the trail with his history just hanging out there?
BROOKS: It means we will have a long primary fight. I think right now we're guaranteed to go to Florida, probably go for another couple months. I still find it very hard to believe that a politician with a 27 percent national approval rating is going to get the nomination. So it'll prolong it. Still hard to see how Romney loses this thing unless there's something hidden in those tax returns.
CORNISH: Well, we'll know in the next day or so whether or not this race continues for the next weeks - for the next few weeks.
David Brooks of the New York Times and EJ Dionne of the Washington Post, thanks so much to both.
BROOKS: Thank you.
DIONNE: Thank you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And on the eve of tomorrow's primary, the college of Charleston was the scene of a big political rally today. And the draw was not one of the candidates we've been hearing about. It was Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert.
NPR's Don Gonyea was there.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: The crowd topped 3,000, nearly all students, in the outdoor square. And right on time, 1 PM, a marching band entered clearing a path for Stephen Colbert. On stage, a gospel choir, Colbert sang harmony.
(SOUNDBITE OF A MARCHING BAND)
STEPHEN COLBERT: (Singing) ...by the dawn's early light. What so...
GONYEA: Then Colbert introduced a special guest, former presidential hopeful Herman Cain.
HERMAN CAIN: As I said during one of the debates, America needs to learn how to lighten up.
GONYEA: For Colbert, this rally and having Cain there to add a surreal element is all a way to make a point about campaign finance laws. Tomorrow is the second anniversary of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision.
COLBERT: With the stroke of a gavel, these brave men leveled the playing field and then sold the naming rights to that playing field to Bank of America.
GONYEA: Last year, on this show, Colbert formed his own Super PAC. Now he's set up a presidential exploratory committee. Because of that, this month he turned control of the Super PAC over to Jon Stewart, Colbert's fellow Comedy Central star.
COLBERT: If that is a joke, then they are saying our entire campaign finance system is a joke. And I don't...
GONYEA: The college crowd loved it in this strange campaign year, where this fake rally was bigger than any I've covered for a real candidate.
Don Gonyea, NPR News, Charleston.
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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel. Now, a new movie that does a very good job with a familiar old theme - man from economically developed, formerly known as civilized world, goes off to live and find meaning in traditional, formerly known as primitive society. The movie is "Oka." The society in question is a clan of Bayaka pygmies who live in the Central African Republic and what elevates this twist on the old trope is the stunning music of the pygmies, their voices...
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: ...and their use of virtually everything around them, trees, even the water in the stream, as musical instruments.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: "Oka" is very much based on the story of Louis Sarno, an American musicologist originally from Newark, New Jersey, whom I interviewed almost 20 years ago about his life among the Babenzele pygmies, a people in transition.
LOUIS SARNO: Their society is still based on hunting and gathering. Most other peoples around them are already agriculture-based societies.
SIEGEL: In the movie, based on Sarno's quarter of a century living among the pygmies, it's not just his character, Larry, who returns to nature. It's also the pygmies themselves. Filmmaker Lavinia Currier directed and co-wrote "Oka" and joins us now.
Welcome to the program and congratulations.
LAVINIA CURRIER: Thank you.
SIEGEL: What does oka mean?
CURRIER: Oka means listen in the Bayaka language, Aka.
SIEGEL: Speaking of the Bayaka language, the character of Larry is played by Kris Marshall and most of his dialog with the Bayaka is in their language. Did he learn the language?
CURRIER: He did, very proudly.
SIEGEL: Aka is the name of the language.
CURRIER: It is. Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "OKA")
SIEGEL: So we see much of it in subtitles - what happens in the movie. You're also directing the Bayaka who are played by the Bayaka.
CURRIER: Yeah.
SIEGEL: Obviously, they're new to acting in a movie, but they seem to be pretty talented.
CURRIER: They're performers. You know, their tradition is, at the end of every day, to sort of recoup the day with storytelling and singing and dancing, and so they were naturals.
SIEGEL: There's a scene in which a local farmer, who is not a pygmy - he would be called a bantu by the Bayaka - he has a fight with them about whether they've done enough work for their pay.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "OKA")
SIEGEL: It looked to me like it almost could have been a documentary. It seemed very real. Was the farmer a professional actor?
CURRIER: He wasn't. We cast him, also, locally in the village among the bantu, but what happened in that scene is that the Bayaka got very excited. You know, they were very happy to be able to express themselves in a safe environment because they're extremely marginalized. So when that happened, the scene just took off.
SIEGEL: You have to describe the situation of the Bayaka. They are a minority in the Central African Republic. Formerly, they were truly a forest people. Their environment is under threat and their social situation is threatened from the get-go.
CURRIER: That's correct. I mean, they're among the most ancient people on earth, being related to the San bushmen and the original inhabitants of Africa and they remain hunter-gatherers, which is an extremely rare and precarious situation because what's happening now is that the bush meat trade is increasing and the animals that they depend on for survival are being hunted out. So it's becoming less and less easy for them to survive in the forest and they're thrown back in the village, where they're prey to economic exploitation and alcohol and disease and less nutrition.
SIEGEL: The truly bad guys in this story are the corrupt mayor and the Chinese logging company that is in the process of clear-cutting the forest. First of all, did the government of Central African Republic approve of and assist you in making this film, which doesn't cast their state in an all together positive light?
CURRIER: They did, in a way. They feel proud of the Dzanga-Sangha preserve, which is in the southern part of the country, one of the safer areas of Central African Republic. We had a lot of problems with government folks coming down and stopping filming. You know, gangs of guys with AK47s would say, stop filming until you give us more money for this department or that department.
So that was a bit of drama, but in the end, they were supportive. It's a coproduction with the Central African Republic and we went back and showed it both to the Bayaka and to the government, even the president, and they were very enthused about that film being shown.
SIEGEL: The Bayaka, as Louis Sarno told us almost 20 years ago here, are not a pristine people by any means. They have encountered village life and alcohol and all kinds of positive and negative things about the modern world. Were they familiar with movies before this?
CURRIER: No. I was very gratified when they said that's the best movie we'd ever seen, when we showed it. And, of course, it was the only movie they had ever seen.
SIEGEL: Now, the music of the pygmies is sensational and we're not just talking about ethnological field recordings anymore. The CD, "Listen, Oka," which has the music from the movie on it, is the result of a sound engineer - not just Louis Sarno, but someone else traveling there and introducing sophisticated recording techniques.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CURRIER: The composer, Chris Berry, who's himself a student of African music and a master drummer, went back with us and asked the Bayaka if they'd be interested in doing some what he called radio cues, more modern cues. And the women just lined up and these women dream their songs. In fact, one of the women who worked on our crew said, I was in the forest camping with my husband, I woke up dreaming the song and my husband was singing the same song.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CURRIER: So they brought these songs to Chris Berry and the first time they'd ever heard themselves on earphones, they were just laying down tracks one after the other.
SIEGEL: Tell me about the track on the CD that we hear in the film. It's "Bottlefunk Girls."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BOTTLEFUNK GIRLS")
CURRIER: "Bottlefunk Girls" was written by the girls. The boys are playing plastic bottles with water in them and the girls are doing the vocals, so it was the children of the village from age three to 14 were playing on that track.
SIEGEL: I mean, the impression one comes away with in the movie is that, if we left a few random objects around the forest floor somewhere and the Bayaka found them, somehow, within some period of time, they would figure out how to make music with them.
CURRIER: They play everything. In fact, they invented a new instrument from some pipe that was lying around in the village and they were both blowing on it and beating it at the same time and getting a kind of kazoo sound. They start music when they're two years old and the word eboka(ph) is the same for music and dance, so they don't distinguish between dancing and singing.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: You come away from this feeling that in another 25 or 27 years, however long it's been since Louis Sarno took off for Central Africa, that there will still be people living at least part of the time in the forest and hunting and gathering or have you captured the twilight of a small civilization?
CURRIER: I think we have to realize that these people are not vanishing of their own accord. And we're driving them out of their habitat with logging, with our appetite for resource and it's not just Americans or Europeans, also Chinese. I think it's very delicate. I'm not sure there will be people living as hunter-gatherers in 25 years.
SIEGEL: Well, Lavinia Currier, thank you very much for talking with us about your film, "Oka."
CURRIER: Thank you, Robert.
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The Supreme Court wants a do-over. It's ordered a lower court to redo a redistricting plan in Texas, giving greater deference to a plan drawn up by the state's Republican-controlled legislature. The unsigned unanimous ruling came 11 days after the justices heard arguments in the case. But as NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports, today's decision is likely not the last word in how this Texas case will play out.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: The 2010 census showed the Texas population grew by more than 4 million people. And as a result, the state was allocated four new congressional seats. But when the Republican-controlled state legislature came up with its redistricting plan, black and Hispanic voters, who accounted for an astounding three-fourths of the population growth, challenged the plan in court, contending it violated the non-discrimination provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
Under the Voting Rights Law, states like Texas, with a demonstrated history of discrimination, are required to pre-clear their redistricting plans in advance either with the Justice Department or a special three-judge court in Washington, D.C.
SIEGEL: When Texas failed to win timely pre-clearance, a federal court in Texas drew up an interim plan that maximized the power of the state's booming Latino population. The result was that three of the four new congressional seats would likely go to Democrats, as opposed to the state-drawn GOP plan that would likely have resulted in three of the four seats going to Republicans.
TOTENBERG: Texas appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. And today, the high court ruled that the lower court had not given adequate deference to the state plan. The justices rejected the notion that a plan that has not been pre-cleared is totally invalid. And they told the lower court to use the state plan as the starting point, make an educated guess as to what parts of it are illegal under the Voting Rights Act, and then to fix those parts.
Although minority groups sought to put an optimistic clause on the decision, voting rights experts said Texas was the victor, at least for now. Yale law professor Heather Gerken.
HEATHER GERKEN: I think it's clear that Texas won more than it lost. What it really wanted was something close to the plan that its own legislature proposed and that's, ultimately, what it's going to get.
TOTENBERG: If that sounds definitive, however, it is not. The reason is that, here, we're talking about an interim plan. And right now, a federal court in Washington, D.C. is hearing evidence as to whether the Texas Legislature's plan deserves to win pre-clearance under the Voting Rights Act.
There's every indication that some time in the next month or so the D.C. court will issue an opinion saying that at least some parts of the Texas plan illegally dilute minority voting strength and that therefore the plan cannot be pre-cleared. And once the D.C. court does that, that becomes the new baseline. NYU law professor Richard Pildes.
RICHARD PILDES: The whole situation, I think, is a sort of a train wreck for the federal judicial system as a whole.
TOTENBERG: Yale's Professor Gerken agrees.
GERKEN: Texas has won the first battle, but there's a long war ahead of it, and it may well lose.
TOTENBERG: All of this takes place against a backdrop of imminent primary elections in Texas now set for April. Texas has one of the earliest congressional primaries in the country. The federal courts do have the authority to push the date back if necessary, or the fight could continue on with the 2012 elections held under one redistricting plan and the next election held under a different plan. After all there are some court issues presented in this case that have not been tackled yet, just, for example, whether in cases whether there is a huge bulge in the minority population, as there was in the Latino population in Texas. The state can be required to maximize Latino voting power with a larger number of majority Latino districts. Professor Gerken.
GERKEN: I think it is highly likely to be back at the Supreme Court this year.
TOTENBERG: Texas wasn't the only state redistricting plan that the Supreme Court dealt with today. In a case from West Virginia, the court blocked a lower court order that had overturned a redistricting plan because there was some minor population variance between districts. The lower court said there needed to be zero variance. The Supreme Court prevented that decision from going into effect to allow an appeal to go forward. The practical effect would seem to be that, at least this year, elections will take place in West Virginia under the bipartisan plan drawn up by the state legislature.
NYU's Professor Pildes notes that for years the Supreme Court has driven redistricting plans to be absolutely equal in population, while many academics and redistricting experts have wanted a little play in the joints, for instance, to follow county lines.
PILDES: The fact that they issued a stay here may be a signal that the court is open to rethinking that issue, you know, sort of at the margin.
TOTENBERG: Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
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The National Football League playoffs are down to four teams, and after the weekend, they will be down to two. On Sunday, the New England Patriots hosts the Baltimore Ravens, and the San Francisco 49ers host the New York Giants. The winners advance to the Super Bowl on February 5th.
Sportswriter Stefan Fatsis now joins us as he does most Fridays. How you doing, Stefan?
STEFAN FATSIS, BYLINE: Hey, Robert.
SIEGEL: All season long, we've heard about how this season confirmed the total transformation of the NFL into a league dictated by offense. Suddenly, that is not looking like it's the correct conclusion.
FATSIS: Yeah. We're supposed to still be talking about the explosive pass-happy Green Bay Packers and New Orleans Saints, but they were eliminated last weekend, so now three of the final four are defined by defense. The website FootballOutsiders rates the 49ers and Ravens the third and fourth best defenses in the NFL for this season so far and, over the last month, it says that the Giants have had the best defense.
And they all do different things well. The 49ers are great against the running game and their punter, Andy Lee, is like a defender. He had one of the best seasons in NFL history, averaging 50.9 yards per punt.
The Giants sacked quarterbacks for big losses. The Ravens are very stout, especially against the pass in the so-called red zone. That's when the other team gets within 20 yards of scoring.
SIEGEL: And that should be awfully important on Sunday because Baltimore is playing the one team you haven't mentioned, the New England Patriots.
FATSIS: And I didn't mention them because the Patriots don't have a very good defense. They rely on their star quarterback, Tom Brady. The defense is one of the worst in the league. Brady threw for more than 5,000 yards in the regular season. He threw six touchdown passes against what was supposed to be a strong Denver Broncos defense last Sunday. He's in his sixth American Conference Championship game in 12 seasons in the league. He's got the most diverse corps of receivers in football, especially his two big tight ends, Aaron Hernandez and Rob Gronkowski.
The Patriots haven't lost a game since November 6th and, love them or hate them, they've got Bill Belichick, the mastermind coach looking for his fourth Super Bowl title.
SIEGEL: Now, football wouldn't be football without a little trash talk and we've had some of that leading up to this weekend, notably between the Giants and the 49ers.
FATSIS: And when you have good defenses, they take pride in the fact that they're aggressive and hard-hitting and one Giants defensive lineman said that this game would be a bloodbath. The New York Post, of course, took that and put it on the back page with red ink dripping from the letters.
And then the Giants running back Brandon Jacobs said all kinds of silly things, the most silly of which was, I wish like hell they'd hit me in the head, a helmet-to-helmet hit. I want one of those. Given the attention to concussions and helmet-to-helmet hits and the latest in a string of lawsuits filed by retired players over concussions and brain disease came down this week against the league, so this was probably not a choice of words that NFL executives were thrilled with.
SIEGEL: Now, some sillier pro football news involves the future of Indianapolis quarterback Peyton Manning. Tell us what happened there this week.
FATSIS: Manning, of course, missed the season with a neck injury. The Colts owe him $28 million in bonuses, so the question is whether they're going to pay it, let Manning leave, trade him, do something else. Then, on Wednesday, we had this breaking news on Twitter: Hearing my fav, number 18, Peyton Manning, will not return to NFL. Wow. The source of that tweet was the actor Rob Lowe.
So his tweet sent reporters scrambling. Manning's father and his agent said that Manning's retirement was news to them and Irsay finally responded with a tweet of his own: My sources tell me Rob will star in an epic remake of "Deep Throat" with aging porn stars and four-fingered circus clowns.
SIEGEL: Thank you, Stefan.
FATSIS: Let it not be said that NFL owners don't have a sense of humor, at least Jim Irsay.
SIEGEL: And go Giants. Stefan Fatsis talks with us most Fridays about sports and you can hear more of him on Slate magazine's sport podcast, "Hang Up and Listen."
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. France is temporarily suspending training and combat activities in Afghanistan. The move comes after four French soldiers were killed today by an Afghan soldier. President Nicolas Sarkozy says he may even bring French troops home earlier than the 2014 pull-out date.
NPR's Eleanor Beardsley has our story.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Word of the attack, which also injured at least 15 soldiers, eight gravely, came this morning. It brings the total number of French deaths in Afghanistan to 82, but this time, the soldiers weren't killed by the Taliban, but by a supposed Afghan ally.
A grave looking Sarkozy said France had chosen to send soldiers to Afghanistan to help the Afghan people fight terrorism and barbary.
PRESIDENT NICOLAS SARKOZY: (Foreign language spoken).
BEARDSLEY: But the French Army is not in Afghanistan so that Afghan soldiers can fire on them, said Sarkozy.
SARKOZY: (Foreign language spoken).
BEARDSLEY: The president said he was dispatching his defense minister and the head of the army to Afghanistan to assess the situation and, if basic security conditions could not be met, then France would consider withdrawing its forces early.
France has about 4,000 soldiers fighting in the NATO-led force against the Taliban. Afghan authorities confirmed that the shooting occurred while French and Afghan soldiers were on a joint operation. It is not known whether the shooter was an Afghan soldier or a militant dressed as one. The Taliban commended his actions.
There is increasing talk of a crisis of trust and compatibility between the Afghan and allied soldiers. Edward Burke with the London-based Center for European Reform says Sarkozy's unilateral action is unfortunate for NATO, but understandable.
EDWARD BURKE: The French decision today reflects a deep frustration amongst many coalition partners that they don't feel that they're making the progress that perhaps has been widely reported in Brussels by NATO and in Washington, D.C.
BEARDSLEY: Journalist Jean-Marc Illouz says Sarkozy had no choice but to suspend military operations.
JEAN-MARC ILLOUZ: President Sarkozy wants to be re-elected for a new term in May and he's obviously under pressure from his main rivals, both on the left and the extreme right, to bring home troops this very year.
BEARDSLEY: After 9/11, Illouz says the French largely supported the war in Afghanistan, but have turned against it as casualties mount. Parisians headed home from work Friday evening. Businessman Dominique Aldwain(ph) says he draws parallels between Afghanistan and the failed French war in Algeria in the 1960s.
DOMINIQUE ALDWAIN: (Foreign language spoken).
BEARDSLEY: If we pull out of Afghanistan, we may leave it in chaos, but do we really have the right to stay in a country and impose our will? It's a tough call, he says.
Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
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One of the biggest file sharing sites on the Internet, MegaUpload, has been shutdown. The Justice Department says the move is part of one of the largest criminal copyright cases it's ever brought.
As NPR's Laura Sydell reports, the case raises important questions for anyone who stores files of any kind online.
LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE: The reason the Justice Department spent two years investigating MegaUpload is because of people like Harry Dinwidde. You're stealing music.
HARRY DINWIDDIE: Pretty much.
SYDELL: Dinwidde used to use MegaUpload to pirate music all the time but not anymore. Yesterday, the Justice Department took down MegaUpload. Four of its executives were arrested in New Zealand. U.S. officials claim that hundreds of millions of dollars of copyrighted material - movies, music, TV shows, video games, computer programs - were being pirated using the same technology.
Officials were tipped off to the problem by the Motion Picture Association of America, says Kevin Suh, who works on content protection for the association.
KEVIN SUH: MegaVideo and MegaUpload really are the worst copyright infringers on the Internet. And given that fact, it's important for us to use U.S. government resources to address this kind of problem.
SYDELL: And if Hollywood had been looking to cast a guy in the role of Internet pirate, no actor could play the role better than the founder of MegaUpload, Kim Dotcom.
KIM SCHMITZ, AKA KIM DOTCOM: Awesome, man. Eighteen holes, man.
SYDELL: That is Dotcom himself from one of many online videos. In this one, he's driving a Mercedes right across the green way of a golf course. In other pictures, he's with girls in bikinis, standing by vats of cold champagne bottles or driving a yacht. Dotcom was previously known as Kim Schmitz and Kim Tim Jim Vestor. And in his native Germany, he was found guilty of insider trading and computer hacking.
The Justice Department isn't giving interviews about the case, but in its five-count indictment, it says Dotcom and his executives are guilty of criminal copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit money laundering and racketeering. They face up to 20 years in prison.
Jim Burger, a copyright attorney, says even if people were breaking the law on the site, that's not enough to convict these guys.
JIM BURGER: It's not just what people are doing on your website. It's that you, by actions and words, are inducing them to violate copyright law.
SYDELL: In the indictment, the Justice Department appears to have good evidence. For example, there are emails between company executives where they make it clear that they know they are profiting from copyright theft.
But Burger also says the case raises some concerns, as we move into an era where more and more people are storing movies, photos, music and more on the Internet. Or, as they say, in the Cloud. Like the kinds of services that Apple and Google have.
BURGER: If you think about, you know, all the various Cloud computing services they can't monitor everything everybody stores on the site. It's just not really realistic to do that.
SYDELL: MegaUpload's technology also lets people store files in the Cloud. MegaUpload claims that most users are like Katie Fishman, who used the site for legitimate reasons.
KATIE FISHMAN: There are huge chunks of data that I have uploaded for my own use, so that I'll be able to access them whether or not I'm at my computer or someone else's, or a work computer, if it's a question of multiple documents that I need to transfer and can't send over email.
SYDELL: Unfortunately, all the stuff she had stored on MegaUpload is now inaccessible to her because the Justice Department took down it down. MegaUpload user Dinwidde says it's easy to just go someplace else to pirate.
DINWIDDIE: You can go to RapidShare. You can go to File Sharing, there's many other websites. MegaUpload was just the biggest name.
SYDELL: Indeed, many people may recall a long list of other pirate sites, beginning with Napster and onto Grokster, and so forth. MegaUpload may be just the last model.
Laura Sydell, NPR News.
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The Obama administration announced today that it would not weaken new rules that require insurers to offer women contraceptives at no additional cost. That's despite a furious lobbying effort by the Catholic Church. As NPR's Julie Rovner reports, the decision has won praise from women's health groups, but it opens the administration to charges that it's hostile to religious freedom.
JULIE ROVNER, BYLINE: The decision to require nearly all health insurance plans to cover prescription birth control without requiring women to pay a deductible or co-payment actually came last August. Here's how Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius put it at the time.
SECRETARY KATHLEEN SEBELIUS: Since birth control is the most common drug prescribed to women ages 18 to 44, insurance plans should cover it. Not doing it would be like not covering flu shots.
ROVNER: The administration exempted churches from the contraceptive coverage requirement, but not religious-based hospitals, universities, charities and other organizations whose primary purpose is not religious. That launched a furious backlash, primarily from the Catholic Church, which claimed its members would be forced to choose between offering contraceptives which violate its teachings, or not offering its workers health insurance at all. Last November, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, took his complaints directly to the Oval Office. Sister Mary Ann Walsh, the spokeswoman for the bishops, confirmed reports that the talks seem to go well from their point of view.
SISTER MARY ANN WALSH: I think that the president has said he wouldn't do anything to hinder the church's ministry.
ROVNER: Which is why, says Walsh, Dolan was not pleased when the president called him personally this morning to inform him of the decision not to substantially alter the requirements.
WALSH: It's an unconscionable decision, really. It's unconscionable to force citizens to buy contraceptives against their will. This is an assault on religious freedom.
ROVNER: Of course no individual will be required to purchase contraceptives. She's talking about the employers who will have to offer them as part of insurance coverage. The final version of the rules, announced today, does give religious universities, hospitals and the like an additional year - until August of 2013 - to come into compliance with the contraceptive coverage rule. But it does not provide them an exemption, which the bishops find unacceptable.
WALSH: A year to decide how to violate your conscience?
ROVNER: That's no solution, she says. But while the bishops - and many of the Republican presidential candidates - have accused the Obama administration of waging a war on religion. Women's groups are hailing the decision.
CECILE RICHARDS: This is a health care issue that's based on what's good for women's health.
ROVNER: Cecile Richards is president of Planned Parenthood. And Richards says it's not just about health, but also economics.
RICHARDS: A lot of women are still paying, even with insurance, are paying $50 a month for birth control. And at a time where women, families are struggling, this is an enormous advance.
ROVNER: Richards also points out that despite the bishops' claims, many Catholic institutions already offer contraceptive coverage as part of their health insurance package.
RICHARDS: It's the most common medicine women use, and this will mean that women, regardless of their - you know, where they work, what their religion is, will have access, equal access, to birth control coverage. And that's really what this is about.
ROVNER: But while the rules are now final, the bishops say the fight is not over. They are vowing to have them overturned, in court if necessary. Julie Rovner, NPR News, Washington.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Time now for music and a sound you might have heard 40 years ago piercing through the static on your AM radio.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: Those big strings, that angelic chorus and layers of echo, a Phil Spector production? Not quite. This is a brand new record, and it's by a young singer-songwriter named Jesse Baylin. This album, "Little Spark," was finished two years ago, and it's been sitting on a shelf ever since just waiting for a label to give it a chance. It finally came out this past Tuesday, and when I spoke with Jesse Baylin about it, she says she wanted to create a sound that would be timeless.
JESSIE BAYLIN: I wanted a bigger, more epic soundscape, and at the same time, I wanted the lyric to feel really intimate. And I drew a lot of inspiration from Burt Bacharach and Dusty Springfield, "Dusty in Memphis" in particular, and those records just felt so big to me. And at the same time, listening to them, I feel like they're singing right to me, and that's why I wrote the songs. But then I knew that I had to bring in the right kinds of people, so I found Kevin Augunas and Richard Swift, who is the chief arranger and played most of the instruments. And then we brought in Jimmy Haskell, who has arranged orchestral arrangements for "Bridge over Troubled Water." And Bobby Gentry's just an unbelievable man and character, and he was so playful with his arrangements. It was exactly what I wanted and what the songs needed.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVE IS WASTED ON LOVERS")
BAYLIN: (Singing) Oh, your love was wasted on lovers. They don't know what's in their arms, they don't know until it's gone. Who put out that spark. Love is wasted on lovers. They will open every stage, making something just to face, seal it with a kiss. Love is wasted on lovers.
RAZ: That sound, the way you captured that sound, it was done very methodically. You wanted it to sound that way.
BAYLIN: Mm-hmm. We did it all to tape on analog. And the tape machine that we recorded on, for some reason, wasn't allowing us to punch in at all, so we had to do everything on one take, which was exhausting sometimes. But I think it makes a difference because there's a performance there. We did it in a very classic way, so maybe - and we wanted to be nostalgic, too, but still fresh and modern and you can't really place where it comes from, you know?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YUMA")
RAZ: You have a track on here called "Yuma." And there's a line in there that says: I gaze in Arizona and I took the California coast.
BAYLIN: Yeah.
RAZ: A lot of the songs on this record are about heartbreak, about relationships ending. Are your words personal? Are they autobiographical?
BAYLIN: Yes. Yes, they are. They come out of my journal. I try and journal every day, and that's where a lot of my lyric comes from.
RAZ: Every day you do it?
BAYLIN: I try. I haven't lately because I've been too busy, but I did write this morning. It was a very short entry. But I had to write because I realized this morning when I woke up that I'm living a dream. I didn't expect all of this. Like, it feels really great, and I just wanted to make sure I remembered that.
RAZ: The dream of being able to make a living from music?
BAYLIN: Yeah. I didn't even know if this record would even come out. When I left Verve Records...
RAZ: That was your old label.
BAYLIN: Mm-hmm. I wasn't sure. I thought I should just upload it onto the Internet because nothing's going to happen with it. But then I thought it was too good, and I held that back. And a year and a half after we finished it, I met my manager and this great little distribution company and label in Nashville. And it's somehow working out and now it's coming out. So it's just - it's such a dream. And my only expectation has been that it would come out, so everything else is just a cherry on top, truly.
RAZ: What did you do during that period? I mean, wow, a year and a half must have been agonizing.
BAYLIN: I cried a lot.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BAYLIN: I did. I mean, I remember I was on the road with my husband. We were in London.
RAZ: And I would be remiss not to mention your husband is Nathan Followill. He's the drummer for the well-known band Kings of Leon.
BAYLIN: Yeah. And it was so painful for me. There was nothing happening, and it had been like a year, and I was just like rocking the fetal position every day. I was so sad. I'm like, all I want to do is share this piece of art that I've spent so much time making, and it just was really, really painful for me. But at the same time, I'm so glad I was patient and waited because this is like the moment that I'm ready for this. It feels right. I'm ready to give it away now.
RAZ: That's singer-songwriter Jessie Baylin. Her new album is called "Little Spark." You can check out a few tracks at our website, nprmusic.org. Jessie, thank you. And good luck to you.
BAYLIN: Thank you so much.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GUY RAZ, HOST:
The past two years have been good ones for pecans. So good, in fact, that from California to Georgia, there has been a state of pecan thefts. Thefts worth thousands of dollars. It's all prompted Greg Daviet to mount armed patrols of his pecan farm in Las Cruces, New Mexico. We called him to find out why pecan prices have risen more than 365 percent in just two years.
GREG DAVIET: One of the major reasons for pecan prices being so high currently is our export market has increased significantly in the last four or five years, primarily China. But we've got pecans going to Europe, to the Middle East. India's coming into the market as well.
RAZ: So why are they so popular in China? Do you have any idea?
DAVIET: I'm not an expert on it by any means, but they're primarily used as gifts during the Chinese New Years. I'm told that when you bring a guest into your home, it's very customary to give them a gift. They're very into healthy foods, and pecans are the healthiest nut there is to eat.
RAZ: In just a few years ago, it was something like 60 cents a pound. Now, I guess this year, the price is something like $2.85 a pound.
DAVIET: It's been a very good year for us. We're price takers. We're not price makers. So whatever the price is is what we have to sell our crop for. And especially with trees where you have to plant them a decade or more in advance of when you're actually going to be selling your crop, we're kind of stuck with whatever the market gives us. So when it moves up like this, it definitely helps us to get through the years that the price is 60 cents and we're all losing money.
RAZ: And these high prices have caused you a big problem, which is why we called you, because people are stealing pecans. There are pecan thieves on the loose.
DAVIET: That's absolutely correct. The most common thing is people coming in, literally, in the middle of the night shaking nuts out of trees, wrecking them up and then taking them out in their vehicle. And it's in the thousands, probably tens of thousands of pounds, you know, every week that are being stolen out of pecan orchards. So it's gotten to the point now that many farmers, myself included, are having to be armed all the time.
Farmers in general tend to face fairly low margins, and so if just one percent of my crop is stolen, it could be a third of our net income for the entire year. And so that'd be like someone having to have four of their months of pay stolen every year. It's difficult to overcome.
RAZ: I read in an article you've been pretty vigilant. Can you describe what you've been doing?
DAVIET: We significantly increased our security. I have patrols that drive by our farm day and night. I have security guards that are on the premises overnight and have become just very unfriendly, unfortunately, during pecan season. When you drive onto my farm, we take a picture of your driver's license, we find out why you're there. And I just don't like being so unfriendly, but unfortunately, I have to.
RAZ: So what's the best way to prevent thieves from being successful once they've stolen the crop? You know, how do you prevent them from selling it?
DAVIET: Currently, there aren't really measures in place. And it's an industry we're trying to work with our legislatures, with law enforcement, with the district attorney's office to find solutions for this. We've talked about trying to license the buying stations so that if you're buying pecans, you need to have been approved by our industry. We know who you are. You're not someone who's actively trying to buy stolen pecans.
RAZ: All right. What's your favorite pecan recipe?
DAVIET: Oh, I'd have to go with pecan pie.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
DAVIET: I love pecan pie.
RAZ: That's an easy one.
DAVIET: Yeah.
RAZ: I like pecan-crusted swordfish or something.
DAVIET: Well, I also like chocolate-dipped pecans. I like chili-roasted pecans. You know, I like all pecans.
RAZ: I do too. They're good. And thank you for harvesting them.
DAVIET: You're welcome. Eat all you want. We'll make you more.
RAZ: That's Greg Daviet. He's a pecan farmer in New Mexico talking about a spate of recent thefts in the area. Greg, thanks so much for being with us.
DAVIET: You're very welcome. I was happy to be here.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
From NPR News, it's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz.
And so we arrived at this day. Traditionally, the make-or-break moment in the Republican race to the nomination. The last poll taken overnight in South Carolina showed former House Speaker Newt Gingrich with a double-digit lead over Governor Mitt Romney. Both candidates focused their fire on the other today at a campaign stop in Greenville.
MITT ROMNEY: If we think that we need a Washington insider to run Washington, there are a lot of people to choose from. But I'm the only guy who spent his life in the real world. I'm in a fight to put America back to work.
NEWT GINGRICH: I am the only conservative who has an opportunity to stop a Massachusetts moderate, and I need the vote of every conservative in South Carolina today.
RAZ: South Carolina votes - that's our cover story today. Let's get right to our correspondent Don Gonyea. He's in Charleston at the Citadel with the Santorum campaign.
And, Don, it seems to me that the big story so far in South Carolina is the, I guess we should say, the re-resurrection of Newt Gingrich.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: This has been a remarkable year with candidates rising to the top and then falling back, sometimes due to self-inflicted wounds, sometimes because the other campaigns or surrogates for the other campaigns really opened up on them with negative ads.
The thing that I think the Romney campaign had not anticipated is that someone could rise again. And that's exactly what Newt Gingrich has done. He rose to the top just before the Iowa caucuses, faded. And the Romney campaign kind of thought, OK, that was the last of them we needed to vanquish. Here we are with Gingrich seeming to have all of the momentum again in South Carolina.
RAZ: That's incredible. What is Mitt Romney's strategy going forward if, in fact, he loses to Newt Gingrich tonight?
GONYEA: That's going to be interesting. You could hear in that piece of tape just a moment ago at that place in Greenville. You could hear kind of a strain in Romney's voice. You can hear him kind of shouting to be heard. We have not seen Mitt Romney in that kind of a mode. His events have always been so controlled and so well-staged. And he's rarely talked about his opponents. He's always talked about President Obama.
So if Newt Gingrich wins here in South Carolina, if Romney doesn't do really well, then I think you look for a different kind of Romney campaign in Florida. Still one that paints him as inevitable and the only guy who'll be able to attract votes in the general election enough to beat President Obama, but probably a much more aggressive, much more confrontational Mitt Romney.
RAZ: We can expect him essentially to go after Newt Gingrich.
GONYEA: He's going to have to if today goes the way polls indicate that it might. Again, we have to wait till the votes are counted.
RAZ: Don, this is an open primary. Democrats can vote as well. We probably expect mostly Republicans to vote. Do voters in the state seem excited? Are they engaged about this vote?
GONYEA: It's funny, you have to be careful not to compare it to Iowa and New Hampshire, because those two are so intense and they're so activist-driven. South Carolina is a different kind of place. It's bigger, it's diverse. You can walk down Charleston, where I am today, and almost not even know that there's a primary going on today, unless you saw the headlines on the paper, there's a smattering of yard signs here and there. But we are hearing that in some places, voter turnout is very heavy; in some places, it's very light; in some places, it's steady to moderate. But you don't get the feeling you get in those earlier primaries.
RAZ: It's going to be an exciting night. That's Don Gonyea in Charleston. Don, thanks.
GONYEA: It's my pleasure.
RAZ: Now, while South Carolina tends to anoint the GOP nominee, it's also home to a particular brand of politics. Some call it dirty politics. We asked Danielle Vinson, chair of the political science department at Furman University in Greenville to explain why.
DANIELLE VINSON: South Carolina is the last stand. If you don't come out of here in first or second place, it's hard to keep going. And so by the time they get here, they kind of know who the front-runner is and they start going after him and he starts going after them.
RAZ: And there have been several examples of this, most famously, I guess, is the case when there was a whispering campaign saying that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate child with an African-American prostitute. That was in 2000. How far back does this kind of campaigning go?
VINSON: Oh, at least to the '70s, if not before. One of the more famous political operative in the state was Lee Atwater. And he made it very clear that nothing was off limits when it came to campaigns, public or private.
RAZ: Lee Atwater, of course, was a legendary GOP operative. And in 1989, he seemed to suggest that the incoming Democratic House speaker in Washington, Thomas Foley, was gay. That prompted Bob Dole to stand up on the floor of the U.S. Senate and say this.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVAL RECORDING)
BOB DOLE: This is not politics. This is garbage.
RAZ: But it also cuts across party lines, right? Danielle, I mean, Dick Harpootlian, who's a well-known Democratic operative, called Lindsey Graham, the current U.S. senator in the state, light in his loafers.
VINSON: Hmm. Oh, yeah. I mean, both parties have engaged in the mudslinging over the years. And at times, it's worked, but I think in recent history, it has not been as successful. It often backfires on them, and the candidate that's being attacked gets something of a sympathy vote from it.
RAZ: You're saying that these negative attacks actually backfire?
VINSON: Yeah. Go back to our gubernatorial primary just two years ago. Nikki Haley was being - people are making allegations that she had been unfaithful to her husband.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Nikki Haley fighting a second claim she's had an affair. But now, she's dealing with an ethnic slur.
VINSON: And she actually ended up winning the primary in part because people didn't think she had been treated fairly during the campaigning.
RAZ: And it seems like, even more recently, with the story about Newt Gingrich and his messy divorce from his second wife, her claims that he asked for an open marriage. When Newt Gingrich pushed back on that during the recent debate, the audience cheered wildly.
JOHN KING: She says you asked her, sir, to enter into an open marriage. Would you like to take some time to respond to that?
GINGRICH: No. But I will.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
RAZ: If the voters aren't receptive to it, why do you think that it persists? I mean, who's responsible? Is there a certain kind of - a certain type of political operative that just happens to live in South Carolina and work there?
VINSON: Well, I don't know that it's unique to South Carolina. I'm sure that other places must have negative campaigning. But I do think, you know, our political operatives don't mind taking the gloves off when it comes to campaigning, which is funny given the reputation of the state for being relatively polite. But sometimes in the primaries, there's not that much difference on the issues. So the political operatives go for the private lives as a way to separate the candidates.
RAZ: But it sounds like, though, you would argue that South Carolina gets a bad rap. Every four years, people talk about this. They talk about the dirty politics of South Carolina. But maybe it's all just a little exaggerated.
VINSON: Some of it's exaggerated. But also keep in mind, not all of this is South Carolina's (unintelligible). You know, a lot of what's going on in the presidential primaries over the years has actually been outside groups coming in and paying for phone call from the state. So we can't take credit for all the nastiness.
RAZ: That's political scientist Danielle Vinson from Furman University. The key to winning in South Carolina is winning over social and religious conservatives. This year, says Richard Land, who's the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, those voters have a dilemma.
RICHARD LAND: Evangelicals make up 60 percent of the votes in South Carolina. And it's also true that South Carolina has voted for the person who became the Republican candidate every year since 1980. I mean, the base of the Republican Party is the old South. And South Carolina represents that.
RAZ: Do you think that social and religious conservatives right now face a dilemma? I mean, we don't know what's going to happen tonight. But, say, Mitt Romney is the GOP nominee, is that going to pose a major dilemma for people like you?
LAND: No, I don't think so. Mitt Romney is a more reliable social conservative in 2012 than he was in 2008, because he's been that longer.
RAZ: So why so much suspicion over him?
LAND: Well, I mean, look, it's not his Mormonism. If he had been more Mormon on the social issues that matter most to social conservatives, they'd be less concerned about it.
RAZ: You're talking about abortion, for example.
LAND: Sanctity of human life and same-sex marriage. If he'd held the position that his church holds his whole political career, there'd be virtually no doubts about his social conservatism.
RAZ: I've read a quote from one prominent evangelical leader who said: It's not Mitt Romney's Mormonism that worries me, it's how the Mormon church will market him in their bid to convert others to the faith around the world. Are there some evangelicals who feel threatened by that idea?
LAND: Sure. Look, if a Mormon becomes president, it will mainstream Mormonism in a way that Mormonism has not been mainstreamed before. In the same way that when you had an evangelical president, it mainstreamed evangelicalism in a way it had been mainstreamed.
RAZ: You're talking about George W. Bush.
LAND: Yes.
RAZ: But you would argue that evangelicalism wasn't considered mainstream before that? I mean...
LAND: No. Not as much as it was after he was elected and certainly not as much as it was before Ronald Reagan.
RAZ: What about Jimmy Carter?
LAND: Well, when Jimmy Carter ran for president, people said: Born again, what's that mean? Is he a snake handler? What is that?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
LAND: The national media had no idea what a born again Christian was in 1976. Jimmy Carter had to try to explain it to them, as well as a lot of the rest of us.
RAZ: So you're saying that if Mitt Romney becomes President Romney, the fear among some evangelicals is that it will mainstream Mormonism?
LAND: Well, it'll certainly increase the mainstreaming. But I think if Romney is the only one who runs even or looks viable against Obama come nomination time, he will be the nominee. I know more social conservatives - Catholic and evangelical - who are following the William F. Buckley dictum this time than ever before. The late William F. Buckley Jr., his dictum was this: I'm for the most conservative candidate who can get elected.
RAZ: Let me turn to some of the other candidates in the race, particularly Newt Gingrich who, of course, has surged in recent days and could, in fact, win this primary. Why haven't social and religious conservatives rallied around him?
LAND: He does have baggage in his past. And, you know, they intuitively feel that if you're going to be the party of family values, you better walk the walk. And there have been times in Mr. Gingrich's past when he has not walked the walk. I mean, after all, he's the first presidential candidate that has two ex-wives.
RAZ: I know that you don't personally endorse candidates, Richard Land, but you know a lot of social and religious conservatives who have indeed endorsed Rick Santorum.
LAND: Yes.
RAZ: Do you think Rick Santorum could beat Barack Obama?
LAND: Yes. And when people say, come on. In January of 2008, who thought Barack Obama could beat Hillary Clinton? Barack Obama and his wife, maybe a few others, that's it. I mean, in this 24/7 news cycle that we live in now, Barack Obama is the poster child for the fact that you can become a nationally known figure very, very quickly.
RAZ: That's Richard Land with the Southern Baptist Convention. More politics in a moment with Jim Fallows and why some pecan farmers are now packing heat to protect their harvest.
That's next up on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
JAY CARNEY: We need to do something about online piracy by foreign websites.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Stop SOPA. Pass on PIPA.
REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER: It's pretty clear to many of us that there's a lack of consensus at this point.
RAZ: That's House leader John Boehner and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on two bills to curb online piracy. Under enormous pressure, Congress abandoned those bills this past week. James Fallows of The Atlantic joins us now as he does most Saturdays for a look behind the headlines. Jim, good to have you here.
JAMES FALLOWS: Thank you, Guy.
RAZ: Let me start out with the story about what's known as SOPA and PIPA. These were supposed to easily pass in Congress. Now, basically, a massive campaign mounted by technology companies sunk them. What happened with this thing, Jim?
FALLOWS: This was fascinating in several ways. One was the speed of the change that happened. As you noted, a week ago, 10 days ago, almost everybody would have thought this would have gone through the Congress without much problem. But just in a couple of days because of the boycott mounted by Wikipedia, Google had blacked out logos on its page.
You saw just hour by hour senators backing off their support of the bill. And the Obama administration also which had sort of testily approved it moved away. The additional aspect of this that was so interesting is you can sort of sum it up as a San Francisco versus Hollywood struggle.
RAZ: Because Hollywood supported it.
FALLOWS: Exactly. So you had the content creators saying we need this protection against piracy. And then you had the technology industry of Northern California saying that this is too clumsy and crude a tool. That we understand a need for an intellectual property protection, but in so doing, you're going to wreck a lot of the basic infrastructure of the Internet. And the idea that in that struggle, the traditional political powers of Hollywood who had also been very important to the Democratic Party traditionally, they were not able to outwit or outpoll the new powers of the Internet industry. That was a sign of a kind of correlation of forces we haven't seen.
RAZ: I mean, I'm wondering, if this is crushed so easily, some of these tech companies - I mean, I wonder if they're going to come to regret this in the future. Google, for example, you've pointed out, they are really worried about their intellectual property. They are fiercely protective over their source code, I guess, to the extent that they don't even give it to their Chinese office.
FALLOWS: Exactly. So the technology industry understands that intellectual property is important. It just hasn't paid as much attention to movies and music, et cetera, and probably the apparent defeat of this bill will be a step towards a more sensible solution.
RAZ: But for now, the battle is over.
FALLOWS: Yes.
RAZ: Let me turn to another story that we're going to be hearing a lot about next week, and that is President Obama's State of the Union speech. Normally, the speeches are state affairs, it doesn't matter which president is delivering them. But this is an election year. Are we likely to see a campaign speech?
FALLOWS: We are. And I mean that in a good way. Something that's bad about these speeches - and as you know, I once worked on them for President Carter long ago - is that State of the Union speeches are essentially contracts. Or they are tender offers.
RAZ: Here's what we're going to do.
FALLOWS: Exactly. And every branch of the government gets mad if there's not one clause about its program. Every country in the rest of the world gets mad if they're not mentioned, et cetera. But when a president is preparing for a reelection year, there's a different sense to the State of the Union speech, even though presidents have a disproportionate share of airtime and headspace and all the rest in the American consciousness.
But the last couple of months, it's mainly been his Republican challengers who've been on the air with all their debates. And so we haven't heard as much directly from the president as we usually do. And so his case about what the Republicans are saying on the over-reach of government, about his medical care plan, about who's responsible for the economy, I think we'll hear a preview of the way he wants these issues to be considered in the next 10 months.
RAZ: This past week, President Obama took some people by surprise, I guess you could say by storm, when he stood up to sing this. Take a listen, Jim.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: (Singing) I'm so in love with you.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
RAZ: That is not Al Green. President Obama.
FALLOWS: I thought that was incredibly gutsy a thing to do, because to try a cappella in front of a big crowd just to do a rift on the Reverend Al Green...
RAZ: And the Apollo Theater, by the way.
FALLOWS: The Apollo Theater. It reminds me of the time during the campaign when he was on some military base in the Middle East. And he attempted this three-point basketball shot...
RAZ: He made it.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FALLOWS: He made it. It was nothing but net. So this was a big risk, and I am impressed that he pulled it off.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Those guys didn't think I would do it.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
OBAMA: I told you I was going to do it.
RAZ: That's James Fallows. He's national correspondent for The Atlantic. You can read his blog at jamesfallows.theatlantic.com. Jim, thank you so much.
FALLOWS: My pleasure, Guy.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Our next story is about a journey, this one from North Korea to the South. It's a dangerous journey, getting caught is certain death. But once a defector arrives in the South, a new set of challenges await. Reporter Doualy Xaykaothao followed one recent defector as he began his new life.
DOUALY XAYKAOTHAO, BYLINE: A short man in his 40s walks out of a building that looks more like a prison than a state-run home dedicated to helping North Korean defectors. Kim, who didn't give his full name, wears a dark suit and a new winter jacket. He immediately gets into an unmarked government car. He's visibly anxious, not only because he's meeting foreign journalists for the first time, but because he's about to experience life in a completely different world from the totalitarian state he left behind.
During the long drive, Kim notices there are many more trees in the South. He also mentions the metal rails along the freeway, saying in North Korea, you'd never see such solid infrastructure. He never makes eye contact. And his body language indicates he's uncomfortable. But his wide eyes, staring out the window, suggest he's full of wonder about his new adopted country.
In the last six months, he's been getting essentially de-programmed by the South Korean government, un-learning everything North Korean. To make his transition into South Korean society easier, his friend, Korean-American writer Krys Lee, accompanies him. She first met him nine months ago at a safe house in China before Kim escaped through Southeast Asia and later to Seoul. She volunteers to translate.
KIM: (Foreign language spoken)
KRYS LEE: He's talking about basically just be ready in five years when you have to be fully independent, because you have no support after that. But it was very detailed. I mean he's looking at, like, exactly, like, what month he's going to get a job, like, what, you know, when he's going to study. He's very determined to resettle successfully here.
XAYKAOTHAO: Kim finally arrives in a provincial town and his new home in a collection of grey buildings that look like public housing units in the U.S. Once inside his simple, one-bedroom apartment, there's relief, surprise and joy.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: (Foreign language spoken)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: (Foreign language spoken)
KIM: (Foreign language spoken)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: (Foreign language spoken)
XAYKAOTHAO: After Kim's personal effects are left on the kitchen floor, the driver and others leave. Kim then begins to pull out manuals on how to be a good new neighbor, as well as books about local customs. But he has few belongings.
He basically has two bags, one box, and a box of ramen, and a bag of rice that was donated by the National Red Cross of Korea.
The first thing he scrambled for is a pack of smokes. He's finally free, independent of South Korean and North Korean authorities.
KIM: (Foreign language spoken)
LEE: He said, no, I'm not exhausted at all. I wasn't able to sleep at all. Last night, I had so many thoughts. I was thinking about how difficult it had been to come here. And now that I'm here, I really have to live a good life, and how am I supposed to make that happen.
XAYKAOTHAO: After a few more puffs, he says he can't imagine living like this in North Korea. Here, he has privacy, his own balcony, a closet, a kitchen. In the North, he says he was homeless for years, living inside trash dumps. Now, surrounded by the smell of new ivory patterned wallpaper, he hopes to sleep better. But the memory of his kids haunt him.
KIM: (Through translator) The most terrible thing is I wasn't able to bring a photograph of them from the North to here. And so when I was in Hanawon, I even drew a picture of them, and I looked at them and I would cry.
XAYKAOTHAO: Crossing into China from North Korea is too risky for children, and some die trying to escape. Kim explains he's divorced, and chooses not to reveal where he's from because he fears for his family's safety. Around his neck hangs a large ivory cross. He says he doesn't know much about religion, only that the people who helped him escape believe in God. In this moment, he says he's just trying to believe in himself. For NPR News, I'm Doualy Xaykaothao in Gyeongju Province, South Korea.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
The NFL is on the cusp of determining who will be playing in Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis. Tomorrow on the West Coast, the San Francisco 49ers face the New York Giants, and on the East Coast, the New England Patriots host the Baltimore Ravens. NPR's Mike Pesca is here to preview the matchups. Mike, hello.
MIKE PESCA, BYLINE: Hello.
RAZ: Let's talk about the Giants. I'm supposed to be neutral here, Mike, but they're going into this game with a nine and seven record during the regular season. Disgraceful. They do not deserve to be there, Mike, against the 49ers. Are they actually favored to win against them?
PESCA: Disgraceful? Wait. Well, if you factor in the two wins in the playoffs, they have 11 wins, and that compares favorably, to be honest with you.
RAZ: Fair enough.
PESCA: Also, they beat the Packers who were the best team with only one loss in the regular season.
RAZ: That was weird.
PESCA: And I think, you know what, they were the better team last week.
RAZ: They were. They were.
PESCA: They showed that with all their guys healthy - and that's a big difference - they could put pressure on any quarterback. And when they could rattle Aaron Rodgers, Packs' quarterback, in the game, imagine what they're going to do to Alex Smith. He's the San Francisco 49er quarterback, and until this year, he was pretty much viewed as a flop. Jim Harbaugh comes in as coach of the 49ers, gives him a bit of a different playbook. Alex Smith is a smart guy. He majored in econ at Utah, and he knows about pendulums. I think the pendulum has swung very far in the other direction.
But if the - like I said, if the Giants could get after Aaron Rodgers and could cause him to make mistakes, that pressure can be brought to bear on Alex Smith, and that's why this game really is a toss-up according to the people who decide who's the favorites.
RAZ: All right. You've won me over, respect for the Giants. We'll see what happens in that game. Let's go to the other side of the country: the Patriots versus the Baltimore Ravens. The Patriots, obviously, hoping to return to their first Super Bowl since 2007. That was the season when they were undefeated, and then, of course, they lost the Super Bowl to the Giants that year. Talk about the Ravens - how much of an obstacle do they represent to the Patriots?
PESCA: Well, the Ravens have a very good defense, and they have, by advance metrics, the number one pass defense in the NFL. However, I would - you know, NFL teams don't play every other team. And among the teams that the Ravens didn't play were the Saints, the Packers, the Patriots. In other words, the great quarterbacks. And when they did play a good quarterback, like Philip Rivers of San Diego, he basically torched them. Whereas on the other side, the Patriots have a really bad defense, and I think the Ravens can do some damage. I think the Patriots are a vulnerable team. I don't know if their vulnerabilities are kind of aligned with the Ravens' strength, if you want to make a case for the Ravens pulling the upset in this game.
RAZ: Mike, I think I know the answer to this, but which matchup would have the most intrigue?
PESCA: Well, of course, you have the Giants and the Patriots...
RAZ: Rematch.
PESCA: ...like a few years ago, yes. But the Giants also played and lost to the Ravens. So whoever the Giants play, it'll be a rematch. If San Francisco plays the Ravens, that would be the Harbaugh brothers. Brothers had never faced each other as head coaches until they faced earlier this year. I can't even imagine two brothers facing down in a Super Bowl.
RAZ: That's like a Civil War story.
PESCA: Yeah. The country will be so inundated with Harbaugh mania it will be hard to even dig out. So, yeah, no matter what happens, there's going to be a lot of drama, and I'm going to guess, a lot of attention.
RAZ: That's NPR's Mike Pesca on tomorrow's NFL conference championship games. Mike, thanks.
PESCA: You're welcome.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE HOUSE I LIVE IN")
NANNY JENNER: Drugs is a monster. The killing, the stealing, those people being destroyed, it's devastating.
RAZ: Since 1970, the war on drugs has cost over two and a half trillion dollars and resulted in more than 44 million arrests. During that time, sales of illegal drugs have grown steadily. That statistic hangs on the screen like a warning sign in a new documentary by Eugene Jarecki. It's called "The House I Live In." Jarecki is the man behind the award-winning film "Why We Fight." It's about the military industrial complex. Now, he's tackling the war on drugs and its consequences. The movie debuts at the Sundance Film Festival this weekend, and it begins with a very personal story. It's a story of how drugs upended the family of the woman we just heard from, Eugene Jarecki's childhood housekeeper, Nanny Jenner.
EUGENE JARECKI: Well, Nanny Jenner is like a second mother to me. I've known Nanny, and she's known me, my whole life. Her name is actually Nanny. It's her birth name.
RAZ: She lost one of her sons, of course, to AIDS. He was a drug user and contracted it from a dirty needle.
JARECKI: Yeah, yeah. And I grew up with her children. I knew them very closely. And Nanny is African-American. And I think we all grew up in a kind of a utopian post-civil rights mindset where we thought America had entered a really new time and that opportunity awaited us. And what I watched happen over the years was that members of her family who've grown up alongside me, they didn't find the same kind of opportunities I found. They weren't blessed in the ways that I found myself to be blessed by circumstance. Instead, they met a new kind of challenge, what Michelle Alexander, who's in the film, calls a new Jim Crow.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE HOUSE I LIVE IN")
MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Well, in any war, you've got to have an enemy. And when you think about the impact, particularly on poor people of color, you know, there are more African-Americans under correctional control today, in prisoner jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. And that's something we haven't been willing to look in the mirror and ask ourselves. What's really going on?
JARECKI: But what I discovered is that something was holding a great mass of black people back in a new and very different way, and that's what the film starts to uncover.
RAZ: Then, of course, in the case of Nanny Jenner, was drugs what sort of unraveled her family's life. And you began to explore the question of drugs and the relationship between drugs and incarceration. And so then, of course, your journey began.
JARECKI: Virtually everyone I spoke to said, well, sure, drugs are a problem and they're a public health concern. But something much larger has happened that's far more damaging than the drugs themselves, and that's namely the war on drugs. That, as David Simon, who created "The Wire" is in the film and he has a marvelous way of thinking about this. And at one point in the film, he says, you know:
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE HOUSE I LIVE IN")
DAVID SIMON: We are the jailingest country on the planet, beyond Saudi Arabia, North Korea and China. Nobody jails the population like we do. And yet, drugs are pure than ever before. They're more available. There are younger and younger kids willing to sell them. It'd be one thing if it's draconian and it worked. But it's draconian, and it doesn't work, and it just leads to war.
RAZ: The war on drugs, the beginnings of it, are generally attributed to the administration of President Nixon.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: President Nixon promised an all-out war on drug addiction.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: The president stretches with law enforcement to tighten the noose around drug peddlers.
RAZ: But in the film, you describe President Nixon's take on it is - the way it's described seems comparatively progressive.
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: Because a program of law enforcement alone is not enough.
JARECKI: Well, Nixon is kind of complex, kind of fascinating. And yes, he declared a war on drugs and was really the first modern day tough-on-crime candidate. And as such, he proved his success for a politician of running a tough on crime campaign. And yet, though he declared a war on drugs, privately, his policy was that he spent two-thirds of his drug budget on treatment rather than criminal justice.
NIXON: This means that on the treatment of addicts, we must go parallel...
JARECKI: And yet, when the 1972 election approaches, even though he knows the treatment is working better, he recognizes that talking tough on crime gets you elected. And that forges for decades that we've now been experiencing this American model where politicians understand that it is successful to talk tough on crime, even though that may be misguided and terribly destructive to the goals of the country. And they also know that not doing so by now is considered a form of political suicide.
RAZ: Let's go back to the criminalization of drugs because the film - as the film points out, back in the 19th century and the early 20th century drug use today that is illegal - opium and cocaine and marijuana - back then was not. How did these drugs become thought of in the way we think of them now?
JARECKI: Sure. Well, once upon a time, those people who used opium and people who used it ever excessively were seen sort of sympathetically as though it were a public health concern. But then something happened that teaches us a great deal, and that was that all of a sudden, laws began to be passed outlawing opium. But they weren't laws all across the country. They were only laws in California and only for one specific way of using opium, namely smoking it and why? Well, it had nothing to do with smoking opium. It had to do with who was smoking opium, and that was the Chinese. And the Chinese had come to America and were, of course, seen as taking American jobs and a threat to the labor force.
And local politicians in California got together and said, well, wait a minute. We can't stop people because they're Chinese, at least you couldn't make that publicly palatable. What if we made illegal a form of behavior that is typical to the Chinese? You know, we've had a long history, chapter by chapter, in which drug laws in America have, with a varying range of intention, ended up de facto operating as racist instruments.
RAZ: I'm speaking with the award-winning documentary filmmaker Eugene Jarecki. His new film is called "The House I Live In," and it's about the war on drugs. I was struck by how many law enforcement officers you spoke to who expressed deep skepticism about the drug laws and about the things they had to do to enforce them, feeling almost as it was distracting them from doing real police work and taking on real crimes, violent crimes for example.
JARECKI: The one thing I could never have imagined would be that the most farsighted and deeply introspective critics of the drug war would be people on the inside. One of the characters in the film is this very, very hardened security chief named Mike Carpenter who runs a facility in Oklahoma.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE HOUSE I LIVE IN")
MIKE CARPENTER: I am very much a law and order kind of guy.
JARECKI: And from the outside, you would think, this is like your prototype tough prison guard. But deep down, he actually has deep reservations about how the system does what it does and why.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE HOUSE I LIVE IN")
CARPENTER: I think sometimes we have people doing a whole lot of time for not very much crime. It's almost like they're paying for our fear instead of paying for their crime.
JARECKI: The thing that happens is that politicians run on tough-on-crime rhetoric. You appeal to the public and say, let's put more money into taller fences, tougher laws, tougher sentencing, handcuffs, and where does that money come from? Well, immediately, it comes out of all the money needed for corrections. So somebody who's running a facility and wanting to make it a better place that's effective at, say, reducing recidivism sees that the political winds don't blow that way, that what happens is that politicians don't run smart on crime. They run tough on crime because it's in their short-term interest, and as Mike Carpenter taught me and others, it's ultimately in the short-term profit interest of a wide range of corporate and other actors who profit and benefit from the system being the way it does and not looking critically at itself.
RAZ: In one of your previous films, "Why We Fight," it suggests that what Eisenhower described as a military industrial complex, it was called the defense industry, in some ways, stands in the way of serious reform when it comes to the amount of money we spend on defense. And I wonder if it's the same with the industry that depends on drug laws. I mean, do they stand in the way of major reform?
JARECKI: Sure. I think they represent what Richard Lawrence Miller in the film refers to as bureaucratic thrust. The thrust that keeps a system from self reflecting and self correcting because, you know, if you were to decide that the drug laws are woefully misguided, that they have failed, that we have spent more than a trillion dollars on the drug war, it's led to 45 million arrests and yet we have not remotely curbed the sale or use of drugs and their purity and the youth of the people willing to sell and use them. If it's totally failed in its mission and you want the system to reflect on that and change course, well, think about all the people who will lose their livelihood.
And I don't think any of those people sit down at night rubbing their evil hands together, hey, I'm going to connive to keep a system going that preys upon my fellow man. They don't think that. They just think, I need to put food on the table. And until somebody tells me otherwise, this is the system we have. But if you talk to people, they're human beings. So if you ask just an extra question or two about their deeper thoughts, you find a great deal of empathy lurking beneath the surface. And I was inspired to find a great deal of desire to see a change.
RAZ: That's the documentary filmmaker Eugene Jarecki. He's the director of the new film, "The House I Live In." It's about the war on drugs. It's debuting at the Sundance Film Festival this weekend. If you want to see clips or learn more about the film, you can find that out at thehouseilivein.org. Eugene Jarecki, thank you so much.
JARECKI: Thank you for having me.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Human embryonic stem cells have generated a lot of excitement and a lot of controversy, but no results yet - at least not in human patients. Well, scientists are now reporting the first hints that the cells may have helped someone get better. Two women appear to have unexpectedly regained some vision while volunteering for a preliminary study.
As NPR's Rob Stein reports, everyone involved in the work is being extremely cautious about how they interpret the results so far.
ROB STEIN, BYLINE: The provocative news is about two patients with progressive, incurable eye diseases. Steven Schwartz of UCLA is leading the research and describes their conditions this way.
DR. STEVEN SCHWARTZ: If you wanted to imagine what one of these patients was going through, you could hold the palm of your hand about one inch from your nose and look straight ahead. You'd see a huge blind spot. If you look down to the right or the left, the palm or your hand or the blind spot would move with you. So wherever you look, you can't see.
STEIN: Eventually, patients with macular degeneration often lose their ability to read, recognize faces, drive, work, even go outside on their own. Now, the main goal of this study is really just to see whether it's safe to inject cells made from human embryonic stem cells into someone's eye.
SCHWARTZ: Imagine sitting there with your doctor and he tells you that we don't know whether or not this is going to help you or this is going to hurt you. We don't know whether or not these stem cells are going to turn into some sort of tumor, or other problem, or whether it's going to remove the remaining vision that you have in that eye.
STEIN: Even with those warnings, two of Schwartz's patients agreed to let him inject 50,000 cells into one of their eyes in July. Both women had lost so much vision and the dose they got was so low that no one expected the cells would actually help them see better. But within weeks, both started to think something might be happening.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: I sort of like woke up one morning and did realize that, wow, you know, there is a difference between the two eyes now. They only worked on the left eye. The furniture on the other side of the room has a lot of - I have some hand-carved furniture there, and I could actually see the detail on the carving. You know, on the other side of the room there, on things that I couldn't see from that distance before.
STEIN: This patient had started going blind in her 20s because of a disease called Stargardt's macular dystrophy. She's in her 50s and lives in Los Angeles. She didn't want her name used because she's worried about losing work. It turns out, she's a graphic artist.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: It was pretty amazing. I mean, I was like kind of looking at everything new again, you know.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Just sort of going around and first not believing it, but then really looking, you know. And realizing that, you know, I definitely had more sight in that eye.
STEIN: The other patient is Sue Freeman of Laguna Beach, California. She has a condition known as dry, age-related macular degeneration. It's the leading cause of blindness in the developed world. The disease had slowly destroyed Freeman's ability to read, drive, cook, and do so many things that were once so easy. It got to the point where she couldn't even go outside for a walk by herself.
SUE FREEMAN: Everything got harder. You know, simple things like seeing a telephone, turning on a TV, pouring a glass of water without spilling it
STEIN: But within weeks of getting the cells, Freeman, who's 78, noticed landscapes seemed clearer and brighter. Soon, she was making her own breakfast again. One day, she felt so much better she convinced her husband to drop her off at the mall so she could go shopping.
FREEMAN: One day I looked down and I could see my watch, which I wear it even though, because I like jewelry. So, I always wear it, but I probably hadn't seen it in about a year and a half or two. And I could see. That was exciting for me. And I remember saying: Oh, my goodness. I can see my watch. I can actually tell time.
STEIN: UCLA's Steven Schwartz is pretty confident that the graphic artist might really have gotten better because of the cells. When his team examines her treated eye, they can actually see the transplanted cells thriving. He's a little less certain about Sue Freeman. At first, he suspected the placebo effect, and he's worried about raising expectations too high, too fast.
SCHWARTZ: And my job is to decrease suffering. And if we overstate this and raise hopes falsely and then it doesn't work out, it will hurt people rather than help them.
STEIN: The company that made the cells, Advanced Cell Technology, has the OK to treat a total of 24 patients in the United States and 12 in the United Kingdom. Clearly, they have a lot more work to do to make sure the cells are safe, let alone establish that they are really working. After all, the results they have so far come from just two patients.
Schwartz plans to treat a third patient on Tuesday. And doctors in London have started injecting cells into patients there last week.
Rob Stein, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And finally this hour, another Winter Song story. Over the past few months, we've asked for your memories of music that reminds you of winter. And, today, we bring you one listener's memory about dancing on a cold day in Minnesota to music sung by a man nicknamed Tennessee.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SIXTEEN TONS")
VERONICA HORTON: My name is Veronica Horton and my winter song is by Ernie Ford and it's "Sixteen Tons" and what do you get?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: What do you get?
HORTON: (Singing) You get another day older and deeper in debt.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SIXTEEN TONS")
HORTON: When I connected with that song, I was living in a little town called Forest Lake, Minnesota and we lived in the country. And my mom and dad were hard working people, and you made fun with what you had. And come a weekend, my mom would have the radio playing and she's always be singing along with it and I remember us kids always snapping our fingers and going along with Ernie Ford.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SIXTEEN TONS")
HORTON: It takes me back to Thanksgiving weekend, 1963. You know, the country was in turmoil and it'd only been a week since the president had been assassinated. And I can remember going outside and just feeling safe. You know, my parents always made us feel safe at home.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SIXTEEN TONS")
HORTON: We had ponies. They were out in the field and they had their winter coats. You know, they were all fuzzy and wooly looking and we had an old car that kind of bit the dust and my dad parked it out back of the barn and that's where it was laid to rest.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
HORTON: So, you know, I just remember being bundled up. We hadn't had any snow yet and it was so cold. It was like almost like you could feel it trying to snow, but it just wouldn't.
I went outside and I had my western boots on and I climbed up on the roof of that car and I tap danced out "Sixteen Tons" and totally uninhibited and it was wonderful. My horses looked at me like, what is she doing? You know.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SIXTEEN TONS")
BLOCK: How old were you, Veronica?
HORTON: I was 12. Yeah. And, you know, nothing can beat the feeling of dancing on the hood of an old car. You can't get a video game that does that to you.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: Well, Veronica Horton, thanks for talking to us about "Sixteen Tons" and your Winter Song and dance memory.
HORTON: Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure, Melissa.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SIXTEEN TONS")
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The first bids are due today for one of the most storied franchises in pro sports. The Los Angeles Dodgers are up for auction after Major League Baseball forced the deeply unpopular owner, Frank McCourt, to give up control of the team.
The Dodgers lost their luster and then some under McCourt's ownership, but NPR's Tom Goldman reports that the new sale price could still set a record.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: So you want to own the Dodgers? First, get a billion dollars or more. Estimates for the winning bid range from $1.2 to $2 billion. Obviously, only one percenters need apply and they have, in droves.
We don't know the whole list. There's a lot of secrecy and non-disclosure requirements surrounding the process, but we know some of those involved. Billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen, Tom Barrack, real estate titan. And then the names we recognize. Former Dodger stars Orel Hersheiser and Steve Garvey. Former Dodgers manager Joe Torre, and then some cross-league pollination. L.A. Lakers legend Magic Johnson reportedly is in, as is NBA bad boy owner Mark Cuban. He played coy with NBC's Jay Leno a couple of days ago.
JAY LENO: Would you like to buy the Dodgers, if it was possible?
MARK CUBAN: It could be fun. It could be fun. Can you imagine? L.A. would never be the same.
GOLDMAN: Neither would the Dodgers, and if you ask most Angelenos who care about the team, that would be a good thing. The McCourt years were marred by the lavish lifestyles of Frank and now ex-wife Jamie, funded in part by team money, their bitter public divorce and a less than enjoyable and sometimes dangerous ballpark experience at Dodger Stadium that ultimately led to vast swaths of empty seats.
So with the franchise in decline, why the ownership interest and huge projected sale price?
MARC GANIS: It's a reflection of the opportunity value if done properly.
GOLDMAN: Meaning, according to sports business expert Marc Ganis, there's gold in Chavez Ravine, the Dodgers' home in the hills overlooking downtown L.A.
Ganis, president of Sportscorp Limited, a consulting firm that focuses on team acquisitions, says three little letters, RSN, potentially make the Dodgers, already a fabled franchise, an astronomically valuable one as well. RSN, Regional Sports Network, like the ones included in a new long term TV deal between Time Warner Cable and the L.A. Lakers that Ganis says potentially could be worth $3 billion.
GANIS: That was so extreme that it makes many people feel that there's something unique about the Los Angeles market that should allow for a monstrous rights fee or Regional Sports Network equity deal.
GOLDMAN: Monstrous rights fees and RSN equity deals are of little concern to the 99 percenters who won't be bidding on the Dodgers, but many of them are hopeful that new ownership will make it easier to cheer on the team.
At last night's Lakers game, Dodgers fan Arturo Hernandez got specific.
ARTURO HERNANDEZ: Hopefully they can lower the prices on the beer. That's for damn sure.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
GOLDMAN: But before there's cheap beer, there's a thorough vetting process of up to 10 bidders by Major League Baseball. Those who make it through that will take part in an auction. Frank McCourt reportedly will reveal the winning bid by early April and then use an estimated $1 billion of it to pay off his debts.
Tom Goldman, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Now to technology: Unlocking the ivory tower. NPR's Steve Henn takes us to Stanford where professors are making classes available online to thousands.
STEVE HENN, BYLINE: Last semester, Sebastian Thrun, who helped build a self-driving car for Google, got together with a small group of other Stanford computer science professors. And pretty impulsively, they decided to open their Stanford classes to the world, and allow anyone anywhere to attend online for free; take quizzes, ask questions, even get grades.
They made this announcement with almost no fanfare, sending out a single email to a professional group.
SEBASTIAN THRUN: Within hours, we had 5,000 students sign-up. That was on a Saturday morning. On Sunday night, we had 10,000 students.
HENN: Eventually, more than 160,000 students signed up for Thrun's class with Peter Norvig on artificial intelligence, or A.I.
THRUN: We reached many more students, Peter and I, in this one class than all other A.I. professors combined reached in the last year.
HENN: People from 190 countries signed up. Students from the Australian outback, Shanghai, Africa, the Ukraine, and all over the Unites States studied together online. After it was over, videos offering thanks flooded in.
JACK WISE: Hello, my name is Jack Wise.
MELODY BLISS: Hello, my name is Melody Bliss.
BOLUTIFE OGUNSOLA: Hi, my name is Bolutife Ogunsola.
JANINE COHEN: Hi, my name is Janine Cohen.
WISE: I am from Tallahassee Florida.
OGUNSOLA: University of Legos Nigeria.
HENN: All of these students and tens of thousands of other completed the class.
COHEN: I teach math, science, robotics and computer technology at a Montessori school.
BLISS: I am a disabled woman going through dialysis three times a week.
WISE: I'm 16 years old.
HENN: They took the same class Stanford students took, and they got grades. But they didn't pay a cent and they didn't get credit.
Jim Plummer is the dean of engineering.
JIM PLUMMER: I think it will actually be a long time, maybe never, when actual Stanford degrees would be given for fully online work by anyone who wish to register for the courses.
HENN: Stanford does give degrees for online work, but only to students who get through the admissions process and pay - often 40 or $50,000 for a master's degree. But technology could push prices down.
DAPHNE KOLLER: On the long-term, I think the potential for this to revolutionize education is just tremendous.
HENN: Daphne Koller is a computer science professor at Stanford and a MacArthur Genius Fellow. She's been working to make online education more engaging and interactive for years.
KOLLER: There are millions of people around the world that have access only to the poorest quality of education, or sometimes nothing at all.
HENN: Koller says technology could change that. She says it makes it possible in many subjects to teach classes with 100,000 students, as easily and as cheaply as a class that has just 100 students. And if you look around the world, the demand for education in places like South Africa is enormous.
KOLLER: In the University of Johannesburg, a few weeks ago, they had a very small number of places that were still open. And so, there were thousands of people parked outside the gates, sitting there for the gates to open, so they could be first in line to register for that limited number of slots. And when the gates opened there was a stampede.
HENN: Twenty people were injured and one woman was killed. Koller hopes in the future technology will make these kinds of tragedies preventable. In this semester, Stanford will put 17 interactive courses online for free.
Over the last six months, Sebastian Thrun has spent roughly $200,000 of his own money and lined up venture capital to create a new online institution of higher learning, independent of Stanford.
THRUN: The name is Udacity. We are committed to free online education for everybody.
HENN: Udacity is announcing two new classes today. One will teach students to build their own search engine, another how to program a self-driving car. Eventually, the founders hope to offer a full slate of classes in computer science, all for free.
Thrun believes Stanford's mission is really to attract the top 1 percent of students from all over in the world and bring them to campus. He says Udacity's mission is different: Free quality education for all anywhere. A sweeping disruptive technology.
Here's Daphne Koller.
KOLLER: What I think is clear is that this change is coming. And it's coming whether we like it or not. And so, I think the right strategy is to embrace that change.
HENN: Over the years, Stanford has launched dozens of disruptive technologies into the world. But now, administrators and professors here seem to agree it could be about to disrupt itself.
Steve Henn, NPR News, Silicon Valley.
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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
This is NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block.
You might see John Hawkes on screen - focus on his intensity, his wiry form, piercing blue eyes and long nose - and think, oh, it's that guy. Now, what's his name? Well, again, it's John Hawkes. And now, a brief survey of his most memorable characters. In the notoriously foul-mouthed HBO series "Deadwood" - set in the muck and mire of the Dakota territories in 1870s - he played the Jewish merchant Sol Star, in love with a hot-tempered whore, Trixie.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "DEADWOOD")
BLOCK: John Hawkes is mostly drawn to indie movies, like "Winter's Bone" from a couple of years back. He was nominated for an Oscar for his role as the tattooed Ozark meth addict Teardrop.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "WINTER'S BONE")
BLOCK: And in the recent indie "Martha Marcy May Marlene," he's terrifying as a charismatic cult leader who mixes tenderness with extreme violence.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE")
BLOCK: Now, John Hawkes is veering briefly away from small indie films. He plays a supporting role in Steven Spielberg's next movie "Lincoln," a big-budget, big-cast production. They were shooting recently in Richmond, Virginia, and that's where I met up with John Hawkes to talk about his acting career and his deliberate choice to keep to the fringes.
When I was telling people that I was coming to talk with you and explaining who I was talking with and explaining some of the roles you've been on, I'd say, you know, he was Teardrop in "Winter's Bone," he was Sol Star in "Deadwood," he was in the "Perfect Storm" and those sort of things, and they'll go, oh, he's that guy. Is that appealing to you in any way? Is it - does it feel pejorative in some way?
: No. I think to kind of be thought of as that guy or I think I know you from somewhere kind of guy is an asset for me. I have a difficult time sometimes believing movie stars playing characters. I often think when you get to know so much about someone and their personal life and their wives and, you know, the charity work they do or the - for appearances they made on all the talk shows the week before or whatever, I often think, wow, that movie star is doing a pretty credible job pretending to be a waiter.
And when I walk on screen, I want people to say there's a waiter - believe that's a waiter. So I have no kind of desire to be a household name, for sure. I don't think I have the face for it, anyway. So I don't think I have to worry too much about it. But I'd rather be invisible. I'd rather be a mystery. As I said, you're doing an interview on NPR with you.
BLOCK: As menacing as he's been on screen, John Hawkes is surprisingly elfin in person, his whole face crinkling when he smiles. He's 52. He comes from the tiny town of Alexandria, Minnesota.
: Bit like a Bergman movie in the winter...
BLOCK: Yeah.
: ...total black and white and chilly.
BLOCK: Hawkes started acting in school plays. Everyone got in, he says. They needed warm bodies. And he says that's where he discovered he really felt at home: on stage. He went to college for a year but then headed South, to Austin, Texas.
: A buddy and I hitchhiked around thousands of miles, and those were the best acting lessons, I think, I've ever had.
BLOCK: Hitchhiking?
: Yes.
BLOCK: Why?
: Oh, you have to play a character. If it's driving rain or really cold out and someone picks you up whose worldview you may disagree with, I found that in order to keep from getting kicked out of the car, I had to kind of pretend that I'm agreed with certain people that I didn't really agree with. It's a great character study. You're in a small room hurtling down the road and got someone there to listen to, to exchange with, and I don't have really formal training as an actor, but that was probably the best I could get.
BLOCK: And slowly, the roles started coming as he washed dishes, bused tables and did carpentry. Now, with appearances in dozens of films and TV shows behind him, including "From Dusk Till Dawn," "The X-Files" and "24," John Hawkes likes being able to be choosy.
: I feel like the art that changes the world, which is what I want to be part of, is never the storyteller guessing what the audience would like, but rather the storyteller telling the story the way they would want to tell it, audience be damned in a way. And that always is more compelling to me, and I feel like a lot of larger movies seemed to guess what the audience wants, and I'm never too satisfied as a viewer. I think I'd rather see someone have a point of view. And I don't need to sound so highfalutin. I'm lucky to have a job.
Believe me, I'm lucky that I've gotten anywhere in this business. But I'm always happiest when I choose projects that seem to have, again, a storyteller who has a story they want to tell in a unique way.
BLOCK: And that's what led John Hawkes to "Winter's Bone" and the character of Teardrop, that coiled ball of menace who becomes his niece's savior.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "WINTER'S BONE")
BLOCK: Did you find there was something that kind of unlocked that character for you, a small thing?
: I did a lot of research for that one. There was a novel to read. There was learning about methamphetamine. There was learning about that particular area of the Ozarks. There was a book called, I believe, "Almost Midnight" that told of a murder around methamphetamine that was different from our story, but that book told about bars that you wouldn't go into if you were a tourist. So part of my challenge was to get there a week early and find clothes that I could pass as a local person and try to go into a couple of those places.
And I wasn't trying to be haughty or daring or cocky about it. In fact, I was pretty terrified in a couple of those places, but just to go in and sit and drink a beer for an hour and try to pass...
BLOCK: Did it work?
: Yeah. Yeah. I listened a lot and tried not to talk too much, but shoot pool with people and just kind of see how people moved and spoke.
BLOCK: And there's the trick because the more films John Hawkes is in and the better known he becomes, the harder it is to pass unnoticed.
: If someone comes up and says, I saw you in "Winter's Bone," I'm usually thrilled. If someone comes up and said, my friend said you were in a movie, what movies were you in, and things like that, it becomes more difficult to begin listing things. Well, I haven't seen that. Well, I haven't seen that. So sometimes it's easier just to keep your hat pulled down and move about and live a normal life.
BLOCK: You've chosen a very public line of work for a very private person, Mr. Hawkes.
: I think there are many of us out there probably who have, yes.
BLOCK: Have you figured out a graceful exit line for those encounters on the street that you really don't want to have?
: No. If you think of one, let me know.
BLOCK: It's not my problem.
: I'm the guy who's, you know, who's 20 minutes late and still talking to a family or something like that.
BLOCK: And sure enough, after our interview, as we were walking down the streets in Richmond, John Hawkes got that guy. Hey, aren't you an actor? Hawkes posed for a photo and quietly asked that it not be posted on social media. His next film is titled "The Surrogate." He plays a polio survivor in an iron lung, basically motionless, who starts a relationship with a sex surrogate. And, yes, it's an indie. A tiny, little movie, he says with pleasure.
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When the president delivers his annual State of the Union Address tomorrow, the economy will of course be a top issue and housing is still at the heart of the country's economic woes. The Federal Reserve said this month that the crash in home prices has cost $7 trillion in household wealth, and that means people and businesses are spending a lot less. NPR's Chris Arnold reports.
CHRIS ARNOLD, BYLINE: The state of the housing market is definitely not strong. On the campaign trail in Florida today, Republican Mitt Romney offered this assessment.
MITT ROMNEY REPUBLICAN, PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: It doesn't have to be like this. It can get better. It will get better.
ARNOLD: Romney and his fellow Republican candidates haven't offered many specifics about how housing will get better or when.
CANDIDATE: I can't predict when it's going to get better other than if I'm fortunate enough to become president, I will care very deeply about getting it better in a big hurry.
ARNOLD: But it is at least possible now to take a glass half-full view of things. Mark Zandi is chief economist at Moody's Analytics. He's been tracking the housing market closely and advising policymakers in Washington.
DR. MARK ZANDI: Well, the six-yearlong housing crash is coming to an end. It's not quite over. I think we've got a bit more to go with respect to house price declines. But for the first time since late 2005, '06, I think the trend lines look actually quite good for housing.
ARNOLD: Zandi says the pace of home sales is picking up. That, though, does not mean that lots of average Americans are jumping back in, getting loans, buying houses and brimming with confidence. The fact is that many of those sales are actually investors using cash to buy foreclosed properties. That might not sound so good, but Zandi says he likes to see that.
ZANDI: Yeah. Investors are probably about a third of the existing home market right now, a very important part of the market which is very encouraging. They sense value. The prices have now fallen enough that investors can come in, scarf up these properties, rent cover their costs and hold on. These aren't flippers. They're looking out three, five years.
ARNOLD: Still, it's likely to be two or three years before housing starts to look really healthy again. For now, we're still at the bottom of the cliff. And from that perspective, things are so bad that housing economists Patrick Newport and Erik Johnson felt the need to title a recent report on housing in Latin.
PATRICK NEWPORT: I'll let Erik pronounce it because he has five years of Latin, and I don't.
ERIK JOHNSON: Six years, actually. Well, for the housing sector 2011 turned out to be an Annus Horribilus, just a horrible year for housing.
ARNOLD: If you look at home construction, the numbers are striking. Newport and Johnson are with IHS Global Insight. They say that the past three years have been the worst since before record keeping began.
JOHNSON: The lowest level since World War II.
ARNOLD: And that's not adjusted for population, so we're actually building fewer houses in the U.S. than we have in more than 60 years. And that translates into a lot of unemployed or underemployed construction workers. Patrick Newport.
NEWPORT: It's not only that the numbers are low nationally, but they're bad in just about everywhere, in every state in the country.
ARNOLD: One problem is that millions of foreclosed homes keep glutting the market. Meanwhile, foreclosure prevention efforts have been very tangled up. Neil Barofsky served as the special inspector general overseeing the so-called TARP program in Washington.
NEIL BAROFSKY: I think unfortunately, we've seen remarkably little progress since where we were a year ago.
ARNOLD: President Obama's foreclosure prevention plan is called HAMP, and it was supposed to help three to four million homeowners. But so far, it's reached less than a million, and lately, it seems to be slowing down.
BAROFSKY: That's a correct characterization. If anything, the HAMP program has gone from an anemic program to one that is even more mediocre than it was just a few months ago.
ARNOLD: Barofsky blames the banks, and he also blames the Obama administration for not pushing the banks harder.
Still, some economists hold out hope for some new efforts to help housing. One we might see in the next year aims to take foreclosed homes and convert them into rental properties on a large scale. Chris Arnold, NPR News
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Now to the propaganda war in Afghanistan. The Taliban is producing its own CDs and DVDs in an attempt to influence public opinion.
As NPR's Ahmad Shafi reports, clips of these Taliban songs and other propaganda material are openly sold in Kabul.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD)
AHMAD SHAFI, BYLINE: In bustling downtown Kabul, Mustafa, a 22-year-old college student is sitting on a chair behind the large glass doors of an electronics store. He's selling music CDs to 20-something customers. He also helps them upload the music on their cell phones.
But not all of Mustafa's customers are looking for the latest Afghan, Indian or Western pop songs. He says he has customers who only look for Taliban songs, a sort of hypnotic chanting of religious and nationalistic poems unaccompanied by music. He clicks on one the audio files.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SHAFI: In Pashto, one of the two main languages of Afghanistan, the song calls for a holy war against the infidels. The song says the fight will continue until corruption is wiped out and the Taliban's version of Islamic law is restored.
MUSTAFA: (Foreign language spoken).
AHMAN SHAFI, BYLINE: Mustafa says if someone brings him the Taliban CDs that he suspects to have probably been downloaded from the Internet. He sells 50 songs for about a dollar.
Since 2005, in an attempt to demonstrate its resurgence, the Taliban has been mass producing CDs and DVDs featuring footage of alleged NATO atrocities in clips of insurgents battling NATO forces. The CDs and DVDs are readily available in Kabul and other major cities.
In some rural areas, the Taliban operates pirate radio transmitters, through which the militants broadcast warnings to the locals and Afghan government officials.
Bilal Sarwary, a BBC reporter, witnessed the impact of the Taliban's radio programs on a recent trip to his native Kunar province, which lies on the border with Pakistan.
BILAL SARWARY: I was hearing, along with thousands of other villagers, very clearly warnings issued by one of the Taliban radio stations and they were calling the Afghan National Police traitors. They were naming some people, warning them not to help the Americans and the Afghan government or else they will be killed.
SHAFI: Sarwary says the Taliban broadcasts refer to the impending withdrawal of NATO troops scheduled for the end of 2014 as a sign of victory for the insurgents.
SARWARY: It was a Taliban commentator and he said, look, conduct however many Special Forces operations you want. You will not scare the Taliban. NATO is leaving. NATO is losing. NATO cannot fight us.
SHAFI: NATO has been using social media sites, such as Twitter, to try to counter the Taliban's propaganda. However, only a small percentage of Afghans have access to the Internet. NATO has also been supporting some local radio and TV stations, but the Taliban has also shifted tactics, assassinating radio personalities who oppose them. This month, they killed a prominent tribal leader in Kandahar who used his radio station to preach against the Taliban.
In the battle for psychological advantage, many analysts believe ISAF, the acronym for the U.S.-led NATO mission in Afghanistan, has largely failed to deliver its message.
Candace Rondeaux from the International Crisis Group says the Taliban, on the other hand, has improved its propaganda machine over the years.
CANDACE RONDEAUX: In the meantime, you know, ISAF kind of sits silently or they frequently put out, you know, these sort of propaganda videos or commercials or radio statements that don't really connect with Afghan realities at all.
SHAFI: Many observers believe a victory over the Taliban will only come if NATO does more in the battle for public opinion.
Ahman Shafi, NPR News, Kabul.
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In Cairo today, Egypt's first freely-elected parliament in six decades held its inaugural session.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken)
BLOCK: Egyptian state television broadcast the hours-long session which was largely spent swearing-in the 508 members. Most of those members belong to Islamist parties, including the Muslim Brotherhood and the ultra-conservative Salafist Movement.
Outside the parliament, not everyone was celebrating, as NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reports.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: Even before the lawmakers could get down to business, many among the hundreds of Egyptians gathered outside parliament made it clear they expected a lot from the new assembly.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
NELSON: There were demands for higher wages. There were cries for justice for the many hundreds of protesters killed by police and soldiers. And there were warnings to Islamist lawmakers not to oppress Egyptians as the previous regime had.
That prompted arguments and scuffles with some pro-Islamist demonstrators. They'd come to celebrate their new legislators.
One of those celebrating was Mohammed Salama, a 30-year-old English teacher from the northern town of Mansoura, who proudly flashed his Freedom and Justice Party membership card. The party is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which controls nearly half the seats in the new parliament. Its secretary general was elected speaker.
But Salama says that doesn't mean the Brotherhood should dominate the parliamentary agenda, which includes appointing a panel to draft Egypt's new constitution.
MOHAMMED SALAMA: I think all the Egyptian members of the parliament should unite together for the development of Egypt. We are together.
NELSON: Nevertheless, many supporters of the Islamists are demanding parliament change Egyptian law to reflect the conservative religious values of the majority.
One is 57-year-old Mervat Moharam.
MERVAT MOHARAM: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: She says lawmakers must revise current family law to reflect Islamic norms, like giving fathers greater custody rights and lowering the age that girls can marry.
One Salafist supporter, Mohammed Yousef, predicts the Islamist-dominated parliament won't go far enough to make Islamic law, or Sharia, the law of the land.
MOHAMMED YOUSEF: We have previous experiences with similar parliaments in other parts of the world. None of those councils or assembly of people managed to institute Sharia into every day-to-day life, none of them.
NELSON: That sort of talk worries protestor Dua el Keshef. The 19-year-old Cairo University student fears, as many of her generation here do, that the Islamists will ultimately try to silence the youth movement that spearheaded last January's revolution.
DUA EL KESHEF: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: She argues this parliament is no different than ones under former President Hosni Mubarak, where one faction ended up making all the decisions.
KESHEF: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: Keshef adds the revolution has failed to deliver the freedom Egyptians deserve. That message is one many protesters are expected to take to the streets in Cairo and across Egypt on Wednesday, the first anniversary of the revolution that ousted Mubarak and swept the Islamists to power.
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Cairo.
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An escalation today in the battle with Iran over its nuclear program. The European Union announced an embargo on Iranian oil. The measure could hurt. Iran depends on oil exports for about 80 percent of its foreign revenue, and about a fifth of that revenue comes from Europe. Iranian leaders reacted sharply to the embargo.
As NPR's Tom Gjelten reports, they threatened once again to close the Strait of Hormuz.
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: For years, Europe has been reluctant to join the United States in imposing tough sanctions on Iran. The United States years ago stopped buying Iranian oil, but France, Spain, Italy and Greece kept up their purchases and in significant quantities. What changed was a report last November from the International Atomic Energy Agency highlighting evidence that Iran might be moving toward a nuclear weapons capability. And today, Catherine Ashton, the European Union's foreign policy chief, announced that all 27 member states have decided the time has come to increase the pressure on Iran.
CATHERINE ASHTON: We've adopted tough new sanctions against Iran because of the concern we have over their nuclear program. We've added additional restrictive measures in the energy sector, including a phased embargo on Iranian crude oil imports to the E.U.
GJELTEN: New contracts to buy Iranian oil are barred, but countries with existing contracts can honor them for another six months. That coincides with a U.S. sanctions time line. Within six months, the Obama administration has to decide whether to impose sanctions on countries that buy Iran's oil through its central bank. A senior Treasury Department official today said he expects, in his words, a significant drop in Iranian oil exports as a result of the U.S. and E.U. sanctions.
That could explain a $1 jump in the oil price today. Traders could be anticipating that Iranian oil will be coming off the market, leaving less supply to meet global demand. But how much of a drop is not clear. Jamie Webster, a Middle East oil analyst at PFC Energy, says the U.S. and E.U. sanctions could simply lead to a shift in Iran's oil customers.
JAMIE WEBSTER: Iran will pull back from delivering to the E.U. and will start delivering more into Eastern markets.
GJELTEN: For example, China, with its abundant energy needs, may move to buy some of the Iranian oil that would otherwise go to Europe. But even so, Webster says, a result of the U.S. and E.U. sanctions may be that Iran is not able to export as much oil as it does today.
WEBSTER: Six months from now, it would not surprise me if there was some portion of Iranian barrels that they were having difficulty marketing, so, you know, 100,000 barrels a day, 200,000 barrels a day. I don't expect it to be a huge amount. I don't expect this to drop things down to, you know, half of their production.
GJELTEN: Iran depends on oil for its income, and a drop in its oil revenue would do major damage to the already weak Iranian economy. It all depends on what other countries do. At the E.U., Catherine Ashton today said she's hopeful the world will show solidarity in putting pressure on Iran to back off any thought of developing nuclear weapons.
ASHTON: We've talked with a lot of countries about the particular role they can play. Some have decided to follow us on sanctions. Others have found other ways of putting on the pressure.
GJELTEN: Iran, of course, could feel the pressure but still refuse to negotiate over its nuclear program. Tom Gjelten, NPR News, Washington.
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We begin this hour in Florida, where the Republican presidential candidates are busy preparing for yet another nationally televised debate this evening and what a difference a week makes. Over the weekend, former Speaker Newt Gingrich won a resounding victory in South Carolina. That win along with a revised vote total in Iowa that put former Senator Rick Santorum on top there, dealt a big blow to former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney's campaign.
Two weeks ago, Romney won the New Hampshire primary easily and seemed to have the GOP presidential nomination all but locked up. Well, in the last two days, Mitt Romney has responded by pounding Gingrich for his work consulting on health care issues and on behalf of Freddie Mac.
MITT ROMNEY: If you're working for a company, getting paid for a company through one of your many entities and then you're speaking with congressmen in a way that would help that company, that's lobbying. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck.
BLOCK: And here's Newt Gingrich responding to that critique this morning on ABC's "Good Morning America."
NEWT GINGRICH: I did no lobbying, period. He keeps using the word lobbyist because I'm sure his consultants tell him it scores well. It's not true. He knows it's not true. He's deliberately saying things he knows are false.
BLOCK: Well, joining us to talk about the race and tonight's debate is NPR's national political correspondent, Mara Liasson who is in Tampa. And, Mara, let's start with Newt Gingrich who got a huge boost out of a series of strong debate performances in that South Carolina primary. Do you expect Newt Gingrich again to be on the attack this evening?
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Yes, I do. He'll be on the attack against Mitt Romney. He'll also be on the attack against establishment elites. That worked very well for him in South Carolina, despite the fact that he has been in Washington for 33 or 40 years, according to Mitt Romney's math. He is known as an anti-establishment bomb thrower. That's his persona. I think the challenge for Gingrich in Florida is to see if he can use his momentum and his authenticity against Romney's obvious financial and organizational advantages here.
BLOCK: We mentioned, Mara, that Mitt Romney has been pounding Newt Gingrich for his work with Freddie Mac, went so far today as to say: You should give back the money that Freddie Mac paid you. Any sign that that line of critique is working with voters?
LIASSON: Not yet. The average of the polls in Florida still show Gingrich almost 10 points above Romney. Now, Romney has been able to kill that kind of a Gingrich surge before by spending millions of dollars in negative ads against him. It might work again. He's certainly going to try it in Florida. But I do think that this attack on Gingrich's work for Freddie Mac is probably Romney's best hope, because Freddie Mac is viewed by many conservatives in the Republican Party as the number one cause of the financial crisis.
The test for Romney is to see also if he can neutralize Gingrich's advantages in the debate, see if he can get under Gingrich's skin and turn in a better debate performance himself.
BLOCK: Mara, another issue that Mitt Romney has been taking a drubbing for is his tax returns. And he has now said he will release at least some of those returns tomorrow. Do you think that will put that issue to rest?
LIASSON: I doubt it. I think that there'll be calls for him to release multiple years of returns, just like his father did when he ran for president. It's also going to raise the issue of tax policy. He said that he pays a 15 percent rate. Newt Gingrich has said, well, why doesn't he propose paying - that everyone should pay a 15 percent rate? Newt Gingrich has proposed an alternative flat tax that he is now calling the Romney tax, where everybody would have the choice of paying 15 percent. And I think that will open up a whole new debate about fairness and tax policy and tax reform.
BLOCK: OK. NPR's Mara Liasson in Tampa, Florida, for tonight's Republican debate. Mara, thanks so much.
LIASSON: Thank you, Melissa.
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Here's a big difference between the Florida primary and everything that's gone before. Florida is big. Add up the population of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and you get around nine million. Florida's population, over 18 million. So long retail politics, hello multiple major media markets. And so much for simple characterizations of the state's electorate, the most subtly variegated picture of the different varieties of, say, South Carolinian looks monochromatic compared to the tapestry that is Florida.
Well, David Johnson is a former executive director of Florida's Republican Party. He worked as a political consultant on Jon Huntsman's campaign and he joins us now from Tallahassee. Welcome to the program.
DAVID JOHNSON: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: And when you look at a map of Florida and you sit down and describe the state to a candidate who's running there, what are the different regions that you see?
JOHNSON: Well, we do have 10 major media markets. And the first thing that you notice is where the primary turnout's going to come from in a Republican primary. Nearly 50 percent of the vote in any statewide primary comes from a combination of two major media markets on I-4, the Tampa/St. Petersburg market and the Orlando media market. So, first and foremost, the famous I-4 corridor really does matter in a Republican primary.
SIEGEL: And to reach people in the I-4 corridor most effectively, you advertise out of Tampa/St. Pete and out of Orlando?
JOHNSON: Absolutely. They're buying a lot of broadcast television. They're buying a lot of cable television. And in a Republican primary, focusing largely on FOX News, we'll find that 70 percent of the Republican primary voters say that they do watch FOX on a regular basis.
SIEGEL: And who are these people? How do you describe the Republican primary electorate in Florida?
JOHNSON: Well, first, look at the age and ideology. Seventy percent of these folks consider themselves to be strongly or somewhat favorable of the goals of the Tea Party. Eighty percent consider themselves to be conservative. Our primary electorate, historically, will be a bit older than the three previous states. Forty percent of the primary voters are over 65. They're churchgoers. About 62 percent describe themselves as pro-life. And it's a more conservative primary electorate than, of course, we will see in the general election in November.
SIEGEL: But it would sound as if a candidate is going to get labeled as a northeastern Massachusetts moderate, not a great thing to be in Florida.
JOHNSON: Well, Governor Romney, if that's who we're speaking of, Robert...
SIEGEL: Yes, it's (unintelligible).
JOHNSON: That's - I thought so. And those labels will be a challenge for him and they were in 2008. Of course, he has been on the ballot before.
SIEGEL: When Republicans vote in Florida, inevitably some reporters go to West Miami or Eighth Street and they talk about the Cuban-American population there. Significant or a very small part of the primary electorate?
JOHNSON: Well, it's actually very significant. The Hispanic vote in Florida in a primary can be 10 to 12 percent of that vote. And as we saw in the 2004 Republican primary when Mel Martinez won the nomination, a very high turn-out in Miami-Dade where the vote moved in a large direction towards one candidate, it can be very telling and very important to building a vote margin.
SIEGEL: Well, you've been a consultant to candidates in Florida. So, I want you to give away a little bit of it for free right now. If you were consulting with Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich and you had a simple message to convey to each of them, what would it be?
JOHNSON: Well, first, for Speaker Gingrich, his message is obviously based on connecting with a Republican voter electorate that's very angry. Some polling that I saw for another client in the late fall showed that only 2 percent of the Republican primary voter felt the country was going in the right direction and people are mad. They want someone that will take the fight to the president.
SIEGEL: So the guidance to Newt Gingrich is anger can work in Florida, tap into it. And to Mitt Romney?
JOHNSON: Governor Romney is running a very sound mechanic campaign. You know, in Florida, we are an early voting state, absentees are very important. Currently, 240,000 Florida Republicans have already voted and that campaign is putting a lot of emphasis on ground game, on identifying favorable voters and turning them out. And of course, if these races get very, very negative - and I believe that they are going to get quite rough - some voters may determine that they want to vote for one of the other two candidates. So, those are still factors that are out there.
SIEGEL: Well, David Johnson, thank you very much for talking with us.
JOHNSON: Happy to be here today, Robert. Have a great day.
SIEGEL: David Johnson spoke to us from Tallahassee. He's a former executive director of the Florida Republican Party.
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To Arizona now, where Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords spent the day meeting constituents, including some fellow survivors of last year's shooting. This is one of Giffords' last days in office. She caught many off guard yesterday when she announced she's leaving her seat to focus on her recovery.
As NPR's Ted Robbins reports, today's events in Tucson began with Giffords completing her fateful "Congress on Your Corner" event.
TED ROBBINS, BYLINE: A year later, the "Congress on Your Corner" wasn't held at the Safeway supermarket in Tucson. It was a private event at her district office. Suzie Hileman was one of the 19 people shot. She told the Tucson CBS affiliate how remarkable it was to finally meet Gabby Giffords.
SUZIE HILEMAN: When you think that a year ago she was lying on the cold concrete with a bullet in her brain. And today, she walked in under her own steam and said hello, and shook our hands and listened.
ROBBINS: Giffords spent the entire morning greeting not only those directly affected by the shooting, but dozens of friends and constituents. Gary Thrasher is a rancher who lives near the Mexican border. He's a Republican, but he's been an active backer of the Democrat Giffords because of her support for border security. He drove two hours to see wish Giffords well.
GARY THRASHER: Well, I'm happy to see her and I'm glad she's - and I told her that she's just the epitome of true grit. And that's about all I can say about her.
ROBBINS: There were mixed feelings among those I spoke with. Happiness that Gabby Giffords was there greeting them, sadness that she is leaving Congress after having survived so much. Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild.
MAYOR JONATHAN ROTHCHILD: Yeah, you were hoping for one more. You know, Gabby has done so well. And she kept the hope so up that she would return to office, that it's sad to see such a great public servant leave office.
ROBBINS: Rothschild and others learned only yesterday that Giffords is stepping down. Her office released a two-minute video posted on her Facebook page.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
ROBBINS: Gifford's short sentences are inter-cut with shots of her when she was healthy, as well as images from the last year.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
ROBBINS: By all accounts, Giffords decision to step down was hers. Over the last few weeks, those close to her say she realized that she couldn't be in rehab for her brain injury part-time, while being a part-time congresswoman. She tires easily and her rehab will take years, not months.
When her resignation is officially submitted within a week, Arizona's governor will call a special election for a successor to fill out the remainder of her term, though Giffords indicated that she is not through with public life.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
ROBBINS: After attending an event at the Tucson Community Food Bank today, Gabby Giffords is heading to Washington for President Barack Obama's State of the Union address Tuesday. Her husband, Mark Kelly, will sit with Michelle Obama in the first lady's box. Gabrielle Giffords will sit in her seat as a representative one last time.
Ted Robbins, NPR News, Tucson.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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I'm Robert Siegel. And it's time now for All Tech Considered.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: Today, reinventing RIM. Research in Motion makes the once ubiquitous BlackBerry. In recent years, it's watched the iPhone and other devices take a huge bite out of its market share.
As NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports, the Canadian company named a new CEO today and is hoping for a turnaround.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: If shareholders were hoping for totally new leadership, they didn't get it. RIM's board opted for one of their own, Thorsten Heins, who's been at the company for four years, previously as chief operating officer. Heins, who is German, told employees in a video that the company, despite some issues, remains cutting edge.
THORSTEN HEINS: At the very core of RIM, at its DNA - how I always describe it - is the innovation. I mean, we always think ahead. We always think forward. We sometimes think the unthinkable.
NOGUCHI: That may have been true a long time ago, but not in recent years, says Ted Schadler. Schadler is an industry analyst with Forrester Research. He says former co-CEO Mike Lazaridis missed many boats.
TED SCHADLER: I just remember standing up in front of their analyst meeting, with holding my little iPhone in 2008 going: So, Mike, what are you going to do about this computer that I'm carrying around in my pocket? And he just basically laughed me out of the room.
He was like: What are you talking about? Nobody cares about that. Like, yes, they do. It's a computer. It does everything. I can get on the Internet right here. Look. And he was like, yeah, that's not what we do. Like, well, boy. Then you're going to be in trouble.
NOGUCHI: Consumers preferred the iPhones, with their thousands of applications or apps. And that forced many employers to follow their lead. Within three years, Schadler says BlackBerry went from having a near monopoly in smartphones to less than half the market.
SCHADLER: And RIM missed. They missed that shift to the consumer. So, they've been playing catch up. And they've lost really their focus on what really makes them different, which is the network.
NOGUCHI: That network, Schadler says, is RIM's key to the future. Unlike other device makers, RIM built and uses its own network - one that is more secure. And, he says, although it's a smaller market, there are businesses and government clients who need just that.
Yuki Noguchi, NPR News, Washington
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Every year, the American Library Association awards the Caldecott Medal to the most distinguished picture book for children that's published in the U.S. And today, the winner was announced and he is a past medalist. Chris Raschka. His book is called "A Ball for Daisy."
Raschka also won in 2006 for "The Hello, Goodbye Window" and he was the Caldecott honoree or finalist in 1994 for the book, "Yo! Yes?" Chris Raschka, did I get the inflexion right on that?
CHRIS RASCHKA: That's perfect. That's exactly right.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: Chris Raschka joins us from New York. And congratulations on the medal for "A Ball for Daisy."
RASCHKA: Thank you so much.
SIEGEL: I would ask you for a reading of the book. But alas, it has no words.
RASCHKA: It's my first wordless picture book. Certainly, a challenge and I went through many, many variations.
SIEGEL: With the proper spoiler alert, why don't you roughly tell us the story of "A Ball for Daisy?"
RASCHKA: Well, it's about a little dog named Daisy who has a big red ball that she loves very much and her owner, a little girl, takes her to the park and they play until this beloved ball is in a wrestling match with another dog. It is popped and comes to an end of its existence. And Daisy is distraught. And where we go from there was my - what I set myself as a task.
SIEGEL: It's the old dog has a ball, dog loses a ball.
RASCHKA: Exactly.
SIEGEL: A dog laments and...
RASCHKA: That's right.
SIEGEL: Eventually - well, if you're not listening, all three to seven year olds, gets another ball.
RASCHKA: That's right.
SIEGEL: That's what happens in the story.
RASCHKA: That's right.
SIEGEL: And this story - how did you decide to do this?
RASCHKA: Well, it does come from a real experience. But in this case, it was not a dog named Daisy. It was my son named Ingo, whose beloved ball was actually destroyed by a dog. When he was four, this happened and it was such a devastation for him. It was kind of almost the first time he experienced something he loved ending and that he couldn't get that back.
SIEGEL: Now, in years past, you have drawn - or I guess painted is more appropriate - children's books about some unusual subjects. "Charlie Parker Played Be Bop" is one of your books. "Mysterious Thelonious" is another one.
RASCHKA: Yes.
SIEGEL: And, on the other hand, "Arlene Sardine," the story of a fish who dreamt of becoming someone's breakfast.
RASCHKA: Yes.
SIEGEL: How do you settle on these subjects?
RASCHKA: Well, anything that creates a strong emotion in me, whether it's music, loss of something, loneliness or friendship, if that emotion is heightened in some way and painted to fit in between the covers of 32 pages, that can become a picture book.
SIEGEL: So here's the question that I have for you, having looked at "A Ball for Daisy," in which we see many pictures of Daisy the little dog. My question is, how do you, as an artist, manage to draw a character so many times doing many different things, seen from different angles, so that she's always perfectly recognizable? Is there a waste basket full of bad drawings of Daisy that don't make it in?
RASCHKA: You can't imagine how big that waste basket is. It is - in fact, sometimes, I worry about the amount of paper I waste and...
SIEGEL: You can do a story about a tree that wants to be somebody's book.
RASCHKA: Very sadly, I'm afraid I can. But - well, for me, finding that is that is the real challenge and especially because I like to be fairly gestural, that is, not repaired, kind of immediate. So, it either works or it doesn't work and that's the fine line defined, literally.
SIEGEL: Chris Raschka, thank you very much for talking with us today.
RASCHKA: Thank you so much.
SIEGEL: That's Chris Raschka, winner of the Caldecott medal. His book is called "A Ball for Daisy."
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The Supreme Court weighed in today in the debate over privacy in the information age. It ruled that police must obtain a warrant from a judge before placing a GPS tracking device on a car. The ruling came in the case of a drug investigation conducted by a joined FBI-Washington, D.C. police task force. The court's decision may have been unanimous, but NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports that three separate opinions on the legal rationale showed plenty of disagreement.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: The FBI placed a GPS tracking device on the car of suspected drug kingpin Antoine Jones. And for 28 days, every time that car moved it was tracked by satellite with the information sent every 10 seconds to the FBI. The tracking led to the seizure of 97 kilos of cocaine and $850,000 in cash. Jones was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to life in prison.
But today, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction because law enforcement authorities had failed to get a valid warrant before installing the tracking device. While the court's decision was unanimous, its reasoning was not, nor did the justices lined up along the usual liberal conservative lines.
Justice Antonin Scalia, usually classified as a conservative, wrote the court's opinion, declaring that because the tracking device was physically placed on Jones' property, at a minimum, it was a search within the original meaning of the Constitution's ban on searches of property without a warrant. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, usually categorized as a liberal, provided the fifth vote for that rationale, but suggested that in the modern information age, she may be willing to go much further.
And four justices, led by the usually conservative Justice Samuel Alito, said the property rationale makes no sense and disregards a half century of Supreme Court doctrine. To approach the question as a question of trespass on private property, said Alito, is simply unwise. What matters, he said, is the reasonable expectation of privacy in a modern world. What good is it, he asked, if a warrant is required to put a GPS device on a car for a short period, but no warrant is required when a person can be tracked for a much longer period by a remote control or with aerial surveillance? The court's decision, thus, is a narrow one and leaves open some of the most vexing privacy issues in the digital age. Smartphones, for instance, can disclose an individual's location and email contacts are similarly recorded by providers. But today's ruling provided no definitive answers as to whether the government must obtain a warrant for access to either.
George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr is an expert in the field of technology.
ORIN KERR: It leaves open how the Fourth Amendment applies to cellular phones, it leaves out how the Fourth Amendment applies to email, it leaves open all these questions of high-tech surveillance that just don't happen to involve a trespass onto somebody's property.
TOTENBERG: David Kelley, who served as the top federal prosecutor in New York City during the Bush administration, said he was not surprised by the court's decision. He said most federal prosecutors had long assumed they needed a court authorized warrant to attach a GPS tracking device to a car. But beyond that, he said, there's nothing into today's opinion to prevent other high-tech surveillance techniques without a warrant.
DAVID KELLEY: Once you choose to operate and drive out in the public and knowing that, as we all do, that there's various surveillance equipment out there, you kind of waive any sort of expectation of privacy you might otherwise have had.
TOTENBERG: But Professor Kerr says the court has quite deliberately not resolved that question.
KERR: This is nine justices trying to figure out how does the Fourth Amendment apply in the new technological world, and the answers are really uncertain.
TOTENBERG: Indeed, while Justice Scalia, in his opinion, seemed to push for a narrow and clear line that would limit privacy claims, Justice Alito said the Scalia opinion decides a 21st century case based on 18th century law. And Justice Sotomayor, while signing on to the Scalia opinion, suggested that the entire framework used in the past may well be ill-suited to the digital age. She said that because people now reveal a great deal of information about themselves in order to carry out mundane tasks, it may be time to reconsider past decisions that allow police to get information without a warrant from third parties like phone companies or banks or email providers.
Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
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The military trial of a Marine sergeant came to a sudden end today. His case defined an era and recalled the bloodiest days of the Iraq war. On November 19, 2005, 24 Iraqi civilians were killed in the village of Haditha. Eventually, murder charges were filed against several Marines, including Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich. He was the last Marine facing any charges, the murder charge reduced to manslaughter.
NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman joins us now with the end of that case. And, Tom, this case ended with a plea deal. What exactly did Sergeant Wuterich plead guilty to?
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Well, Sergeant Wuterich pleaded guilty to one count of dereliction of duty. Now that's a fairly low-level charge. So what he'll face after all of this is forfeiture of pay, reduction in rank, and he could face up to three months in jail.
BLOCK: This case, as we said, goes back to 2005, Tom. Remind us what Sergeant Wuterich was originally charged with and what specifically happened there in Haditha.
BOWMAN: Well, again, this is the fall of 2005, or at the height of the Iraqi insurgency in the village of Haditha in western Iraq. Now the Marines that day were on a routine supply mission and one of their vehicles struck a roadside bomb, killing one of the Marines here. And that's what started this whole thing.
And in the middle of that, right after the bomb struck, this car suddenly pulls up with five Iraqi men in it. The Marines ordered them out of the car. They were unarmed. The Marines say they started to run, and the Marines killed all of them.
BLOCK: And after that, what happened?
BOWMAN: Then the Marines started taking fire from some nearby houses. This is all very chaotic at the time. It was Sergeant Wuterich's first time in combat. They stormed into the house. They threw grenades and were using assault weapons, and women and children were killed in that house. Then they moved on to three more houses, firing and killing others.
When it was all over, two dozen Iraqi men, women and children were killed. No weapons were found. Sergeant Wuterich and seven other Marines were implicated in the case, some charged with murder, others with lesser charges. And all those cases were dismissed, or charges were dropped. One of the Marines was acquitted.
BLOCK: Tom, the defense here for Sergeant Wuterich basically claimed that horrible things happen in war, but that this was not a crime.
BOWMAN: That's right. They say what happened here, you know, the Marines were under fire, one Marine, of course, was killed. They deemed those houses hostile, and they thought they were justified in attacking the house. Prosecution says hang on a second here. You went too far, that Sergeant Wuterich couldn't keep his Marines under control, that they went beyond the rules of engagement, where you have to have positive identification before you shoot.
BLOCK: Why in the end did the prosecutors agree to such a light charge? Again, he's pleading guilty to one count of dereliction of duty. That's it.
BOWMAN: Right. The sense was the case simply just fell apart. They didn't have the forensic evidence. They didn't have witnesses. They offered immunity to some of those involved in exchange for testimony. But in the end, some of those witnesses actually were favoring the defense, talking about the hostile environment and saying they could use deadly force.
Some people I talked with fault the Marine prosecutors for not aggressively pressing this case over the years. And, again, it took six years to bring this to court, and over that time memories fade. In the end, they just didn't have much of a case.
The other thing, too, is some Marines I talked with are particularly upset by this. They say 24 innocent people were killed. No one is really facing stiff punishment, and this sends the wrong message to other Marines.
BLOCK: And this is the end of this case of Haditha?
BOWMAN: Yeah. This is all over. Sergeant Wuterich was the last one facing charges in the Haditha killings, one of the more horrific incidents of the entire Iraq war.
BLOCK: OK. NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman. Tom, thanks so much.
BOWMAN: You're welcome, Melissa.
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The South is cleaning up from yet another round of devastating tornadoes. The storms started first in Arkansas, then brought baseball-sized hail, heavy wind and lightning to parts of Tennessee and Mississippi. But it was Alabama that saw the worst of it. At least two people died with 100 more injured.
As NPR's Russell Lewis reports, the overnight storms hit communities still struggling to recover from a series of devastating tornadoes last year.
RUSSELL LEWIS, BYLINE: Just past daybreak in Center Point, Alabama, Marcel Horn(ph) stood on the city's main road blocked by deputies because of downed power lines. Horn had tears streaming down his face as he looked up.
MARCEL HORN: I just been saying 100 prayers.
LEWIS: Some cell towers blew over and the phone lines were jammed. Horn hadn't heard from his fiance and was worried about his son and her daughter. It was the second time in less than a year a tornado had targeted his family. During the devastating April twisters, which killed almost 250 people, his parents' home, the next town over, was destroyed.
HORN: I don't know what it is. It can't be God because it's devastation, man. I don't know where we're going to begin at again, man. My family - they haven't even recovered yet. Now, I need some help. They need the help. Now, I need some help. I don't know where to begin, sir. I just don't know where to begin.
LEWIS: Center Point is a predominantly black suburb of Birmingham with about 17,000 residents. All morning long, police radios cackled, ambulances raced across town and helicopters flew overhead taking in the damage.
(SOUNDBITE OF HELICOPTER)
LEWIS: The devastation spared few people it seemed. Entire businesses were flattened. The veterinary clinic was blown out, but amazingly, every cat and dog in the kennels survived. Street signs were wrapped all the way around telephone poles and looked like twist ties from a loaf of bread.
Elsewhere, massive pine trees blew over, crushing houses, cars and anything else in their way. Michelle Simmons(ph) stood on her doorstep reliving the terror of the tornado.
MICHELLE SIMMONS: And it got louder and louder and louder and then all the glass and everything started flying. Stuff off the walls started flying and then that tree fell on top of the house and it blew my husband off the bed on the side over the kids. A 300 pound man, it picked up off the bed and threw him over against the wall.
LEWIS: Firefighters continued to hear stories like that one as they went house to house, searching for survivors. One block over, on 23rd Terrace, John Leeshtee(ph) used a chainsaw to cut up what was left of his parents' stately magnolia tree.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHAINSAW)
LEWIS: He was so busy, he didn't want to switch off his saw as we talked. He said he's trying to look at the bright side.
JOHN LEESHTEE: Well, my mom and dad are fine. They're safe. That's what's important. I mean, friends across the street are OK. You know, they had trees fall down on their house, but I mean, you know, you get along, move on. We'll manage.
LEWIS: Alabama's governor, Robert Bentley, declared a state of emergency and, ironically, this was also the day he was to receive a report on the devastating April tornado outbreak with suggestions on how the state better prepare and respond to future disasters, something Alabama is getting good at doing.
Russell Lewis, NPR News, Birmingham.
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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block. A former CIA officer has been charged with leaking secrets to reporters and then lying about it. The Justice Department has accused John Kiriakou of violating the Espionage Act by outing his colleagues and passing sensitive details about counter-terrorism operations to the New York Times and other media outlets.
Kiriakou appeared in federal court in Virginia this afternoon, where he was released after posting a quarter million dollar bond. NPR's Carrie Johnson has our story.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: In the spring of 2009, authorities found pictures of CIA officers and contractors in the cells of some of the highest profile al-Qaida detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The discovery caused an uproar and prompted the Justice Department to investigate whether lawyers for those detainees had broken the law.
But as with many questions that involve leaks of classified information, investigators wound up with a surprising answer. They exonerated lawyers for the detainees and pointed the finger at one of their own: John Kiriakou, who left the CIA in 2004 after working at headquarters in several overseas assignments.
Here's Kiriakou talking about his government service on CNN two years ago.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED AUDIO)
JOHNSON: Kiriakou made a big splash after he left the CIA by talking openly about one of the agency's biggest cases, the capture and waterboarding of al-Qaida logistics chief Abu Zubaydah. Here he is on ABC, where he later became a contributor.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED AUDIO)
JOHNSON: Information now at the root of Kiriakou's legal troubles. Four criminal charges, including lying to the CIA about material he put in his book called "The Reluctant Spy." Prosecutors say Kiriakou violated the oath he took to protect the nation's secrets when he joined the CIA by disclosing the identity of a covert operative to a reporter and by confirming to the New York Times and others that another CIA officer took part in the operation against Abu Zubaydah.
They say he even gave reporters the officer's contact information while denying the whole thing to the officer himself. Authorities say they found incriminating messages in two email accounts connected to Kiriakou.
Bad trade craft, says former national security official Pat Rowan.
PAT ROWAN: He was an intelligence officer for about 14 years and, remarkably, doesn't understand that emails are retrievable.
JOHNSON: Rowan says the criminal complaint is remarkable because it describes in unusual detail the way the government went about its investigation.
ROWAN: The core of the case is the pipeline between the defendant and GITMO.
JOHNSON: According to the Justice Department, the pipeline worked like this: Kiriakou allegedly told a reporter, known in court papers as Journalist A, that a certain CIA officer had worked on the Abu Zubaydah case and the reporter turned around and gave the information to a defense investigator working for the Guantanamo detainees.
Rowan, the former national security prosecutor, says that leaves Kiriakou with few options.
ROWAN: Then the question will be what can Kiriakou do to make this prosecution painful to the government?
JOHNSON: Kiriakou's lawyer, Plato Cacheris, may have a few strategies up his sleeve, such as demanding information about other people who worked on the sensitive programs and arguing that what Kiriakou did is business as usual in Washington.
Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington.
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Today, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney spoke about the president's upcoming State of the Union Address. He said if you get everything done that you propose in that speech, you're not setting goals high enough.
Well, on the eve of this year's address, we're joined by NPR's White House correspondent Scott Horsley to talk about what was on President Obama's mind last year when he spoke to the Congress.
Hi, Scott.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Robert.
SIEGEL: In his State of the Union Address last year, Mr. Obama early on highlighted that many jobs have been siphoned off to China and other countries.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: At stake is whether new jobs and industries take root in this country or somewhere else.
SIEGEL: That was the theme a year ago. What's happened since then, Scott?
HORSLEY: Well, the president and the Congress spent a lot of the last year talking about the budget deficit. And it was really only in September that President Obama came out with a jobs plan, almost none of which has been enacted. He's been somewhat fortunate in recent months, though. Job growth has ticked up and the unemployment rate has dipped to a still high, but not as high, eight and a half percent.
SIEGEL: Now, last year, the president didn't just talk about creating new jobs but of creating new industries, especially in alternative energy development, for example, solar and wind. He framed it this way.
OBAMA: This is our generation's Sputnik moment.
HORSLEY: Yeah, green energy has been a priority for this president from the get-go. One thing that that happened this last year that hasn't gotten a lot of attention was he struck a deal with the automakers to dramatically boost fuel economy standards. And just today, the Energy Department came out with its forecasts showing a decline in demand for imported oil. So that's been a positive. Of course, there was also the black eye of the Solyndra bankruptcy.
SIEGEL: Then there was immigration.
OBAMA: I strongly believe that we should take on, once and for all, the issue of illegal immigration.
HORSLEY: Well, that's one of those areas where there's been zero progress at the congressional level over the last year, although the administration has taken steps administratively to use a little more discretion in who they're deporting.
SIEGEL: Here's an issue that we've heard a lot about since when the president, in last year's State of the Union, addressed our tax code.
OBAMA: So tonight, I'm asking Democrats and Republicans to simplify the system. Get rid of the loopholes. Level the playing field.
HORSLEY: I'm afraid when you do your taxes this year, it's going to be just as complex as it was a year ago.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
HORSLEY: That's an area that they talked about as part of that grand bargain, but it didn't come to pass, and so it's an area of the president can highlight again in this year's speech.
SIEGEL: And also, in January of last year, the president set out a spending plan, or at least very broadly, speaking one.
OBAMA: I am proposing that starting this year, we freeze annual domestic spending for the next five years.
HORSLEY: Yeah. Ultimately, the president wound up having to make larger cuts to domestic spending than he wanted, though not so large as congressional Republicans wanted as part of their deal to raise the debt ceiling and get a handle on the federal budget.
SIEGEL: And here's something that President Obama said in his State of the Union last year. He talked about streamlining the federal government. He cited examples of waste and of overlapping authority.
OBAMA: There are 12 different agencies that deal with exports. There are at least five different agencies that deal with housing policies. Then there's my favorite example: the Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they're in freshwater, but the Commerce Department handles them when they're in salt water.
HORSLEY: So just 10 days ago, Robert, the administration did come back with its first proposal to do some of that streamlining. The president wants to merge the Commerce Department and the U.S. trade representative and several other frayed agencies into one big, new cabinet department that would be focused on trade and business. That still needs congressional approval, though.
SIEGEL: And finally, Scott, a nonstarter: healthcare. Last year at this time, the president said this to members of Congress who found fault with the healthcare law that he had championed.
OBAMA: So let me be the first to say that anything can be improved. If you have ideas about how to improve this law by making care better, or more affordable, I am eager to work with you.
HORSLEY: Well, they did make one change to the healthcare law. They took away paperwork requirement that a lot of small businesses felt was very burdensome. But the fight over health care is far from over. It's now moved over to the Supreme Court.
SIEGEL: Thank you, Scott.
HORSLEY: My pleasure, Robert.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's Scott Horsley at the White House. He was reviewing last year's promises and proposals in the State of the Union Address. This year's address is scheduled for tomorrow night.
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Support for gay marriage is growing this week among lawmakers in Washington state and New Jersey. Both could soon vote to join the six other states, and the District of Columbia, where gay marriage is now legal. Gay marriage proposals are also moving forward elsewhere.
But as NPR's Tovia Smith reports that several states are also considering moves to ban it.
TOVIA SMITH, BYLINE: Gay advocates like to say last year was a biggie. When New York legalized same sex marriage, it doubled the number of Americans living in states where gays could marry. It's hard to imagine another doubling this year but advocates are hoping to build on that success.
MARC SOLOMON: We haven't hit a tipping point. But we've certainly hit a turning point.
SMITH: Marc Solomon, with the Freedom to Marry Coalition, says the fact that New York passed gay marriage with bipartisan support bodes well for bills coming up this year in Washington state, Maryland, and New Jersey - where even some lawmakers who opposed gay marriage just a few years ago are now in the support column.
SOLOMON: We're seeing a really dramatic shift. I think the trend – the accelerating trend is very clear.
SMITH: That trend would be tested in Washington and Maryland, since voters there would almost certainly get the last word on gay marriage through a ballot question.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie today said he'd like to see a popular referendum in New Jersey, too. Gay marriage shouldn't be decided, he says, by 121 people in the capitol.
GOVERNOR CHRIS CHRISTIE: Let's stop treating this like a political football and let's let the people of New Jersey decide. This issue is too big and too consequential not to trust the people who will be governed, ultimately, by any change in law or maintenance of the current law.
SMITH: Opponents like to point out that gay marriage only passes when it's imposed by what they call out of touch lawmakers or activist judges. It has lost each of the 31 times it's been put directly to voters.
But Solomon insists that could soon change in Maine, where advocates will announce this week whether they'll try to become the first state in the nation to enact gay marriage through a popular referendum.
SOLOMON: We think 2012 is going to be year that we actually win a state at the ballot and take away, really, our opponent's last good talking point that they have on this matter.
SMITH: Well, maybe.
PASTOR BOB EMRICH: I mean , even if they won in Maine, the score would be, what, 31-to-1.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SMITH: Pastor Bob Emrich, who led the fight against the Maine ballot question in 2009, says opponents would be even better prepared to defeat it again this year by refuting arguments that opposition is based on bigotry and, Emrich says, by making their case that gay marriage impinges on religious liberties.
EMRICH: They try to make everybody feel like, oh, you don't have to do anything that's contrary to your religious beliefs. But it's not true. I mean, there are cases all over country where that sort of thing is already taking place.
SMITH: Supporters call that a red herring, saying it's anti-discrimination and public accommodation laws, not gay marriage that govern whether gay couples, for example, can adopt or rent a social hall.
But expect that to be part of the fight in three other states where gay marriage is also on the agenda. Voters in Minnesota and North Carolina will consider a constitutional ban on gay marriage. And in New Hampshire, where same-sex marriage has been legal for two years, lawmakers are now considering a repeal.
As Sarah Warbelow, of the Human Rights Campaign puts it: That would set a nasty precedent. But she says gay marriage could lose a battle and still win the war.
SARAH WARBELOW: I don't think it's make it or break it. Winning one of these certainly would be nice, but losing isn't going to stop the change in American opinion.
SMITH: A game changer could come from the U.S. Supreme Court, which may soon rule on California's Proposition 8, banning gay marriage, and on a challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act.
Brian Brown, of the National Organization for Marriage, says what states do now could influence the Court.
BRIAN BROWN: Given that we have a Roe versus Wade-type decision, these state fights become even more important because some of the justices don't like to have the law be too far ahead of where the public is.
SMITH: Even a Supreme Court decision however is unlikely to end the debate. If the justices find same-sex marriage bans unconstitutional, opponents say they'll just redouble their efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution.
Tovia Smith, NPR News.
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In rural China, it's not uncommon for schoolchildren to skip lunch, not because they're too busy, they're simply too poor. Well, thanks largely to the efforts of one man, 25,000 poverty-stricken children in China are now getting a free lunch every day. And indirectly, his efforts have helped millions more.
NPR's Louisa Lim has the story from Shaanxi.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
LOUISA LIM, BYLINE: For 10-year-old Xie Xiaoyuan, just getting to school is an ordeal - her frostbitten ears a testament to this.
XIE XIAOYUAN: (Foreign language spoken)
LIM: I get up at five o'clock, she says, then I comb my hair and start walking.
Xie navigates a mountain path in the dark, trudging through snowstorms and mudslides. Then she has to get a bus for about 10 miles. She hasn't time to eat breakfast.
XIAOYUAN: (Foreign language spoken)
LIM: For lunch, I spend 15 cents on two pieces of bread and a drink, she says.
That's all she eats until dinner at home at 5:00. That's all her family can afford with an income of about $120 a month for five people. For a while, she even stopped going to school because they couldn't afford the bus fare. But they were told this is against the law.
Many of her fellow students at Hujiaying Primary School go hungry every day. Headmaster Bai Baojun says his biggest challenge is left-behind kids - those whose parents who've gone away to the cities to make money.
BAI BAOJUN: (Through Translator) About 80 percent of our kids have parents who've gone away to find work. For half our students, both parents have gone away. So they depend on the grandparents, who can't help with their homework.
LIM: China's growing income disparity can be seen here, not just in the dirt roads and lack of sanitation but in the very bodies of these kids. As they do their daily exercises in the playground, they're warmly wrapped up, since the classrooms have no heating. But one recent survey found 12 percent of children in the poorest rural regions are stunted due to malnourishment. They're on average two to six inches shorter than city kids.
One new grassroots program aims to change that by providing free lunches for countryside children.
(SOUNDBITE OF SIZZLING STOVE)
LIM: Through the Internet, it solicits donations of less than 50 cents, enough for one meal per child per day. These are then donated to schools in the poorest places in China. At this school the money pays for these basins of meat and tofu, which are being cooked in enormous metal vats. The school chef is cooking for more than 200. There's so much food in there he's actually using a shovel to stir the food.
BAOJUN: (Foreign language spoken)
LIM: Headmaster Bai gives a speech to mark the first official day of free lunch at the school.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
LIM: Now, we're actually trying the free lunch. There's a spicy tofu dish, celery with meat, and mushrooms and greens. And it's actually really, really good. I would pay a lot more in a restaurant for this.
The kids line up eagerly. For most, this is their best meal of the day. Some, without parents here, even have to cook their own supper.
This program is the brainchild of Deng Fei, a campaigning journalist from Phoenix Weekly news magazine. But even he's been blown away by the speed with which the Free Lunch Project has caught on.
DENG FEI: (Through Translator) In eight months, we've raised $4 million in funds, 900,000 people gave us money. We've helped 162 schools give free lunches to 25,000 children.
LIM: He's been working closely with local authorities, who sometimes contribute funds - in this case, building the school canteen. Since he started, the central government announced it will expand its own nutritional support program. It'll spend two and a half billion dollars, providing extra nutrition to 26 million Chinese kids in the countryside.
Headmaster Bai believes Deng Fei's program prodded the government into action.
BAOJUN: (Through Translator) The government would probably have given some money for free lunches anyway, eventually but I think it would have happened later.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
LIM: In the dining room, the kids are wolfing down their food, giddy with joy. But this program is facing challenges, including how to monitor all the schools that take part. Here in Hujiaying, there are plans for a two-track system, with better meals for those that can pay more. Apparently inequality is so entrenched in China that even within a poverty alleviation program, there are haves and have-nots.
Louisa Lim, NPR News, Beijing.
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Finally, this hour, a story of a bakery started by Jewish immigrants and rescued by Pakistani Muslim immigrants. Coney Island Bialys & Bagels claims to be the oldest bialy bakery in New York City. It was founded in 1920, but it's faced hard times and changing demographics. As NPR's Margot Adler reports, the bakery is still alive and still kosher.
MARGOT ADLER, BYLINE: Coney Island Bialys & Bagels makes everything by hand the old-fashioned way. Zafaryab Ali, who worked in the bakery for 11 years before leaving to drive a cab and now runs the shop along with his partner Peerzada Shah, gives me the abbreviated bagel tour.
Cinnamon raisin, plain bagel, sesame, poppy - I have - onion, pumpernickel, rye bagel...
It's a small store being slowly renovated in a kind of rundown area on Coney Island Avenue. But the customers know what they like.
JEANIE WITTSON: Scoop out the dough on both sides with a little butter.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Got it.
ADLER: Jeanie Wittson works in a nearby store.
WITTSON: I love their bialys, and I like their flagels.
ADLER: What are these?
WITTSON: That is a flat bagel. They're not as doughy.
ADLER: And today, you're getting what?
WITTSON: I'm getting cranberry with a little butter.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
ADLER: The store was founded by Morris Rosenzweig, who came from Bialystock at the turn of the century, where bialys originated. Bialys usually have an indentation in the middle, but it's not a hole like a bagel, and often some onions in the middle or other flavoring. At one point, the bakery did so much business, it was open 24 hours a day on the weekends. Later, the store was run by his son and then by Steve Ross, his grandson, now in his 50s.
STEVE ROSS: By the time I was 10, 11 years old, I was working the cash register. I had to stand on a milk case. By 12, 13 years old, I was, you know, making bialys. By 16, I was rolling bagels. You know, so I worked literally the bottom up.
Ross also worked as a firefighter until he got injured on the job. He's had three surgeries. He couldn't easily commute from New Jersey to take care of the shop. Also, the neighborhood changed. Ross says many of the traditional customers moved to the suburbs. He tried to sell the business; there were no buyers. And when Ali heard about it, Ross asked him, want to take it over?
ZAFARYAB ALI: And then we take charge, and then I say, OK, we'll try, you know?
ADLER: Shah and Ross say not much has changed.
PEERZADA SHAH: I'm using same recipe, same ingredients from same suppliers.
ROSS: I gave them all the phone numbers. If you need, you know, this, this is who you're going to get it from, and they stayed with all that.
ADLER: For the bagels, that means high-gluten flour, brown sugar, liquid malt, making them by hand, not by machine, boiling them, not steaming them before they are baked. As for keeping the bakery kosher...
Kosher and halal is very, very close, like brother and sister...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
ADLER: ...maybe twin, you know?
Ali and Shah say the only thing remaining is official kosher supervision and certification.
Very soon, we go to bring rabbi for blessing.
SHAH: I'm looking for that.
ADLER: Ross, Shah and Ali talk to each other at least several times a week. They all say business is picking up. And when people look askance at the idea of Muslims running a kosher Jewish bakery, Ross has this response.
ROSS: They were reliable. I taught them everything. There was never any argument. I wish them well.
ADLER: Truthfully, I didn't want to believe these bagels were any better than those at my local deli which are half the price. But the verdict after buying a dozen and bringing them back to the office? My deli lost. Margot Adler, NPR News, New York.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block. No street signs point to Slab City, California. From Los Angeles, you head east deep into the desert and then south past the Salton Sea. For years, the abandoned Marine base has drawn loners and outcasts.
Now, Gloria Hillard reports the troubled economy has driven other travelers to the site dubbed the last free place in America.
GLORIA HILLARD, BYLINE: If there was a speed sign posted at the entrance of Slab City, it might read: slow roll. Following the tire tracks of countless RVs, trailers, vans and campers, you pass a landscape of those vehicles that have taken root here, their tires now soft on the desert floor.
VINCE NEILL: You kind of give yourself your own address out here and we're 100 Low Road.
HILLARD: Vince Neill parked his aging brown and tan RV here a few months ago.
NEILL: And then, of course, the RV is - that's for our housing and we all live in there. Me and the wife and six of the kids.
HILLARD: His family's small RV is anchored by a long concrete slab and circled by a couple abandoned trailers and a speed boat filled with bottles and cans. They came here from the Sacramento area. A few puppies are running in circles as a teen in a pink tank top sweeps up debris from recent winds.
ALLIE NEILL: I clean up around the slab. I treat it like as if I was living in a house.
HILLARD: Eighteen year old Allie is Neill's oldest daughter.
NEILL: We're in a transition. We also came out here to experience the (unintelligible) Slab City because we've heard so much about it.
HILLARD: Slab City gets its name from the numerous concrete foundations that dot the land. The state is somewhat of an absentee landlord on this 600 acre patch. Population estimates are anywhere from several hundred to a few thousand.
A nearby RV has a generator. There's no running water, no power lines, no sewage service and no trash pickup, which can give the place a "Mad Max," post-apocalyptic feel. Rusted bicycles and box springs peek through small mountains of twisted metal.
Walking down Low Road, you'll come upon the Oasis Club where a few residents are sitting at an outdoor table rolling their own cigarettes. A camper truck piled high with belongings approaches. They look up warily.
TENNESSEE KEN FREELAND: This looks like a newbie coming in.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: A newbie coming in (unintelligible).
FREELAND: There's people - before you take anybody's picture, you want to ask them and make sure it's OK because there are people out here that are being stalked. I know a couple women.
HILLARD: Tennessee Ken Freeland is a man of undetermined age and background in a cowboy hat and plaid shirt. This is his fourth year.
FREELAND: Out here, nobody bothers you. You treat people the way you want to be treated and everybody gets along great.
HILLARD: To be a member of the Oasis Club, it'll cost you $20 a year. Coffee is served from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00. Lynne Bright pretty much runs things here. The 55 year old says some people who come to Slab City have a misconception about the place.
LYNNE BRIGHT: They think that - come to Slab City and you will be provided for and that's the furthest thing from the truth. This little piece of ground that you're standing on is free. That's all.
HILLARD: Everything you need to survive, from propane to water, you need to buy or bring with you. The former public service employee met her husband here three years ago.
BRIGHT: I like the community. I like what I do. I like being not part of the stuff out there in the world. I like being unplugged.
HILLARD: Toward the end of Low Road, the desert neighborhood starts to change. There's no trash and the motor homes are, well, more expensive. Rick Lee recently sold his house in Texas and bought one.
RICK LEE: It was better for me to just go ahead and take the loss and sell it, and since I've been out here, I've heard quite a few people that's done the same, so...
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
HILLARD: Michael Depraida operates Slab City's pirate radio station out of his fully equipped 1995 polished and solar-powered Airstream. He's an artist from New York.
MICHAEL DEPRAIDA: Up until 2008, I was doing very well, and 2008, the art market collapsed for me.
HILLARD: He still does his artwork and sells custom designed t-shirts for the increasing number of tourists who drive by.
DEPRAIDA: There's a great sense of community here.
HILLARD: One of the first communities here years ago were the snowbirds, mostly retirees that flocked here in the winter. In fact, Low Road gets its name from a club called Loners on Wheels. Gas barbecues and lawn furniture take their place in front of fully equipped RVs.
Sixty-two year old Barbara Russell agrees, it doesn't look like the rest of Slab City.
BARBARA RUSSELL: A lot of those are young people who have run away from this or that. We haven't run away. We've run to.
HILLARD: The sky has turned a shade of turquoise, and in a few more weeks, the desert flowers will bloom. Come May, temperatures can reach over 120 degrees here. That's when the snowbirds will depart and only the rattlesnakes, scorpions and Slab City's most hardy residents will remain.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
HILLARD: For NPR News, I'm Gloria Hillard.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Whether you're into football, baseball, hockey or hoops, fantasy sports have taken off in a big way. They generate almost $2 billion a year. Commentator Laura Lorson is big on fantasy leagues, just not so much with the sports.
LAURA LORSON, BYLINE: Another football season is winding down, college basketball is uninteresting until the tournament, pro basketball is, you know, whatever. And it'll be a while before pitchers and catchers show up for spring training. But fortunately for all of us, we are smack in the middle of cold and flu season. And the action in my Cold and Flu Fantasy League is really heating up. I pore over issues of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report like it's a racing form. I'm trolling the Internet for hints on what the up-and-comer viruses might be from the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine.
And everybody knows about WebMD, which has undeniably solid information and background, but my secret weapon in drafting the real sleeper virus picks? Telehealth Ontario. The Canadians rarely steer you wrong. Basically, you're looking to pick up under-the-radar illnesses. Take coronavirus: causes the common cold. Undeniably solid, the Tom Brady of communicable disease, eventual Hall of Famer, total game-day player. You want to start coronavirus every week.
But everybody knows about coronavirus. So what you really want to look for is the solid performer the fair weather fans haven't necessarily heard of, maybe has kind of mediocre jersey sales, but is super contagious and hard to stop. Last year, I pinned a lot of my strategy on rotavirus, which totally fit that profile. I have a friend who works in a day care center, and she gave me the tip. I also went ahead and drafted Listeria because I had heard someplace that USDA funding was under attack. Kind of a mediocre pick, actually.
My coworker, though, who drafted E. coli, totally cleaned up, but then he had a higher salary cap than I did. I'm not having a great season, but it ain't over till it's over. The weather could get worse. More people could be staying indoors, sneezing on each other. I got stuck with diphtheria in a really boneheaded trade I made earlier this year, but I had a hunch a few weeks ago and I picked up pertussis on waivers since the two kind of go together, what with all these people refusing to get their kids immunized.
I also have kind of a big stake in flu, which is always risky. It's either feast or famine with flu. It either has a monster season or it's a total bust. I drafted AH1N1, which historically has had absolutely mind-blowing statistics, but I haven't started him this year. Good to know he's on the bench, though. When the virus strain that started the 1918 pandemic takes the field, people sit up and take notice. At least, people at the CDC do. Anyway, if you could do me a favor, I'd really appreciate it if you could be a little more lax about hand washing here in the next couple of weeks.
If I'm going to win this league, I'm going to need your help. So go on, go to work with your sniffles and your productive cough. Your boss and your co-workers will think you're really dedicated, and I, quite frankly, could use the points. Winning this year's Cold and Flu Fantasy League may not have quite the cache of winning at fantasy football or Rotisserie League Baseball, but it would really be a confidence booster for me this coming spring, when I'm getting my Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show bracket picks together during Mutt Madness.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BLOCK: Laura Lorson is thinking about starting a "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" fantasy league at her home in Perry, Kansas.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel. Now, the story of a community in Texas that is actively seeking the help of immigrants. From Red River Radio, Kate Archer Kent reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHURCH BELLS)
KATE ARCHER KENT, BYLINE: The bells from a Methodist Church proclaim 5 o'clock in downtown Nacogdoches, Texas. No bumper-to-bumper traffic on these brick streets. Historical marker signs dot the town that holds a claim to being the oldest in Texas. People from Nac - as they say here - are proud of their heritage and the latest development. It's been nearly a year since the chicken processing plant announced it would hire a couple hundred new workers, all of them refugees from Myanmar, also known as Burma.
The initial reaction, it wasn't as good as it should have been.
The town's mayor, Roger Van Horn, recalls a tense meeting when Pilgrim's Pride said Southeast Asian refugees would debone the chicken by hand. About 33,000 people live in Nacogdoches, and the unemployment rate is low. So it's hard to find people to do this kind of work.
MAYOR ROGER VAN HORN: Immigration is a very touchy issue in this part of the country, you know, being so close to the border. And why are our people unemployed, and you're bringing other people in to take the jobs?
KENT: These refugees are in the U.S. legally, and what Pilgrim's Pride did in hiring them was aboveboard too. Van Horn says you can't pretend the Burmese aren't here. Besides, they're taxpayers now. Pilgrim's Pride wouldn't comment but said in an email that it was impressed by the town's support. The school district planned a welcome center. A South Texas pediatrician from Myanmar moved his practice to Nacogdoches. The newspaper wrote dozens of articles addressing customs, food and life in refugee camps. Publisher Rayanne Schmid says the paper was just trying to help people understand their new neighbors.
RAYANNE SCHMID: We felt like the more we could explain to our community, the less frightened they would seem, and the less - and now that you see them in town and that they're just part of our community now.
KENT: Twenty-seven-year-old Ker Paw Nah supervises 72 workers at Pilgrim's Pride. He moved from Houston to take the job. Other Burmese have relocated from California and Oregon. Nah wears a black Adidas jacket over his traditional woven top. He says when he needed a new home to rent, members of this church helped him at every turn.
KER PAW NAH: Everybody need their freedom. Everybody need their independence. I need a safe place to live, and I need a better life. That's my dream.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Foreign language spoken)
KENT: At Nacogdoches High School, 14 students are from Myanmar, and they know their future depends on learning English. On a recent day, several get called to the nurse for vaccinations. ESL instructor Katherine Whitbeck sees a teachable moment.
KATHERINE WHITBECK: Immunizations.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Immunizations.
WHITBECK: Immunizations.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Immunizations.
WHITBECK: Shots.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Shots.
WHITBECK: OK.
KENT: Whitbeck says the students are assertive about learning, and they make the honor roll. Their education could open up job possibilities beyond the chicken plant.
Upholstery shop owner Linda Greer wants to hire some refugees to alleviate her furniture order backlog. She says Nacogdoches is so receptive because they came from an oppressed country.
LINDA GREER: You don't mind helping somebody that's good and kind and wants to work. It's a small town, and I think people in a small town have a little more tolerance.
KENT: For the Nah family, any time they've asked for help, local residents have stepped up. Nah's dream is for his baby boy to become governor of Myanmar and bring peace to the country. Meanwhile, he's found peace in a town that adopted him far from his troubled homeland. For NPR News, I'm Kate Archer Kent.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
In tonight's speech, President Obama is expected to defend his record on energy policy, both on finding alternative sources and reducing dependence on foreign oil. Presidents since Richard Nixon have been bedeviled by questions of energy security. Here's President George W. Bush in his 2006 State of the Union.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: And here we have a serious problem. America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.
SIEGEL: Well, since President Obama took office, the U.S. has actually made considerable progress overcoming that addiction. Though you wouldn't know that from listening to his critics, as NPR's Elizabeth Shogren reports.
ELIZABETH SHOGREN, BYLINE: Republicans have steadily heaped criticism on President Obama for standing in the way of domestic oil production. They've attacked him for slowing offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico after the BP spill and for deciding not to open some federal lands in the West for oil and gas development.
MITT ROMNEY: We have an energy policy that doesn't take advantage of our natural resources. That makes no sense. We need our oil, our coal, our gas, our nuclear...
SHOGREN: That's Mitt Romney during a recent debate for the Republican nomination. But this criticism obscures a major breakthrough that's under way. The Energy Information Agency said this week that U.S. oil production started increasing a few years ago, and the agency predicts this increase will continue and pick up steam.
DR. HOWARD GRUENSPECHT: That's really reversing a long slide.
SHOGREN: Howard Gruenspecht is the agency's acting chief. U.S. oil dependence peaked under George W. Bush at 60 percent. It's down to 49 percent. And that's just the beginning.
GRUENSPECHT: Reliance on imported petroleum, we expect to decline dramatically over the next 20 years.
SHOGREN: To about one third of the country's oil needs. Other energy experts say these forecasts should change the way the country thinks about itself and its relationships with unfriendly oil-rich nations. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Chemistry Professor John Deutch is a former CIA chief who advises the Obama administration on energy.
PROFESSOR JOHN DEUTCH: We have a complete change in the historic view that we are helplessly dependent on energy imports, oil imports going forward.
SHOGREN: Deutch says the situation is even brighter than it seems, because much of U.S. oil imports in the future could come from Canada.
DEUTCH: I frankly find Canadians as reliable as Californians in providing us with energy. So you should not include the Canadians in that import dependence.
SHOGREN: Oil industry executives agree that the outlook is rosy. James Mulva is the CEO of ConocoPhillips.
JAMES MULVA: Passed assumptions of oil and gas scarcity that went into business strategic plans, governmental policies and public attitudes are out of date. The major production trends have certainly been reversed.
SHOGREN: Oil companies are using new technologies to blast open rock that contains oil. It's called hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Mulva notes that more rigs are drilling for oil in the U.S. today than have been for 25 years.
But here's where the criticism of President Obama comes in. Mulva stresses that most of these rigs are on private property. They're drilling in places like the Bakken Formation, which lies under parts of North Dakota and Montana.
MULVA: Had this been government land, we would likely still be awaiting drilling permits or fighting lawsuits from NGOs or outright drilling bans enacted by Congress.
SHOGREN: Still, increased U.S. oil production is only one reason that reliance on foreign oil is waning. Another is Americans are using less fuel. The recession played a role in that, but so do policies that boost fuel efficiency of cars and increase the use of renewable fuels like ethanol. President Obama deserves credit for those, so does his predecessor, President Bush.
Elizabeth Shogren. NPR News. Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BHI BHIMAN: (Singing) Hold me down, keep me back. I don't know what I'd do. My baby's with that man again. I thought that they was through.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
This is the music of singer-songwriter Bhi Bhiman. With his folk melodies and wry lyrics, he's been compared to Woody Guthrie. His new album is called "Bhiman" and Robert Christgau has our review.
ROBERT CHRISTGAU, BYLINE: Delivering a brief, early opening set in Manhattan one recent Monday, Bhi Bhiman looked like a law clerk in Mumbai stopping by for a drink after work - a neat South Asian man in a newsboy cap and glasses wearing a gray sweater over a wing-collared white shirt, except for one thing. He was holding a big acoustic guitar and picking it John Hurt style as he sang a little something about kimchee.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "KIMCHEE LINE")
BHIMAN: (Singing) So I climbed upon a ladder to see what I could see. Well, the (unintelligible) is getting fatter, I feel my stomach bleed. I'm on the Kimchee line. I'm on the Kimchee line. I'm on the Kimchee line and it's scallion time.
CHRISTGAU: Singing blues in a vocal style that suggests a more modest Nina Simone would be an unusual formal choice for any young person in 2012. For a second generation Sri Lankan-American who grew up on grunge, it's a heroic act of will, but Bhiman's songs would be remarkable from anybody. Here's another track from his self-titled album. It's called "Ballerina."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BALLERINA")
BHIMAN: (Singing) We got married in a Wal-Mart down by the Wrangler jeans. I'm 'a dress my baby like a vampire next week on Halloween.
CHRISTGAU: Bhiman is a penetrating melodist, as well as an accomplished guitarist and a striking singer, but what he likes best about songwriting is word play. Note the trick rhymes on the sadder, but funnier "Life's Been Better."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LIFE'S BEEN BETTER")
BHIMAN: (Singing) Life's been better. I had more cheddar, but all my feta's run dry. I packed my bag and I'm headed for Saginaw. I'm guessing that you're tagging along. I called my captain to make something happen, but he said that he was napping it off.
CHRISTGAU: Bhi Bhiman is a work in progress. He gets a lot out of his guitar and some spare accompaniment, but he's mired in four-four rhythmically, and his personal songs don't sink as deep as the descriptive ones. Nevertheless, he's an original in a folky mode that always looks played out until the next surprise from nowhere comes along.
That surprise begins with the first track on "Bhiman," a song called the "Guttersnipe" that had me listening before his voice even entered.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GUTTERSNIPE")
BHIMAN: (Singing) I jumped the first train I saw. It'll surely take me home.
SIEGEL: The new album from Bhi Bhiman is called "Bhiman." Our reviewer is Robert Christgau.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GUTTERSNIPE")
BHIMAN: (Singing) I had a mama. At least I'd have a place to go, but I'm just a guttersnipe. I got no place to wipe my nose.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
A new study finds that chemicals known as PFCs can impair a child's immune system. PFCs are found in non-stick coatings, stain-resistant fabrics, food packaging and even some seafood. Their use is declining in the U.S.
But as NPR's Jon Hamilton reports, exposure to even relatively low levels seems to have an effect.
JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: In the past decade, scientists have become increasingly concerned about PFCs, which are known formally as perfluorinated compounds. Philippe Grandjean, who works at Harvard and the University of Southern Denmark, says one reason is that PFCs are just about impossible to avoid.
PHILIPPE GRANDJEAN: These compounds have been around for, like, 50 years. I mean, you can find them in polar bears and they are all over the environment.
HAMILTON: Also, PFCs tend to linger for years in the body and, in lab animals, they've been shown to suppress the immune system.
Grandjean wanted to know whether this was happening in children, so he led a team that studied nearly 600 kids in the Faroe Islands, which lie about halfway between Scotland and Iceland. The Faroese have levels of PFCs similar to those of U.S. residents. Grandjean figured that if the chemicals were having an effect, it would show up in the way the kids' bodies responded to vaccinations.
Normally, a vaccine causes the production of lots of antibodies to a specific germ, but Grandjean says that response was less pronounced in the children whose blood contained higher levels of PFCs.
GRANDJEAN: We found that, the higher the exposure, the less capable the kids were in terms of responding appropriately to the vaccine and some of the kids were more or less incapable.
HAMILTON: The study looked at the responses to vaccines for diphtheria and tetanus in children from five to seven years old. Grandjean says the result suggests these kids have a blunted response to other vaccines, as well, and perhaps bigger problems.
GRANDJEAN: Of course, we worry that something more serious is going on here, that the immune system is not really developing optimally.
HAMILTON: If so, children with higher levels of PFCs might be less able to fight off infectious diseases.
Alan Ducatman from West Virginia University has worked on something known as the C8 Health Project, which has been studying the health effects of one particular PFC in Ohio and West Virginia.
He says results from the new study are consistent with some of their own findings regarding PFCs and immune function.
ALAN DUCATMAN: PFCs have certainly undergone a transformation in our perspective on them over one decade.
HAMILTON: Ducatman says consumers in the U.S. have reason to be concerned, even though companies here have phased out some PFCs and some exposure levels have begun falling. Ducatman says PFCs are not the most frightening chemicals out there.
DUCATMAN: But they are also clearly problematic and something to think about and, to the degree that levels are going down in the United States, we should also acknowledge that they're not going down in other parts of the world and, in fact, there are places where they may even be going up.
HAMILTON: Grandjean says China is one country that appears to be using more PFCs these days and they are putting them in products that get sold in the U.S.
GRANDJEAN: We may just be importing products with the same compounds instead, so I don't think that we have solved the exposure problem yet and I think it needs international attention.
HAMILTON: It's getting some. Global treaties are just beginning to include language restricting the use of certain PFCs. The new study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel. We begin this hour with Mitt and Newt. The two top Republican contenders campaigned in the Tampa area exactly one week before the Florida primary. In a few minutes, we'll hear more about Newt Gingrich, first though, to Mitt Romney.
BLOCK: Today, Romney released his tax returns and we'll have more on that elsewhere in the program. But during an appearance this morning, he kept his focus on President Obama. Romney offered what his campaign called a pre-buttal to tonight's State of the Union address. NPR's Ari Shapiro was there in Florida.
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: From the beginning, it was clear that this would not be a typical stump speech. Romney did not walk into his standard anthem of "Born Free." He delivered his remarks from a teleprompter, not off the cuff as he usually does. And instead of the believe in America banner that typically hangs behind him, smudged white letters against a chalkboard gray background read, Obama isn't working. Romney stood behind a lectern in a cavernous empty warehouse.
MITT ROMNEY: In 2008, this plant closed because of an economic downturn. In a normal recovery, under strong leadership, it could be full of workers by now.
SHAPIRO: What followed was a 15-minute indictment of President Obama. Romney described it as the real state of our union.
ROMNEY: The president's been telling people that his agenda will create economic opportunity that's built to last. That's the phrase he'll use - built to last. Well, let's talk about what's lasted. What's lasted is unemployment above 8 percent for 35 straight months.
SHAPIRO: This is a return to form for Romney. He used to focus exclusively on the president, but since he lost his frontrunner status, he's been focusing more on Newt Gingrich. Romney did not mention Gingrich once this morning, talking, instead, about what a Romney presidency would look like.
ROMNEY: Do you want a president who will keep promising that this time he'll get it right? Do we want a president who keeps telling us why he's right and why we're all wrong? Or do we want a sense of new beginning and excitement that comes with a new leader?
SHAPIRO: Romney didn't mention his tax returns once either. Earlier in the day, he released his paperwork from the last year and an estimate for this year. They show that the family made about $20 million a year, mostly from investments. A physician named Michael Santos(ph) at the Tampa speech said he sees the tax returns as the strongest argument around for the value of capitalism and free enterprise.
MICHAEL SANTOS: He obviously made a fortune in it, but, you know, the old-fashioned way, by working hard, by making good investments, by being better and giving a better service than your competition. So he understands the free enterprise system and is the best person to go out there and defend it.
SHAPIRO: Later this afternoon, Romney focused on a different, more painful side of the free enterprise system, the foreclosure crisis. He spoke to voters in front of a vacant home in the Fort Myers area. As people arrived, the music from the speakers played, somewhat incongruously, "Celebrate Good Times." Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Lehigh Acres, Florida.
BRIAN NAYLOR, BYLINE: This is Brian Naylor, travelling with the Gingrich campaign. While Mitt Romney was focused on the president's speech tonight, Gingrich was mostly focused on the task at hand, next Tuesday's GOP primary. Addressing a crowd jammed into the booths at St. Petersburg's Tick Tock restaurant this morning, the former Speaker referred back to Romney's aggressive attacks at last night's debate.
NEWT GINGRICH: Romney has a new debate coach, whose specialty is to say as many untrue things as fast as you can to get them all into one or two quick statements. So I thought it was kind of wild.
NAYLOR: Gingrich's debate performance was much on the Speaker's mind today. Usually combative, Gingrich came across as relatively subdued Monday night, a performance he's blaming on the format. He told Fox News this morning that from now on, he'll not take part in debates unless the audience is given a free reign to respond.
GINGRICH: We're going to serve notice on future debates, we won't - we're just not going to allow that to happen. That's wrong. The media doesn't control free speech. People ought to be allowed to applaud if they want to. It was almost silly.
NAYLOR: There's another debate scheduled for Thursday night in Jacksonville. Gingrich has been speaking to enthusiastic crowds as he buses down Florida's Gulf Coast. He said he'll need that enthusiasm on primary day.
GINGRICH: I need your help between now and next Tuesday. The fact is, Governor Romney will have vastly more money than I will, but we'll have many more people than he will. This is exactly what happened in South Carolina and people power beats money power every time.
NAYLOR: At one stop this afternoon, the crowd was a little more than enthusiastic, waiting for him at an appearance at a Sarasota airport hangar. One of the warm-up speakers said it was time to send the president back to Chicago. Some in the crowd, though, yelled Mr. Obama should be sent to Kenya. When he took the podium, Gingrich also mentioned the president's impending State of the Union address.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD CHANTING "KENYA")
GINGRICH: I thought I might suggest a few things that would improve the state of the union. You always have to wonder when Obama speaks which country he thinks he's talking about. You also have to wonder what his source material is.
NAYLOR: Gingrich is clearly buoyed by two new polls showing him ahead of Romney in the state. And the Romney campaign is showing more than a little concern. One of Romney's top surrogates in the state went to the Gingrich rally to urge reporters to dig deeper into Gingrich's work for Freddie Mac.
Brian Naylor, NPR News, with the Gingrich campaign in Florida.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Newt Gingrich's career as Speaker of the House from January 1995 until November of 1998 is the subject of much dispute in the Republican primary season. Here's what's not in dispute. In the 1994 elections, Gingrich galvanized a Republican party that had spent half a century in the minority. He helped make that year a national election based on opposition to the new Democratic president, Bill Clinton, and a conservative reform agenda called the Contract with America.
NEWT GINGRICH: The new Republican majority will immediately pass the following major reforms and a restoring of faith and trust of the American people in their government.
SIEGEL: Congress would be subject to its own laws. It would be streamlined and transparent, committee chairs would be term-limited and tax increases would require super majorities. Well, that November, the GOP took the House. Four years later, in November 1998, the Republican majority was so badly reduced, Gingrich was forced to resign.
GINGRICH: Having lead the party to three consecutive victories in terms of having a majority in the House, the only time since 70 years we've done that, I could hardly stand by and allow the party to cannibalize itself in that situation and I thought it was best for all of us. Marianne and I have lots of things to do and I've already talked to a lot of people today about opportunities to do some more learning and maybe earn a little bit of money.
SIEGEL: Here's what is in dispute about Gingrich's tenure as Speaker of the House. To hear him tell it, along with Bill Clinton, he balance budgets and reformed entitlements, epitomizing both steadfast conservative principle and the art of compromise. To hear his rivals tell it, he was an erratic ideas man who couldn't manage, a Speaker who was cited for an ethics violation, challenged by some of his most conservative members and ultimately forced from office.
Reporter Janet Hook of the Wall Street Journal covered the House when Newt Gingrich was Speaker. Back then, she was congressional correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Welcome...
JANET HOOK: Thank you.
SIEGEL: ...to the program. And let's work our way backward on the Gingrich record, since the manner of his departure is in some dispute. He describes it as a fairly gracious exit. His critics say he was driven from a post that he would have lost in a contested election within the House Republican caucus. Who's right?
HOOK: Well, probably both sides are right. I think Newt Gingrich would've preferred to have stayed on as speaker. I think he saw the writing on the wall. Many Republicans had already stepped out and said they would vote against him if he stood for speaker. Some even said they would run against him.
SIEGEL: There's also the matter of the House Ethics Committee investigation of Newt Gingrich. He says that he was acquitted of all substantive counts against him, it was a question of just a couple of documents and that he wasn't fined, he says. He was just required to pay the equivalent of court costs. What actually happened?
HOOK: Well, the investigation concerned a lot of complicated transactions. Newt Gingrich had a college course that he taught that was sort of typical Newt Gingrich grand ideas that was supposedly financed mostly by a non-profit organization. In fact, there were found to be some connections with his political arm and that that was a violation that the ethics committee concluded that he either should have or did in fact know about. In the end, there was kind of almost like a plea bargain toward the end, where it came down to them saying he should have known it.
He was found to have violated House rules and it was the first time in history that a speaker had been formally reprimanded by the House in the way he was.
SIEGEL: He had been speaker, of course, during the impeachment of Bill Clinton. And he's always said that was about the president's lying and not about the behavior that he was lying about. But you reported in those days that behind closed doors, he could get furious about what he thought of Bill Clinton's behavior, and once called him a misogynist - one of your sources quoted him as saying.
HOOK: Yeah, and it was an era rife with some hypocrisy there. And...
SIEGEL: 'Cause he was actually engaged in an affair at that time.
HOOK: He was engaged in an affair with Callista Bisek, who came to be his wife. One thing that's interesting though about that whole chapter is that he was such a driving force behind the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
But in the end, that had a big part in his downfall because in the 1998 elections, when House Republicans lost so many seats, it was in part because Newt Gingrich and the Republican campaign committee tried to make impeachment a national issue in local elections. And it kind of backfired on them. The whole episode called into question his judgment as a political strategist.
SIEGEL: Janet Hook, I want to ask you about the moment when Gingrich was not forced to step down as speaker, that is a year earlier in July of 1997, the year before he actually stepped down. There was a rebellion within the ranks and a group of members - Republican members tried to oppose him. This is what he told reporters when he was in Georgia at that time.
GINGRICH: But there has been no serious challenge. I mean, nobody believes that there is anything like enough votes in the conference to matter, in terms of my being speaker.
SIEGEL: Well, I mean, did he actually face serious plot, a challenge to his leadership?
HOOK: Yes, there was quite a serious plot. And part of the reason why it was more serious than other ones is that it seemed that members of his own leadership team were complicit in it.
SIEGEL: Now, what about the big picture contrasts here between Speaker Gingrich - the architect of great ideas and balanced budgets - and on the other hand, Newt Gingrich the guy who would come up with a hundred ideas a week and most of them would go nowhere?
HOOK: Well, truth is that both are elements of Newt and that's why he is a character of endless fascination. He really did do big, important things with President Clinton. I mean, the Welfare Reform Bill that the passed, he's not exaggerating its significance. The balanced budget deal, that was a hard one. And maybe it's only somebody like him, risk-taker, big ideas guy, who would be able to do that.
One of the things that he had going for him, why he was able to accomplish those things, is the fact that the big class of conservative Republicans who were elected in 1994 felt like they owed their election to Newt Gingrich. And so, he could propose big, risky things, and for a long time they would follow him.
SIEGEL: Well, Janet Hook, thank you very much for talking with us.
HOOK: My pleasure.
SIEGEL: Back in the day when Newt Gingrich was speaker of the House, Janet Hook was covering the House for the L.A. Times. She's now with the Wall Street Journal.
And you're headed for Florida, I gather...
HOOK: I hope so.
SIEGEL: ...to cover the race. Bye-bye.
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Fox is getting into the lucrative Spanish language TV market here in the U.S. They're putting together a broadcast network that will begin airing this fall.
As NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports, it's a partnership with RCN, a Colombian television company.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: RCN is a major producer and exporter of Spanish-language programming. They're the ones who created the original "Ugly Betty."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SERIES "YO SOY BETTY")
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Foreign language spoken)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Foreign language spoken)
BLAIR: Fox International has partnered with RCN to take advantage of the growing Latino market in the U.S., and because they believe MundoFox can do better than the Spanish programming that's currently available, says Fox International's Hernan Lopez.
HERNAN LOPEZ: We think there's an untapped opportunity for viewers that want to see television, but they're just not happy with the kind of programming that is available to them.
BLAIR: Lopez says MundoFox programming will include sports, entertainment, movies and news.
JUAN TORNOE: It's really a very interesting contender for Univision and Telemundo. I was very impressed.
BLAIR: Juan Tornoe heads up the marketing consulting firm Cultural Strategies. He thinks with such a major corporation supporting it, MundoFox could be a game changer for the Latino market in the U.S.
TORNOE: It's bigger than some small nations. It's very interesting and it will continue to grow.
BLAIR: And Tornoe offers the new network a challenge.
TORNOE: I really truly would like MundoFox to show more thought than cleavage.
BLAIR: One of the shows to be featured on MundoFox is called "Kdabra."
LOPEZ: And that's a fantasy and religion-themed weekly drama, with very high production values.
BLAIR: High production values and, says Lopez, starring one of Mexico's most popular actors, Christopher Uckermann.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SERIES "KDABRA")
CHRISTOPHER UCKERMANN: (as Luca) (Foreign language spoken)
BLAIR: MundoFox might give Univision and Telemundo some stiff competition. But they won't be easy to beat. Just last week, Univision out-performed CBS and NBC in the all-important 18 to 34 demographic, and that's with Telenovelas that don't look all that highly produced.
(SOUNDBITE OF TELEVISION CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: (Foreign language spoken)
BLAIR: MundoFox is scheduled to launch this fall. Hernan Lopez says it will also carry news programming that he says will be independent from the American Fox News.
Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.
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It's been a turbulent year in Ohio politics. Republican John Kasich was sworn-in as governor last January and wasted no time making big changes based on his conservative, business-backed ideas. But he also suffered a massive defeat when voters overwhelmingly rejected a key piece of his ambitious agenda.
Karen Kasler, of Ohio Public Radio, reports that after a year of ups and downs, many in the state are now wondering what to expect next from their outspoken governor.
KAREN KASLER, BYLINE: John Kasich rode a Republican tsunami into office in 2010, as Ohio turned from mostly blue to solidly red in the mid-term elections. Kasich defeated incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland by just two points. But the conservative former congressman and GOP candidate for president didn't let a tiny margin of victory stop him from showing some swagger on election night.
GOVERNOR JOHN KASICH: Guess what. I'm going to be governor of Ohio.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING)
KASLER: The state legislature was also suddenly and firmly in the Republicans' control, allowing Governor Kasich's business-friendly ideas to sail through. They included the elimination of the estate tax and his plan to privatize Ohio's job creation agency using the state's liquor profits, along with huge budget cuts to schools and local governments to deal with a big budget deficit.
But Governor Kasich also verbally took on lobbyists, special interests and Democrats. And, in a speech to state workers last February, even a police officer who pulled him over a few years ago.
KASICH: He's an idiot. We just can't act that way. And what people resent are people who are in the government who don't treat the client with respect.
KASLER: And Kasich's anger at the public employee unions who supported his Democratic opponent didn't stop there. He said this, just hours after he was elected governor.
KASICH: I am waiting for the teachers unions, however, to take out full-page ads in all the major newspapers apologizing for what they said about me during this campaign.
KASLER: And John Kasich made it clear a few weeks later that he wanted changes in the state's law on collective bargaining.
KASICH: My personal philosophy is I don't like public employees striking. OK? I mean, they got good jobs, they got high pay, they got good benefits, and great retirement. What are they striking for?
KASLER: Ohio's huge collective bargaining reform law, known as Senate Bill 5, went further than the controversial one in Wisconsin because it included police and firefighters and allowed public employees to refuse to pay union dues. Furious unions and Democratic activists put the law on the November ballot, with the governor as its face. Polls showed the law was unpopular, and not surprisingly, Kasich's approval rating plummeted.
And Senate Bill 5, the biggest piece of legislation signed in Ohio in 2011, was trounced by an almost two-to-one margin. Afterward, Kasich sounded conciliatory.
KASICH: My view is when people speak in a campaign like this, in a referendum, you have to listen when you're a public servant.
KASLER: But few here expect that tone to last long. With the unemployment rate falling and state revenues rising, the governor is already talking about new business-related bills. The eastern part of the state is seeing a boom in oil and natural gas exploration. And while a recent poll shows nearly three quarters of Ohioans want to stop the drilling process called fracking until its environmental impact is studied, Kasich has been supportive of the industry.
But this year could bring fewer controversial proposals from the governor, in part because many lawmakers who have supported him are up for re-election, says Paul Beck, a political science professor at Ohio State University.
PROFESSOR PAUL BECK: Well, I think it's going to be a year where Republicans and the governor are less willing to take the kind of political risks that they took in their legislative activity in 2011. The rebuke that Senate Bill 5 or its defeat constituted in the November 2011 election is something that many legislators have very fully in mind.
KASLER: But John Kasich already has plans to shake up the status quo again here. He recently announced he'll deliver his State of the State speech not in the traditional setting of the statehouse, but in Appalachia, in a small town along the West Virginia border 150 miles away.
For NPR News, I'm Karen Kasler, in Columbus.
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And I'm Melissa Block. It's that time again. Oscar nominations were announced this morning and the two frontrunners are films steeped in movie history.
"Hugo," which is both a children's adventure and a tribute to a French film pioneer, received the most nominations, 11, including Best Picture and Best Director.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "HUGO")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: You've tried to forget the past for so long.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Maybe it's time to try and remember.
BLOCK: Close behind "Hugo" with 10 nominations is "The Artist," a silent black and white comedy about the dawn of talking pictures.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE ARTIST")
BLOCK: And, as always, there were surprises and omissions. Our film critic, Bob Mondello, is here to guide us through them. And, Bob, let's get one thing clear right from the top. Nine nominations this year for Best Picture. The last two years, there were 10. What's going on?
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Well, it's all very strange. The Oscar nominating process has changed a lot in the last few years. The original idea in expanding to 10 nominees was to get in more pop hits, like "Inception" last year, "Avatar" the year before. That worked, maybe a little too well because the new rule is aimed at the opposite direction. The votes are weighted now with an academy member's first choice counting more than his second or third choice.
And that's led this year to seven broad consensus choices, "Hugo" and "The Artist," which you mentioned before, "The Descendants," "The Help," "Midnight in Paris," "War Horse" and "Moneyball."
And then there are two sort of dark horse candidates, which are "The Tree of Life" and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," which apparently some smaller group of people thought were really terrific.
BLOCK: A mini trend here, Bob, about movies that are about movies or movie making.
MONDELLO: Right.
BLOCK: We saw it with "Hugo" and "The Artist" and I guess "Midnight in Paris," which the main character is a screenwriter there, too.
MONDELLO: Sure. That does.
BLOCK: What other trends are you seeing?
MONDELLO: Well, the big one, it seems to me, is that the nominees are a lot more international than usual. You've always got five foreign language films, right. But this year, seven of the acting nominees hail from outside the U.S., including Demian Bichir, a surprise Mexican-born nominee for Best Actor. He played the undocumented immigrant in "A Better Life," a wonderful drama. He's terrific in it. He was really great.
The Best Original Screenplay - there are nominees from France, "The Artist" and Iran, "A Separation," which is also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. There's a fine German documentary called "Pina" and in the Best Animation category, which has been more or less owned by Pixar since it was created, Pixar's "Cars 2" didn't make it, but two foreign language cartoons did. I mean, that's really different. "A Cat in Paris" from France and "Chico and Rita" from Spain. So it's quite an international year.
BLOCK: And, Bob, we mentioned omissions. One, John Hawkes, whom we profiled on the program yesterday...
MONDELLO: Right.
BLOCK: ...did not get nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Leonardo DiCaprio did not get a Best Actor nomination for his work in "J. Edgar."
MONDELLO: Which is a surprise. I think he probably would have been the nominee if not for Demian Bichir. Frankly, these awards are now so talked about and there are so many other awards that it's hard for there to be surprises anymore, but you know, you can come up with a couple. A lot of people thought that "Adventures of Tin Tin" would be up for animated film. Apparently, there are people in the academy who don't think that motion capture is real animation.
Spielberg had two shots at Best Director in December for "Tin Tin" and "War Horse," but he didn't make it. In the Best Actress category, Rooney Mara is kind of a surprise. She was nominated for "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." I think most people expected Tilda Swinton to be in that slot for "We Need to Talk About Kevin."
If you were doing it under the old voting system where you get 10 nominees, I think either "Bridesmaids" or "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" would have made the Best Picture list. They both did OK, though. "Tinker Tailor" got a nomination for Gary Oldman for Best Actor and "Bridesmaids" got Supporting Actress for Melissa McCarthy, who was kind of wonderful, and Screenplay, which is not bad for a comedy that was not written by Woody Allen. So, not bad.
BLOCK: And Hollywood's biggest night is when, Bob?
MONDELLO: Sunday, February 26th.
BLOCK: OK. Can't wait. NPR's film critic Bob Mondello, talking about this year's Oscar nominations. Bob, thanks so much.
MONDELLO: It's always a pleasure.
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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
We know far more today than we did yesterday about Mitt Romney's money. After much prodding on the campaign trail, Romney released his 2010 tax returns and estimates for 2011. There were few surprises. It's well-known that before he was Massachusetts' governor, Romney made a fortune in the private equity business.
BLOCK: What we didn't know is exactly how much money that fortune continues to earn Romney in interest and dividends, or how much tax he pays on it. The answer, he brought in about $21 million a year and his effective tax rate is just under 15 percent. NPR's Tamara Keith reports.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: All of the tax experts we spoke with say Romney's returns follow the letter of the law. They aren't something you can throw together in a few hours on TurboTax. In fact, his family hires the heavy-hitting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. Thomas Cooke is a professor of law at Georgetown's Business School.
THOMAS COOKE: As a tax professor, it's the type of tax return I rarely get a chance to show to my students.
KEITH: The Romney campaign released about 500 pages of tax documents this morning, and Cooke says there are no major surprises.
COOKE: It's an example of how one can be extremely wealthy, be in 100 percent compliance with the law, take advantage of every aspect of the tax law that's out there and wind up paying a very, very low effective tax rate.
KEITH: Romney's effective tax rate at just below 15 percent is far lower than Newt Gingrich's at 31 percent, and President Obama's at around 25 percent. That's because both Gingrich and Mr. Obama get their most of their income from wages and other sources taxed at a marginal rate of up to 35 percent. Mitt Romney gets almost all of his money from investments, interest and dividends, taxed at the lower 15 percent capital gains rate.
LARRY ZELENAK: All you have to do is be, you know, fabulously wealthy, and those are the rules that apply to you.
KEITH: Larry Zelenak is a professor at Duke Law School. What stands out to him about the Romney taxes is...
ZELENAK: That it's kind of remarkable under current law that an extremely wealthy couple like the Romneys don't have to do anything very aggressive at all in order to get their average tax rate down to around 15 percent.
KEITH: There are no special tax tricks or dodges here. The tax code simply favors Romney's kind of income. Roberton Williams is a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
ROBERTON WILLIAMS: If we choose to tax investment income at 15 percent, then we're going to have situations like the Romney case where his overall income tax rate is relatively low.
KEITH: The economic theory being that investment helps boost the economy and should be rewarded with a lower tax rate. Williams says Romney pays a much lower tax rate than your average wealthy person and about the same as your average middle-income American because they're also hit with payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare. But there are some items in the Romney taxes that you won't find in most Americans' tax returns, including the Cayman Islands investments in a Romney family trust and a Swiss bank account. Both places are known as tax havens and Romney's legal team went to great lengths this morning to explain them away as perfectly normal.
Romney's trustee says he closed the Swiss bank account in 2010 because, quote, "it just wasn't worth it." Georgetown's Cooke says he can see why.
COOKE: At the end the day, he probably felt they did not pass the smell test even though they may have been perfectly legitimate investments. And according to all accounts, he accounted for the gain on those accounts through his tax return.
KEITH: If nothing else, these returns provide a window into the tax lives of the extremely wealthy who are able to make money largely because they already have so much. Tamara Keith, NPR News.
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One year ago, Egyptians took to the streets to protest. The month before, protests had broken out in Tunisia. And that example inspired and emboldened Egyptians like Adel al-Sharif, a father of three, who told our reporter in Cairo, he was demonstrating for the first time for political and economic freedom.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
ADEL AL-SHARIF: This is the exact thing that moves everybody. The status quo is too much, too much not doing anything. We're not progressing. My children are growing. I don't know how to tell them that we've been living like this for ages. So we need this changed.
SIEGEL: Now, one year later, Egypt's long time leader, Hosni Mubarak, stands accused of corruption and ordering the killing of protesters. The generals who assumed what was ostensibly transitional authority are still in charge and the Muslim Brotherhood, which played a minor role in instigating the protests, has emerged as the major winner of parliamentary elections.
Last year around this time, I was being filled in on the Egyptian protest movement by Sherif Mansour, an Egyptian who works at the Washington-based pro-democracy group Freedom House. And Sherif Mansour, welcome back.
SHERIF MANSOUR: Thank you very much.
SIEGEL: Good to see you.
MANSOUR: Good to be here.
SIEGEL: The gentleman we heard a moment ago wanted economic and political freedom for him and for his children. Do Egyptians have that today?
MANSOUR: We, this year, at Freedom House, continue to rank Egypt as not free, mainly because public freedoms, political rights have not seen the real progress that we could promote Egypt and make it at least partially free.
SIEGEL: Today, a field marshal Hussein Tantawi, the head of Egypt's ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, announced a partial lifting of the state of emergency, which was invoked to excuse the repressive policies of several past Egyptian presidents. Which is more noteworthy to you, the lifting of the state of emergency or the fact that it's only a partial lifting of the state of emergency?
MANSOUR: Well, the partial part and I think, because this has been the performance of Mubarak, every time Mubarak promises that they will only use it in nonpolitical cases, the implementations always contradict. So it has been used by Mubarak to justify torture, to create and sustain restrictions on political speech and political organization.
And what we're seeing today from Tantawi is some of that. He, at least, is only limiting the use of emergency law to one caveat, which is...
SIEGEL: Thuggery.
MANSOUR: ...thuggery, which is a very broad word which - there is a law in Egypt that tackles this issue, which is organized violence. And so there is not really need for it to continue to be a caveat on the emergency (unintelligible).
SIEGEL: I wanted to ask you about something that I experienced in Tunisia in the spring, which is that, when a country has an election, a country that has no real history of free elections and has no real history of constant political polling and demonstrations, people in the country really don't know their own country. They don't know how many people in it are likely to support the military or the mosque because there's no history of free expression.
Is Egypt getting to know itself these days?
MANSOUR: Absolutely. The country is rediscovering itself and it's not about who is in charge. It's about the attitudes, the practice of the habits. The biggest lesson is that they have managed to get Mubarak out of the system. He's currently in jail, but there is a Mubarak in every single institution in Egypt and it's a long fight to make sure that the country gets out of this habit of listening to whoever in power, of doing autocracy as a day-to-day behavior.
SIEGEL: Sherif Mansour of Freedom House, thank you very much for talking with us.
MANSOUR: You're most welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: And, tomorrow in Egypt, protests are planned to demand that the military speed up the timetable for electing a president and promptly turn power over to a civilian government. Sherif Mansour tells us that he expects millions of people in the streets.
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It's time now for your letters about music and memories. Yesterday, listener Veronica Horton told us about her winter song, one that brought back that cold of a Thanksgiving weekend in 1963.
Then 12 years old in Western boots, Horton tap-danced on the hood of an old car to a song from Tennessee Ernie Ford.
VERONICA HORTON: "Sixteen Tons" and what do you get? And...
BLOCK: What do you get?
HORTON: You get (singing) another day older and deeper in debt.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SIXTEEN TONS")
TENNESSEE ERNIE FORD: (Singing) Saint Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Well, Jennifer Andreka(ph) of Madison, Wisconsin, tells us that "Sixteen Tons" was her grandfather's theme song. He was born in Croatia, but moved to the U.S. and worked as a coal miner. She writes that her Grandpa Joe felt that "Sixteen Tons" perfectly captured the poverty, degradation and violence in the life of a miner. Although short and slight physically, he was possessed of a powerful bass voice, and on every holiday, he would stand at the head of the table and belt out the song before we ate.
In his later years, she writes, he went with a group of people to celebrate the birthday of a friend in a nursing home. She had dementia and didn't recognize anyone until she noticed Grandpa in the back of the room. She smiled broadly and said in her Croatian accent: ah, "Sixteen Tons."
BLOCK: Finally, last week, we remembered singer Etta James, who died Friday at the age of 73.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "A SUNDAY KIND OF LOVE")
ETTA JAMES: (Singing) I want a Sunday kind of love.
BLOCK: Well, Joseph Howell(ph) of Tucson writes this. Growing up, Etta James' Top 10 album was a standard during family barbecues and your story brought back sweet memories of family members laughing and dancing while the cracking and popping vinyl record struggled to do its due diligence to relay Etta's mammoth voice.
SIEGEL: Well, thanks to all who wrote in and please keep your letters coming. Just go to NPR.org and click on Contact Us.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I WANT A SUNDAY KIND OF LOVE")
JAMES: (Singing) Oh, yeah. I want a love that's...
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President Obama has a giant soap box tonight. It's the annual State of the Union Address, one of the biggest opportunities for the president to speak to a primetime audience. This year, it's also a chance for the president to offer a counterweight to the Republican White House hopefuls who've been dominating the airwaves. For a preview of tonight's speech, NPR's Scott Horsley joins me from the White House.
And, Scott, of course, presidential campaign well underway. Tonight's speech is largely a policy address, or are there political overtones as well?
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Overtones, undertones and through tones, I think. There will be policies the president talks about tonight. He's going to talk about steps to encourage manufacturing and domestic energy production. The White House calls this a blueprint for an economy that's built to last. But, you know, you just can't escape the sort of political hothouse that we're in, and that's why the president's re-election campaign has been organizing house parties, where supporters can get together to watch the speech. And it's why over the weekend, Mr. Obama sent a video preview of the speech to his campaign supporters.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: This is a make or break moment for the middle class and folks trying to work their way into the middle class. Because we can go in two directions: one is towards less opportunity and less fairness, or we can fight for where I think we need to go, building an economy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy few.
HORSLEY: And in that video, Mr. Obama said tonight's speech is a kind of bookend to one he gave last month in Osawatomie, Kansas. That was very much a table setter for the president's re-election campaign.
BLOCK: A table setter that struck a very populist tone, that speech in Osawatomie.
HORSLEY: Yes. He really rekindled some of the themes he'd run on in 2008, namely that we're all in this together, that even though Americans are individualists, we have responsibilities to one another, and that government has a responsibility, not just to get out of the way - as some Republicans would argue - but to create conditions for economic growth.
He pointed to Eisenhower's effort to build the Interstate Highway System, to Abraham Lincoln's Transcontinental Railroads, and he very self-consciously invoked another Republican president Teddy Roosevelt.
BLOCK: Teddy Roosevelt who had spoken in Osawatomie, Kansas, himself, I think, in 1910. One of the things that Teddy Roosevelt pushed for was a progressive income tax. And it will be interesting to see how much we hear about that from the president tonight.
HORSLEY: I think we're going to hear another appeal for Mr. Obama for the wealthy to pay higher taxes, or what he calls their fair share. I doubt very much he will mention Mitt Romney by name, but he will talk about what he perceives as the unfairness of the tax system that allows wealthy investors to pay a lower tax rate in many cases than middle-class families.
This is an issue that the president first raised back in September when he proposed the Buffett Rule, named for billionaire investor Warren Buffett who has complained that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. And, by the way, Warren Buffett's secretary, Debbie Bosanek, will be in the First Ladies' Box for the speech tonight.
BLOCK: And, Scott, the president is speaking to a huge national audience, but it's the members of Congress who are sitting right there in front of him. He has been pretty critical of Congress, talking about a do-nothing Congress that he's going to campaign against. How receptive are lawmakers likely to be to his proposals tonight?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
HORSLEY: That's a good question. You know, the president says that even with all the partisan bickering, he sees opportunities, even now, to work with Congress this year. The White House notes that a lot of lawmakers, including Republican lawmakers, are up for re-election in November and think they will want some kind of progress to show their constituents.
In particular, the president wants to get a year-long extension of that payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance and see some other areas for potential cooperation, investments in public works projects. But so far, there has been very little sign that lawmakers, at least the Republican lawmakers, are eager to work with the president.
And, as you say, if that continues to be the case, then Mr. Obama has promised to go out and campaign against a do-nothing Congress just as Harry Truman did. Now, of course, Harry Truman had a Republican House and Senate to run against. Today, Democrats still control the Senate even if they're often hamstrung by Republicans. So when Mr. Obama takes aim at lawmakers in general, there tend to be some Democratic casualties as well.
BLOCK: And, Scott, after the State of the Union Address tonight, the president hits the road tomorrow.
HORSLEY: Yes. Over the next three days, he'll be traveling to Iowa, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and Michigan, all states likely to be important in November.
BLOCK: OK. Scott, thanks so much.
HORSLEY: My pleasure.
BLOCK: That's NPR's Scott Horsley from the White House.
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Newt Gingrich celebrated his win in the South Carolina primary with a fundraising blitz, a two-day push to raise as much money as possible. The campaign says it brought in $2 million. That money will come in handy in Florida. But as NPR's Peter Overby reports, the need for quick fundraising shows the precarious state of the Gingrich campaign's finances.
PETER OVERBY, BYLINE: The campaign first set a target of $1 million and then doubled it. Spokesman R.C. Hammond says they made it.
R.C. HAMMOND: Most of that is coming in online, and a lot of it is coming in the mail. People are being very generous writing checks. But what it means for us is that we're going to have the money to compete on air, on television and radio here in Florida.
OVERBY: It's just-in-time campaign finance, the kind of thing politicians hate. Hammond says there are benefits in building a network of small donors.
HAMMOND: We can go back again and again to these folks, and as long as they continue to be generous to us, we will continue to be successful with the money they give us.
OVERBY: But ever since he announced, Gingrich has been on a financial roller coaster. The fundraising started out all right, although far behind the then-frontrunner Mitt Romney. But donors seemed to give up on Gingrich, only to come running back when businessman Herman Cain left the race. The Gingrich campaign says it raised $9 million in the fourth quarter. And yet by last week, that money was pretty much gone. The campaign manager fired off an email plea, quote, "we're surging and in position to win South Carolina, but we've still got to raise about 100K to fund our TV ads in the next 24 to 48 hours," unquote. And at a press conference, Gingrich begged for cash, too, right after slamming the traditional analysis of money as a measure of political strength.
NEWT GINGRICH: Are there things going on in America that don't fit the consultant big-money model? Now having said that, let me take this opportunity with all of these cameras to say we would love to have anybody who would like to go to Newt.org and donate, it would be very helpful, and it will make Florida work much better.
OVERBY: Actually, to make Florida work better, the Gingrich camp will need a lot of money and fast.
KEN GOLDSTEIN: If he's got it, he'll be spending it in Florida.
OVERBY: That's Ken Goldstein of Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group.
GOLDSTEIN: TV advertising is going to be much more important in Florida, because it's a big state, and they only got seven days.
OVERBY: A big state as in more than 800 miles from Key West to Pensacola, 10 media markets, $1.6 million dollars a week for a good ad buy on TV. But just yesterday, Gingrich got a big break. It was disclosed that a donor is giving $5 million to the pro-Gingrich superPAC Winning Our Future. It's an independent operation run by former aides. The donor is Miriam Adelson of Las Vegas. Her husband is Sheldon Adelson, a casino billionaire who gave the superPAC five million just two weeks ago. Ken Goldstein says that Sheldon Adelson's money helped to put Winning Our Future on the air in South Carolina, something the campaign itself was struggling to do.
GOLDSTEIN: Winning Our Future aired about twice as many ads than Gingrich did. So of ads aired on behalf of Newt Gingrich or against Newt Gingrich's opponents, two out of three were Winning Our Future.
OVERBY: Winning Our Future goes up on Florida TV today. That's three weeks after the pro-Romney superPAC began hitting the state with $2 million worth of mail, email and TV. So those $5 million from Miriam Adelson loom large right now. John Green is a political scientist at the University of Akron.
JOHN GREEN: Large infusions of cash from one or a small number of donors can be the difference between a campaign being viable or being ineffective.
OVERBY: There may be other multimillion-dollar donors like the Adelsons. We won't know until disclosures are made next week and next month. And here's another unknown. Miriam Adelson doesn't want her money used for attack ads. It's hard to predict what effect this will have on the messages from those who are trying to make Newt Gingrich the Republican nominee. Peter Overby, NPR News, Washington.
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Microsoft is facing criticism for a new app it has patented for GPS services. It has been dubbed the avoid ghetto feature. The technology is meant for pedestrians, to help them avoid bad weather, difficult terrain and what the patent describes as an unsafe neighborhood. As we hear from NPR's Allison Keyes, critics consider the feature nothing short of racist, while others insist it's simply the next step in GPS technology.
ALLISON KEYES, BYLINE: Let's be clear: The word ghetto doesn't appear anywhere in the patent. It's called pedestrian route production. Microsoft declined any comment. The technology in the patent will take information from maps, weather information, crime statistics and demographics, then create directions, quote, "taking the user through neighborhoods with violent crime statistics below a certain threshold." But a slew of headlines included the incendiary avoid ghetto nickname and generated some outrage.
SARAH CHINN: I was pretty appalled.
KEYES: Sarah Chinn is author of "Technology and the Logic of American Racism" and an English professor at Hunter College. Chinn says she understands why people might want such a GPS feature so they'd feel safe, but she says it reinforces assumptions about violent crime that aren't true. Chinn says the nickname the patent has picked up and the news coverage of the technology illustrate the assumption that it will steer you away from neighborhoods where blacks and Latinos live because those are bad neighborhoods.
CHINN: Even that immediate association is itself a symptom of the problem.
KEYES: Chinn says that storyline is so embedded in American society that people make what she calls that jump without even having to explain it.
CHINN: Which is to say we as white middle-class readers will immediately understand, you know, what this is all about.
KEYES: Chinn says we need to be able to distinguish between our prejudices and our assumptions and what's actually true. Though FBI crime stats for 2010 show that whites were arrested more often for violent crimes than any other race, Chinn says...
CHINN: In much of dominant American culture, there's an assumption that criminality and being poor and not white go hand and hand.
KEYES: On the Internet, there have been bitter battles with written comments urging people to, quote, "just stay out of black and Hispanic neighborhoods." Or others describing as racist people who, quote, "naturally associate avoiding crime with avoiding blacks." Of course, some folk, including loop21.com editor Maurice Garland, poked a little fun at the controversy.
MAURICE GARLAND: I mentioned Flint, Michigan.
KEYES: Garland posted a piece on the African-American website listing places he felt would likely show up as unsafe on the software. Flint had the highest crime rate in current city crime rankings by the CQ Press.
GARLAND: I wouldn't be surprised if the entire city of Flint got a big red dot on the avoid ghetto application.
KEYES: Garland says many of those offended by his posting about the technology were people of color, but he personally thinks the feature is more classist than racist.
GARLAND: I don't think anybody from any particular race is being singled out, I mean, because they are using crime data to come up with these figures. So I mean, you know, if you don't want to end up in those places, I mean, I don't see anything wrong with somebody trying to help you out.
ROB ENDERLE: I think it's something that users of the technology have been asking for for some time.
KEYES: Industry analyst Rob Enderle says the GPS feature in the patent has nothing to do with race or income. He says it's about technology doing for us what it's supposed to be doing.
ENDERLE: It's part of an overall effort to make navigation systems more intelligent, so they keep you out of danger whether you're driving or you're on foot.
KEYES: In England two years ago, Jeff Gilfelt created a similar app that also uses government data. He says what's important is how software is developed and the quality of data it uses.
JEFF GILFELT: If it's taking data about, you know, incidents of crime that, you know, directly impact public safety, there should be no racial or economic or class bias there.
KEYES: Gilfelt says his app didn't generate the level of controversy the Microsoft patent has. But there is an app that was created as an answer to his. It's called the Awesome Meter, and its description says it gives hope and security rather than spreading fear and distrust.
Allison Keyes, NPR News, Washington.
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President Obama wants to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. Insourcing was a theme of his State of the Union message. And we're going to hear now from a CEO who opened a plant in this country recently.
James Curleigh runs Keen - K-E-E-N - the Portland, Oregon, company that makes footwear, bags and socks. Welcome to the program.
JAMES CURLEIGH: Hi, nice to talk to you.
SIEGEL: And in 2010, you opened a plant in Portland to make work boots. I read that it employs 30 people. I want you to run us through a bit of the calculus that made you decide to open domestically rather than, say, in China.
CURLEIGH: Sure. I mean, we're an 8-year-old company, born in this century. So we looked at all the technical dimensions that we deal with - and that can be areas like duty rates; it can be transportation costs; it can be intellectual property; it can be development costs. And when you put it all together, and you look at it in the context of what we need for our business and our brand and our products, from a costing perspective it starts to make sense.
But the broader picture is looking at the dynamics, what's happening over in Asia and other parts of the world, where we see labor rates increasing at a significant rate. We also see vertical integration of our factories being closer linked to commodities and materials that basically, tie us into some deals that might not be in the best interest of our product build, or our product business.
SIEGEL: But you still make most of your footwear in Asia. Does this logic change that? Or should we expect to see some of that production, and some of those jobs, coming back to the U.S.?
CURLEIGH: Yeah, I mean, we've already started it. And I think it's the classic, you know, one small step for insourcing and America, and one giant leap for Keen - where we decided to embark on a new category that we call Utility, which is our steel-toe shoe.
So when you think about a category of steel-toe, you think about built in America; you think about Americans building things. But also, what we recognize was when it comes to intellectual property and innovation, beyond the technical cost of the product, the cost of protecting your brand and some of your innovation is becoming increasingly more important. So...
SIEGEL: I'm surprised that you attach that much importance to intellectual property. I remember asking the manager of an American shoe plant about 25 years ago, how long does it take you from the time you steal the design in Paris, to the time that that ladies' shoe is in shoe stores? And the answer wasn't very huffy - it was a month to six weeks. I thought that shoe business is all about taking other people's designs.
CURLEIGH: Yeah. Well, I think when it comes to new categories and trying to, you know, say to our fans that we're going to bring you breakthrough innovation, we have to make sure we can control that innovation. And also, I think there's the balance point of innovation and quality control. So by building a factory here in Portland, Oregon, we were able to say we completely understand labor dynamics, overhead dynamics, the shift from manual to automation.
And as a result, not only for our own factory but when we speak with our other sourcing partners, we're much more educated to be able to make better decisions in the interest of, you know, cost reduction and quality improvement.
SIEGEL: Are we reaching a point where automation and computerization of production has reduced factory workforces by so much that wage differentials just don't matter that much anymore? If it's only 30 people, what's the big deal?
CURLEIGH: Yeah, I think we're getting there. And this always sounds a little controversial but one of the challenges that I think we see on a, you know, global economic level is that sometimes when labor is too cheap, there is no incentive to automate to improve productivity. So the kind of vision we had was, can we improve the quality of the job, the quality of the labor, and actually introduce some automation to improve productivity?
And what we're finding is that we're starting to see that balance point already at our factory in Portland.
SIEGEL: You speak of the fan base - I went to the Keen website, and there's an ethos to your company. You talk about hybrid lifestyle. And this has to do with work and recreation, and integrating our lives.
Do you think that that means that actually for people who buy Keen shoes or boots, the fact that it's made in America, you think, will actually be a plus; it's a marketing advantage to you?
CURLEIGH: I think to a certain fan, they actually do connect with the fact that we're a young company, and we're trying things. And just the fact that we have an effort and a very real business and brand effort that creates product in America, I think, is important.
SIEGEL: Well, Mr. Curleigh, thanks a lot for talking with us.
CURLEIGH: I appreciate it.
SIEGEL: That's James Curleigh, speaking to us from Portland, Oregon, where he is the CEO of Keen, which opened a factory in 2010 in Portland.
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The school taco is getting a makeover. Today, the USDA released new school lunch standards. They trimmed salt, sugar and portion sizes to make lunch healthier. First Lady Michelle Obama was on hand at an elementary school in Alexandria, Virginia for a taste test.
NPR's Allison Aubrey has the story.
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: As the first lady slid her tray down the lunch line with a bunch of students at Parklawn Elementary, she scooped up the brown rice turkey tacos served with fresh salsa on whole grain flatbread.
MICHELLE OBAMA: This is so nice. It's so well prepared. Oh, I love it.
AUBREY: And she says this is what a meal is supposed to look like. Lots of color, lots of taste, but lighter on fat, calories and salt. Talking to parents who'd gathered at the school, the first lady says these new standards, which also mandate two servings of veggies per meal, aren't only about combating obesity. They're also about helping kids stay sharp mentally in the classroom, avoiding those mid-afternoon sugar crashes. And, hopefully, she says, the standards will help reinforce the messages lots of moms and dads have been trying to drill into kids' heads about good nutrition.
OBAMA: When we send our kids to school, we have a right to expect that they won't be eating the kind of fatty, salty, sugary foods that we're trying to keep from them when they're at home.
AUBREY: More than 32 million kids participate in school meal programs every day and advocates who've been pushing for healthier meals say this is progress, though the rules are not as aggressive as the Obama administration had hoped for.
Margo Wootan directs nutrition efforts at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
MARGO WOOTAN: It's a huge step forward. These new school meal standards will mean much healthier foods on our kids' lunch trays.
AUBREY: Even though the trays will continue to carry servings of French fries and pizza, Wootan says the U.S. Department of Agriculture was not able to finalize a provision that would have restricted servings of French fries, nor were they able to cancel out a rule that allows schools to count pizza as a vegetable. On these issues, she says Congress and powerful food lobbyists prevailed.
WOOTAN: Under the new standards, even though USDA wasn't able to do what they wanted to do around limiting French fries and not counting pizza as a vegetable anymore, there still will be healthier pizza in the school lunch.
AUBREY: It'll have a whole grain, be lower in sodium and fat and it will need to be served with another vegetable. The USDA estimates that the price tag for new nutrition standards will total about $3.2 billion over the next five years, with many of the changes being phased in gradually. But Diane Pratt-Heavner of the School Nutrition Association says school food directors are already trying creative ways to win students over on healthier eating.
DIANE PRATT-HEAVNER: We're seeing more schools with salad bars and student taste tests and Harvest of the Month programs that they're really trying to encourage kids to expand their pallets and try fruits and vegetables that they might not have encountered at home.
AUBREY: As for mom, Ellisa Simmons, who attended the first lady's announcement today, she says these new lunches, especially the two servings of vegetables, will be better than what she usually manages to pack for her son.
ELLISA SIMMONS: We're always so pressed for time. You just throw here and there. You figure one is good enough.
AUBREY: So, Simmons says, from now on, her son will be eating the school lunch.
Allison Aubrey, NPR News.
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President Obama took his ideas from the State of the Union on the road today. With stops in Iowa and Arizona, he is underscoring his message that government should do more to encourage manufacturing jobs. The president's three-day trip also includes stops in Colorado, Nevada and Michigan. Those are all states likely to be important in the November election. NPR's Scott Horsley reports on the president's economic and political agenda.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Manufacturing is one of the central pillars in Mr. Obama's blueprint for a healthy U.S. economy. So he kicked off his road trip at a factory in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that's home to a company called Conveyor Engineering.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: They specialize in making augers, those giant screws, and they're used to mix and move everything from cement to chocolate. They don't use the same ones for...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: Just in case you were wondering.
HORSLEY: Conveyor's not a particularly big company - just 65 workers - but it's hoping to double in size over the next several years. Manufacturing in general has been a relative bright spot in the U.S. economy. The auto industry, in particular, has rebounded. With the help of the government's rescue of General Motors and Chrysler, American automakers and suppliers have added nearly 160,000 jobs over the last two years.
OBAMA: And I want what's happening in Detroit to happen in other industries. I want it to happen in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Raleigh, and I want it to happen right here in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
HORSLEY: Mr. Obama spoke fondly of the Iowa caucuses that launched his national political career four years ago. But it's not just nostalgia that brought him to Cedar Rapids. Iowa, like all the states he's visiting this week, are important to the president's re-election chances. And while perhaps better known for corn and soybeans, Iowa is also home to a significant number of factories, says Dave Swenson of Iowa State University.
DAVE SWENSON: The eastern part of the state along the Mississippi River is an area that is well-known historically for its farm machinery, construction machinery, and a broad array of durable goods manufacturing.
HORSLEY: Iowa's experience helps illustrate why the administration wants to promote manufacturing. Factory jobs tend to pay higher wages, and create bigger ripple effects in the surrounding economy. Factories account for just 11 percent of the jobs in Iowa but 17 percent of the state's payroll.
Swenson says in order to command those high wages, today's factory workers need specialized skills.
SWENSON: It may have been 25, 30 years ago that you didn't even need to go to high school to get a good manufacturing job, and to have a good life. Those days are rapidly going away. You need to be able to operate computer equipment. You need to be able to operate computer-driven machine tools. Then you're going to need to have quantitative problem-solving skills.
HORSLEY: Skilled workers and advanced equipment are helping to make U.S. factories more productive than ever, and more cost-competitive with rivals overseas. Mr. Obama wants the federal government to encourage that trend.
OBAMA: We got to help these companies succeed. And it starts with changing our tax code.
HORSLEY: The president's upcoming budget will propose a series of tax breaks to reward companies for locating factory jobs in the U.S. while eliminating tax breaks for companies that move jobs offshore. It's not at all clear Congress will go along with those changes. But by making the case, Mr. Obama is also trying to make a larger argument about the role of government: to show that his controversial rescue of the auto industry has paid off, and that prosperity is greatest when it's most widely shared.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
OBAMA: This country only exists because generations of Americans worked together and looked out for each other and believed that, you know, we're stronger when we rise together.
HORSLEY: That's a pillar not only of the president's economic blueprint, but also of his re-election campaign.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, traveling with the president.
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More than six years after Hurricane Katrina, thousands of blighted properties dot the landscape in New Orleans. A group of artists has taken one property and transformed it into something surprising, a structure that makes music. Kathleen Osborn paid a visit.
KATHLEEN OSBORN, BYLINE: It's called The Music Box. In fact, it's a small village of ramshackle sculptures huddled together on Piety Street in the Bywater section of the once flooded 9th Ward. They're outfitted as musical instruments and made almost entirely of the remains from the 18th century Creole cottage that used to sit on this lot.
Curator Delaney Martin points to a rotating organ speaker on top of half an A-frame shack called the Heartbeat House.
DELANEY MARTIN: A stethoscope plays your heartbeat through a spinning Leslie speaker and it spins round and round and, you know, unlike a church bell that calls people to congregation or an alarm, what we want to have is a heartbeat, this primal beat that calls to the people of New Orleans and says, come out and dance. Come out and sing. Come out and have fun.
(SOUNDBITE OF HEARTBEAT)
OSBORN: Local and national artists were invited to dream up the instruments and structures that inhabit the lot. Taylor Lee Shepherd is a mechanical sculptor who moved to the city after Hurricane Katrina. He's built a singing wall that samples and plays back the voices that fill the home.
TAYLOR LEE SHEPHERD: Just start recording people as they come through with little kids and anybody that seems interested or curious and it'll just change all throughout the day and I have all of these different textures and rhythms all mixed together. It sums up a moment in time.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
OSBORN: These structures are an experimental first step towards building a fully functional musical house that will be the headquarters and residency space for the New Orleans Airlift. The organization was created after Katrina to raise the profile of local artists, often through collaborations with more famous creators.
New York-based street artist, Callie Curry, known as Swoon, designed the house for Airlift.
CALLIE CURRY: I hope it represents this very basic need in people while rebuilding to rebuild joyfully and with imagination.
OSBORN: Transforming that hope into reality by bringing in outsiders is a touchy subject in the city, says Music Box associate curator, Theo Eliezer, who grew up in New Orleans.
THEO ELIEZER: There's a lot of resentment that existed over the past six years of people coming to New Orleans to contribute in a way that was about fixing New Orleans. And there were legitimate things that needed to be fixed, like houses that were flooded but, culturally, we didn't need to be fixed and our communities didn't need to be fixed.
OSBORN: Everyone involved in the project is keenly aware of striking the right balance in the city where Hurricane Katrina turned long term homeowners into renters.
Jay Pennington is Airlift's co-director.
JAY PENNINGTON: There is a natural antipathy in this neighborhood to seeing anyone do anything with a house that's not going to put somebody in it to live and it's something that people are really sensitive about here.
OSBORN: As the city continues the long process of rebuilding, Pennington and Delaney Martin hope the final house will be an example of the beauty that can emerge from all of that destruction.
MARTIN: I, amongst many of my other artist friends, can look at an old falling down house and see a great deal of beauty, see a great deal of salvageable materials and see a great deal of inspiration. What I don't want to see, as much I want blight to be resolved, I would hate to see all these beautiful old properties bulldozed and thrown away and new developments put in. That's not our neighborhood anymore if we do that.
So this was our answer to it and I think what is important to us to create out of this blight is a sense of wonder and possibility. We have 30 school children in the yard right now, so I'm going to go and tend to them. You're welcome to join.
OSBORN: Fifteen-year-old D'Angelo Faulk, who came with a group of students from the New Orleans Center for Creative Art, tried out the musical rocking chair.
MARTIN: What do you think?
D'ANGELO FAULK: It's so cool. I think this is the most - best music I ever heard made on my own.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FAULK: It's very artistic. I never seen something like this and I live in the neighborhood.
OSBORN: And that's the point, says Delaney Martin.
MARTIN: Right across the way there, across this big street on the other bad side of the tracks, there is this utter lack of wonder and possibility. There's a lot of closed doors. There's not many options and what I hope that, you know, can happen is that they can come here to the Music Box, which is really like a Peter Pan wonderland, and remember this blighted house and now see this sort of resurrected, amazing thing and that that does have value because when you don't have options and you see something that totally is from another world, that is about expanding your imagination and your options. And I think that there is true value in that.
OSBORN: As one neighbor put it, the Music Box also brings something else to their community: hope. For NPR News, I'm Kathleen Osborn.
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Dudley Butler is quitting his job tomorrow. Never heard of him? He was picked by President Obama to run a division of the USDA. Butler was part of a group charged with exposing and fighting agribusiness monopolies. But he's the last of the group.
Frank Morris of Harvest Public Media explains his mission and what happened to him.
FRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: Dudley Butler set out to change the cattle industry, a business cattleman Shawn Meyer will tell you gets harder all the time.
SHAWN MEYER: It seems like the smaller go away and the bigger just get a little bigger.
MORRIS: More than half a million families have stopped raising cattle in the last three decades. Some say efficiency and economies of scale fully account for the decline. Others blame a revolution in the way livestock is sold.
(SOUNDBITE OF AUCTION)
MORRIS: At sale barns like this one in Kingsville, Missouri, cattlemen still bid openly for breeding stock. Meatpackers once bought on the open market, too.
STEVE KAY: But, yeah, those days are over.
MORRIS: Steve Kay, the publisher of Cattle Buyers Weekly, says the four big packing companies now buy mostly on contract, a more sophisticated and efficient arrangement.
KAY: It rewards producers who produce the most consistent, highest quality cattle so that we can then produce more consistent high quality beef for consumers.
MORRIS: Packers get a guaranteed supply. Cattle producers get a guaranteed market. That's good for everybody, according to Mark Dopp with the American Meat Institute.
MARK DOPP: That working relationship gives everybody some certainty and removes risk.
MORRIS: But it also removes a measure of independence and that rankles some cattlemen. The system took hold in the poultry industry years ago. Now, fewer producers raise a whole lot more birds and they work almost exclusively under restrictive contracts for packers.
Fred Stokes, a Mississippi cattleman who runs the Organization for Competitive Markets, says beef is next.
FRED STOKES: We call chickenization. Go the way the poultry guy is, where the farmer owns the land, totes the mortgage, does the work, but is under contract to someone who determines how much he's going to get paid.
MORRIS: And if that pay seems unfairly low, well, Stokes says there's much a producer can do about it under the current interpretation of the Packers and Stockyards Act. This is where Dudley Butler comes in. A lawyer with experience suing poultry processors, Butler took over the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration determined to make litigation against packers easier. Stokes, a friend of Butler's, saw hope for the family farm.
STOKES: Oh, I thought, my God, finally. Finally. It was unprecedented.
MORRIS: The USDA linked up with the Justice Department to launch a massive study of antitrust issues in agriculture, five big public hearings. Christine Varney was leading a freshly invigorated antitrust division, launching investigations and working closely with Butler. Now, Varney says she's sad to see Butler step down.
CHRISTINE VARNEY: I think he's terrific. I think he's done a great job for farmers in America and I think it's a great loss to the Department of Agriculture, but these are tough jobs and everybody serves their time.
MORRIS: In fact, Varney resigned last summer.
BILL BULLARD: This was the reformist team that was supposed to restore competition to the markets.
MORRIS: Bill Bullard runs R-Calf USA, a cattleman's advocacy organization.
BULLARD: Now, they are all gone and we have seen no improvement whatsoever in the ongoing erosion of competition.
MORRIS: Now, that's not the way major meatpacking and livestock groups see it. They say what Bullard would call increased and transparent competition for cattle would have thrown a wrench into the beef industry big enough to cost thousands of jobs, millions of dollars and significantly raise the price of beef. In the end, the House refused to fund implementation of the proposed rule change. So, after a long fight, the big meatpacking companies will keep their efficient production system while smaller producers will continue to scramble for their place in the modern meat industry.
For NPR News, I'm Frank Morris in Kansas City.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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Last year, the Louvre Museum in Paris had a record nine million visitors. About 10 percent of them were American, yet the museum has only four American paintings in its collection. Well, now, curators at the Louvre are raising the profile of art from across the pond.
NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports from Paris about a new exhibition of American art.
GUILLAUME FAROULT: French, of course, and Italian, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, British, German...
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: That's curator Guillaume Faroult running down the list of nationalities that make up the Louvre's stunning 4,000 painting collection. To be fair, France actually owns some 2,000 American paintings, but those Whistlers, Homers and Cassatts are exhibited in more modern museums, such as the Musee d'Orsay. The Louvre's collections don't go beyond the year 1848, so the museum is trying to put the spotlight on early American art with an exhibit called "New Frontier: American Art Enters the Louvre."
The collection explores American landscape painting, which curator Faroult says all began with Thomas Cole in the early 19th century.
FAROULT: Thomas Cole was the first to say, well, we have the scenery, American scenery, which is completely different and we have to be proud of it, to be aware of it and proud of it. And we have to paint it, so that's what he did.
BEARDSLEY: Cole's paintings show Indians, the blood red leaves of North American autumns and dramatic scenery. Faroult says Europeans were stunned when his landscapes were first exhibited in London and Rome in the 19th century.
FAROULT: The colors were quite different. And also, the scale was gigantic. It was showing mountains, cliffs, lakes that were looking like seas. They looked gigantic and the European critics said, well, it's not real. It's unbelievable.
BEARDSLEY: This small, five-painting exhibit will travel to Atlanta and Arkansas later this year. It's sponsored by the Louvre and three U.S. art institutions. Three other American exhibits will follow in the next four years focusing on themes such as scenes from daily life and portraits at the time of the American Revolution. In addition, there will be talks and conferences to help boost the French public's appreciation for early American art.
Faroult says public support is important to the Louvre's efforts to acquire paintings in a highly competitive and expensive international art market. Visitors trickle in to the American landscape room from the Goyas and El Greccos next door in the Spanish hall.
Middle school teacher, Danielle Le Bourse, says she came to the Louvre especially to see the American paintings, although she says she's a little disappointed by the size of the exhibit.
DANIELLE LE BOURSE: (Through translator) I know American literature better. We really don't know American art, aside from Andy Warhol. But these paintings are nice and the colors are flamboyant.
BEARDSLEY: Curator Faroult says he has a surprise. He can't give any details yet because it's not a done deal, but he says the Louvre may be about to acquire another American painting, making it the fifth in its permanent collection.
Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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And I'm Melissa Block. With just under a week to go to the Florida primary, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich continue to duke it out over who will win that big and important state. An estimated 2 million voters are expected to turn out for this Republican-only contest.
SIEGEL: Texas congressman Ron Paul is polling in fourth place this week. He is not expecting a big win on Tuesday. In fact, he's not even competing there. He's back home in his home state today, and that's where I reached him earlier.
Representative Paul, welcome to the program once again.
RON PAUL: Thank you. Good to be with you.
SIEGEL: This week's release of Mitt Romney's taxes, and President Obama's advocacy of a millionaire's tax, raise questions about fairness in funding the government. The first question: Do you believe that income derived from dividends, interest or capital gains should be taxed at a lower rate than income earned from a salary or commissions?
PAUL: Well, I'd like to have everybody taxed at the same rate and, of course, my goal is to get as close to zero as possible because there was a time in our history when we didn't have income taxes. But when government takes it upon themselves to do so much, you have to have a tax code. But if you're going to be the policemen of the world and run all these wars, you have to have a tax code.
But as far as what the rate should be, I think it should be as low as possible for everybody.
SIEGEL: But since we do have a tax system, you would say do away with the preferential rate for investment income?
PAUL: No, I wouldn't do away with it. I would just realize that there are some problems with it. If you want it equitable, we should lower everybody's rate down to the investment rate...
SIEGEL: So, 15 percent or so?
PAUL: Yeah. I mean, if the investment rate, or the capital gains rate, is 15 and somebody else is paying 30, I wouldn't go for equity by raising everybody to 30. I'd want to lower everybody to 15.
SIEGEL: If - you've - you advocate auditing the Federal Reserve. If the Fed were closely audited and overseen by the Congress, why wouldn't it be reasonable for us to expect that more direct political pressure on monetary policy to always produce lower interest rates? Can you imagine the Congress that would say, why don't you raise interest rates already? Why don't you make money tougher on people?
PAUL: No. I think you're absolutely right. That's why I don't want that to happen because indirectly, that is the case. Presidents have put pressure on the Fed, and there's been statistics to show in election years, if you have a friendly Fed, they keep interest rates low. So you're right. I don't want the Congress dictating interest rates. I want the market to dictate interest rates by savings.
SIEGEL: But doesn't the proposal to audit the Fed, and to be able to get inside the workings of the Fed - doesn't that, in fact, increase congressional pressure on monetary policy?
PAUL: Oh, it can't be any worse than it is right now. But what it would put pressure on is, find out how they spend $16 trillion - which they used during the crisis - which banks got benefited, which European banks got benefited, and which ones will in the future? Why should their budget be two or three times bigger than the congressional budget, and nobody knows what they're doing?
SIEGEL: Newt Gingrich has proposed a commission to consider a return to the gold standard. Do you think he's sincere about the gold standard, or is he just trying to win over some Florida libertarians who might otherwise vote for you?
PAUL: I think the latter is the case.
SIEGEL: You think it's more of an electioneering ploy?
PAUL: Oh, yeah. I mean, he would've had the chance over all those years to help me out.
SIEGEL: Everyone else who's still in the Republican race can claim to have won a caucus or a primary - but you. What state can you point to down the road which you think is a sign of the viability of your candidacy - you can win, and should win?
PAUL: I'm not going to do that because I haven't calculated, so we have to wait and see. That Iowa vote was a straw vote, and the delegate allocation hasn't yet been done. And I've a very good chance to do quite well out there. So we've only had two, and I will be working in the caucus states. So to say that this means that I have no chance on - gathering up adequate number of delegates is sort of jumping the gun.
SIEGEL: No, but what's an adequate number of delegates?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
PAUL: As many as I can get. More than 10.
SIEGEL: But if you're in it to win.
PAUL: I haven't even looked at them carefully enough. Somebody else worries about those kind of things. I just think that this thing is so up and down. Romney was up for a long time. Now, he's down. Gingrich was down at the bottom and now, he's up. How many have come and gone? One thing you can't say about my campaign - I don't come and go. All I do is add.
SIEGEL: Last subject. When you've been asked about a third-party run, you always say you don't plan, intend or want to do that. Let me put the question this way: After contesting the Republican primaries and caucuses, would it be honorable to say, I didn't win; I'm going to take my marbles, go home, and run against the Republican candidate?
PAUL: Would it be honorable to do that?
SIEGEL: Yeah.
PAUL: I think it's total neutral. I don't think it's honor one way or the other.
SIEGEL: But doesn't taking part in the Republican process imply some loyalty to the Republican Party so that your rivals whom you're debating with all this time and running against, if one of them bests you and gets a lot more delegates...
PAUL: Well, what if, what if young people now decide that the Republican Party wants sound money and no wars? Would it be honorable for them to come and join us?
SIEGEL: Well, that would be their decision. My question is about you as a candidate. Would you go with them? It sounds to me - you're not taking it off the table, is what it sounds like to me.
PAUL: Well, it's awfully premature because as you said, you're waiting to find out what state I'm going to win, and how many. So we have a few months to go before I will need to answer a question like that.
SIEGEL: Fair enough. One thing that Republican - or conservative pundits always remark on is, they say that what's different now from past cycles when you ran is that your son, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, his future in the Republican Party might be jeopardized if you were seen as disloyal to it. Is that a factor at all in your...
PAUL: Well, I don't think that's true. I don't think they'd punish the next generation for something they think that I might've contributed to.
SIEGEL: Well, Representative Ron Paul, thank you very much for talking with us today.
PAUL: All right. Thank you.
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Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S. And now, a new study offers a simple method for predicting the risk of having a heart attack or stroke. It comes from the New England Journal of Medicine, and NPR's Patti Neighmond tells us more.
PATTI NEIGHMOND, BYLINE: As it is now, doctors talk to middle aged patients about the risk of having a heart attack or stroke over the next five to 10 years. That typically means a four percent chance of having a cardiovascular event even if patients have high blood pressure or cholesterol.
When you look at the rest of someone's life, say, the next 20 or 30 years, the risk changes dramatically. Cardiologist Donald Lloyd-Jones headed the study at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
DONALD LLOYD-JONES: If at age 45, you have two or more of either elevated blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, diabetes or smoking, and you're a man, then there's basically a 50-50 proposition that you will have a heart attack or a stroke during your remaining lifespan.
NEIGHMOND: To figure that out, Lloyd-Jones tallied the results of 18 different long-term studies over the past 50 years involving men, women, African-Americans and whites, more than 250,000 adults. He looked at risk factors for heart disease, like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes or smoking, then he compared that to who died or suffered disability from a heart attack or stroke. Lloyd-Jones found both African-American and white men who had at least two risk factors had a 50 percent chance of suffering a major cardiovascular event, while women had a 30 percent chance. Having even one risk factor dramatically increased the risk of heart disease.
LLOYD-JONES: Currently, only 5 percent of Americans make it into middle age - by which I mean ages of 45 to 55 years - without already having elevated blood pressure or elevated cholesterol or diabetes or being a smoker.
NEIGHMOND: That means 95 percent of middle-aged Americans have at least one risk factor for heart disease. Nonetheless, there is some good news here. Actually, great news, says Lloyd-Jones, nonsmokers who can make it to middle age with normal levels of blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugars bring their risk of heart disease down to nearly zero.
LLOYD-JONES: Our data suggested that for a 45-year-old man, the likelihood he would have a heart attack or stroke by age 80 was only 1.4 percent.
NEIGHMOND: The goal, says Lloyd-Jones, help more Americans make it to middle age without any risk factors for heart disease. That means tracking their blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar early in adulthood. Cardiologist Gordon Tomaselli is president of the American Heart Association. He says young adults should measure their blood pressure even if they don't have a doctor.
DR. GORDON TOMASELLI: There are automated blood pressure cuffs publicly available in many venues, like in grocery stores and in pharmacies, where you can actually go to get your blood pressure measured.
NEIGHMOND: If it's high, says Tomaselli, see a health care provider. As for cholesterol...
TOMASELLI: If you have a family history of high cholesterol, that really should prompt you to get checked earlier on in life.
NEIGHMOND: In your 30s or even 20s, he says. That also goes for diabetes. If there's a family history, blood sugars should be checked early on. Diet, exercise and medications can be highly effective when people have these health problems. And while they can't wipe out heart disease risk entirely, they can control and manage symptoms pretty well. Patti Neighmond, NPR News.
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Now, to a former Republican presidential candidate. Governor Rick Perry didn't generate enough support to stay in the race, and he's returned to Texas somewhat tarnished. But as NPR's Wade Goodwyn reports, his political opponents would be fools to underestimate Perry's power in Texas.
WADE GOODWYN, BYLINE: This was not exactly the way 61-year-old Rick Perry imagined it when he decided to throw his hat into the presidential ring last year - at least $15 million down the tubes, and an electoral exhibition that was such a disaster that were he playing quarterback at his alma mater, Texas A&M would've lost 63 to nothing. Perry's debate performance was so mortifying that after his dismal showing in the Iowa caucus, the editorial board of the conservative Dallas Morning News called on the governor to quit the race, come home, and use his remaining campaign contributions to repay strapped Texas taxpayers for his security detail.
TOM JENSEN: Rick Perry's going back to Texas extremely unpopular.
GOODWYN: Tom Jensen is the director of Public Policy Polling, which conducted a statewide poll last week.
JENSEN: Only 42 percent of voters in the state approve of him now; 51 percent disapprove. Beyond that, there's a pretty strong sense that Perry's candidacy was a bit of an embarrassment to the state.
GOODWYN: Jensen says that Perry is so diminished that in a hypothetical match-up with President Obama, Perry only beats Obama 49 to 48 percent in Texas, one of the most Republican states in the country.
JENSEN: The crux of Perry's problem is that he came across as not being very smart. And it certainly doesn't help Texas's image and obviously, this made a pretty negative impact on the folks back home.
BILL MILLER: My prediction is if you saw him on the street today, it'd be like nothing happened.
GOODWYN: Bill Miller is a Republican political consultant in Texas. Miller agrees that Perry is coming home wounded. But he says the rich Republican soil that is the current Lone Star State electorate will help heal the governor's wounded pride.
MILLER: We're going to remember the mistakes, there's no question about that. But this kind of intense misery associated with it will pass. And if he can laugh about it, he'll get well fast.
GOODWYN: The governor still has nearly three years left on his term, and he could run again if he wishes. Unlike his predecessor, George W. Bush, Rick Perry has never been popular with Texas independents. The source of Perry's political strength is his ability to raise money.
Craig McDonald is the director of Texans for Public Justice, which tracks campaign contributions in Texas.
CRAIG MCDONALD: Rick Perry is going to be governor for three more years. I suspect his big-money supporters will line up behind him, just as they have for the previous decade.
GOODWYN: It is Perry's long tenure through which he derives much of his political power. The leaders of the state's regulatory and political infrastructure have all been chosen by him.
MCDONALD: Rick Perry still has a bureaucracy behind him. Perry has appointed all of the Texas appointees in the regulatory branches. Over 4,000 appointees still have their loyalty to Rick Perry.
GOODWYN: When Perry announced his bid for president, he raised $17 million in a matter of days - a feat which left his poorer competitors, like Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum, goggled-eyed. Those donors are unlikely to turn their backs on the incumbent governor of Texas, if he doesn't turn his back on them. And making sure big campaign contributors feel appreciated has long been a Rick Perry specialty.
Wade Goodwyn, NPR News, Dallas.
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These days, each time the Federal Reserve meets, an announcement soon follows that interest rates will stay low - very low. Well, today it happened again. The Fed predicted that rates will remain low through late 2014.
That's a longer time period than in past statements. It was an attempt to reassure financial markets, as NPR's Jim Zarroli reports.
JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: At a press conference after the end of the Fed's two-day meeting, Chairman Ben Bernanke said the U.S. economy is expanding moderately, and labor market conditions are improving. But he said the data in areas like retail sales and business investment is still mixed.
DR. BEN BERNANKE: We are, obviously, hoping that the strength we saw in the fourth quarter, and in recent data, will continue into 2012. But we're going to continue to monitor that situation. I don't think we're ready to declare that we've entered a new, stronger phase at this point.
ZARROLI: For that reason, he said, the Fed is unlikely to raise rates for at least two years - and possibly longer. Fed officials have never made such a long-range projection about rates. But Bernanke wants to send a message to businesses and consumers that they can expect cheap credit for an extended period, as a kind of confidence-building gesture. Bernanke also noted that the Fed is ready to step up its efforts to pump money into the economy by buying long-term securities, if it thinks it's appropriate.
In saying that, Bernanke was essentially shrugging off complaints from inflation hawks, who warned that the Fed is sowing the seeds of higher prices down the road.
Today's meeting was the first time the Fed released projections from individual members about where they expect interest rates to be in the years to come. It's part of an ongoing effort by the Fed to be more transparent about how it operates. Six of the 17 policymakers think rates could go up this year or next, but five think they won't go up until 2014. And another six think it won't happen until 2015 or '16.
Bernanke made clear that these are projections only, and that predicting the future path of the economy is a difficult thing to do.
BERNANKE: I think it's important to emphasize that we're not going to mechanically take the interest rate projections that participants provide, and just build policy off of that.
ZARROLI: But Bernanke said, like a business, the Fed has no choice but to try to make projections as best it can.
Bernanke and the Fed increasingly have become targets of criticism in recent years. And the attacks have increased during the Republican primary campaign. The Fed chairman was asked what he thought about the attacks. He smiled ever so slightly, and said he wouldn't get involved in political rhetoric.
Jim Zarroli, NPR News.
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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
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For years, Latinos in East Haven, Connecticut, have complained of systematic abuse and harassment by police. Well, yesterday, four East Haven cops were arrested and charged with multiple civil rights violations. We have the story from Diane Orson, of member station WNPR.
DIANE ORSON, BYLINE: East Haven is a blue-collar, working-class town of 28,000, just next door to New Haven, home of Yale University. New Haven's gone out of its way to welcome Latinos. Not so in neighboring East Haven, which has seen its Hispanic population double in the past decade.
The federal indictment announced Tuesday alleges that four East Haven police officers routinely conspired to violate, and violated, the civil rights of members of the local community - particularly, Latinos.
Janice Fedarcyk is assistant director in charge of the New York City office of the FBI, which worked on the case.
JANICE FEDARCYK: In simple terms, they behaved like bullies with badges.
ORSON: David Fine, U.S. district attorney in Connecticut, says the indictment describes more than 30 instances of abuse.
DAVID FINE: The four defendants have been charged with using excessive force in the arrest of five individuals, conducting unreasonable searches and seizures...
ORSON: The arrests follow a federal report that details a deeply rooted pattern of discriminatory policing - frequent race-based traffic stops, where officers allegedly used ethnic insults; raids on Latino businesses; and beatings of Latinos taken into custody. The officers have pleaded not guilty.
HUGH KEITH: Charges like these are easily made; they're not so easily proven.
ORSON: Lawyer Hugh Keith represents the town of East Haven. He says Connecticut police officers are often sued for false arrest and excessive force.
KEITH: In all the years that I've done the work for East Haven on these lawsuits, they have had a success rate in court, in front of juries, of well over 90 percent.
ORSON: What's riled up East Haven residents today is a comment made by East Haven Mayor Joseph Maturo, just hours after the officers' arrests. A local TV reporter asked the mayor what he was doing to support Latinos in the town, and he responded by describing what he planned for dinner.
MAYOR JOSEPH MATURO: I might have tacos when I go home; I'm not quite sure yet.
ORSON: The taco remark, by Mayor Maturo, prompted a scathing response by Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy, who issued a statement calling it repugnant and unacceptable.
At a restaurant on Main Street in East Haven, just blocks from where much of the alleged abuse took place, Elio Cruz says he's bothered by the mayor's comment, but not surprised.
ELIO CRUZ: He doesn't have - no clue of our community. He doesn't have - no clue of other communities growing up in his town. This guy runs the town, and he's not really paying attention to our community. It's not like everybody looks Spanish, everybody eats tacos.
ORSON: Maturo has apologized, and called the remark stupid. Meanwhile, the federal criminal investigation is ongoing, and authorities have not ruled out the possibility of future arrests.
For NPR News, I'm Diane Orson in New Haven.
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The acclaimed filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos has died. He was struck by a motorcycle yesterday in Greece while crossing a road. Angelopoulos was not well-known in the U.S. but he was one of Greece's most famous directors. And he took home multiple awards from the Cannes Film Festival. He blended myth, history, and politics in films that included "Ulysses' Gaze" and "Eternity and a Day."
Pat Dowell has this appreciation.
PAT DOWELL, BYLINE: Theo Angelopoulos called himself a war child. He was born in Athens in 1935, saw the Nazis invade, lived through the Greek civil war, and saw his father arrested and disappeared for months. All of that figured into his movies.
Angelopoulos told NPR he was inspired to make his 1995 story of a filmmaker in the Balkan conflict, "Ulysses' Gaze," by a report of an individual's resilience.
THEO ANGELOPOULOS: (Through Translator) I had heard and I had read that whenever the shooting would stop in Sarajevo, in the snow, in the middle of winter, there would be a lone cellist who would come out in a central square and play his music. And that's where I got the idea for the orchestra.
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DOWELL: In "Ulysses' Gaze," as in all the filmmaker's work, characters cross dangerous and arbitrary borders, followed by a camera that tracks them in famously long takes, through landscapes made mysterious.
And the films have a poetic, travelling rhythm, too, says David Thomson. The author of "The Biographical Dictionary of Film," says Angelopoulos went against the grain of fast cutting that dominated filmmaking by the end of the 20th century. Thomson says there was a reason some Angelopoulos films needed four hours.
DAVID THOMSON: They were films about time. Almost always it was what had happened to a place and to people over the course of their lifetime, and usually the dramatic form was a search or a journey.
DOWELL: Thomson counted Theo Angelopoulos among a handful of the great masters of filmmaking, and not just because of his stunning visual imagination.
THOMSON: The ultimate reason for valuing him so highly is the humanity in his work, and the sense of the terrible damage that has been done to people in a world of so many refugees and displaced persons; people who have lost their roots, lost their family contacts, don't really quite understand what happened to them in life.
DOWELL: Angelopoulos once said that the question that haunted his films is whether we've learned anything from history. That's why so often, past and present, myth and political reality co-exist and struggle in his films. When he was young, he said in 1996, he hoped that films could change the world.
ANGELOPOULOS: (Through Translator) But it didn't happen that way. And now that we know that we can't change the world, but we can do something - for our films to function as witnesses, as testimonies on the fate of men and women.
DOWELL: And he was still providing witness when he died. Theo Angelopoulos was shooting a film about the men and women ground up in the current financial crisis in Greece.
For NPR News, this is Pat Dowell.
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This month, we've been examining state budgets. And when it comes to balancing the budget, few states are struggling more than Illinois.
NPR's David Schaper reports on the impact of that's having.
JONAS GINSBERG: Good morning.
(SOUNDBITE OF A CHICKEN)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Foreign language spoken)
DAVID SCHAPER, BYLINE: Counselor and team leader Jonas Ginsberg is leading a session of about a dozen Asian immigrants suffering from mental illness. They're working on education and social skills in a program run by Asian Human Services in Chicago.
GINSBERG: So today is the - today's a special day, actually.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Foreign language spoken)
SCHAPER: With the help of a translator, the group is discussing the Chinese New Year.
GINSBERG: So today is the Chinese...
GROUP: New Year.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Today is the lunar New Year.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: (Foreign language spoken)
SCHAPER: In addition to mental health counseling, Asian Human Services provide health care at a clinic, educational programs, and job skills training - all in 25 different languages.
Abha Pandya is the social service organization's CEO. And she says most of these programs are funded by the state of Illinois, or at least they're supposed to be funded by the state. But Illinois is a little bit behind in paying its bills.
DR. ABHA PANDYA: And actually, the state, we are owed 1.2 million.
SCHAPER: And that's an improvement. Pandya says just last month, the state finally caught up on all its bills from last fiscal year, which ended June 30th.
PANDYA: We've been bankrolling the state. The providers are bankrolling the state when we have no money. And I think it's completely, it's the most ridiculous situation that one should be in.
SCHAPER: And her organization is not alone, the state is up to four to six months behind in paying its bills to scores of service providers, including doctors, hospitals and nursing homes, as well as vendors providing everything from office furniture to vehicles.
The Illinois Comptroller's Office estimates the backlog of unpaid bills is near $8 billion right now, and that is after majority Democrats in the legislature and Democratic Governor Pat Quinn, last year, significantly raised Illinois' personal and corporate income tax rates to reduce a $15 billion deficit and to catch up on bills.
LAURENCE MSALL: We are in a horrible situation.
SCHAPER: Laurence Msall is president of the Chicago-based Civic Federation, a non-partisan government budget watchdog group.
MSALL: The current budget is not balanced. The current budget for fiscal year 2012 has an operating built-in deficit of about $500 million.
SCHAPER: And Msall says that doesn't even include the billions in unpaid bills. Illinois did make its scheduled payments into its employee and teacher pension funds this year. But Msall says Illinois' future pension costs are skyrocketing.
MSALL: There needs to be a very significant effort to reduce the pension liability. Right now, the state of Illinois owes over $80 billion in unfunded promises to its retirees and to its employees.
SCHAPER: The constant fiscal uncertainty and the higher tax rates have led some companies to threaten to leave Illinois and take thousands of jobs with them. That hasn't really happened though, in part, because the state has given away some tax breaks and incentives to corporate giants such as Sears, the CME Group and others.
But Republicans in the Illinois legislature say the mere threats and the continued financial mess show that last year's tax increase was a failure and should be repealed.
Kelly Kraft, assistant budget director for Governor Quinn, disagrees.
KELLY KRAFT: So that tax increase did bring in an extra $7 billion to our state and that's helping to stabilize our budget. Really, the tax increase helped us from falling off of a cliff. That cliff, that was there because of the decades of fiscal mismanagement that had existed in the past.
SCHAPER: Kraft says the budget that the governor will present to Illinois lawmakers next month projects a small surplus for the first time in years. And she says the governor is looking for ways to reduce pension costs. But the big pile of unpaid bills remains. And Abha Pandya, of Asian Human Services, wonders how long social service providers and their clients can hold on.
PANDYA: We are just totally frustrated and upset and angry and disheartened, actually. Really disheartened, because on a daily basis we see people with enormous needs coming here. And oftentimes, lately, we've had to turn them away.
SCHAPER: Pandya says she tries to keep hope. But after years of broken promises from Illinois politicians, she doesn't have too much hope left.
David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.
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The economic downturn is providing lots of fodder for filmmakers. That's become abundantly clear at this year's Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
Steven Zeitchik covers entertainment for the Los Angeles Times and he joins me from Park City.
And, Stephen, you're seeing this theme both in feature films and documentaries. Why don't we start with the documentaries. What have you seen?
STEVEN ZEITCHIK: Well, there are a number of films, Melissa, that really is to sort of get at the kind of economic malaise - and sort of general cultural malaise - that I think a lot of people would say we've been in for a little while now as a country. And one film that I think has been getting a lot of attention, and I think will get a lot of attention upon release, is called "Queen of Versailles."
It's a documentary about a couple that tries to build the biggest house in America and kind of all the things that sort of go wrong when the bust hits. And it's an interesting film because you're kind of sympathizing with them and then you're laughing at them at the same time. And you sort of - there's a little bit of schadenfreude that comes with watching something like that.
Other films that are a little bit maybe more intense, a little more policy-oriented, I guess you could say, is a film about the war on drugs and how it's disproportionately affected the black community from a well-known documentarian named Eugene Jarecki and that film is called "The House I Live In."
The third film here that's playing, also a documentary, kind of gets at a very particular place and that's Detroit. The movie is called "Detropia" and it basically looks at kind of the city that's been down on its heels for quite some time now. You know, everything from the unraveling of the auto industry to kind of other urban issues they've had. Not exactly a feel good film, but I think people are taking notice of it here just because it does sort of, in some ways, distill a lot of the issues this country has been facing.
BLOCK: So those are some of the documentaries there at Sundance with this hard times theme. You're also seeing it, though, in feature films there.
ZEITCHIK: You know, it's a really interesting point. You wouldn't think that feature films, even those at Sundance, would necessarily be that topical. It takes a long time for films to get made, but there have been a number of very kind of light, entertaining films that still manage to slip the theme in.
I saw a film the other day called "For a Good Time, Call" and it's a sort of a kind of a raunchy phone sex comedy about these two women who lose their jobs in New York and they can't really piece together a living and so they do what, you know, we would all do, which is start a phone sex line. And probably not the best remedy for kind of any economic downturn, but - hey, it worked for them and it's kind of a light comedy, but it does get at that same issue.
Another movie, which is a little bit more serious and certainly deals with kind of economic and class disparities is Spike Lee's new film, "Red Hook Summer," kind of a throwback film for him, going back to his "Do the Right Thing" days. It even picks up on some of the same characters. Kind of a book end, if you will, but very much about, you know, life in this Brooklyn project and kind of the haves and the have-nots.
I mean, it's amazing when you're sitting in some of these features to kind of realize that there's sort of - the one percent, 99 percent question is actually being played out, you know, on the screen almost, it seems, in real time.
BLOCK: One percent, 99 percent, but the atmosphere at Sundance is just full of high living and parties galore, the contrast between the themes on the screen and the hoopla around the screenings must be incredible.
ZEITCHIK: It really is and it's a good point. There's a certain inconsistency, to say the least, about, you know, sort of - you're sitting in a theatre watching kind of people who, you know, can't make a living and are struggling to keep their home and then you walk out and go to a party for that same film, in some cases, and, you know, people are just kind of sipping on champagne and eating these rich desserts and entrees. And so it can sometimes feel a little bit jarring. There's sort of the argument, I guess, that to reach the people who can make changes, you need to reach the one percent.
I think, if you walked out from some of these screenings and into the events that kind of populate this festival, you'd be surprised that they're actually taking place in the same place at the same time.
BLOCK: Reporter Steven Zeitchik with the Los Angeles Times, talking with us from the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Steven, thanks so much.
ZEITCHIK: Thanks, Melissa.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel. There was a tearful scene of rare solidarity today in the House of Representatives. Arizona Democrat Gabrielle Giffords handed in her resignation one year after being shot in the head by a would-be assassin.
NPR's David Welna has the story.
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: Last night in the House Chamber, the battle lines were clear as President Obama delivered his State of the Union Address. Democrats leaped to their feet and applauded. Republicans sat on their hands.
Today, it was a different story.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
WELNA: Republicans and Democrats alike rose and applauded as Gabrielle Giffords slowly walked down the center aisle. She was welcomed by Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
REPRESENTATIVE NANCY PELOSI: All of us come to the floor today, colleagues of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, to salute her as the brightest star among us, the brightest star Congress has ever seen.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
WELNA: To which the Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor added...
REPRESENTATIVE ERIC CANTOR: I know I speak for all of my colleagues when I say we are inspired, hopeful and blessed for the incredible progress that Gabby has made in her recovery.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
WELNA: It was Florida Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz, though, who hit the emotional hot button in the chamber as she stood with her arm around Giffords.
REPRESENTATIVE DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: I couldn't prepare anything this morning because I knew that I would not be able to hold it together very long.
WELNA: Wasserman Schultz had agreed to be the voice of her close friend from Arizona, but she first had something to say herself.
SCHULTZ: No matter what we argue about here on this floor or in this country, there is nothing more important than family and friendship and that should be held on high above all else. And I will always carry that in my heart and, even though I know we won't see each other every day, Gabby, we will be friends for life.
REPRESENTATIVE GABRIELLE GIFFORDS: Yes.
SCHULTZ: For life.
GIFFORDS: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
WELNA: With Giffords' mother and husband Mark Kelly looking on from the visitors' gallery, Wasserman Schultz read aloud Giffords' resignation letter.
SCHULTZ: From my first steps and first words after being shot to my current physical and speech therapy, I have given all of myself to being able to walk back onto the House floor this year to represent Arizona's Eighth Congressional District. However, today, I know that now is not the time. I have more work to do on my recovery before I can again serve in elected office.
WELNA: But the letter ended with a firm vow.
SCHULTZ: I will recover and will return and we will work together again for Arizona and for all Americans. Sincerely, Gabrielle Giffords, member of Congress.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
WELNA: And, with that, Giffords handed her resignation letter to the openly weeping Speaker of the House, John Boehner. Whether it's a Democrat or a Republican who replaces her seemed, today, at least, to matter little.
David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block.
Cairo's Tahrir Square overflowed with Egyptians today. Traffic was snarled for miles as people jammed bridges and streets. The crowd marked the first anniversary of the popular uprising that drove Hosni Mubarak from power.
And as NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reports from Cairo, many people did not come to celebrate.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: Protestors who marched to Tahrir Square from across Cairo shouted slogans against the ruling generals overseeing Egypt's transition to democracy. The protestors say they see no difference between the generals and Mubarak, whose government included many of the officers still in charge. The generals have repeatedly said they will hand over power after a president is elected this summer.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
NELSON: But as protestor and artist Lara Baladi explains, Egyptian who turned out to mark today's anniversary don't trust the junta to follow through.
LARA BALADI: For a lot of people, this the second revolution or it's the continuation of the revolution.
NELSON: Many young protestors echoed her message.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHANTING)
NELSON: This isn't a party. It's a revolution, they chanted, as they dance in Tahrir Square. Forty-year-old protestor Sahar Hamed was one of many who planned to spend the night there.
SAHAR HAMED: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: The first time we came here was to bring down the regime, not for Mubarak to be put in a hospital and his ministers in a five-star prison from which they still rule our country. The system has not fallen.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHANTING)
NELSON: Protestor Hany Rashed says adding insult to injury is that the generals have failed to bring the people responsible for killing thousands of protestors over the past year to justice.
HANY RASHED: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: The 36-year-old has a picture of his slain friend, Ahmed Bassiouny, pinned to his shirt. Rashed says a fitting tribute to his friend will be to force the ruling military council from power. For their part, the generals appeared to get the message that they would not be welcome at today's commemoration. Planned flyovers by military jets and a government-sponsored rally to mark the anniversary didn't take place.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHANTING)
NELSON: Nor were Egyptian security forces or soldiers sent to deal with the crowds. Instead, volunteers from the Muslim Brotherhood checked IDs of people entering the square and detained anyone who tried to cause trouble among protestors. Still, the protestor unity that was so striking last January was lacking on this first anniversary of the revolution. Liberals and Islamists congregated on different sides of Tahrir, signaling the deepening political divide between the groups.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: On the Islamist side, speakers hailed the new parliament dominated by the Brotherhood, an ultra-conservative Salafists. They also denounced the former regime and its dealings with Israel. Unlike their secular counterparts, they did not call for a revolution to oust the generals.
MOHAMED FAWZY: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: Brotherhood supporter and protestor Mohamed Fawzy says that's because continuous protests won't help Egypt get back on its feet. The 34-year-old teacher says political and economic reforms Egyptians are seeking will only happen if people go back to work and give the new parliament a chance to bring about change. A recent Gallup poll found that 93 percent of Egyptians share Fawzy's view that new protests will harm their country.
That's no surprise to Khaled Fahmy, who heads the history department at the American University in Cairo. He says the generals and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces or SCAF are stirring up anti-protest sentiment.
KHALED FAHMY: People are tired. Economically, the country is in tatters, and the economy has all but collapsed. There's no tourism. There's no new investments. The rate of unemployment is soaring. At the same time, SCAF has conducted a very successful PR campaign to blame all of this on the demonstrators.
NELSON: But Fahmy, who later went to the square, says today's large turnout proves that as tired as Egyptians may be, they will not relinquish their hard-fought right to freely express themselves.
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News. Cairo.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Last night, just moments before President Obama gave his State of the Union address, he stopped to greet his defense secretary. The microphones captured the president saying this to Leon Panetta.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Leon, good job tonight. Good job tonight.
SIEGEL: Good job tonight. Well, now we know what the president was talking about. Earlier in the day, U.S. commandos had rescued two hostage aid workers in Somalia. One of the hostages is an American.
NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman has been looking into this story and joins us with more details. Hi, Tom.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Hello, Robert.
SIEGEL: The commandos, I gather, came from SEAL Team 6, the same unit that killed Osama bin Laden. How did it carry out this operation?
BOWMAN: Well, it's the same unit that killed Osama bin Laden, but not the same individuals. This time, more than a couple of dozen SEAL Team 6 members came in by C-130 aircraft. They parachuted in, and they assaulted an encampment in northern Somalia. We're told that shots were fired, and they killed nine Somali men. And then, they saved the two hostages. The American is Jessica Buchanan. She's 32 and from Virginia. And her colleague, a 60-year-old man from Denmark. Then the whole group loaded onto helicopters, and they went back to Djibouti, where the U.S. took off from initially.
SIEGEL: Now, I gather the hostages - Ms. Buchanan and the Danish man - worked for an aid group. What were they actually doing in Somalia?
BOWMAN: Right. They're working for this Danish organization that disables landmines. Somalia, of course, is covered with landmines. After all, there's been fighting there now for decades. So they would help remove the landmines. And also, Jessica Buchanan and her colleague also helped with refugees along the border with Kenya. They were abducted last October. And we're told that President Obama and other senior officials were kept abreast of their situation, getting updates over the months.
SIEGEL: Tom, what do you know and what can you tell us about the timing of this operation? Why now?
BOWMAN: Well, we're told within the last week this whole thing really ramped up, Robert. And there are two reasons for that. First of all, the U.S. had intercepts of communications, maybe a cell phone, maybe a radio that indicated Jessica Buchanan's health was deteriorating rapidly. She apparently was on medications. We don't know if she was running out of her medicines or not, but they knew they had to move quickly. Second thing was what they call actionable intelligence, which pinpointed exactly where she was being held, this encampment in northern Somalia.
SIEGEL: And what do we know about the people who were actually holding them hostage?
BOWMAN: Well, we don't know too much. The Pentagon is calling them common criminals. At first, they were calling them pirates, but now they're just calling them criminals. We, of course, have seen a lot of piracy in Somalia lately from everything, from attacks on cruise ships to attacks on Iranian fishermen. But in this case, they're just saying common criminals. There's no indication whether they were requesting ransom or not. We have no indication of that. But there's also no sense from Pentagon officials that they had any connection to al-Shabab, the terrorist group with, of course, ties to al-Qaida.
SIEGEL: Did Pentagon officials explained the definition of pirate that these people they say fell outside of?
BOWMAN: Well, I'm not sure. Just because they were land-based they were not considered pirates or not. But, again, they're using term common criminals to describe them.
SIEGEL: OK. Thanks, Tom.
BOWMAN: You're welcome, Robert.
SIEGEL: That's NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman speaking with us about the rescue of two relief workers by Navy SEALs. They were being held in Somalia.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
In Miami today, the campaigns of Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney traded attacks, both in English and Spanish. Both men appeared separately in a candidates' forum on the Spanish-language network Univision, and both went on the air in Miami with attack ads on Spanish-language radio.
NPR's Greg Allen is in Miami. He's been following all this. And, Greg, you have these two candidates today in Miami fighting for the same thing, and that's the powerful Cuban-American vote in Florida.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: That's right, Melissa. They both were here, and they both also delivered addresses on Latin America while they were here. Mitt Romney's address was downtown in Miami at the Freedom Tower, which is the old customs building which became a building of some prominence and significance of Cuban-Americans who immigrated her in the '60s. But it's all a reminder of how important the Cuban-American vote is, especially in Republican primaries in Florida.
Hispanics represent about 11 percent of the Republican registered voters here. Two-thirds of that group - the 11 percent - live in South Florida, just in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties alone. So, you know, that - it's a big battle. Mitt Romney's been up with Spanish-language campaign ads for some time. Newt Gingrich just started. And today, Gingrich launched a tough attack ad against Romney on Spanish-language radio.
BLOCK: And we have that Newt Gingrich ad here. Why don't we hear a bit of it.
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWT GINGRICH'S POLITICAL AD)
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
ALLEN: Yeah, as we listen to it, it's not clear which Kennedy it is. It doesn't say, you know, of course, Ted Kennedy being the liberal from Massachusetts. But John F. Kennedy also was a person with some history here. There are a lot of people in the Cuban-American community have never forgiven him for the Bay of Pigs. So it's not clear, but I don't think it matters, really.
That catline of Castro saying Fatherland or Death, the ad then goes on to say Mitt Romney has said something very similar. And then it also goes on, the ad, to call Mitt Romney anti-immigrant. It's all pretty raw, even here in Miami.
Gingrich was on that Univision show today, that candidate forum, and anchor Jorge Ramos asked him about it.
JORGE RAMOS: You call him anti-immigrantâ¦
NEWT GINGRICH: Well, he certainly shows no concern for the humanity of people who are already here. I mean, I just think the idea of wanting to deport grandmothers and grandfathers is a sufficient level of inhumanity. First of all, it's never going to happen.
ALLEN: And you know, it all kind o ratcheted it up today. A number of elected Hispanic leaders wrote Gingrich an open letter. They called the ad untrue, offensive and unbecoming of a candidate for the Republican nomination. And one of those signing the letter was Florida Senator Marco Rubio, very popular down here. He's so far has stayed neutral in the race. So by the end of the day, the Gingrich campaign said they would take the ad down.
BLOCK: Hmm. Well, in the ad wars, Mitt Romney also launched his own Spanish language attack ad against Newt Gingrich today.
ALLEN: That's true. And this one attacks Gingrich for his ethics violations as House speaker - things we've heard before - his work for Freddie Mac, and as the ad says, also for calling Spanish a language of the ghetto.
Gingrich, when he was on Univision today, was asked about it by Jorge Ramos. He said he was just making a point about immigrants needing to learn English if they're going to succeed in America. In that same interview, he laughed at Romney's comments in Tuesday's debate that, you know, when faced with tough immigration laws, illegal immigrants may choose to, as he called it, self-deport. Gingrich called that an Obama-level fantasy. And on Univision, when he was on later, then Romney was asked about it and defended it.
MITT ROMNEY: On that basis over time, people will find it less attracted to be here if they can't find work here. Some refer to that as self-deportation. And what it says is, I'm not in favor of going around the country trying to round people up and put them in buses and take them across the border.
BLOCK: Well, Greg, after all this back and forth and these attacks, is there a sign of how these two candidates are doing in the Cuban-American community there in Florida?
ALLEN: Well, we had a poll today from Univision which shows Romney with a big lead over Newt Gingrich in the Hispanic community, both here in Florida and also nationally. That poll, however, spans some time that was before Gingrich's win in South Carolina, so it's really not clear how representative it is right now.
Romney does--though have the support of nearly every prominent Cuban-American Republican elected official in South Florida, with the exception of Rubio, as I mentioned, and that all carries a lot of weight down here in the community.
Gingrich is here campaigning, trying to cut into that support, but he appears to be the only one who's doing so. Ron Paul, as you know, is skipping Florida. Rick Santorum was supposed to be here today at that candidate forum, but cancelled at the last minute because of scheduling conflicts.
BLOCK: OK. NPR's Greg Allen in Miami. Greg, thanks so much.
ALLEN: You're welcome.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block. Google is revamping its privacy policies, and privacy advocates are not happy about it. The changes will allow Google to track its registered users across the Web. NPR's Steve Henn reports.
STEVE HENN, BYLINE: Google executives say they're making these changes for simplicity's sake. Taken together, Google sites and services have more than 70 separate privacy policies. There's one for search, one for YouTube, another for Gmail. But starting March 1st, most of these will be rolled into one. And in most cases, information collected by one part of the company will be shared throughout Google's online empire. That means if you Google Prozac, you might see an ad for Zoloft the next time you're on YouTube.
(SOUNDBITE OF AD)
HENN: Or a link could pop up in Gmail. Jeffrey Chester at the Center for Digital Democracy says Google is in a fierce battle to give online advertisers exactly what they want.
JEFFREY CHESTER: Increasingly, online advertisers want to be assured that they can access users online, knowing everything possible about them.
HENN: Google's rival in the space is Facebook. And this week, Facebook's rolling out dozens of new apps to make sharing easier, apps that will automatically post to your Facebook page what you're doing online or even in the real world. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg calls it frictionless sharing.
MARK ZUCKERBERG: You don't have to like a book. You can just read a book, which is good, because you've probably read about 10 times more books than you'd want to like on Facebook, anyway.
HENN: For advertisers, this is a boon. But for all these new Facebook apps to work, you have to opt in first. What Google's doing is a bit different. It's taking existing services, services you may already use, like Gmail, and changing what it does with the information it collects on them.
RYAN CALO: I think the danger for Google is that people may be surprised and may be creeped out by just how much the company seems to know about them.
HENN: Ryan Calo directs privacy studies at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society. He says there's legitimate reason to be concerned, but there's also a chance that Google will use all this data it collects to create new, better products. And that's exactly what Alan Eustace, a VP at Google, says the company is hoping to do.
ALAN EUSTACE: An example might be a calendar will say I have a meeting in San Francisco, and another product will, you know, look at the maps and the traffic situation and say, hey, you know, if you want to leave at this time, you know, you'll actually make it, but this time, you won't.
HENN: Eustace says that's only possible if different Google products can share the information they collect with each other. Of course, that makes selling ads easier too.
EUSTACE: Absolutely.
HENN: And selling ads is, after all, the business that Google is in. Steve Henn, NPR News, Silicon Valley.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Some of the best novels manage to say the most with few words. That's the case in a book that comes recommended by the writer Amy Waldman. As part of our series You Must Read This, she tells us about "The Twin," by Gerbrand Bakker.
AMY WALDMAN: I found "The Twin" sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.
I've recommended it again and again. And while I can't say it's entirely undiscovered - it won the 2010 IMPAC Dublin Award - no one I know ever seems to have heard of it.
The plot is minimal, the language plainly descriptive. The characters reveal themselves through spare dialogue and gestures. The humor is dark. It begins: I've put Father upstairs. He sat there like a calf that's just a couple of minutes old with a directionless, wobbly head, and eyes that drift over things.
The narrator is Helmer, a 55-year-old dairy farmer whose identical twin, Henk, died some three decades before. Their mother is dead now, too, leaving only Helmer to care for his aging father - the same father who favored Henk and who, after Henk's death, reclaimed Helmer for the farm.
You're done in Amsterdam, Father said, with typical economy, his words crushing Helmer's academic dreams. Ever since, Helmer has been frozen in place. "The Twin" chronicles his partial, hesitant thaw.
Half my life, I haven't thought about a thing, Helmer, a bachelor, observes. I've milked the cows day after day. In a way, I curse them, the cows, but they're also warm and serene. There's nothing as calming, as protected, as a shed full of sedately breathing cows on a winter's evening.
With only a few characters, with almost no drama, Bakker manages to explore the resentments and obligations of blood relations, the sting of disfavor, the stun of loss. Yet the novel also makes clear how their temperaments, interests and sexuality were already prying the brothers apart. Helmer's desires are not only unfulfilled; they're often unarticulated. Homoerotic tension curls through the novel, and the expressions of strong feeling sear because they're so rare.
Bakker wrote subtitles for nature films before becoming a novelist. In the book, relations with animals seem proxies for human ones: a botched killing of kittens conveys Father's casual cruelty; the two donkeys Helmer buys, despite their lack of utilitarian purpose, his own tenderness. At the time I read "The Twin," I was in the Hudson River Valley, an area of farms and open hills. Time had slowed. I wonder if this opened me not just to "The Twin's" story but its rhythms. Its prose, its unspooling, somehow mimics nature itself, in which the most incremental changes accrete to the progression of life.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: That's Amy Waldman. She's the former South Asia bureau chief for the New York Times, and she is the author of the novel "The Submission."
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block. Each month, we invite our listeners sitting in the backseat of their parents' car or at the kitchen table to join our Backseat Book Club. This month's pick is "The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963." NPR's Michele Norris asked the author, Christopher Paul Curtis, to set up the story for us.
CHRISTOPHER PAUL CURTIS: It's a family from Flint, Michigan, who has a 13-year-old semi-juvenile delinquent son named Byron, who is becoming increasingly bad. And so the parents decide to send him to Grandma Sands in Birmingham, Alabama, who has a reputation for being very tough.
MICHELE NORRIS, HOST:
The Watsons are an African-American family. Byron's younger brother, Kenny, is the comical narrator of the story. The all-important family road trip is central to this tale. And the family's venture to Birmingham is rich in vivid detail, from the songs the kids enjoy in the car...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YAKETY YAK")
NORRIS: ...to their parents' mushy ballads.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG)
NORRIS: The year is 1963. The destination, Birmingham, on the eve of violence in the city that would shake a nation's conscience. But the story is anchored by love and humor. And as usual, our Backseat Book Club members had lots of comments and questions for the author.
DAPHNE KUNIN: Hi. My name is Daphne Kunin. I live in Lancaster, Pa. Did you base any of the stories on your life, like the Nazi flamethrower of death? Thank you. I really enjoyed your book. Bye.
CURTIS: Well, it's interesting you asked that. The "Nazi Parachutes," that's chapter five. I know it well. And it's the most autobiographical thing that happened in the book, and it's where Byron lights toilet paper parachutes over the toilet and flushes them away. It was based on me. I just threw matches in the toilet. I liked the sound they made when they hit the water. And I was lighting and flushing. And my mother came in and - much as it happened in the story - threatened to burn me if I did it again.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CURTIS: And I said, I'll never do it again, Mama, and I smartened up. Next time I did it, I locked the bathroom door.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CURTIS: She came in. She grabbed me by the collar. She kicked the door down. I can remember this very clearly. I was amazed that she had that power in her legs. And she came in. She grabbed me by the collar and lifted me with one hand. And as I was dangling there, I can remember thinking, I never would have done it if I knew she was this strong.
NORRIS: The title of that chapter is "Nazi Parachutes Attack America and Get Shot Down over the Flint River by Captain Byron Watson and His Flamethrower of Death."
CURTIS: And his flamethrower of death. Yup.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
NORRIS: This is the first Backseat Book Club where the main character in the book actually spends some time in the backseat of the family's car - actually, quite a bit of time. And I want to talk a little bit about that journey and what it meant for you to place him in the backseat of a car and in a very particular car, the Brown Bomber, the father and the family really takes meticulous care of.
CURTIS: That's right. It's a 1948 Plymouth, and it was based on a car that we had as children. The car was not painted brown, but all the paint had come off of the car, and it was in brown primer. So my father called it the Brown Bomber after Joe Louis. It was a wonderful time. We listened to the music. We didn't have an ultra-glide, of course. We just had the radio with two stations in Flint. So it was rather limited that way. But the car was a great place to be.
NORRIS: And the ultra-glide, that crazy contraption where people were actually playing record albums inside a moving vehicle.
CURTIS: Absolutely insane. It made the eight-track look like a good idea. It was the size of a suitcase, and it was a really bad idea because every time we turned a corner or hit a bump, the needle would jump and scratch the record.
NORRIS: No, there wasn't much gliding. It was like the needle bouncing across...
CURTIS: No. It was the...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CURTIS: It was more like the...
NORRIS: ...the record album.
CURTIS: ...the ultra-scratch.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
NORRIS: Ow. It hurts my ears just think about that.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
NORRIS: Did you decide to set much of this book inside a car not just because of your father's love for his own Brown Bomber but because of your relationship with cars? You spent a lot of time working on a factory line, building cars.
CURTIS: I kind of fell into being an author. I really disliked the factory. I disliked it tremendously and...
NORRIS: What were you doing? You were attaching...
CURTIS: I was...
NORRIS: ...doors to cars, right?
CURTIS: I was hanging doors, they called it. I was a - it was a very physical job. The doors weighed anywhere from 50 to 80 pounds. Each person would do 300 of them a day in a 10-hour shift. It was almost like a ballet the way you had to have each step - each step had to be done correctly, where you placed your feet, you know, and it took a while to learn how to do it. But it was in there that my friend and I decided - the guy - Doug Tenet(ph) is his name. And we decided that instead of doing every other job, he'd do 30 in a row, and I'd do 30 in a row.
And that gave us each a half hour out of every hour to sit down and do whatever we wanted to do. And then, I found out that if I sat down and started to write, I forgot about being in the factory. And I think that led to me being a writer.
NORRIS: Stolen moments. Eventually, Curtis left the factory for a year to follow his dream of writing. He put himself to work five hours a day at his local library, scrawling out "The Watsons" story in longhand. The book went on to win the prestigious Newbury Honor. The book's humor delighted our readers, and many were also moved by the civil rights struggles and the church bombing that killed four little girls. Brothers Sebastian and Martin Parra from Nashville asked about that tumultuous period.
SEBASTIAN PARRA: Mr. Curtis, did the bombing affect you as a kid?
MARTIN PARRA: And were you exposed to such radical behavior?
CURTIS: Sebastian and Martin, the bombing did affect me as a kid. I was 10 years old when it happened. And the reason it stuck in my mind, my parents were very, very strict. And I know you think your parents are strict. We used to go to bed at 6:30 every night. And my sister and I would, some of the time, sneak back up and sit behind the couch and watch television while my parents were watching it. And I can remember in 1963, September 15th, when the bombing took place, watching on television, and the reason it impacted me so much was because I'd never seen my parents cry before. And it was a very, very traumatic time when these four little girls were killed because they wanted to end segregation. So it did have an impact on my life.
NORRIS: Christopher Paul Curtis, he's the author of "The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963." Thanks so much for being with us.
CURTIS: My pleasure. Thank you very much, Michele. I appreciate it.
NORRIS: For February, NPR's Backseat Book Club is doing double duty, reading two books. "Shooting Kabul" by N.H. Senzai, it's the story of an 11-year-old and his family's journey from Afghanistan to San Francisco, and it's also about a photo contest that changes his view of the world. We're pairing that current tale about otherness with a classic about bullies and bystanders: "The Hundred Dresses" by Eleanor Estes. Read one or both, think about how they're similar and different, then send your questions to backseatbookclub@npr.org. Or to find out more about a photo assignment for you, come to npr.org/backseat. I'm Michele Norris. Happy reading.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
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And I'm Robert Siegel. More women in the U.S. are giving birth at home. That's according to a new government study out today. Home births are still relatively rare, but they jumped 29 percent between 2004 and 2009.
As NPR's Rob Stein reports, the trend is being cheered by some women's health advocates, but raising concern among doctors.
ROB STEIN, BYLINE: When Kate Miller was getting ready to deliver her daughter last spring, she had no doubts that she wants to do it in her own apartment in Washington, D.C.
KATE MILLER: I wanted the comfort and quiet of my own home and I didn't want any unnecessary procedures done to me or to her.
STEIN: Miller is not alone. About 30,000 babies are born at home each year, about one percent of all births, and the percentage appears to be increasing faster than anyone realized.
Here's T.J. Mathews of the National Center for Health Statistics.
T.J. MATHEWS: This is a larger change in a shorter time period, so it is something to notice.
STEIN: Now, the increase isn't happening among all women. It's really happening mostly among a very specific group - white women ages 35 and older. Home births jumped 36 percent among these women. Why? Eugene Declercq of Boston University says many of these women really want to avoid getting a cesarean and other medical treatments they may not need.
EUGENE DECLERCQ: It may be that older mothers who have had the experience of having had a hospital birth now want to experience a home birth because of whatever they experienced in that first birth.
STEIN: And...
DECLERCQ: It may be they're more comfortable challenging the system.
STEIN: Whatever the reason, the trend is being welcomed by those who think home births are a better choice for many women. Katherine Prown is an advocate for midwives.
KATHERINE PROWN: It's as safe for women who are at low risk as a hospital birth for low risk women, but with significantly reduced rates of preterm birth, low birth weight, unnecessary cesarean sections and also very high rates of maternal satisfaction.
STEIN: But there's a lot of debate about the safety of home births. For many women with uncomplicated pregnancies, it can often be a fine alternative, but when complications occur, the results can be devastating.
Amy Tuteur is an obstetrician/gynecologist and a vocal critic of home births.
AMY TUTEUR: If nothing goes wrong, everything will be fine, but if something bad happens, if that happens at home, you're taking a risk.
STEIN: There are really two big concerns. Making sure whoever is helping deliver the baby is qualified to spot a problem quickly and getting to the hospital in time when a life threatening complication does occur.
Here's George Macones of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
GEORGE MACONES: Sometimes, there are emergencies that you need to respond to in, you know, just a couple of minutes to ensure that the baby is doing OK and those are the ones that we really worry about.
STEIN: Miller, the Washington yoga instructor, had a long, tough labor, but her daughter Ruby was born safely.
MILLER: Oh, my goodness, I am so grateful, I can't tell you. I was able to have my daughter at home. I was able to have a peaceful and supported natural child birth experience. She was born in our nice, cozy bedroom. I know, you're so vocal.
(SOUNDBITE OF BABY)
STEIN: Rob Stein, NPR News.
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As this election year continues, we're sure to be hearing dueling economic plans. All the candidates, including President Obama, are trying to set themselves apart with unique promises to right the financial ship.
But as NPR's Ari Shapiro explains, there is at least one area where their ideas intersect.
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: There are not many things that Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney all agree on, but there is this.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: It is time to turn our unemployment system into a re-employment system that puts...
NEWT GINGRICH: If you need unemployment compensation, you also sign up for a training program run by a business.
MITT ROMNEY: That means great training programs for people who want to come back on the workforce.
SHAPIRO: Job-training programs for unemployed people. Of course, these men disagree on the details, and we'll get to those differences in a moment. But at face value, they agree that worker re-education, in some form, is a useful solution to the country's unemployment problem.
And economist Gary Burtless, of the Brookings Institution, says they're right - if the programs are designed well.
GARY BURTLESS: The basic idea is, you want to train people in occupations and industries where there are growing needs for workers, and quickly get people out of the industries that are shrinking.
That may sound obvious, but there are many instances where job-training programs prepare people for a field that's not hiring; or they provide general education that might look good on a resume but doesn't lead to a job. And even the best programs require highly motivated workers. Still, when the system works...
DR. LISA MACON: Every single intern I've ever supervised - in 13 years of teaching here - has been offered a full-time position at the end of the internship, at the company where they interned.
SHAPIRO: Dr. Lisa Macon chairs the information technology program at Valencia College in Orlando. Last year, the Aspen Institute, in Washington, ranked Valencia the top community college in the U.S.
(SOUNDBITE OF CLASSROOM INSTRUCTION)
MACON: So what we were supposed to do for this week was watch three videos: segments three, four and five. I know you all did that, right?
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Yes.
MACON: Excellent, good work. And the...
SHAPIRO: On this day, she's teaching the latest computer programming languages. Some of her students learned computer programming decades ago and need to update their skills. Then there are people like Brian Peine.
BRIAN PEINE: Basically, two years ago, I was with a large bank. And with all the mess that happened in the financial industry, everybody was downsizing. I got kind of caught up in that mess.
SHAPIRO: He couldn't get rehired. Then one day, he was talking to an engineer at NASA.
PEINE: He helped build, kind of, my career path and said, listen, if you do these things, you know, I can get you over as an internship at NASA.
Ultimately, I want to be in robotics.
SHAPIRO: That's the kind of story everyone applauds. During his State of the Union address, President Obama said he wants to put more people on this sort of path.
(SOUNDBITE OF STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS)
OBAMA: Join me in a national commitment to train 2 million Americans with skills that will lead directly to a job.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
SHAPIRO: The next morning, Mitt Romney pointed to a report by the Government Accountability Office suggesting that the country does not need more workforce training programs.
ROMNEY: Do you know we have 47 different workforce training programs in Washington now? Forty-seven, reporting to eight different agencies. All this money goes to the bureaucrats and the administrators and the overhead.
SHAPIRO: He proposed shrinking them down to just one program. Economist Gary Burtless says there's surely room for improving efficiency.
BURTLESS: But if you actually look at the numbers - how much does a country spend on this activity? - the United States ranks near the bottom among rich countries. We don't spend a lot of money on this kind of activity.
SHAPIRO: There's a separate problem, though. If worker retraining is to be the silver bullet that ends the unemployment crisis, there would have to be the same number of American jobs now as there were five years ago, just in different fields. And of course, that's not how the economy works.
BURTLESS: If we had a perfect training system and a perfect retraining system, we might be able to drop the unemployment rate currently, by 2/10 or 3/10 of a percentage point.
SHAPIRO: That's not much when unemployment is at 8.5 percent. In the long run, Burtless says, a good worker retraining program helps the general health of an economy. But in the short run, even if people of both parties can come together behind these proposals, a few tenths of a percentage point will not fix the job market.
Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Jacksonville, Florida.
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Cynthia Nixon is best known for her role as the sharply dressed, sharp-tongued lawyer, Miranda, in the HBO series "Sex And the City." Now, as Jeff London reports, she's taken on a very different character in a Broadway revival of the Pulitzer Prize winning play, "Wit."
JEFF LONDON, BYLINE: In her dressing room at the Friedman Theater, Cynthia Nixon has a nightly ritual. She rubs Nivea cream all over her shaved scalp to sooth the razor burns. Being completely bald is one of the many demands of the character she plays in "Wit," a brilliant college professor named Vivian Bearing, who's battling ovarian cancer.
CYNTHIA NIXON: She talks so much, she's verbose. She talks in such an erudite and complicated way. She's bald, she's naked and she's dying in a slow, excruciating way. There's a lot. There's a lot of virtuosic elements of the play.
LONDON: Not the least of which is that, for much of the play, she speaks directly to the audience, something that's established at the outset when Vivian walks on stage in a hospital gown and a red baseball cap pushing a portable I.V. drip.
NIXON: (as Vivian Bearing) Hi. How are you feeling today? Great. That's just great. This is not my standard greeting, I assure you. I tend towards something a little more formal, a little less inquisitive, such as, say, hello.
LONDON: And for the next 90 minutes or so, Vivian Bearing dares herself in this unflinchingly honest and, yes, very witty play.
NIXON: But you have to watch out for Professor Bearing. Hold onto your wallet while you're with her because she is an unreliable narrator.
LONDON: Margaret Edson wrote "Wit" when she was 30, based partly on her experiences working at a research hospital. It's her first and only play and, in fact, in it, she is frequently attacked by her own character.
MARGARET EDSON: She feels that she's in charge of the play and she's presenting this documentary of her demise and, in fact, the play is slipping out of her control. She and I are in struggle for narrative control for the play and she thinks I'm a terrible writer. She criticizes me all through the play, but it's my play. OK? And so I don't want her to die without coming into some understanding of herself, into some experience of grace.
NIXON: (as Vivian Bearing) You cannot imagine how time can be so still, it hangs, it weighs and yet there is so little of it. It goes so slowly and yet it is so scarce. If I were writing this scene, it would last a full 15 minutes. I would lie here and you would sit there.
LONDON: And after a long awkward silence, she concludes.
NIXON: (as Vivian Bearing) Not to worry. Brevity is the soul of wit.
LONDON: Nixon says part of what makes Vivian's story so compelling is how Margaret Edson has leavened it with humor.
NIXON: Even at the worst times for Vivian, even when terrible, terrible things are happening, somehow, Margaret has just put those laughs in there and I think the audience just gives full voice to them and they really need them. And it doesn't diminish, in any way, the pathos of what's happening, but it just - I don't know. It helps.
LONDON: Like when Vivian's nurse, Susie, prepares a morphine drip to dull the pain.
NIXON: (as Vivian Bearing) I trust this will have a soporific effect.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (as Susie Monahan) Well, I don't know about that, but it sure does make you sleepy.
LONDON: And Vivian then explains to Susie what soporific means.
NIXON: In the end, she says, I'm a teacher, and I think, you know, what is knowledge for, is the question that really concerns Margaret and concerns the play.
LONDON: Teaching has been Margaret Edson's vocation for well over a decade now. She found out she won the Pulitzer Prize while she was teaching kindergarten. She now teaches social studies to sixth graders, even as her show has been previewing on Broadway.
EDSON: Teaching is me. Teaching is alive. I'm on my feet all day. I'm with my people all day. I'm not separate from anyone and I'm in the mix. I'm out there doing my job every day. I love teaching.
LONDON: And Broadway audiences can learn much about life, death and the holy sonnets of John Donne when "Wit" opens at the Manhattan Theatre Club tonight.
For NPR News, I'm Jeff London in New York.
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And I'm Robert Siegel. From its earliest days, the 2012 presidential race has defied prediction. Three states have voted so far in this primary season, producing three different winners. One factor stands above all others in driving the dynamics of the race for the GOP nomination, televised debates and there's another one tonight in Florida. NPR national political correspondent Don Gonyea has this look at the impact the debates have had and their unprecedented popularity.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: First off, it seems inadequate to describe them simply as debates. They've actually been more like regular installments of a blockbuster TV series.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE)
GONYEA: There's been a mix of familiar characters, names like Romney and Gingrich and the introduction of new political stars including Congresswoman and Tea Party favorite, Michele Bachmann, who actually used a candidate's debate to announce her candidacy in June.
REPRESENTATIVE MICHELE BACHMANN: I filed, today, my paperwork to seek the office of the presidency of the United States today.
GONYEA: Bachmann did well in that debate. She surged in polls. For another candidate, though, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, the same event brought trouble. He had been publically attacking Mitt Romney and his Massachusetts health care law using the term Obamney-care, a catchy line, but Pawlenty wouldn't use it in the debate, prompting this from CNN's John King.
JOHN KING: If it was Obamney-care on Fox News Sunday, why is it not Obamney-care standing here with the governor right there?
TIM PAWLENTY: It is. President Obama is the person who I quoted in saying he looked to Massachusetts for designing his program. He's the one who said...
GONYEA: Pawlenty offered a long explanation, but in an instant, he was labeled not tough enough. He never recovered. There were others more than ready to grab the spotlight.
HERMAN CAIN: This is why I have proposed my bold plan of 999.
GONYEA: Former Godfather's Pizza CEO, Herman Cain, had a very simple oft repeated message.
CAIN: That's why my 999 plan is a bold solution.
GONYEA: Thanks to the debates, Cain, too, rose to the top in polls, even with little time spent in Iowa and New Hampshire. Voters have clearly been paying attention. Andy Kohut of the Pew Research Center notes that in December, four years ago, one-third of likely GOP primary voters said they'd watched one or more debates.
ANDY KOHUT: In January of 2012, that percentage is 47 percent, a very, very big increase.
GONYEA: One big reason is that GOP voters this year are enthusiastic about the election, that they're hungry for information about the candidates. But Kohut also says the debates themselves have delivered the goods.
KOHUT: Virtually all of the important moments in this campaign have occurred on these debate stages.
GONYEA: Just ask Texas Governor Rick Perry, who entered the race as an instant frontrunner, but seemed unprepared in debates, hitting the low point of his entire campaign in November.
GOVERNOR RICK PERRY: The third agency of government I would do away with - education, the commerce and let's see, I can't - the third one, I can't. I'm sorry. Oops.
GONYEA: Perry never recovered, but he did stay in the race and weeks later, forced his multimillionaire rival, Mitt Romney, into an awkward moment of his own. The topic, again, was health care.
MITT ROMNEY: You know what? You've raised that before, Rick, and you're simply wrong.
PERRY: It was true then and it's true now.
ROMNEY: No, no. Rick, I'll tell you what, 10,000 bucks, $10,000 bet?
PERRY: I'm not in the betting business, but I...
ROMNEY: Oh, okay.
GONYEA: That moment and Romney's more recent handling of the issue of his tax returns have put him on the defensive. Early on, the debate stage was so crowded, some candidates complained they barely got a chance to talk. Senator Rick Santorum grumbled about that back in November.
RICK SANTORUM: Hold on. I'm not done yet.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN 1: Thank you.
SANTORUM: I'm not done yet. I've only been able to answer one question, unlike everybody else here, so let me just finish what I'm saying.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN 1: Okay.
SANTORUM: We need to repeal Obama-care...
GONYEA: Getting noticed hasn't been a problem for Congressman Ron Paul, though often it's because he's so far from the rest of the field on issues, such as defense policy and national security. Last week, he criticized the killing of Osama bin Laden.
RON PAUL: Just think, Adolf Eichmann was captured. He was given a trial. What's wrong with capturing people? Why didn't we try to get some information from him? You know, we're accustomed to asking people questions...
GONYEA: The audience reaction...
(SOUNDBITE OF AUDIENCE BOOING)
GONYEA: Debate audiences have been another character in the drama, cheering or jeering answers and questions. No candidate has taken advantage of that like Newt Gingrich. A classic example came in South Carolina last week. The moderator asked about a claim by one of Gingrich's ex-wives that he wanted an open marriage.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN 3: Would you like to take some time to respond to that?
NEWT GINGRICH: No. But I will.
GONYEA: Then, came this.
GINGRICH: I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office and I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.
GONYEA: In that single moment, Gingrich carried the day. Forty-eight hours later, he won the South Carolina primary. He had the debate and the opportunity it created to thank.
Don Gonyea, NPR News.
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A panel of experts today set forth a plan to store thousands of tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste. Most of it is spent fuel from nuclear power reactors. It was supposed to go to a repository in Nevada called Yucca Mountain, but the government has abandoned that plan.
NPR's Christopher Joyce reports on the latest effort to find a home for America's nuclear waste.
CHRISTOPHER JOYCE, BYLINE: Yucca Mountain was largely done in by Nevadans who didn't want their state to be the country's nuclear waste dump. Some also questioned how geologically secure the underground storage site would be.
Now, the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future has a new plan. Commission member General Brent Scowcroft says it hinges on convincing the public that a new site can be safe.
BRENT SCOWCROFT: It's psychological. People don't understand nuclear waste. The problem itself is solvable.
JOYCE: Not only must the new repository pass geological muster, it has to win local approval. Scowcroft says this worked for the military's dump site in New Mexico's salt caverns.
SCOWCROFT: Salt is one of the most attractive medium for permanent disposal. And we've found, in visiting there, that the people of the region generally are supportive of taking on additional burden.
JOYCE: The commission, though, wasn't asked to pick a site, just set up a process to find one. For decades, the country's commercial waste has been sitting in temporary steel and cement casks at nuclear power plants. The new plan would finally gather all that waste into interim holding sites while a permanent geologic dump is built. That would require moving lots of radioactive waste around the country.
Commission member Lee Hamilton, former congressman from Indiana, says that's already being done safely with military waste. One other thing. The commission would fire the Department of Energy. They want an independent organization to be in charge this time.
LEE HAMILTON: They have a record of not dealing with the problem successfully. They have lost credibility to do it.
JOYCE: The nuclear industry definitely wants a permanent dump site. Alex Flint is vice president of the Nuclear Energy Institute.
ALEX FLINT: As we go out and talk in communities about building new plants, about relicensing new plants, one of the principal issues they have is what are you going to do with the used fuel? And we feel an obligation to solve that.
JOYCE: So, next up, create an organization to find a dump site and prove the waste will be safe there for hundreds of thousands of years.
Christopher Joyce, NPR News.
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Courting the Latino vote is a must for candidates of both parties in Florida and across the country as it has been for years.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD)
BLOCK: That's Jackie Kennedy in an ad from 1960. Fast-forward to January 2012 and Florida is again flooded with political ads in Spanish. And they're causing some controversy as NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates reports.
KAREN GRIGSBY BATES, BYLINE: Tune into Spanish language radio or TV for even a few moments in Florida these days, and you'll hear ads touting the virtues of Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Neither candidate speaks much Spanish, so the voice-overs are outsourced, sometimes to family members.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD)
BATES: Craig Romney spent a couple of years as a Mormon missionary in Chile and spoke fluently on behalf of his father, telling voters his values and theirs are the same. But the ads to reach Latinos often aren't, says Matt Barreto, a co-founder of polling research firm Latino Decisions.
MATT BARRETO: When we do analysis of campaign ads and look at the similarities and differences, we usually find big differences in what Republican candidates are saying in their outreach in Spanish language TV and radio, and in English language TV and radio.
BATES: That's happening now in Florida, where the heavily Hispanic Service Employees International Union launched an ad this week. It accuses Romney of pandering in an ad they call Las Dos Caras, The Two Faces of Mitt Romney.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD)
BATES: The ad goes on to say Romney's Spanish language ads profess to care about the future of Latino children, even as he promises other non-Latino audiences that he'll veto the Dream Act, a path to citizenship for undocumented college students.
Newt Gingrich got a crispy public admonition from Florida's junior Senator Marco Rubio for calling Romney anti-immigrant in one Spanish language ad. Rubio isn't endorsing either candidate but felt the charge was untrue and unseemly. That ad has since been pulled.
It's a serious misstep for Gingrich, who already raised the ire of millions of Latino voters when he made this observation in 2007.
NEWT GINGRICH: We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English, so people learn the common language of the country, and so they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.
BATES: He quickly followed that with an apology in Spanish, saying he'd just meant English was the pathway to the key to success for opportunities and good jobs, education and more.
GINGRICH: (Foreign language spoken)
BATES: A corazon sincero - a sincere heart - is essential, says Matt Barreto, in effectively reaching Latino audiences.
BARRETO: Latino voters will see right through a Spanish overlay or a dubbed commercial that doesn't appear to be making any personal or real connection.
BATES: Casey Klofstad, a political science professor at the University of Miami, says Gingrich and Romney might do well to take a page from George W. Bush's playbook.
CASEY KLOFSTAD: If you go back to President Bush's two campaigns, he made a very concerted effort - nationally and especially in Florida - to really make outreach and inroads with the Latino community. And it really yielded dividends
BATES: Bush has Hispanic relatives. His half-Mexican nephew, George P. Bush, barnstormed Florida on behalf of his Tio Jorge, to great effect. Other ads paid homage to George Bush's Texas upbringing, like this catchy tune.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD)
BATES: GOP candidates will no doubt continue to refine their Spanish language ads as they make their way through the primaries. But they'll need to do it authentically or they'll end up saying disculpame - I'm sorry - a lot more as the months wear on.
Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR News.
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Call it war; call it political stalemate - whatever you call it, the situation in Syria is getting worse by the day. After more than 10 months, the protest movement remains steadfast in its call for the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But Assad's government has been equally steadfast, cracking down violently on protesters. Caught in the middle: Soldiers from the Syrian army have begun defecting and fighting for the opposition.
NPR's Kelly McEvers reports now on the latest international efforts to stop the violence and force political change.
KELLY MCEVERS, BYLINE: One thing that's for sure about the Syrian uprising is that there's nothing romantic about it. There's no Tahrir Square filled with hundreds of thousands of people; no Mad Max dudes in the desert, fighting Moammar Gadhafi with guns they've welded to the backs of their pickup trucks.
Instead, to get an idea of what the Syrian uprising is like, day in and day out, you only have to check my NPR colleague Ahmed al-Omran's Twitter feed.
AHMED AL-OMRAN: (Reading) Video shows a little girl who was reportedly wounded when security forces attacked. ... Graphic: Video shows a man who was shot in both legs in...
MCEVERS: If it sounds disconnected and surreal, that's because it is. Analysts here in the region say since the uprising began last March, the Syrian regime has been expert at keeping the violence just low enough that the story doesn't burst onto the international stage.
AL-OMRAN: (Reading) Heartbreaking - 2-year-old boy crying after he was reportedly shot...
MCEVERS: But that doesn't mean the situation isn't getting more and more violent, and more and more at risk of turning into something that no one wants: a civil war.
Last month, the Arab League decided to send a group of observers to Syria, as part of a peace plan to slow the regime's brutal crackdown on protesters. But that didn't work. Activists say hundreds more people were killed, even while the observers were there.
But then, earlier this week, the Cairo-based league came up with a new plan. It calls for Assad to transfer power to a deputy who would oversee a national unity government, and parliamentary elections would follow.
The Syrian regime immediately rejected the plan. Assad is nowhere near stepping down. But neither, analysts say, was the president of Yemen at first. It took months of a massive uprising, that was also turning violent, in his country before he finally handed power to his vice president. Just this week, he traveled to the U.S. for medical treatment. Some believe it was his quiet exit from power.
Paul Salem heads the Carnegie Center for Middle East Peace here in Beirut. He says there are two reasons the Arab League plan for Syria might actually be useful.
DR. PAUL SALEM: One is that it's on the table, such that if the regime in a few of months really is in trouble, they have a fall-back option, which rather than utter collapse, they can say well, let's discuss something middle of the road, and save parts of the regime - or parts of themselves.
MCEVERS: Like the former president of Yemen did.
SALEM: Secondly, I think it helps undermine the regime's propaganda, which is that there is no middle way. You know, this is a conspiracy and the Arabs are out to get us; we have to fight. Here the Arabs saying no, we're not out to get you; we're proposing a very reasonable way forward that actually saves you.
MCEVERS: And saves your country from all-out war. Now, diplomats from Arab countries and Europe, the U.S. and Turkey are pushing for a U.N. Security Council resolution that uses this Arab League plan as a framework.
While that might sound like more paper-pushing that would fail to stop the violence on the ground, Peter Harling, of the International Crisis Group, says it's the right next step.
PETER HARLING: The only way to convince this regime that it's about time to negotiate, and not simply to talk about possible reforms, is to have a consensus within the international community.
MCEVERS: Up to now, the Assad regime has been bolstered by the fact that Russia threatens to veto a Security Council resolution on Syria. Harling says the time has come for Arabs and the West to draft a resolution the Russians can accept; a resolution that would write off any possibility of a Libya-style intervention, but one that still blames the Syrian regime for the crisis.
HARLING: And that approach would be extremely welcome, in terms of forcing the regime to realize that it cannot just forge ahead with its current course of action that will lead the country into disaster.
MCEVERS: U.N. officials say the resolution could be voted on as early as next week.
Kelly McEvers, NPR News, Beirut.
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In the race for the Republican presidential nomination, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who's had to respond to criticism of his past that he was an unfaithful husband and a failed leader of his party. One label has been especially tough to shake that he was a lobbyist. While he didn't officially register as a lobbyist, Gingrich built a lucrative career advocating for paying clients. Gingrich insists that's not lobbying. And to prove his point, he released two of his consulting contracts this week.
NPR's Peter Overby took a look.
PETER OVERBY, BYLINE: The two contracts disclosed this week come from Gingrich's work for Freddie Mac, the mortgage giant. Between 1999 and 2007, Freddie Mac paid his firm $1.6 million. The contracts say he was advising and discussing, not lobbying, at least not in the legal sense of the word. Here's Gingrich in Monday night's debate.
NEWT GINGRICH: There's no place in the contract that provides for lobbying. I've never done any lobbying.
OVERBY: Gingrich deliberately avoided registering as a lobbyist, which would make public his clients and their payments to him.
GINGRICH: In fact, we brought in an expert on lobbying law and trained all of our staff. And that expert is prepared to testify that he was brought in to say: Here is the bright line.
OVERBY: Thomas Susman is that expert, now the head lobbyist for the American Bar Association. He says his work for Gingrich is no secret.
THOMAS SUSMAN: He said that I could go public with my representation back when I first worked for him.
OVERBY: But Susman's version doesn't quite match Gingrich's. He says he advised Gingrich a little bit about federal lobbying law.
SUSMAN: Yeah. I'm sure I would have, because that was what my expertise and involvement had been.
OVERBY: But he says he can't remember actually doing so. And besides, that really wasn't Gingrich's focus.
SUSMAN: He was involved with a number of clients of his group at the state level and with state legislators and state officials. And that was where he was most concerned.
OVERBY: Gingrich is also defending his advocacy of the Medicare drug benefit known as Part D. Today, the campaign of rival Mitt Romney brought out a former Republican congressman. Jeb Bradley told reporters about a meeting with Gingrich back before the vote on Part D in 2003.
STATE SENATOR JEB BRADLEY: I'll tell you, that day that I met with Newt, he was lobbying.
OVERBY: Gingrich says he promoted Part D as a citizen, not a paid lobbyist. Here he is at the Monday night debate citing the need for better diabetes treatment.
GINGRICH: I publicly favored Medicare Part D for a practical reason. And that reason is simple: The U.S. government was not prepared to give people anything - insulin, for example - but they would pay for kidney dialysis.
OVERBY: But while Gingrich long supported the drug benefit, it's also true that Novo Nordisk, a company that specializes in diabetes treatment, was a $200,000-a-year member of his Center for Health Transformation. This stance of do no lobbying has defined Gingrich's post-Congress career. The assertion shows up on the website of the Center for Health Transformation and in one of the Freddie Mac contracts. But lobbyists rarely use the L-word in their contracts. Thomas Susman remembers the so-called engagement letters used by his old law firm.
SUSMAN: We'd use such terms as advocacy, you know, including advice and counsel, including organizing, but probably not use the word lobbying in it.
OVERBY: Susman is active in a push to make the lobbying industry more transparent. So is political scientist James Thurber, who heads up an institute on lobbying at American University. Thurber says there should be disclosure by so-called senior advisers - former lawmakers, like Gingrich, who don't formally register as lobbyists.
DR. JAMES THURBER: They don't have to be called lobbyists, but let's find out who they are.
OVERBY: And even some lobbyists want more transparency for their industry. An association called the American League of Lobbyists is working on a reform proposal. And the league's president, Howard Marlowe, says he wishes Gingrich wouldn't run away from the profession.
HOWARD MARLOWE: I mean, if he wants to be the first president who is a registered lobbyist, we'd love it.
OVERBY: But for now, Gingrich and other politicians seem pretty sure that a registered lobbyist is about the last candidate voters would want.
Peter Overby, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block.
This week, an improbable partnership called on Congress. On one side, animal rights advocates. And on the same side, big egg producers. They're advocating together for a law that's supposed to improve the lives of egg-laying chickens.
As NPR's Dan Charles reports, if passed it will be the first federal law that takes into account the emotional lives of farm animals.
DAN CHARLES, BYLINE: Ask two different people and you can get two completely different opinions about what makes a chicken feel comfortable.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHICKENS)
JOHN BEDELL: You hear that sound? That's happy chickens.
CHARLES: John Bedell manages egg production for JS West, a family-run farming operation in Modesto, California.
BEDELL: When they're just sort of calmly clucking away, that's what happy chickens sound like.
CHARLES: We're standing in a long, windowless, dimly lit building. It's home to a whole city of chickens: 150,000 of them in endless rows of wire cages, eight birds to a cage. On average, each hen has a little less space than a single sheet of paper. So, are they really happy?
Ask Paul Shapiro, from the Humane Society of the United States, and he says impossible.
PAUL SHAPIRO: These are living, feeling, sentient animals. And at a bare minimum, certainly they deserve not to be tortured for their entire lives, not to be immobilized to the point where they can't even extend their limbs.
CHARLES: Advocates of animal welfare have been angry about chicken cages for a long time. But until recently, they couldn't do much about it. The system gives us cheap eggs. In fact, 90 percent of all the country's eggs come from chickens in cages.
But in the last few years, activists here and around the world have started to win some victories. They succeeded first in Europe. By law, Euro chickens now have more room in cages and many aren't in cages at all - they're running around loose in barns. Then, three years ago, voters in California overwhelmingly approved something called Proposition 2.
Paul Shapiro, from the Humane Society, helped write it.
SHAPIRO: Well, what Prop 2 says is that laying hens must be able to stand up, lie down, turn around, and fully extend their limbs. That's it.
CHARLES: They have to be able to do that by 2015. It sounds simple, but egg producers say they still have no idea what it requires. Does it mean chickens have to be cage-free? Does it just mean bigger cages? How big?
On top of that, similar voter initiatives passed in other states. Gene Gregory, who's president of United Egg Producers, the egg industry's biggest trade association, says it looked like the industry would have to satisfy dozens of different and confusing state requirements.
GENE GREGORY: It was going to be it was going to be a nightmare, trying to produce eggs and have a free flow of eggs across state lines. And so, we reached out to the Humane Society and said let's have a conversation about this.
SHAPIRO: And indeed, we were able to hammer out agreement to jointly lobby the Congress for new federal rules on the treatment of egg-laying hens.
CHARLES: The proposed law was introduced in Congress this week. It would require all egg producers in every state to move all of their animals out of traditional cages within 15 years. At a minimum, the chickens would have to be in so-called enriched cages - a style developed in Europe. These cages are a compromise between efficient, large-scale production and letting chickens do some things that they seem to really like.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHICKENS)
CHARLES: At the JS West farm, one chicken house already has these cages. The chickens in this building have almost twice as much space as the ones I saw next door.
Jill Benson, one of the company's owners, points out other things. There are metal bars for the birds to perch on. Also, some enclosed spaces, called nest boxes, which seem really popular.
JILL BENSON: The birds, in fact, line up to go into the nest box. They like to go out of the bright light and go into a nest box to lay their eggs.
CHARLES: Jill Benson says she wants this law to pass. Building new chicken houses will cost her company millions of dollars, but she says she can live with that. It probably works out to about an extra penny per egg.
So if the United Egg Producers, representing 95 percent of all U.S. egg production wants this law and some of the industry's fiercest enemies also want this law, who could be against it?
Well, as it happens, some influential farm organizations. Beef producers, hog farmers, dairy farmers and the American Farm Bureau have all lined up against it.
Bill Donald, a rancher in Melville, Montana and president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, says it would be a terrible precedent. Who knows what regulations might come next?
BILL DONALD: It isn't a very large leap to go from egg production to chicken production to beef production.
CHARLES: It's a political situation that would have been unthinkable just a year ago: egg farmers, arm-in-arm with the Humane Society of the United States, doing battle with ranchers and dairymen.
Dan Charles, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And as we mentioned, there's yet another debate tonight that takes place in Jacksonville, Florida. For more on that, we're joined by NPR's Mara Liasson. Hey, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hello, Melissa.
BLOCK: Newt Gingrich came out of South Carolina surging. Now, though, he seems to have fallen behind in the polls in Florida, behind Mitt Romney. Do you expect to see an even more combative Newt Gingrich in the debate tonight?
LIASSON: Yes, I do. Gingrich has seen his second surge squelched by the Romney campaign and the Romney supporting superPAC. Just like they did in Iowa, they've used millions of dollars in negative ads to destroy a Gingrich surge. For some reason, Gingrich held back in the debate in Tampa on Monday, but tonight, I do expect we're going to see the old tough combative Newt. He gave a preview of some of the attacks he might level tonight when he made a blistering attack on Romney in Florida today.
NEWT GINGRICH: We're not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Suisse bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs who had foreclosures in Florida and is himself a stockholder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together and understand what this is all about.
LIASSON: Newt Gingrich knows that Florida is his last chance. He needs to win here in order to slow Mitt Romney's momentum.
BLOCK: Now, after he lost in South Carolina, Mitt Romney in the first debate in Tampa on Monday directly engaged with Newt Gingrich in a way he really hadn't before. He'd been sort of taking a frontrunner's position taking on President Obama. Do you think that Mitt Romney again will continue that aggressive posture against Newt Gingrich to hold onto this lead that he has at least in the polls?
LIASSON: Yes. I think he will. It really worked for him on Monday night. He threw everything but the kitchen sink at Gingrich. He was much more aggressive than in the past. I think he realized he was in danger of losing after Gingrich's victory in South Carolina, but also, he's hired a new debate coach, Brett O'Donnell, who's worked with other Republican candidates, John McCain and George W. Bush, more recently, Michele Bachmann.
Also, he was the longtime debate coach at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. So he is very effective and he clearly did a good job coaching Romney. The stakes are very high for Romney in Florida, but a loss here would be devastating, but not disqualifying. Unlike Gingrich, he can go on and on for the rest of the primaries.
BLOCK: We heard Don Gonyea mention that the audience has played a large role in these debates with their raucous applause, in some cases, or in the one debate on Monday where there was really no applause that was allowed by NBC. What do you make of that?
LIASSON: The audience has been a factor. They - when they have been cheering and jeering and clapping, it's usually been to Gingrich's advantage. On Monday, NBC asked them to be quiet and they complied. But tonight, CNN has made it very clear that that will not happen. They're going to rev up the crowd as they usually do.
BLOCK: There is debate, Mara, about whether a long drawn out primary race is a good thing or a bad thing for the eventual nominee. There was this question back when Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton were vying for the Democratic nomination. How do you think this primary season so far is affecting the candidate's standing with voters?
LIASSON: Well, what not positively so far. The model for a long campaign being helpful, as you said, was the 2008 Democratic fight. That did elevate Barack Obama, but Mitt Romney's positive ratings have dropped by 6 percent over the course of this primary, from about 30 percent to 24 percent in the Wall Street Journal poll. And in just a two week period, around the South Carolina primary, a Washington Post poll showed that Romney's favorability among independents dropped 17 points.
This is creating a lot of angst among Republicans. On - just on The Wall Street Journal op-ed page in the last week there have been two articles. One with the headline: the GOP deserves to lose, and the other one calling it: mutually assured destruction. So the primary battle has really bloodied these candidates instead of elevating them. And it's exposed a lot of deep divisions inside the Republican Party, a kind of class divide - the Tea Party versus the country club.
BLOCK: OK. Mara, thanks.
LIASSON: Thank you.
BLOCK: That's NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Time now for some of your responses to our program.
And first, my interview yesterday with the CEO of Keen. The company is based in Portland, Oregon. It makes shoes. And we talked with CEO James Curleigh because Keen illustrates something President Obama advocated in his State of the Union Address. It recently opened a factory in the U.S. instead of China. President Obama called it insourcing.
Curleigh told us it not only makes financial sense, it's good marketing.
JAMES CURLEIGH: I think to a certain fan, they actually do connect with the fact that we're a young company and we're trying things. And just the fact that we have an effort and a very real business and brand effort that creates product in America, I think, is important.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
John Fowler(ph) of Vancouver, Washington, is definitely one of those fans. Let's hear it for Keens, he writes.
Mister Fowler goes on to say: My first pair took me across icy, rocky rivers in Yellowstone, provided comfort in the wastes of Alaska, even on Kilimanjaro. And when that pair wore out, I was hammering at the door of the Portland store - they'd just closed, but let me in - and I ordered a pair exactly like the first ones. This is how we'll put America back to work one job at a time.
SIEGEL: And Royce Anderson of Seattle offered this response to the question of whether consumers consider a made in America tag when buying shoes.
Yes, he writes. I search, and I search, and I search. And when I find a store or a maker of anything that is dedicated to production in the U.S., or at least in a country that has reasonable wages and worker protection laws, I become a loyal consumer.
BLOCK: Also this week, we profiled actor John Hawkes, who's made a career disappearing into roles, from the blockbuster "The Perfect Storm" to his Oscar-nominated turn in the indie movie, "Winter's Bone." He told me he's happy not a huge celebrity.
JOHN HAWKES: I have no kind of desire to be a household name, for sure. I don't think I have the face for it, anyway. I don't think I have to worry too much about it. But I'd rather be invisible. I'd rather be a mystery.
BLOCK: Well, Carol McKenzie of Marshall, Wisconsin, writes this: John Hawkes isn't quite as mysterious over the radio as he may feel he is in person. I knew right away I was listening to Bugsy from "The Perfect Storm." The minute I heard him speak, I was immediately sitting at the bar next to Rusty Schwimmer, waiting for George Clooney to walk through the door on his way to catch Moby Dick.
SIEGEL: Well, thanks for all your letters. You can reach us at NPR.org. Click on Contact Us.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
This week marks one year since protestors claimed Cairo's Tahrir Square and went on to oust longtime Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak. In the parliamentary elections that followed, the big winner was the Muslim Brotherhood, whose offshoot, the Freedom and Justice Party, won nearly half the seats. More militant Islamist groups won another 25 percent of the seats.
And we're going to hear now from a senior leader of the Freedom and Justice Party, Amr Darrag who joins us from Cairo.
Welcome to the program, sir.
PROFESSOR AMR DARRAG: Welcome, yes.
SIEGEL: In yesterday's demonstrations in Tahrir Square, it was reported that secular liberals and Islamists rallied separately. The liberals called upon the military to surrender power at once. And your side, the Islamists, didn't. Why not? Why shouldn't the military give up power right now?
DARRAG: Everybody in the country is looking forward for the military to hand over power to civilians. Some people say that this has to take place immediately, while others are looking for a safer way - aiming at handing over fully the full power by mid-2012.
SIEGEL: But you said a safer way. What would be unsafe about the military saying, there's now a parliament and until there's a president, the parliament can rule?
DARRAG: Well, actually we have to realize that we've been under the military rule for more than 60 years. We have to make sure that we don't end up with any ugly situation, any conflict between civilians and the military on the long run.
SIEGEL: I want to hear a bit about what political Islam means to you and your party. We've heard some of your Egyptian supporters say that an Islamist-led parliament should change Egyptian family law - fathers' custody right should be stronger, the age at which can marry should be a lower age. Do you foresee any changes of that sort from a majority Islamist government?
DARRAG: Well, let me clarify this. When we talk about Islam, we talk about Islam as a reference for life; as a reference to guiding our steps in economy and politics, and the ethical conduct in general in the political practice. However, we're not talking about any interference whatsoever in the freedom of individuals.
But when we talk about the principles of Islam as a reference, for example, politics, we talk about democracy versus the oppression that we've been having for a long time. When we talk about the economy, we talk about an economy that's based on social justice, based on fair distribution of the wealth. These are...
SIEGEL: But I want to pursue that a little more, Mr. Darrag. When you say Islam means democracy, in fact, this has been problematic for Islamic countries. And certainly in your part of the world, we've associated Muslim countries with monarchies, with new dictatorial dynasties that have been created. Democracy has been hard to come by.
DARRAG: You're absolutely right and we believe that that happened because we were far from Islam. And if we go back to the real values of Islam, the will of the people is the basis actually for governance. They have the ultimate power. We have been suffering a lot because we were far from these principles.
SIEGEL: Including equal rights for women, something that wouldn't have occurred to people for 1,400 years ago?
DARRAG: Definitely, yes. If you look at the parliament, the party that provided the largest number of women candidates and women members is actually the Freedom and Justice Party.
SIEGEL: The Muslim Brotherhood has been very critical of the old regime, the Mubarak regime's relationship with Israel. If your party gains control of Egyptian defense policy, will it secure the Sinai Peninsula and the border area with Israel, so that the only armed groups operating there will be the Egyptian armed forces - no militias, no terrorists?
DARRAG: Well, actually this is not have to do anything with Israel or any other country. I mean, we have - any good government has to secure its lands, it has to make sure that the national security of the country is maintained, whether we have Israel on the other border or anybody else.
SIEGEL: So any of Egypt's neighbors then, including Israel, will be able to count on Egypt to police the border and prevent any armed group from crossing over into their...
DARRAG: Well, this would be our duty as a good government.
SIEGEL: The US gives Egypt $1 billion a year in military aid. Does your party welcome the continuation of that aid or would you prefer to see it discontinued?
DARRAG: We generally will like to see a better collaboration with the United States, based on equal understanding of the mutual interests of the two countries. What we don't like to see is one side putting its agenda and enforcing it on the other.
The billion-dollar you're talking about is really related to the military aid, and that took place actually following the peace treaty with Israel. And as long as the treaty is maintained, I don't see a reason why this aid should not continue.
SIEGEL: And you would intend to see that the treaty is maintained?
DARRAG: Well, we - you know, according to the international law, we have to respect all treaties and agreements of previous governments. We have - however, the other sides of these agreements have to realize that it's not a one-sided game and the Egyptian people, through the parliament, will have to monitor that.
SIEGEL: But will the Egyptian people be offered a referendum to vote on revocation of the treaty with Israel?
DARRAG: Well, this is not on our agenda. If Israel maintains its commitments, according to the treaty, there will be no reason to speak about this anywhere.
SIEGEL: Well, Mr. Darrag, thank you very much for talking with us.
DARRAG: Thank you very much.
SIEGEL: That's Amr Darrag, who is a leader of Egypt's Freedom and Justice Party, the party allied with the Muslim Brotherhood. He spoke to us from Cairo.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
President Obama was in Nevada today, promoting his efforts to increase oil and gas production.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Today, I'm announcing that my administration will soon open up around 38 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for additional exploration and development, which could result in a lot more production of domestic energy.
BLOCK: NPR's Elizabeth Shogren reports that the president's new petroleum push is unpopular with environmentalists and Republicans.
ELIZABETH SHOGREN, BYLINE: President Obama is starting off the New Year by reshaping himself into a champion, not just of clean energy, but of fossil fuels, too.
OBAMA: For decades, Americans have been talking about - how do we decrease our dependence on foreign oil? Well, my administration has actually begun to do something about it.
SHOGREN: Oil production is up and Americans are using less gasoline. As a result, America is importing less foreign oil than it has for 16 years. The chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee says that's no thanks to President Obama.
REPRESENTATIVE DOC HASTINGS: He has done nothing about it. His rhetoric sounds that way, but in fact, that is not the case.
SHOGREN: Republican Doc Hastings says policies of previous presidents boosted oil production. Hastings says President Obama has stood in the way. For example, he cancelled lease sales in Utah and slowed offshore drilling after the BP spill.
Energy analyst Kevin Book says the president's renewed focus on petroleum shows he gets how crucial the industry is for the future.
KEVIN BOOK: The message that energy production creates jobs has been internalized at the highest level of government.
SHOGREN: And yet, Book says the proposals the president is trumpeting aren't really new. For instance, the lease sale announced today was originally planned by the Bush Administration. In the State of the Union, the president said more offshore leases are on the way in the next five years in the Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska.
Environmentalists say the plan is too aggressive. Frances Beinecke, the executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, was on Obama's national commission on the BP spill.
FRANCES BEINECKE: The oil and gas industry is not investing in the safeguards that are required to ensure that spills don't occur.
SHOGREN: The president's new energy push isn't all about oil. He's calling for more homegrown production of natural gas and clean renewable power, too.
Elizabeth Shogren, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Go up, up, up in Minnesota, up to the boundary waters with Canada. Then if the weather clears, hop onto a tiny research plane and fly 15 miles out across the ice of Lake Superior to the wilderness island of Isle Royale. That's where wildlife ecologist John Vucetich is now and where he's been going every winter for the last 12 years to study wolves and moose. He joins us from the researchers' bunkhouse on Isle Royale. John Vucetich, welcome to the program.
DR. JOHN VUCETICH: Yeah. Thank you.
BLOCK: You're involved - this is the longest running study I've read of any predator-prey system in the world, been going on for more than 50 consecutive years. Why are you studying wolves and moose there on Isle Royale? What's the goal?
VUCETICH: The goal is to basically understand how it is that wolf populations affect populations of their prey. In this case, it's moose and the reason we're interested in that is because wolves and humans sometimes conflict with one another. So this study, a lot of it is to understand how, in fact, it is that wolves affect their prey.
BLOCK: And how are you doing this? How do you track these populations on the island?
VUCETICH: Well, every year, we come out for about seven weeks in the wintertime and we'll fly every single day during this period that the weather will allow us to do so. And a couple of these wolves are radio-collared, so we can find their signals that way.
And much of the time, we're just flying over the island looking for tracks in the snow. And we find the tracks in the snow of these wolves and we follow those tracks until we find the wolves. And then, also, when we're following those tracks, next we can see where it is that they've killed the moose and - because that makes quite a scene on the snow, blood and hair and all that kind of thing. And when we know how often they're killing the moose, then that's a part of how we can figure out their impact.
BLOCK: Well, what have you been finding there in recent years in the work that you're doing?
VUCETICH: Yeah. Well, the wolf population has gone to really quite low numbers. Last year, when we counted them, there were 16 wolves. But maybe more surprisingly, the 16 wolves - only two were females. And if those two females go - you know, if they die before giving birth to more females, then that would be the end of the population. So what we're really keen to pay attention to now is to look for signs of mating.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: I almost hate to ask this, but if you're looking for signs of mating, is it pretty obvious what you're looking for, what those signs would be?
VUCETICH: It is, yeah. The males and females are very hierarchical. There's an alpha female and she's dominant over all the other females and similar for the males. That dominance behavior is real characteristic when both sexes are present.
And also, wolves - the physical appearance of them mating looks a lot like when dogs mate. So, we frequently see that. And it may sound peculiar, but it leaves a distinctive set of tracks in the snow and so we can tell from that, as well.
BLOCK: Wow. Wait, wait. You can see a distinctive set of tracks from an airplane that would tell you that wolves have been mating on the ground?
VUCETICH: Yeah. Well, what they do is, when a male and female wolf mate, we say that they're tied together. And when they're connected like that, they kind of wander around the snow a little bit. Not very far, but just wander around.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
VUCETICH: But, you know, you got eight legs instead of four, all connected, and they don't have a normal gait.
BLOCK: Well, I guess if you've been doing this as long as you have, you would know what that looks like, even without the wolves there.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
VUCETICH: Yeah, yeah.
BLOCK: What do you think accounts for the fact that the population has declined so much?
VUCETICH: Well, the wolf population is low right now, mainly because the moose are so low. There's a special kind of tick that bothers only the moose, and this tick has been quite abundant in recent years. And this tick is also tied to climate change. This tick does much better in warmer weathers and we've had increasingly warm weathers in this last decade.
And then, finally, moose are creatures of the North Country. They do best when it's cold. And these warm weathers are just tough for them. So, climate change is certainly a big, big suspect here.
BLOCK: Well, John Vucetich, enjoy the rest of your time there on Isle Royale this winter. Thanks for talking to us.
VUCETICH: You're welcome. It was great fun to share.
BLOCK: That's wildlife ecologist, John Vucetich, talking with us from Isle Royale, Michigan in Lake Superior. His blog posts are appearing on the New York Times website.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
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We've heard a lot about the role of Greece in eurozone crisis. Greece is the bad kid in the small class of bankrupt nations that have gotten bailouts from the European Union and International Monetary Fund. There's a good kid in that class, too. The EU and IMF say they're pleased with Ireland.
But as NPR's Philip Reeves reports, the Irish are not pleased with them.
PHILIP REEVES, BYLINE: Let's turn back the clock a few years. Life back then was good to Breda Clancy. She'd just moved into her new house on the edge of a pretty market town called Athy.
BREDA CLANCY: A big garden. We have kitchen, lovely kitchen, back kitchen. We have a living room in there. This is our sitting room. We have a study there, which I've turned into a bedroom, so I have six bedrooms really at the moment.
REEVES: Back then, Clancy's house was valued at roughly $650,000. It seemed a good investment. Property values were soaring. Those were the boom years when Ireland was the Celtic tiger, when people went a little crazy.
CLANCY: They were building houses for sport. I mean, I don't who they thought were going to buy them or live in them.
REEVES: That's now a distant memory. Clancy works as a nurse in a government-funded home for the elderly. Thanks to Ireland's austerity program, her rate of pay has been cut by a third. Her pension's also shrunk. So has the value of her home by more than half.
Her house stands out because the others on her block are unoccupied, except when the local vandals drop by. Clancy's stoical about all this, though she admits, it's painful.
CLANCY: Oh, I feel hurt, I suppose, but what can we do? I'm sure it will get better, but how much better it'll get, it'll never be back to the boom again. Never. And I feel, for my children, there won't be a whole lot.
REEVES: One of those children, a daughter, is about to head off to Australia, joining the thousands of Irish emigrating every month in search of work. Unemployment in Ireland's above 14 percent. Clancy and her husband, a bar owner, have two other kids to put through college. From now on, she says, there'll be no more holidays.
Ireland's beginning its second year of austerity. There have been tax rises, wage freezes, layoffs and more besides. This is being supervised by the so-called Troika, the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. These are the bodies that bailed out Ireland after the property bubble burst and its banks collapsed.
The other day, the Troika dropped by for a routine check on Ireland's progress and, at a press conference, delivered a glowing report.
ISTVAN SZEKELY: And I have to say that, so far, the Irish economy's performance is really impressive. The gross coming from net export is very large. The contribution is very large. I'm not suggesting that we don't have yet major challenges. That was my opening statement. But we also have results here.
REEVES: That's Istvan Szekely of the European Commission. The Troika says it's pleased that Ireland's meeting its targets in cutting its once yawning deficit. Many Irish take no pleasure in receiving this pat on the back, as journalist Vincent Browne made clear at the same press conference.
VINCENT BROWNE: Just a minute now. This isn't good enough. This isn't good enough. You people are intervening in this society, causing huge damage by requiring us to make payments, not for the benefit of anybody in Ireland, but for the benefit of European financial institutions. Now, could you explain why the Irish people are inflicted with this burden?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Well, I think I have addressed the question.
BROWNE: You have nothing to say? There's no answer. Is that right?
REEVES: The burden Browne's talking about is one particular debt. When Ireland's now defunct Anglo Irish Bank hit the rocks, the government nationalized it and poured in money from its central bank. Paying back that money is now costing the Irish government about $4 billion a year.
NESSA NI CHASAIDE: We want 100 percent right down on this desk.
REEVES: Nessa Ni Chasaide is part of a new campaign by a coalition of social justice groups to press Ireland's government to suspend repayments.
CHASAIDE: The annual debt is what is keeping Ireland from entering into any possibility of economic recovery. It's a huge percentage of our overall debt.
REEVES: The campaign estimates it'll cost the Irish taxpayer more than $60 billion to settle that debt over the next few decades. It's not part of the bailout agreement. Yet the Troika's worried, if Ireland doesn't pay this money, this will have a domino effect, threatening Europe's banking system.
In Ireland's capital, Dublin, a hut erected by the Occupy Ireland movement is festooned with posters berating financiers and politicians and the Anglo Irish Bank.
Activist Steve Bennett says paying the Anglo debt is ridiculous. He predicts Irish taxpayers will eventually reject it.
STEVE BENNETT: We could pay it back as a people and take it for quite a while. But eventually, we will have to rise up. Eventually, we're going to have to stop it.
REEVES: Stopping it, says Bennett, means a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience.
Philip Reeves, NPR News, London.
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This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
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And I'm Robert Siegel.
The U.S. is filled with Chinese-made products but the reverse is not true, yet. U.S. companies have had a hard time getting Chinese consumers to buy American. There are lots of complicated reasons involving currency and saving rates. But there's also a simple reason - sometimes American products need a little help translating.
Robert Smith of NPR's Planet Money Team has the story of how one iconic American brand struggled in China.
ROBERT SMITH, BYLINE: I hold in my hand a normal Oreo cookie.
LORNA DAVIS: Do you mean an American Oreo cookie?
SMITH: Yeah, I guess I do. There was a day when all Oreos were American. But Lorna Davis works in a very different world.
DAVIS: I'm in cookie land.
SMITH: And cookie land these days spans the globe. Davis was born in South Africa, ran the Oreo cookie brand in China and is now calling from a biscuit conference in India, which is why I have to be very specific about which kind of Oreo I'm holding. It is round...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
DAVIS: Yes.
SMITH: ...black and white. And the taste? Well, this is where it gets complicated.
DAVIS: There are 135 components of an Oreo cookie. So, there's bitterness and there's roastedness, burntness...
SMITH: And then there's the white stuff. I just scrapped some off with my bottom teeth.
DAVIS: Exactly. And that is generally quite sweet and quite creamy.
SMITH: And it has been for 100 years. So, no one gave the recipe much thought when Kraft Foods introduced the Oreo cookie to China in the 1990s. Slap a Chinese label on there and you're good to go.
(SOUNDBITE OF AN OREO COOKIE AD)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Singing) Oh, oh, oh, bright ideas and an Oreo cookie. It's a bright...
SMITH: Lorna Davis says Oreo did okay in China. But it wasn't huge. I know it seems crazy but it wasn't until a decade later, when Kraft started to really ask the Chinese consumer what they thought of the Oreo.
DAVIS: They said it a little bit too sweet and it's a little bit too bitter.
SMITH: And it turns out that if you didn't grow up with Oreos and all that emotional attachment, it's a weird tasting little thing. And this started a whole process in the Chinese division of Kraft of rethinking what the essence of an Oreo cookie really is. They changed the recipe and made the cookie more chocolaty, the cream less intensely sweet.
DAVIS: So they said this is a better balance.
SMITH: And then it started to sell. But the amazing thing was that once Davis' team began to tinker with the classic features of an Oreo, why not go all the way. Why does it have to be black and white?
I have here a green one? This is green tea?
DAVIS: Green teas ice cream.
SMITH: Why does an Oreo even need to be round? Kraft sent me a rectangular Oreo, about the length of my index finger. It's kind of difficult to twist open in the traditional manner.
I feel like I've never eaten an Oreo before in my life because it's falling all over the place.
DAVIS: But it dunks pretty well.
SMITH: So it almost becomes a philosophical question. What is an Oreo if it isn't round, black and crazy sweet? What is the essential Oreo-ness?
What the Chinese team at Kraft figured out is that an Oreo is an experience. Their shorthand for it: twist, lick and dunk. All their crazy new shapes and flavors of Oreo wouldn't work in China, unless they could somehow build up that same emotional resonance that Americans feel about the cookie.
DAVIS: In the early days, people said there's no way that Chinese consumers will twist, lick and dunk, because that's a very strangely American habit.
SMITH: But luckily for the Oreo team, the Chinese consumer was just starting to respond to American-style emotional advertising. Oreo launched a series of TV ads in China where cute children demonstrate to their parents and other adults how to eat an Oreo cookie in the Americans style. Here's a cute kid with basketball star Yao Ming getting instruction.
(SOUNDBITE OF AN OREO CHINESE AD)
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: (Foreign language spoken)
YAO MING: (Foreign language spoken)
DAVIS: And to see a father humbling listening to his child explained this new ritual seemed to really connect with Chinese consumers.
SMITH: Davis says they saw sales of Oreos double in China, then double again and again. It's now the bestselling cookie there. And there's a lesson.
DAVIS: Any foreign company that comes to China and says, oh, goody-goody, there's, you know, one and half billion people here and I only need one present of that - and I've heard that from so many people - you're going to get into trouble because you have to understand the way the consumers operate.
SMITH: And sometimes the results surprise you. That rectangular wafer Oreo is no longer just in China. You can now buy it in Canada and in Australia. And perhaps someday it will come home to the United States for the first time.
Robert Smith, NPR News New York.
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This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel. "Shrek," "Hitch," Gattaca," what's in a name, a movie name? Well, the question in Hollywood has nothing to do with smelling as sweet by any other name. As our critic Bob Mondello asks: Would that rose, by any other name, sell as many tickets?
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: On a trip to Latin America recently, I saw a theater poster for a musical direct from Broadway called "La Novicia Rebelde." Now, I'm pretty good with Broadway titles, but this Spanish one - literally something like "The Rebel Nun" - wasn't ringing a bell until I saw the credits at the bottom for Rodgers & Hammerstein. Suddenly, I could see a whole flock of nuns singing about how to solve a problema like Maria.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSICAL, "LA NOVICIA REBELDE")
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (as characters) (Singing in foreign language)
MONDELLO: Now, as titles go, "The Rebel Nun" isn't much like "The Sound of Music," but someone clearly decided it would tell Latin-American audiences what the show was about, which is, of course, the point of titles, even when translation isn't an issue. Book titles, for instance, often fall by the wayside as projects work their way to the multiplex. Take the classic science-fiction story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" That didn't sound nearly ominous enough for what Ridley Scott was putting on screen.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "BLADE RUNNER")
RUTGER HAUER: (as Roy Batty) Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
MONDELLO: So "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" became "Bladerunner." A few years later, test groups thought the title "Shoeless Joe" suggested a story about a homeless person, so for the screen, that baseball novel got rechristened "Field of Dreams." And anyone want to argue that D.W. Griffith didn't know what he was doing when he called his silent epic about the Deep South "The Birth of a Nation"?
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE BIRTH OF A NATION")
MONDELLO: The book it was based on, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan, was titled "The Clansman," not quite as universal. Griffith remained conscious of the power of titles. To atone for the public furor over the racism in "Birth of a Nation," his next epic was a morality tale that he called "Intolerance."
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE BIRTH OF A NATION")
MONDELLO: Sometimes, movie projects go into production with dummy titles that no one expects to make it into release. The film that made Julia Roberts a star, "Pretty Woman," was originally called "Three Thousand" because that's what her call-girl character charged Richard Gere: $3,000 for the night. And back in the 1990s, there was a script that got shopped around Hollywood with the descriptive but cumbersome moniker "Teenage Sex Comedy That Can Be Made for Under 10 Million Dollars, That Your Reader Will Love But the Executive Will Hate."
Once it got green-lit, the producers opted for something a little shorter that would highlight the film's most memorable scene: "American Pie." On one occasion, it was a typo that turned a mediocre title into a much better one. Pierce Brosnan's second stint as 007 was originally going to be called "Tomorrow Never Lies." But a secretary mistyped a single letter one day, the producers loved it, and her mistake stuck.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "TOMORROW NEVER DIES")
SHERYL CROW: (Singing) Tomorrow never dies.
MONDELLO: Often, a lot of care and consideration go into title changes that don't make much difference: "Predator" instead of "Hunter," say, or Pixar's "The Incredibles" instead of "The Invincibles" or Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" instead of "The Cut-Whore Killings." OK, that last one is probably an improvement. But research established that men didn't like the title "The Last First Kiss" for a Will Smith movie, so they renamed it "Hitch." Not sure why that's better.
And there's nothing saying producers will only change titles to give their films extra oomph. George Lucas famously reconsidered the title for his third "Star Wars" movie after the posters were printed and changed "Revenge of the Jedi" to "Return of the Jedi," saying that revenge was not a Jedi concept. And then there's that classic Steven Spielberg hit "A Boy's Life." Not ringing any bells? Well, it made it pretty far into production. Try putting the words "A Boy's Life" into imdb.com and see what pops up.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL")
HENRY THOMAS: (as Elliot) It's too bumpy. We'll have to walk from here. E.T.
MONDELLO: Yup, "A Boy's Life" became "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial." A bit more commercial, wouldn't you say? I'm Bob Mondello.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL")
THOMAS: (as Elliott) Not so high. Not so high.
SIEGEL: And you can find a list of many more films that changed titles on the way to the multiplex at npr.org/movies.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL")
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
On a military procurement manifest, they are S-9s, but when the quarter master at boot camp hands you your new eyeglasses, you are holding a pair of BCGs. That's short for birth control glasses; thick-framed with large lenses said to make the wearer so unattractive, the chances of connecting with a member of the opposite sex are vanishingly small.
Well now, the military is offering a new style - a nod to the fact that the standard-issue spectacles are so ugly, many troops stuff them in the back of their trunk as soon as they leave training.
Well, joining me now is Edward Grout, a retired Navy optometrist who now practices in Jacksonville, Florida.
Welcome to the program, Dr.
DR. EDWARD GROUT: Thank you and my pleasure to be here.
SIEGEL: Tell us, first of all about BCGs. Do they deserve that unfortunate name?
GROUT: Well, I believe that they do. Over the years, you know, when I entered the Navy, initially, we had some gray frames and then we went to some black frames. When the brown frames came out, we were all a little disappointed in the appearance and, judging by the expression that I would see on the active duty people when they were picking up the glasses, I would have to say that that designation of birth control glasses was appropriate.
SIEGEL: So you were not making these people feel cool when they got their glasses. What about the choices that are available now?
GROUT: Well, I think time will probably tell whether or not the new 5A frame will be considered an improvement. I believe that it will because of the fact that, nowadays, it seems to be a little more stylish for a lot of individuals to go back to that Buddy Holly appearance.
SIEGEL: So the new frames, which are black...
GROUT: Yes.
SIEGEL: ...are different in color from the brown ones that...
GROUT: Yes.
SIEGEL: But, in shape and size, are they remarkably different?
GROUT: You know, they are a little bit different. I believe that there's possibly a little less vertical dimension to the lens.
SIEGEL: A little less Harry Potter look there in the glasses?
GROUT: Yes, exactly. And they will come, obviously, in several different frame sizes.
SIEGEL: You know, your observation about Buddy Holly-like frames - and I was reading recently about the fact that John Lennon made granny glasses chic. They were the free glasses the Brits got from the National Health Service for poor people.
GROUT: Yes.
SIEGEL: This would suggest that, if you're going to take anywhere from the mid-'90s until 2012 for the military to introduce new frames, why bother? By that time, the old styles could come back.
GROUT: Well, you know, that is true. The only thing that I would say is that, from the mid-'90s on, the active duty, once they got out of their basic training, did have a little bit of a choice. It was mainly the recruits, the people that were entry level people, were the ones that had absolutely no choice, were given that S9 frame. That's probably why, maybe, that it wasn't possibly the highest priority item to work on.
SIEGEL: Well, Dr. Grout, thank you very much for talking with us about the military and eyeglass frames.
GROUT: Well, thank you for having me.
SIEGEL: Dr. Grout is an optometrist in Jacksonville, Florida, and he is a retired Navy optometrist. We're talking about the military's replacement of the old S9s with new - not brown, but black - eyeglass frames.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: While the old BCG frames might not have inspired many romances, they did inspire this YouTube video.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: It was produced by midshipmen at the Naval Academy celebrating the military's iconic ugly and now retired eyeglass frames.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
President Obama also used his State of the Union message to advance his interest that more kids actually get to college. He called on states to require students to stay in school until they graduate or until they turn 18.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When students don't walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma.
SIEGEL: The White House cited studies that showed that raising the compulsory schooling age helps prevent kids from leaving school.
NPR's Claudio Sanchez reports on how much of this is true and how much of it may be wishful thinking.
CLAUDIO SANCHEZ, BYLINE: For Paul Leather, New Hampshire's deputy commissioner of education, President Obama's call is the right call.
PAUL LEATHER: Well, what it does is it sets the moral imperative so that students and parents and educators become committed to the idea that each student will in fact graduate.
SANCHEZ: New Hampshire recently became one of only 21 states that require kids to stay in school until 18. Leather says it did so after looking at the research.
LEATHER: What we found both in national and international research is that when you raise the compulsory age of education, the graduation and retention rates will in fact increase.
SANCHEZ: So, yes, there's evidence kids might stay in school a little longer. But do these laws actually lower the dropout rate? Not really, says Russell Rumberger, professor of education at U.C. Santa Barbara and author of the book "Dropping Out." Requiring kids to stay in school until they're 18 sounds like good policy, says Rumberger, but it doesn't have the impact people think.
RUSSELL RUMBERGER: You can't just look at the graduation rates or dropout rates by a state and relate it to its compulsory schooling age and say, aha, there's a direct connection.
SANCHEZ: Rumberger says all you have to do is look at the 21 states where the compulsory schooling age is already 18. In Nevada, the dropout rate is 58 percent; Louisiana, 43 percent; California, 37 percent. The figures in the other 18 states aren't much better. And then, there are states like Kentucky, where kids can leave school as early as 16. That's been the law since 1934. And yet, Kentucky has in recent years dramatically lowered its dropout rate by focusing on the causes. Lisa Gross is with the Kentucky Department of Education.
LISA GROSS: The reason kids drop out in Kentucky - and I suspect that this is the case nationwide - is not because they're falling behind, it's because they don't see a connection between what they're learning in high school and what their lives are going to be like as adults.
SANCHEZ: Gross says Kentucky has worked really hard to provide students multiple pathways to graduation. It has created a support system and gotten parents involved. Although holding on to some kids is not cheap or easy, says Gross.
GROSS: If you force children to stay in school when they don't want to be there, schools spend a lot of time addressing discipline problems and other issues that pop up.
SANCHEZ: Still, Gross says President Obama's remarks were important. Russell Rumberger agrees, as long as people don't come away with the expectation that raising the compulsory age to 18 is going to solve the nation's dropout crisis.
RUMBERGER: I don't want to discount it. It's still - it's an important thing to do in the right direction. But by itself, it's probably not going to make a big improvement.
SANCHEZ: Claudio Sanchez, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
I'm Melissa Block.
And we begin this hour in the classroom. In the State of the Union address, President Obama outlined a number of proposals to improve American education. In a moment, fighting the dropout rate.
But first, President Obama announced to push to increase federal support for college students and to pressure schools to keep tuition low.
As NPR's Larry Abramson reports, higher education officials are skeptical.
LARRY ABRAMSON, BYLINE: It's not hard to persuade students at a big state university that government should do more to keep tuition cost down. And President Obama found a receptive audience at the University of Michigan today for the idea that state budget cuts threatened access to public schools.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We know that these state budget cuts have been the largest factor in tuition increases at public colleges over the past decade.
ABRAMSON: To reverse that trend, the White House wants to increase a number of programs, grants, work study and the Perkins Loan program. And he wants to do it in a targeted way, giving more of those benefits to states and schools that keep tuition down and ensure students' success. Raise tuition too much and you risk getting fewer federal dollars.
OBAMA: We're telling the states, if you can find new ways to bring down the cost of college and make it easier for more students to graduate, we'll help you do it.
ABRAMSON: Sounds expensive, right? Well, Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Finaid.org says it doesn't have to be.
MARK KANTROWITZ: Extending the Perkins Loan program from about $1 billion a year to $8 billion a year is actually profitable to the federal government.
ABRAMSON: Because the money gets paid back with interest. But Kantrowitz says this idea probably will never generate enough cash to pay for all the other ideas, doubling the number of work study jobs and preventing an increase in the interest rate on student loans. You can expect to see duels with Congress over the actual cost of these ideas. Kantrowitz questions whether it makes sense to expand these college aid funds while Congress is already trimming the most important program for low income students, Pell Grants.
KANTROWITZ: In particular, Congress reduced the income threshold at which a student receives a full Pell Grant from $32,000 to $23,000.
ABRAMSON: Kantrowitz says that cut could force some students to drop out. Colleges and universities say they want to cut costs, but they do not want Washington deciding which schools are sincere about holding tuition down. Terry Hartle of the American Council on Education says how will the government decide whom to blame for tuition increases?
TERRY HARTLE: In 40 of the 50 states, public colleges and universities don't set their own tuition set by the legislature, set by state governing boards and other actors.
ABRAMSON: Hartle says, for example, it would not make sense to punish California universities for recent tuition hikes. These schools are already suffering from massive state cutbacks. The president did get credit for raising the profile of tuition problems. Richard Vedder is with the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
RICHARD VEDDER: He is at least recognizing the need to increase the negative consequences to schools for continuing to raise their tuition.
ABRAMSON: But at the same time, Vedder says the proposal to increase student aid will defeat the whole purpose.
VEDDER: It makes it easier for people to borrow money, which increases the demand for schooling and pushes up tuition.
ABRAMSON: Still, many student groups welcomed the fact that the president is keeping education front and center as his re-election campaign gets underway. They also applauded a plan to create a college scorecard meant to help families figure out the true cost of going to college.
Larry Abramson, NPR News.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Kano is the biggest city in mainly Muslim northern Nigeria and it's been the scene this week of deadly attacks by Islamist militants. Nearly 200 people have been killed. Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation and the bombings have traumatized civilians, especially those from the country's largely Christian south.
As NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton from Kano, they feel under threat from the rebels they are fleeing the city in droves.
OFEIBEA QUIST-ARCTON, BYLINE: It's bedlam at New Road bus station here in the heart of Kano. Scores of children, women, and men are milling around with huge bundles and baggage in all shapes and sizes, waiting to be loaded onto half a dozen buses. Others are already on board. They're heading south out of town and they're in a hurry, desperate to leave the city and northern Nigeria.
Thirty-two-year-old businesswoman and mother of four boys, Kemi Ezioha, says she's scared.
KEMI EZIOHA: In the bomb blasts, they normally kill both Christians and Muslims. We can't go to church. We can't pray. We can't do anything. All we do is, you know, we are not safe. We are not safe.
QUIST-ARCTON: Others, like Glory Ndudi, standing nearby, nod vigorously in agreement. She's wearing a red T-shirt and a deep frown etched on her forehead. Her five children have already taken their seats on a bus.
GLORY NDUDI: No, we don't want to stay. We want to go. We want to go. We are tired. Can't you see the way I'm feeling? I'm shaking here. I don't want to stay. I'm going. I don't want to die here so I'm going...
QUIST-ARCTON: Both Ezioha and Ndudi are Christians, originally from southern Nigeria. They're part of the Igbo business community that has lived in Kano for generations, alongside the mainly Muslim majority in northern Nigeria's metropolis. But now, they're too frightened to remain here because of the threat from the radical Islamist Boko Haram sect. Deadly multiple bombings last week have shaken residents in Kano, and shaken many people's faith in being able to continue living side-by-side with assailants they feel want them dead.
Sweating in the heat of the bus, Glory Ndudi's 13-year-old daughter, Clara, has this message for Boko Haram.
CLARA NDUDI: (Through translator) We want them to just stop it and lead a good life, like other people. They should look around. They are taking lives - old women and little children. They're taking people's lives and want them to stop.
QUIST-ARCTON: Boko Haram initially targeted government and security institutions, in what appeared to be a battle against the state. But in recent weeks, the militants have also bombed churches and are warning Christians to leave the north.
Governor Rabi'u Musa Kwankwaso gathered community, religious and traditional leaders together this week to discuss the way forward for Kano. Leonard Nwosu heads the umbrella association for the city's Igbo community. He says that while the government has promised to step up protection for civilians, that isn't enough for many people.
LEONARD NWOSU: Well, it's really sad. But what do we do? Life is more sacred, life is more precious. Life is first. If they wish to stay, the government has assured us of security. When they feel the security has finally been restored in Kano state, they might come back.
QUIST-ARCTON: Observers warn that the problem in the north is not between Christians and Muslims, but about Nigerians, some of them Boko Haram members who feel let down by the authorities and excluded from jobs, opportunities and education. So they use violence to try to polarize Africa's most populous nation and capture the president's attention.
These explanations, though, do not convince Kemi Ezioha.
EZIOHA: No. No, I don't really think I'll come back to Kano. This damn place, I'm sick and tired of this place. I don't think I'm going back. I'm leaving Kano for good. Too bad, but I don't have a choice. I don't have a choice.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: We are going. We are going. We are going. We are going...
QUIST-ARCTON: That's troubling for many people here.
Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, NPR News, Kano.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
I was reminded today of these lines from the poet William Carlos Williams: It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. I was thinking about that because we're starting an experiment on the program to find poetry in the news. Each month, we'll be bringing in a poet to spend the day with us at ALL THINGS CONSIDERED and, at the end, to compose a poem reflecting on the day's news.
And to start our series off, we've invited Tracy K. Smith to be what we're calling our news poet. Her latest book of poems is titled "Life on Mars." And all day, Tracy has been here following us around, thinking about today's news and shaping that into verse. Tracy, welcome. It's been great having you here. How did it go?
TRACY K. SMITH: Oh, it's been delightful and a little terrifying also.
BLOCK: I was thinking this is sort of an unfair task to have you do a poem on command in such a limited amount of time and specifically to sort of be following on the headlines. Is that a weird position to be in for you?
SMITH: Well, only the time constraint, I think. I often find that news events are things I'm thinking about and wrestling with and trying to understand better. So generally, I find myself taking time and trying to maybe inform myself a little bit more about stories that have struck me in one way or another. And writing a poem is one of the first approaches that I take to - trying to understand something a little bit better.
BLOCK: Huh. When it came to actually sitting down and starting to write, how did you have the germ of an idea? What was the trigger for you?
SMITH: I find that it's easiest to get into a poem if I can find a particular subjective point of view. And so one of the stories in today's news about Nigerian southerners leaving the north in an attempt to kind of escape violence really struck a chord because of the women's voices that were quoted in the story. And so the sense of individual lives and even just individual bodies gave me a starting point.
BLOCK: Great. Well, Tracy K. Smith, let's listen to the poem that you came up with today.
SMITH: "New Road Station." History is in a hurry. It moves like a woman, corralling her children onto a crowded bus. History spits go, go, go, lurching at the horizon, hammering the driver's headrest with her fist. Nothing else moves. The flies settle in place, watching with their million eyes, never bored. The crows strike their bargain with the breeze. They cluck and caw at the women in their frenzy, the ones who suck their teeth, whose skirts are bathed in mud. But history is not a woman, and it is not the crowd forming in a square.
It is not the bright swarm of voices chanting no and now, or even the rapt silence of a room where a film of history is right now being screened. Perhaps history is the bus that will only wait so long before cranking its engine and barreling down the road. Maybe it is the voice coming in through the radio, like a long distance call, or the child in the crook of his mother's arm who believes history must sleep inside a tomb or the belly of a bomb.
BLOCK: That's the poem "New Road Station" written today here at ALL THINGS CONSIDERED by Tracy K. Smith. Tracy, thanks so much for coming in.
SMITH: Thank you.
BLOCK: And stay tuned: Once a month, we plan to invite a poet into our process, and we'll bring you their lyrical impression of the day's news.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
A senior delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency arrives in Tehran on Sunday. They'll make one more effort to probe Iran's nuclear program for signs of nuclear weapons work. The IAEA disclosed its concerns in a controversial report last November. Until now, Iran has refused to discuss evidence that it is engaging in nuclear weapons development.
But as NPR's Mike Shuster reports, international pressure on Tehran is growing and may help to shake loose some answers.
MIKE SHUSTER, BYLINE: For years, the IAEA has been trying to get answers to some very uncomfortable questions about Iran's nuclear program. The Iranians have dismissed the matter, claiming the intelligence the agency has comes from the United States and Israel, and is forged.
But in last November's report, the IAEA said it now possesses consistent intelligence on Iran's activities from numerous states. Not so easy to dismiss, says Leonard Spector, a specialist on nuclear issues at the Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies in Monterey.
DR. LEONARD SPECTOR: The Iranians have been put on the spot by the actual content of the last IAEA report, you know, accusing them of being involved in militarily-related activities.
SHUSTER: Spector notes there are several areas where Iran has pursued nuclear activities that could only be related to weapons.
SPECTOR: There are questions about experiments with explosives, which would be relevant to detonating a nuclear device. There are documents that they have regarding certain components that are shaped in a way that would only be suitable for a nuclear device.
SHUSTER: The agency also possesses intelligence on Iran's work with neutron initiators that are used to spark a nuclear detonation. And it has received the information from as many as 10 nations, notes Muhammad Sahimi, an Iran analyst who writes for the website Tehran Bureau.
DR. MUHAMMAD SAHIMI: That also made it tougher for Iran to claim that these are all based on forged documents and discredited reports. So in that sense, Iran has been in a tighter position than before.
SHUSTER: Still, Sahimi says, Iran is likely to fall back on its old explanations.
SAHIMI: I don't expect any breakthrough during this upcoming visit to Tehran, simply because neither side has really changed its position. The IAEA insists that Iran should explain some of these issues, and Iran has insisted that a lot of these issues are actually fake.
SHUSTER: This upcoming set of talks in Tehran is rare. The IAEA sends its monitors into Iran every month to check on known nuclear activities, such as uranium enrichment. The last talks to probe the more puzzling questions were held three years ago.
The United States cautiously welcomed the effort to discuss these unresolved issues, in the words of State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland.
VICTORIA NULAND: There were a huge number of questions raised by the November report. They will be seeking to answer those questions. And, you now, it's incumbent on Iran to be supportive.
SHUSTER: The upcoming talks were set some weeks ago. And then, in mid-January, Iran also agreed to hold negotiations with the U.S., the European Union, and Russia and China over its known nuclear activities.
But earlier this week, the Europeans decided to impose what amounts to an oil embargo on Iran, the toughest sanctions against Iran so far, an action that pleased Britain's foreign secretary, William Hague.
WILLIAM HAGUE: This shows the resolve of the European Union and is absolutely right to do this, in view of Iran's continued breach of U.N. Security Council resolutions and refusal to come to meaningful negotiations on the nuclear program.
SHUSTER: It's not clear yet whether these sanctions, which don't take full effect until July, will persuade Iran to negotiate more seriously or will make it more intransigent.
Leonard Spector is hopeful the pressure will do what it's meant to do.
SPECTOR: The totality of the pressures that are being brought to bear are quite substantial. It's a big change from a year or two ago. And it would be surprising not to see a little bit of movement, at least, from the Iranians. And perhaps, you know, we'll find to our surprise that we're really about to make some progress.
SHUSTER: The IAEA's visit to Tehran begins on Sunday and is expected to last for three days.
Mike Shuster, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
As he campaigns for the Republican nomination, Newt Gingrich almost always works the name of Ronald Reagan into his speeches. In fact, Gingrich's name dropping is so common that it's being criticized by Mitt Romney and the superPAC that backs him.
NPR's Brian Naylor has that story.
BRIAN NAYLOR, BYLINE: Sometimes, Gingrich invokes the name of Ronald Reagan to associate himself with the policies of the former president, as he did in this speech in St. Petersburg earlier this week.
NEWT GINGRICH: When I worked with President Reagan, we adopted a lower taxed, less regulation, more American energy policy and it led to 16 million new jobs.
NAYLOR: Sometimes, he invokes Reagan's name as an inspiration, as he did a few days later in central Florida.
GINGRICH: Because I was involved in that period and because I lived through it, I will confess to you, I am channeling Ronald Reagan in 1975, '76 and I'm channeling the way that he used the Panama Canal and the fact that he didn't back down. He lost five straight primaries and he didn't quit for a day.
NAYLOR: Sometimes, Gingrich claims to be Reagan's political heir.
GINGRICH: In 1995, at the Goldwater Institute, Nancy Reagan said that Ronald Reagan's torch had been passed to me as speaker of the House and that I was carrying out the values he believed in.
NAYLOR: And he's more or less right. Here's what the former first lady actually said after Republicans won a majority in the House and elected Gingrich speaker following the 1994 elections.
NANCY REAGAN: Barry Goldwater handed the torch to Ronnie and, in turn, Ronnie turned that torch over to Newt and the Republican members of Congress to keep that dream alive.
NAYLOR: And, in fact, Gingrich has been endorsed by Michael Reagan, the president's son, who said Gingrich exemplifies the conservative principles his father championed. But Gingrich's relationship with Ronald Reagan was a bit more complicated. He was a back bencher in Congress when Reagan was in the White House and he wasn't always supportive of the then president, writing in the National Review online, former Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams recalls Gingrich criticizing Reagan's policy in Afghanistan, saying it was marked by, quote, "impotence and incompetence."
In a conference call arranged by the Romney campaign today, Dov Zakheim, a former Defense Department official in the Reagan administration, dismissed Gingrich.
DOV ZAKHEIM: He just wasn't a factor, other than a sort of a gadfly who criticized Mr. Reagan on occasion. But if you read the memoires of Cap Weinberger or George Shultz, you won't even see Newt Gingrich's name mentioned at all. He simply was not a major factor.
NAYLOR: Romney has also directly questioned Gingrich's ties with Reagan, raising the issue at a recent debate.
MITT ROMNEY: I mean, I looked at the Reagan diary. You're mentioned once in Ronald Reagan's diary.
NAYLOR: And Restore Our Future, the superPAC backing Romney, put out this ad making much the same charge.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: From the debates, you'd think Newt Gingrich was Ronald Reagan's vice president.
GINGRICH: I worked with President Ronald Reagan. Worked with Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan playbook. President Reagan. Reagan. Reagan.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Gingrich exaggerates, dropping Reagan's name 50 times. But in his diaries, Reagan mentioned Gingrich...
NAYLOR: In response, at last night's debate, Gingrich pointed to Romney's unsuccessful run for the Senate and how he then distanced himself from the Reagan-Bush era.
GINGRICH: In '94, running against Teddy Kennedy, he said flatly, I don't want to go back to the Reagan-Bush era. I was an independent.
NAYLOR: There are several ironies about all this back and forth. In the battle over Reagan's legacy, both Gingrich and Romney forget the 11th commandment popularized by the former president. Thou shalt not attack a fellow Republican.
And while for older Republicans, Reagan remains a touchstone, for young voters, this is a squabble over a figure familiar only from history books and perhaps grainy YouTube videos.
Brian Naylor, NPR News with the Gingrich campaign in Miami.
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Most of the coverage of last night's Republican debate has focused on the clashes between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney over relatively personal issues. Those include Romney's wealth and whether or not Gingrich ever lobbied.
As NPR's Julie Rovner reports, this 19th debate also featured one of the liveliest exchanges yet over the very public issue of health care.
JULIE ROVNER, BYLINE: The health issue was raised, not by a member of the media, but by a voter, Jacksonville resident Lynn Frazier. She described herself as unemployed for the first time in 10 years.
LYNN FRASIER: And unable to afford health care benefits. What type of hope can you promise me and others in my position?
ROVNER: None of the candidates pointed out that Ms. Frazier would likely get help under the Affordable Care Act, the federal law that passed in 2010. Depending on her income, she'll either be eligible for Medicaid or a subsidy to help her buy insurance starting in two years.
One thing all the candidates agree on is they want to see that law repealed. But Frazier's question sparked quite a debate between former Senator Rick Santorum and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.
Santorum said the Massachusetts law passed under Romney's stewardship in 2006 is too close to the federal law for Republicans to make health care an issue this fall.
RICK SANTORUM: And it does not provide the contrast we need with Barack Obama if we're going to take on that most important issue. We cannot give the issue of health care away in this election.
ROVNER: Romney insisted that's not the case, that the Massachusetts law and the federal law differ in significant ways. But then he launched into an eloquent justification for the requirement at the heart of both measures, the so-called individual insurance mandate.
MITT ROMNEY: Under federal law, if someone doesn't have insurance, then we have to care for them in the hospitals, give them free care. So we said, no more. No more free riders. We're insisting on personal responsibility.
ROVNER: In fact, says John McDonough, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, Romney did something President Obama himself failed to do in his State of the Union earlier this week.
JOHN MCDONOUGH: Romney has given, in this entire presidential campaign, last evening, what I believe is the most effective and persuasive rationale and defense of the individual mandate.
ROVNER: The bad news for Romney, however, at least in a GOP primary, is that it's not just the individual insurance requirement that the Massachusetts and federal health laws have in common, says McDonough, who was intimately involved in the drafting of both measures.
MCDONOUGH: And the similarities go far, far beyond the mandate. The essential architecture of the insurance reforms in the Affordable Care Act are taken wholly from the Massachusetts health reform laws.
ROVNER: On the other hand, Santorum may have over-spoken when he claimed that the Massachusetts law isn't working very well. Sharon Long is a professor at the University of Minnesota. Just this week, the policy journal Health Affairs published her study looking at the Massachusetts program's first five years in operation. She says, overall, the state's doing very well in terms of getting nearly all of its citizens insured.
SHARON LONG: Including this year - for the first time, we're seeing reductions in emergency department use and also some improvements in health status. So, really, some very positive changes that came with health reform.
ROVNER: Positive for Massachusetts' residents, perhaps. Positive for Mitt Romney's chances to win the Republican nomination? That still remains to be seen.
Julie Rovner, NPR News.
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Now, a dispatch from the House Democrats' retreat. The rank-and-file have spent the last few days on Maryland's Eastern Shore for their annual gathering. They're strategizing for the year to come. And today, President Obama flew out to join them and to offer a pep talk.
NPR's Andrea Seabrook headed out to the shore as well, and she sent this report.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Ho.
ANDREA SEABROOK, BYLINE: The head of the Democratic Caucus, John Larson, whipped up the crowd. Democrats, he said, came out of the president's State of the Union address this week with a fresh, new message...
REPRESENTATIVE JOHN LARSON: That reignited and energized this caucus...
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
LARSON: ...but more importantly, the American people inspired. We came here to work.
SEABROOK: Lawmakers jumped to their feet, cheering the arrival of the Democrat in chief.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE AND CHEERING)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Thank you.
SEABROOK: President Obama recapped many of the themes in his State of the Union speech, stressing manufacturing, bringing outsourced jobs back to the U.S., leveling the playing field, he said, for the middle class.
OBAMA: We are focusing on companies that are investing right here in the United States because we believe that when you make it in America, everybody benefits, everybody does well.
SEABROOK: The president also talked about the biggest thorn in his side: the House Republicans. In their year in the majority, the GOP and Democrats have tussled over even the most basic functions of government. Voters are starting to understand that, said Mr. Obama, but that doesn't mean Democrats should stop trying to work with them.
OBAMA: Wherever we have an opportunity, wherever there is the possibility that the other side is putting some politics aside for just a nanosecond in order to get something done for the American people, we've got to be right there ready to meet them. We've got to be right there ready to meet them.
SEABROOK: Americans are facing too many problems right now to stop trying, the president said.
OBAMA: On the other hand, where they obstruct, where they're unwilling to act, where they're more interested in party than they are in country, more interested in the next election than the next generation, then we've got to call them out on it.
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OBAMA: We've got to call them out on it.
SEABROOK: That's a preview of Democrats' election message: They've done everything they can, they'll say, and Republicans have played politics. Vice President Joe Biden spoke to the lawmakers earlier today, wondering out loud how the GOP can expect to govern when compromise is a dirty word.
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Who do you make a deal with? Who can you reach out and shake hands with and say, we have a bargain? That's the way this country has always functioned.
SEABROOK: And as for the Republican presidential hopefuls, Biden said whoever is nominated, whether it's Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney or someone else, he will provide a stark contrast to how the Democrats approach governing.
BIDEN: When these guys out there are saying let Detroit go bankrupt or poor people have no habit of working or the Barack Obama is the food stamp president, I think it's not just political theater. I really think they believe it.
SEABROOK: That, said Biden and President Obama, may be an advantage for Democrats this election year. The message they're sending is so very different from the Republicans', they said, that come November, the choice voters have will be crystal clear. Andrea Seabrook, NPR News, Cambridge, Maryland.
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And I'm Robert Siegel. Fresh from last night's debate, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney campaigned across Florida today. The two leading GOP presidential candidates spent the morning in Miami, where they're looking to shore up support from Florida's Hispanic community. NPR's Greg Allen has our story.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: Newt Gingrich started the day speaking to an influential business group in Miami, the Latin Builders Association. Later, he spoke before the Hispanic Leadership Network, a group devoted to building Republican support among Latinos. He laid out his case for an activist policy in Latin America, taking a harder stance against Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, doing more to help Mexico battle drug cartels.
When he came to Puerto Rico, Gingrich said, he supported the island's right to determine its status. An audience member asked him to take a stand. Are you for statehood or not?
NEWT GINGRICH: I just said what I believe and if you don't like it, I'm sorry we disagree. I believe the people of Puerto Rico should make the decision.
ALLEN: Florida's large Puerto Rican community is likely to be a larger factor in the general election than in the primary. In 2008, Florida Puerto Ricans went for Barack Obama and helped him carry the state. Mitt Romney took the stage about an hour later. He was clearly feeling good from his performance Thursday night in Jacksonville.
MITT ROMNEY: I want to thank you and this organization for having helped sponsor the debate last night. I thought it was a delightful debate. I loved it.
ALLEN: Romney handled a question about Puerto Rico a little more deftly, speaking warmly about the prospect of statehood. A few hours later, Puerto Rico's governor, Luis Fortuno, a statehood proponent, endorsed Romney. That was the second endorsement of the day Gingrich lost out on. After Gingrich, Rick Santorum also spoke to Miami's Latin Builders Association, and he's the candidate the group decided to endorse.
Greg Allen, NPR News, Cape Canaveral.
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Here's a stark sign of just how tense relations are between the U.S. and Egypt right now: Egypt has barred at least six American pro-democracy workers from leaving the country. Among them is Sam LaHood. He's the son of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. Sam LaHood is director of the Egypt program of the International Republican Institute or IRI. That's a pro-democracy group that's funded by the U.S. government. And we reached him today in Cairo.
He explained what happened to him. Last Saturday, he went to the airport for a trip to Dubai. He was pulled out of the line by Egyptian authorities, and his passport was taken.
SAM LAHOOD: And I waited for about an hour before somebody from immigration came out and told me that I was being prevented from leaving Egypt. A guy showed up about 40 minutes later and had my passport and walked me out of the airport and kind of left me at the curb there.
BLOCK: So it was clear you're on a travel ban list of some sort.
LAHOOD: Well, I assume there was a problem. On Sunday, my attorney went and spoke with the judge who's doing the investigation into a bunch of NGOs here, and he confirmed that he had issued a travel ban on several IRI employees. And it was only on Tuesday that we actually got the list of who that is.
BLOCK: Let's talk a bit about what led up to this. There's been an investigation into nongovernmental organizations, including your own, and then, raids in late December on offices, including those of the IRI, of your group. What happened?
LAHOOD: In the summer, there was some press reports that the Cabinet was involved in some sort of fact-finding investigation into foreign funding in Egypt. And we thought it was a lot of propaganda and a lot of bluster.
And then, in December, they started calling in people from different NGOs and called in some employees from my organization, from the International Republican Institute. And then we were surprised on December 29th when the police raided our office and basically took all of our computers, took a lot of our files, took the money we had in our office and closed our office in Cairo.
BLOCK: Those computers and the money and the files that you're talking about, have you gotten those back?
LAHOOD: No. I mean, it was four weeks ago and we haven't had anything returned. And our office in Cairo is still sealed and we are not allowed to go back in there.
BLOCK: When Egypt talks about foreign hands being behind the anti-government protests there, is there any legitimacy to that claim? Does your group fund or support Egyptian groups, human rights groups, pro-democracy groups, things like that?
LAHOOD: We're basically involved in three main activities here. We do a lot of technical assistance to political parties. We do a lot of technical assistance in voter education with civil society groups here. And then we're involved in election observation. But we do not give any money to any political parties. We don't give any money to candidates or any money to any groups here in Egypt. And so, that allegation, which has just been kind of lobbed around, is patently false in our case.
BLOCK: It's pretty stunning, Mr. LaHood, when you think that the day before you were kept from getting on that plane in Cairo, President Obama had spoken with Egypt's military leader and he reportedly was telling him exactly this, that American military aid is conditional on steps toward democracy. This sounds like a pretty serious provocation and escalation on Egypt's part.
LAHOOD: You know what, I mean, that's a little bit above my pay grade. But, you know - and there's a lot of speculation as to what's going on here. But it's difficult for me to inject logic into this situation here. I mean, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me and to a lot of other people.
BLOCK: What do you figure happens now, Mr. LaHood? Are you effectively being held hostage there in Egypt? You're free, but you're not free to go.
LAHOOD: That's the analogy. Our attorney is actually - we are being held hostage. The legal implications of what we're facing are very serious. If we are referred to trial, the potential penalty I face and the other foreigners face is six months to five years in jail.
BLOCK: Mr. LaHood, what do you think this all says about where Egypt is right now on the path toward democracy and a civil society that you've been working toward?
LAHOOD: From our experience, from IRI's standpoint, change is a long process. And there's bumps in the road and it doesn't come easy and, you know, I think there was a lot of hope and optimism after the revolution that took place a year ago. But the reality is change takes time and the changes that are underway in Egypt - it's a long-term endeavor. This sort of thing takes time.
BLOCK: Well, Sam LaHood, thanks for talking with us today.
LAHOOD: Thank you, Melissa.
BLOCK: Sam LaHood directs the Egypt program of the International Republican Institute. He's one of a number of pro-democracy workers who have been barred from leaving Egypt.
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President Obama has also been campaigning this week, repeating themes from his State of the Union address. His itinerary included five different states. In Iowa and the mountain West, he talked about support for manufacturing and domestic energy production. His final stop, the University of Michigan. There, he stressed the importance of keeping college education affordable. NPR's Scott Horsley was there.
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SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: There was a pep rally atmosphere inside the Michigan field house. By 9:00 a.m., several thousand students assembled to hear the president, many still dressed in parkas and scarves after waiting hours outside in the cold.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I want to thank all of you for coming out this morning. I know for folks in college, this is still really early.
HORSLEY: Mr. Obama says he knows not only about the hours students keep, but also the burden of student loans. His administration has taken steps to boost student aid and he's urging Congress to do more. But he warned that federal taxpayers can't make up for the rising tuition costs that have outstripped inflation for the last two decades.
OBAMA: Colleges and universities need to do their part to keep costs down, as well.
HORSLEY: Aspiring doctor, Andy Rosco(ph) says he was on the fence about Mr. Obama in the last election, but he liked what he heard today.
ANDY ROSCO: There's not too many opportunities in life to get to be in the same room as the president and hear him talk about education, which is obviously, you know, close to home. A group of us, we're all med students here, so we have a lot of student loans and it's definitely something that's important to us.
HORSLEY: Michigan, like all the states Mr. Obama visited this week, is expected to be hotly contested in the November election. Scott Horsley, NPR News, Detroit.
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Now, a step back view of the week in politics. And much of the recent talk is focused on wealth, who has it and how did they get it. Fairness was the theme of President Obama's State of the Union address.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by.
SIEGEL: Or, he said, we can have an economy where everyone has a fair shot and everyone plays by the same rules. Last night, in the GOP presidential debate, Mitt Romney went after Newt Gingrich for his million-dollar-plus consulting contract with Freddie Mac.
NEWT GINGRICH: We discovered, to our shock, Governor Romney owns shares in both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Governor Romney made a million dollars off of selling some of that. Governor Romney owns shares and has investment in Goldman Sachs, which is today foreclosing on Floridians.
SIEGEL: That actually was Newt Gingrich's response to Mitt Romney and the former Massachusetts governor countered that just as his blind trust included mutual funds that held Freddie Mac bonds, Newt Gingrich's did, too. We thought of inviting two forensic accountants to duke it out this week and I think you'll be relieved to know that instead, E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and the Brookings Institution, and David Brooks of the New York Times are here, as they are most Fridays. Good to see you both.
DAVID BROOKS: Good to see you.
E.J. DIONNE: Good to be with you.
SIEGEL: Good to see you, David. E.J. joins us from California. First, the State of the Union. It's an election year. The House and the president are at loggerheads. David Brooks, what did the president set out to do and how well did he do it?
BROOKS: He set out to be popular. You know, I think he had some big themes, the fairness and everything. What disappointed me about the State of the Union was the size of the proposals he had. We have some big problems, a huge debt problem, a huge wage stagnation problem, a huge distrust in government problem, but there was no big Simpson-Bowles plan. There was no tax reform. There was no sweeping out of all the special interest deals in Washington.
And then, instead, there were a lot of little tax credits. There were some good things, like getting community colleges to work closer with labor markets, but it was a bunch of medium-sized proposals which may be marginally good or marginally bad, but not up to the challenge we face.
SIEGEL: Well phrased, though? Well delivered?
BROOKS: Yeah, I thought well-phrased, well-delivered. I think the equality, he pulled back a little from some of the economic populism which, to me, doesn't sell. But, you know, they were series of popular policies that will appeal to independents. I just don't think they're big enough for the moment.
SIEGEL: E.J., your thoughts on the State of the Union?
DIONNE: Well, if populism doesn't sell, David has to talk not only to Barack Obama, but also to Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. It sounds like we're all populists now. I mean, President Obama tried a big deal on the deficit and it didn't work. The Republicans weren't going to work with him. And he's been on the upswing since September, when he stopped pretending he could get the Republicans to do things in common with him and instead, started making an argument the way Ronald Reagan used to make arguments and Bill Clinton make arguments.
Obama's argument is about reducing inequality, increasing upward mobility and he's in favor of a careful but clear role for government in doing both of those. And I think the combination of a somewhat better economy and the Republican gutter fight between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney and this speech might get the president so happy that he'll sing an Al Green song again at a fundraiser.
SIEGEL: Well, let me ask you about the Republican gutter fight, I believe, was E.J.'s phrase. David, is there anything actually - setting Ron Paul aside, who's quite different from the three other candidates. Is there anything apart from attacks on how people made their money and what they said 10 years ago, is there anything actually different about the three leading Republican candidates?
BROOKS: No. What's remarkable about the Republican Party now is how incredibly unified it is. There's a basic agreement, you have to do a tax reform. You have to simplify the tax code, lower the rates and get rid of the deductions. There's a basic idea that you have to reform entitlements, either by introducing market mechanisms by means testing it so affluent people get fewer benefits. On the big proposals, no matter who gets the nomination, on the big things, Republicans are more unified than ever since I've been covering politics, I think.
SIEGEL: The question is, who's being most authentic about it, more so than what do they stand for?
BROOKS: Right. Though, I think you could say, even if they are faking it, the entire Republican Party is in favor of those things so that president will do those things. And the question is how committed. To me, the big thing that happened this week is Mitt Romney decided he was in a knife fight and he was going to pull out a knife. And that's what really impressed a lot of professional politicians, a lot of people in the Romney campaign.
He decided, I'm not going to lose to that guy. I'm going to be as savage as I need to be and, God knows, he was.
SIEGEL: E.J., I want to ask you about something that Newt Gingrich says often. As Democrats delight in the Republican fratricide and delight in the possibility of a Gingrich candidacy, it seems, he keeps on saying, hey, Ronald Reagan was 30 points back a year before the 1980 election. I'm now back, too, but I'll do what he did. Does he possibly have a point?
DIONNE: Well, I think every Democrat and liberal ought to be careful and remember that, but I think that a lot of people doubt that Newt Gingrich is Ronald Reagan. And so - but be careful what you wish for. Just on what David said, I think he is very charitable to the Republicans. Most of them really want to slash the revenue going to the federal government and so it will be very hard to have the kind of careful balance that David rightly talks about all the time.
I am struck with how whatever they are actually for is being lost in all these attacks. And I think it's a real problem in Florida. Florida is a state the Republicans really want to win and to have all these terrible ads up on the air just can't help them for the fall. Maybe it'll go away but it's not very good for them now.
SIEGEL: David, you spoke of political professionals. Those are people who sometimes are intended when people speak of an establishment. I've heard many references to the Republican establishment about - that supposedly supports Mitt Romney. Is there a Republican Party establishment?
BROOKS: No. Right now, the establishment - the definition is that somebody who actually knows something about Newt Gingrich.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BROOKS: And those people really don't like him. And so, they served with him. They worked for him. Look at what he did this week. He's in the most important political week of his life. He gives a speech about whether we should have statehood on the Moon. This is not a guy...
SIEGEL: (unintelligible) the colony has been established.
BROOKS: Yeah, after the colony has been established. This is not a guy with a firm grip on how to be a disciplined leader and we saw it this week. And it's weird in the debate. He couldn't attack Mitt Romney 'cause it's hard for him to stop talking about himself. And so, he's just not a great candidate. So that's the establishment people know about.
SIEGEL: E.J., is the concept of a party establishment still germane?
DIONNE: Maybe it will be on Newt's Moon. I mean, I think that David is right, that the establishment right now are all the people who've worked with Newt Gingrich. And I am also struck by his lack of discipline. I mean, he came on really strong - did, you know, a heck of a job in South Carolina.
And now, he can't stop talking about Saul Alinsky, a name that probably means more to people on the left who like him than people on the right who've never heard of him. And this Moon idea might work a little bit. I mean, after all, the space program is headquartered in Florida. But it's a lack of discipline that strikes you once again about Newt.
SIEGEL: On that note, E.J. Dionne, David Brooks, thanks to both of you.
BROOKS: Thank you.
DIONNE: Thank you.
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Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and in Turkey, some are hailing what they call a historic step. Last night, Turkish State Television began broadcasting "Shoah" - that's the 1985 French documentary about Nazi Germany's mass killing of Jews during World War II.
As NPR's Peter Kenyon reports from Istanbul, it's the first time the documentary has been seen by a mass audience anywhere in the Muslim world.
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: Claude Lanzmann's documentary featuring Holocaust witnesses and survivors has been hailed as a masterpiece of non-fiction filmmaking. Last night, Turkish State Television showed the first two hours of it. There are more than seven hours to go.
The decision comes at a time of chilly relations between Turkey and Israel. And Ankara is also on the defensive about its refusal to accept the term genocide for the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman forces during World War I. But supporters say Turkey's decision to air "Shoah" is important.
The Aladdin Project, a U.N.-backed effort to counter Holocaust denial, had the film subtitled in Turkish, Farsi and Arabic. Last year, a U.S.-based satellite channel with some viewers in Iran aired the Farsi version. But Aladdin executive director Abe Radkin says this is the first time the film has been broadcast throughout a Muslim country with the government's approval.
ABE RADKIN: What is important for us is that when it's being shown on a public television channel, inevitably you expose it to a large section of the population. That's what we would like to see in this part of the world, where, for the past 60-70 years, the Holocaust and any mention of the Holocaust has been largely ignored, except for quarters that deny it. It is an important development.
KENYON: Radkin is in Turkey for the airing and he says he's talked to Turks who watched the first episode and found it interesting. His next hope is to see the Arabic-subtitled version air in Mideast countries soon.
Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Istanbul.
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Now, a road trip excursion with commentator Andrei Codrescu. On his way across the country, he found himself driving right off the map of memory.
ANDREI CODRESCU: We drove 2,500 miles to see my mother. We drove through five states, mostly on interstates. But when we couldn't take the boring highway that unrolled like the crawl on CNN for thousands of dull infinities, we took the smaller roads in the interior of the United States of Amnesia and found many forgotten Americas; some forgotten already one hundred years ago, some forgotten 50 years ago, some forgotten five years ago, some just forgotten.
And we drove through towns that are being forgotten as we drove through. We were quite possibly the last people to remember them, including the locals who had already forgotten where they lived because they lived along an endless crawl at the bottom of their screens.
For 2,500 miles I kept checking the Google maps on my Apple device, as if it knew better than the highway where we were going. And between directions, I read that in China my device was being made as we drove - by 230,000 employees, many working six days a week often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant; over a quarter of them lived in company barracks earning less than $17 a day. The scale is unimaginable, an Apple employee said. And so are interstates in the United States of Amnesia, where the crawl went on at the bottom of every screen.
And when we finally reached my mother, we were in Florida, the state whose official flower should be the opium poppy and Disney World is an unforgettable memory. Now what is it exactly we forgot?
BLOCK: That's road warrior Andrei Codrescu. He's the author of "Whatever Gets You Through the Night: A Story of Scheherazade and the Arabian Entertainment."
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
I'm Melissa Block. And we end this hour with a trip to the movies courtesy of our co-host, Audie Cornish.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The new movie "The Grey" stars Liam Neeson as the leader of a group of roughnecks who find themselves stranded in the Alaskan wilderness, hunted by a pack of vicious wolves. Now, if you own a television, you've no doubt been subjected to the trailer. It's been on near-constant rotation.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE GREY")
DERMOT MULRONEY: (as Talget) How are we going to deal with this?
LIAM NEESON: (as Ottway) We take them on, one at a time.
CORNISH: And if that trailer is to be believed, this is familiar territory. Monsters chase men, men die and, occasionally, things blow up. Except, having seen this movie, I can say it's no more about wolves than "Jaws" is about a shark. It's about how we live our lives - the choices we make, and the mistakes and regret that can stalk us all. Go figure.
Joining me now is the man behind this little sleight of hand - the movie's director and co-writer, Joe Carnahan. Joe Carnahan, welcome to the program.
JOE CARNAHAN: Thank you, Audie. Thank you for having me.
CORNISH: It starts out this kind of survivalist thriller, only the men are - exhibit qualities that you don't see in this kind of film.
CARNAHAN: Right.
CORNISH: Number one, they're scared.
CARNAHAN: Yes.
CORNISH: They're tired. They're afraid to die. And that is the kind of thing which seems pretty obvious, given the situation, but is so not usually what you see in a movie like this.
CARNAHAN: Right. Well, I think while – listen, I think part of the film, I think, too, is my reaction to a lot of things. I think the things I thought about when I was 20, I think about differently at 40. You know, you have a different kind of set of ideals and personal philosophies that begin to emerge. And, you know, I thought it was important to get at these things in an honest manner, in a truthful way because I think so much of Hollywood is this kind of overly machismo, nonsensical view of masculinity - which I just don't find honest.
You know, I think it's a lot of nonsense. I think it's this idea of - you know, we're told, well, be a man, be a man. But what does that mean, exactly? Does that mean you can't carry yourself with any fear, that you can't acknowledge that you're scared; you can't acknowledge that, I'm not sure what's waiting for me beyond this realm?
You know, I think these are all things that played upon me, and I wanted that to play upon these characters.
CORNISH: At one point, there is a scene around campfire where the men do delve into those questions about life after death.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE GREY")
NEESON: (as Ottway) I really wish I could believe in that stuff. This is real. The cold, that's real; the air in my lungs; those bastards out there in the dark, stalking us. It's this world that I'm worried about, Talget, not the next.
MULRONEY: (as Talget) What about your faith?
NEESON: (as Ottway) What about it?
MULRONEY: (as Talget) It's important.
CORNISH: That was Liam Neeson playing John Ottway, and I think...
CARNAHAN: Yeah.
CORNISH: Was that Dermot Mulroney?
CARNAHAN: That was Dermot Mulroney playing Talget, yeah.
CORNISH: Talk about that scene.
CARNAHAN: You've got a guy that is a pragmatist and feels only what is in the immediate vicinity - you know, the cold, and the air in his lungs. And then you have a guy telling him, you can't abandon your faith because what's going to pull you through in a really rough spot, but that? And I think that's the contradiction we all carry within ourselves. You know, this idea of - is there a God and if so, is he going to take care of me?
And then we hear, well, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Well, these guys - some of them, they don't want it to be mysterious. They want to know what's going to happen, and they want his help. They want, you know, this idea of a deity that could grant them - can you save me? Will I survive?
And then beyond that, the larger questions about - well, what's going to happen to me when I die?
CORNISH: And, in this, you get a sense of grief. You get a sense of - the characters ask themselves...
CARNAHAN: Right.
CORNISH: ...what are the memories we would treasure in our final moments?
CARNAHAN: Sure.
CORNISH: And for these characters, I mean, a huge totem of it are the men's wallets.
CARNAHAN: Yes.
CORNISH: And who knew that a man's wallet could symbolize him in his life, you know?
CARNAHAN: Well, I think, again...
CORNISH: I thought it was a pretty touching thing.
CARNAHAN: Yeah. I think it's - I guess it's - in the end, it's the minutia. And it's interesting because a guy I worked with, a very dear friend of mine, we had a mutual friend and a very young guy; he was 24 at the time. And he passed away rather suddenly and rather dramatically. He just - he happened to be - had too much to drink one night and walked out of this house, and instead of going left, he went right and that was the end of it. You know, he wound up being killed by a passing car.
And my friend remembers going to his home, going to his apartment after that, and seeing - there was still a Led Zeppelin LP on his turntable, and still the signs of life, and still these little notes he had written to himself. And I always thought - it was so heartbreaking to me, you know, that that would be - that's the measure, in the end.
And that's why I kind of insisted on all those pictures that you see at the end of the film. Those are all of the actors and their real families, you know.
CORNISH: So they gave you their own home photos?
CARNAHAN: Yes. They gave me their own photos. And I think that's why it has this great emotional impact - because it's real.
CORNISH: The character of John Ottway - he is grieving the loss of his wife. And how do you ask an actor like Liam Neeson, who just a few years ago lost his own wife, to play a character like this?
CARNAHAN: You know what, Audie, we never had the conversation, per se. I mean, we - obviously, we touched on that. And Liam was very forthcoming with the other actors and myself about - he looked at this as a catharsis. I don't know how, in the approach that I took and that he knew I wanted to take, that this was a subject that could even be avoided. I mean, I think it was inescapable, at a certain point, that he was going to touch on what had had happened to Natasha. And - but I think...
CORNISH: And this is Natasha Richardson.
CARNAHAN: Natasha Richardson, who he lost, yeah, rather tragically. But again, Liam was always very open and sincere, and he was able to liberate from his own, personal life what he needed to make Ottway's situation work. And what those things were are exclusively - kind of the province of Liam.
CORNISH: And at the same time, there are some moments that are really, really very haunting, and I don't know if it's because it's him as the actor.
CARNAHAN: Right.
CORNISH: I don't know if I could picture another actor doing it. One scene in particular, where Ottway is sort of having this tough conversation with God.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE GREY")
NEESON: (as Ottway) Show me something real. I need it now, not later. Now! Show me, and I'll believe in you till the day I die, I swear. I'm calling on you.
CARNAHAN: It's funny to hear it. In the disembodied way, it actually - emotionally, kind of gets to me because you just hear that great desperation and sadness. And when you have an actor like Liam Neeson, you have to take advantage of his talent and his ability to bring that off and make you believe it, and give you that great sense of dread and desperation.
CORNISH: Did this feel like a very different experience for you, in terms of making the movie? Because I look at what you've done in the past; you know, a movie like "Smokin' Aces" - I definitely saw that.
CARNAHAN: Right.
CORNISH: There was the kind of reimagining of "The A-Team."
CARNAHAN: Yes.
CORNISH: Those seem so different from this.
CARNAHAN: Yeah. I mean, I think, again, it's important for me, at least, I guess artistically, to not - and I think part of – maybe "The Grey" was a bit of a response to that. I started getting concerned that I was being viewed or quantified in this way that I was uncomfortable with and...
CORNISH: What were you uncomfortable with? Like...
CARNAHAN: I was uncomfortable with...
CORNISH: ...what's the characterization of you out there?
CARNAHAN: I was uncomfortable being perceived as this - is this - are you kind of this schmucky action director that doesn't really have anything meaningful to say? You know, I think - I guess for lack of a better word, are you going to be taken seriously or not? And so, yeah, I just thought it was high time I made this film.
CORNISH: Joe, thank you so much for talking with us.
CARNAHAN: Thank you, Audie. That was lovely. I really appreciate it.
CORNISH: Joe Carnahan - he's the director of the new film "The Grey," starring Liam Neeson. And I'm Audie Cornish.
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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block.
The U.N. Security Council consulted behind closed doors today on next steps to try to end the bloodshed in Syria. A draft resolution now circulating calls on President Bashar al-Assad to hand over power to his deputy, and that deputy would be part of a national unity government. But Russia objects and vetoed a U.N. resolution on Syria last year.
From Moscow, NPR's Jackie Northam reports on why the Kremlin still backs the Syrian government.
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: Syria may be increasingly viewed as a pariah state. But Russia sees things differently. Syria is one of its closest allies in the Middle East. For months, Moscow has shown it's willing to stick by President Bashar al-Assad and has vowed to use its veto power if the U.N. tries to impose sanctions or authorizes military intervention in Syria.
Vladimir Sotnikov, with the Center for International Studies here in Moscow, says the Kremlin sees the Syria situation as a repeat of what happened in Libya. He says it believes the U.N. authorization to intervene there led to excessive force and mass civilian casualties.
VLADIMIR SOTNIKOV: Russia understands also very well that any external intervention, which would be as a sort of - it was in Libyan case - could not only aggravate the whole situation in this volatile region of Middle East but also could lead to the situation, then there will be unpredictable consequences.
NORTHAM: But Alexander Golts, a military analyst with the Weekly Journal website, says Russia's leaders are also deeply suspicious of popular uprisings. Golts says Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, in particular, simply doesn't accept the right of people to challenge their governments.
ALEXANDER GOLTS: In Mr. Putin's reading, in Mr. Putin's understanding, all what's going on in Middle East now, such as Arab Spring and everything, is the result of Western conspiracy. He has something like paranoia about these colored revolutions.
NORTHAM: Like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Golts says Russia's stand on Syria has a lot to do with Putin himself. The prime minister's foreign policy hardened, he says, after the U.S. invaded Iraq. Golts says that's why Putin has shrugged off criticism of Moscow's support for Syria. That became apparent this month when a Russian ship - reportedly carrying tons of munitions - pulled into the Syrian port of Tartus, Russia's sole military base outside the former Soviet Union.
Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the U.N., expressed grave concerns about arms flowing into Syria and demanded an explanation. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed her concerns.
SERGEI LAVROV: (Through Translator) We don't consider it necessary to explain or justify ourselves as we are not violating any international agreements or any Security Council resolutions. We do trade with Syria, but only what is allowed under international law.
NORTHAM: And there is no U.N. arms embargo against Syria in effect. So, if there are no sanctions against Syria, then Russia says it can sell the country weapons, which it's clearly doing. Earlier this week, the local press reported that Moscow signed a deal to sell Syria about three dozen YAK-130 combat jets.
Military expert Golts says the deal was likely in the works for months.
GOLTS: It's a big deal. The estimation is that it's something like half a billion dollars, which is rather important for Russia. The level of our arms sales is between 8 and $10 billion a year. So it's rather significant.
NORTHAM: Analysts like Golts predict Russia's weapons sales to Syria will likely continue unless an arms embargo or other sanctions are in place.
Jackie Northam, NPR News, Moscow.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
You may recall that Bani Walid was the Libyan town that proved to be one of the last redoubts of pro-Moammar Gadhafi forces in last year's fighting. It's about 90 miles inland from Misrata. It is surrounded by the Libyan Desert. And it is once again the scene of some fighting. There was an attack on a garrison there recently, in which several Gadhafi-era officials who had been arrested for war crimes were set free.
Reporter Chris Stephen of the British daily, The Guardian, got near Bani Walid and joins us now from Tripoli.
And, Chris, first: How big is the conflict in Bani Walid and who's fighting whom there?
CHRIS STEPHEN: Well, the conflict is pretty big as it gets going. At the moment, there's a truce. And it's basically the former rebel army, who are now the pro-government army, against militias within Bani Walid who, I suppose, were with Gadhafi and are now independent.
SIEGEL: And what is the complaint of those who used to be pro-Gadhafi and are now independent?
STEPHEN: Well, their side of the story is that they're, you know, a town trying to get on with its own affairs and that they've been interfered with. And that pro-government militias have been robbing and pillaging - that was last autumn - and that more recently, they've been arresting men who they say are totally innocent.
SIEGEL: Arresting them for things that they did during the fighting or during the Gadhafi regime?
STEPHEN: Well, according to the townsfolk, these people are simply innocent people who shouldn't be arrested. According to the people doing the arresting, these are war criminals. And the government militias say, well, these people are war criminals from all over the country and have sort of drifted into Bani Walid because they know they can get sanctuary.
SIEGEL: When there was fighting before the truce, are we talking about small arms fire or are there tanks involved? How much arms are involved here?
STEPHEN: Well, the fighting blew up last Monday when they made an arrest apparently of a local man who had a lot of local connections. And then his family and his clan turned up at the army base. Now, what happened next or who started it is not quite clear. But what is clear is that there was an assault on the army base with rockets and machine gunfire. Four soldiers were killed, and I understand about 11 local people were killed. Now, whether they're local fighters or local civilians is not clear.
But it ended with the government forces evacuating the town and taking up positions around it and has since been reinforced by militias from all over Libya.
SIEGEL: Does this conflict between a Libyan town and the National Transitional Council, which is, I guess, what passes for the Libyan government these days, is that very unusual? Might it be common throughout the country? What would you say?
STEPHEN: Skirmishes are pretty common around Libya. Some of them do seem to have a political aspect. Others seem to be simply local clans settling scores. I think one of the problems is that there are so many small arms around that it's very easy for score settling these days because there's so much ammunition.
SIEGEL: But does the fact that these were pro-Gadhafi forces in Bani Walid, should one take that as a sign that there might be movement of some sort of restoration of people who supported Gadhafi to the end?
STEPHEN: Well, I think probably not. I don't think - some of the reports have said that this is part of a Gadhafi uprising. But I think it may just be more local. I think the problem is that this was always a very pro-Gadhafi town, and that now the remnants of the - the bits and pieces of the Gadhafi administration, all of them have come to Bani Walid for shelter. And it's causing a big problem with the government militias because they're saying, look, there's got to be just one country here.
I think Bani Walid, I think the people there feel they're a bit caught in the middle because they're not particularly wanting to be associated with these people. But on the other hand, they're living in their midst, and they have guns and are perhaps difficult to confront.
SIEGEL: Do you have any sense of whether the current truce is likely to last or is there a limit to the patience of the pro-government militias? What would you say?
STEPHEN: I think the truce is very precarious because the key issue is these alleged suspects, which the militias insist are being harbored in Bani Walid. Bani Walid, again, is very - is saying, well, you know, we don't have these people. And the militias are saying that you do. Now, if they're not handed over, it seems likely that the militias may take matters into their own hands and go back into the town to look for them. And I think that's the danger and that's where there's going to be a confrontation.
SIEGEL: OK. Well, Chris Stephen, thanks very much for talking with us about it.
STEPHEN: Pleasure.
SIEGEL: That's reporter Christ Stephen of The Guardian speaking to us from Tripoli, in Libya, about the conflict in the Libyan town of Bani Walid.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
One morning many years ago, a little boy in Brooklyn named Peter woke up to an amazing sight: fresh snow.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LEVAR BURTON: (Reading) After breakfast, he put on his snowsuit and ran outside. The snow was piled up very high along the street to make a path for walking.
RAZ: That's "Reading Rainbow's" LeVar Burton reading from the groundbreaking book "The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BURTON: (Reading) Crunch, crunch, crunch. His feet sank into the snow. He walked with his toes pointing out like this. He walked with his toes pointing in like that. Then he dragged his feet slowly to make tracks, and he found something sticking out of the snow that made a new track. It was a stick. A stick that was just right for smacking a snow-covered tree.
RAZ: This year marks the 50th anniversary of "The Snowy Day," which, when it came out in 1962, was the first major kids book to feature a black protagonist who wasn't a caricature. Ezra Jack Keats won the Caldecott Medal for his work, the highest award for a children's picture book.
DEBORAH POPE: Well, the first page is the hook. It grabs the reader. There's a beautiful two-page spread of Peter in his pajamas looking out his window from his bed into the snow. The city is covered with snow.
RAZ: That's Deborah Pope. She is the executive director of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation. And as she explains, the book brings to life a magical moment some children get to experience.
POPE: When you realize, one, you don't have to go to school, and two, you get to play in this world that is all yours - it's all yours; the snow is there just for you. And you can see that expression in Peter's face.
RAZ: The one thing that is never mentioned in the text, Deborah, just doesn't seem like it's a big deal at all - but in fact, it was at the time - is that Peter - this boy Peter is African-American.
POPE: Yup.
RAZ: Why wasn't it ever mentioned?
POPE: Because it wasn't important. It wasn't the point. The point was that this is a beautiful book about a child's encounter with snow and the wonder that - and the difficulties the - being rejected by older kids, the realization that snow doesn't last, it's not forever. This is not about color. This is about childhood.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BURTON: (Reading) He thought it would be fun to join the big boys in their snowball fight, but he knew he wasn't old enough, not yet. So he made a smiling snowman, and he made angels. He pretended he was a mountain climber. He climbed up a great, big, tall, heaping mountain of snow and slid all the way down.
RAZ: This is a visually beautiful book. It's very simple. The art is very simple. It's collage-like. Peter is obviously central in this book. There are all these images that are now iconic, you know, Peter in this red costume, his brown skin against the white snow. Was Ezra Jack Keats trying to make a statement? Was he consciously trying to make a statement when he wrote this book and made Peter an African-American?
POPE: This book - it's hard to answer that question because part of the answer would be yes and part of the answer would be no. Yes, because he said, well, all the books he had ever illustrated, there had never been a child of color. And they're out there. They should be in the books too. And so he wanted to put a child of color into his book. But was he trying to make a cause book? Was he trying to make a point? No, he wasn't. He was writing a book about a child. Some of the criticism that he received had to do with the fact that he didn't mention that this was a child of color and...
RAZ: I mean, at the time, this was 1962. This was quite controversial. Some African-Americans, like Langston Hughes, praised Ezra Jack Keats, sent him a letter praising the book.
POPE: Yes.
RAZ: But others - civil rights activists and others felt that this book didn't go far enough.
POPE: They were worried. This is, as you pointed out, it was a tumultuous time. It was a time in which the African-American community was fighting for its place at the table, was fighting to be heard, and here we have this book. And in the past, when white authors had written about black characters, it had not done well. It was not good. It wasn't good. And so their reaction was, I believe, defensive. And then they realized because of the way it was embraced, because the reaction that teachers and parents and children, because of their positive experience and reaction to the book was overwhelming, the criticism subsided. It was no longer necessary that the book say, I am an African-American child going out into the snow today. They realized you don't put a color on a child's experience of the snow.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BURTON: (Reading) He picked up a handful of snow, and another, and still another. He packed it round and firm and put the snowball in his pocket for tomorrow. Then he went into his warm house. He told his mother all about his adventures while she took off his wet socks. And he thought and thought and thought about them.
RAZ: This character, Peter, is inspired by a real person, right?
POPE: It's inspired by an image that he cut out of Life magazine in the early 1940s, a strip of four photographs of a little boy, an African-American boy, who has been chosen to receive an experimental vaccine in Georgia. And this kid is like a little dollop of sunshine. At the - in the first frame, he's just beaming out at the camera. He's so happy he's been chosen. He's going to be given something special. He's a little boy. In the second frame, he is beginning to offer his arm and he wants to know, well, is this going to hurt. And the third, he's really got his arm out, and he gets the vaccine. And then the last frame, he's so hurt he pulls his - he's pulled his arm back in to him, to his chest, and he's looking out at the camera with such quizzical pain, how could you have hurt me?
And he, Ezra, didn't know why this series of pictures moved him, but he cut it out. He kept it with him for 20 years. And when he was given the chance to make a book of his own, that's when he realized why he had chosen to keep this picture with him for so many years. It was this child who entered the world with such joy and had to deal with the pain that very often comes.
RAZ: Of course, this book went on to win the coveted Caldecott Medal.
POPE: Yes.
RAZ: How did children react to this book?
POPE: Well, children embraced this book - kids who grew up in Iowa or in Florida - kids who never see snow. And so Ezra got tons of mail from kids with pictures of Peter, of the snowman, of the snow angels. And perhaps most movingly, there was a teacher wrote in to Ezra saying, the kids in my class, for the first time, are using brown crayons to draw themselves. These are African-American children. Before this, they drew themselves with pink crayons. But now, they can see themselves.
RAZ: That's Deborah Pope. She's the executive director of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation and a childhood friend of the late author himself. You can see some of the illustrations from "The Snowy Day" and hear the rest of LeVar Burton's reading at our website, npr.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BURTON: (Reading) While he slept, he dreamed that the sun had melted all the snow away. But when he woke up, his dream was gone. The snow was still everywhere. New snow was falling. After breakfast, he called to his friend from across the hall and together they went out into the deep, deep snow.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: And for Saturday, that's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. Check out our podcast. It's also called Weekends on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. You can find it at npr.org/weekendatc or on iTunes. We post a new episode Sunday nights. For more on the show and upcoming interviews, you can find it on Twitter: @nprguyraz or @nprwatc. We're back on the radio tomorrow with more new stories, music and more. Until then, thanks for listening and have a great night.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CUMBIETIOPE")
RAZ: It's time now for music. And today, global music DJ Betto Arcos is back to share some of his favorite new Latin American artists, including this track from Colombia.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CUMBIETIOPE")
RAZ: Betto is the host of "Global Village" on KPFK in Los Angeles where he joins us from our studios at NPR West. Betto, thanks for being here.
BETTO ARCOS: Great to be with you, Guy.
RAZ: Tell me about this band that we're listening to right now.
ARCOS: This is a group called Frente Cumbiero, which sort of loosely translates as the front cumbia group. They're from Bogota, the capital of Colombia, and their name is sort of a play on the idea that the band is sort of building a front for cumbia or on behalf of cumbia, which is a style of music native to Colombia. It's pretty much the most popular dance music in every country but Colombia. And you might wonder why. Well, in the '70s when salsa and vallenato - the accordion-based music of Colombia - took over, cumbia sort of died down. And what Frente Cumbiero, what this group is doing, is trying to revive this music in their own country.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CUMBIETIOPE")
RAZ: That's the Colombian band Frente Cumbiero. Betto, the next artist you brought us is someone we've talked about before, the Mexican singer-songwriter Lila Downs, who is just an incredible voice. She won a Latin Grammy for Best Folk Album back in 2005. This song that you brought us is called "Zapata Se Queda." Let's take a listen to it. Love it.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ZAPATA SE QUEDA")
RAZ: So, Betto, this song is called "Zapata Se Queda." And this song is actually about Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary, right?
ARCOS: Correct. It's a song off her new album "Pecados y Milagros" or "Sins and Miracles." And Lila told me in an interview recently that this song came about because she was having these sort these recurrent dreams. And she was waking up in the middle of the night, and she would sort of see the ghost of Zapata.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ZAPATA SE QUEDA")
ARCOS: So she wrote a song inspired by Zapata. But the song is also about what's happening in Mexico today. This is a song that has to do with this sort of, as she calls it, kind of the Wild West of Mexico that's going on right now with the violence where people are using firearms like it's a movie or something. And she's sort of singing this as a call to get good visionary leadership, like Zapata, to help the country in this time of need.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ZAPATA SE QUEDA")
RAZ: New music from Lila Downs brought to us by Betto Arcos. He is the host of KPFK's Global Village. That's a radio show in Los Angeles. And we're listening to some of his favorite new songs from Latin America, including this one.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHOCK")
RAZ: Betto, thank you so much for bringing us Ana Tijoux, because we've talked about her in the past. She's a French Chilean hip-hop singer. Love her. One of my favorites, and I know one of your favorites. This song is called "Shock." Tell me what it's about.
ARCOS: This song is all about the protests that have taken place in the world over the past year.
RAZ: Protesters from the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements and, you know...
ARCOS: And the Occupy - exactly. In Chile, as you might remember, last year, there were some major protests by students against the government. They turned violent, unfortunately. But they were basically asking, hey, you know, we need education, we need jobs. You know, stop fooling around and do what you're supposed to do. And Ana Tijoux is really kind of paying homage to all of these protesters that are saying, hey, wake up. The time is up. This is the moment that we need change.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHOCK")
RAZ: That's Chilean artist Ana Tijoux brought to us by Betto Arcos. Betto, we have time for just one more.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MAMAYE")
RAZ: A completely different vibe here. This is really nice, Betto. This is a Peruvian band that you brought to us. It's called Novalima. Really interesting sound going on here.
ARCOS: Yeah. This is a really, really cool band. I followed their work for the last few years. This is their third record. It's a group of musicians from Peru who are interfusing hip, electronic dance music with traditional Afro-Peruvian music. Much like the first group Frente Cumbiero, who are sort of reinterpreting the traditional cumbia of Colombia, Novalima are bringing Afro-Peruvian music into the 21st century, blending it with dance styles and electronica. And what I really like about this group is that they managed to keep the roots of the music intact. They're not really messing with the beat and the rhythm. They're adding to it color and texture. Just wonderful.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MAMAYE")
RAZ: I love this energetic beat, this percussion in this song. Just makes it come alive.
ARCOS: Yeah, I know. The heart of this music is really the cajon Peruano, the Peruvian box. It's this instrument that these days you hear a lot in jazz and flamenco. The cajon, the box, originated in Peru and was played by Afro-Peruvian slaves who were brought there against their will. The music and the drum, you know, were banned for many, many years in Peru for a long time, and this song sort of talks about that.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MAMAYE")
RAZ: That's the Peruvian band Novalima. They're just one of Betto Arcos' picks for new music coming out of Latin America. You can hear more of that music on Betto's show. It's called "Global Village" on KPFK in Los Angeles. It streams online as well. Betto, thanks so much.
ARCOS: Thank you so much, Guy.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MAMAYE")
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GUY RAZ, HOST:
The artist best known for dripping and splattering paint across canvases, Jackson Pollock, was born a hundred years ago on this date. And to mark the occasion, we headed down to the National Gallery of Art here in Washington, to check out one of his most iconic paintings with the modern art curator there, Harry Cooper.
HARRY COOPER: We are looking at a painting called Number 1, and informally subtitled Lavender Mist.
RAZ: Despite the fact there's no lavender or mist in it, there are violent stabs and drips of pastel colors - pinks and whites and aquamarines - with black slashes circling it like a web. And Pollock's not just working with splattered paint here.
COOPER: There's a lot of stuff on it; it's - cigarette, and other things. We see some handprints that Pollock very purposely placed in the upper corners, in the upper edge.
RAZ: Jackson Pollock's fame is based on this technique alone, but his career was much more varied than that. When he studied under Thomas Hart Benton, the American regionalist, Pollock's paintings were indistinguishable from Benton's - clear, human forms with enhanced curves as if windblown or carved like river beds.
Now, over time, Pollock's forms would become more surreal, like Picasso's. But the trademark splatter work didn't really make an appearance until Pollock was in his mid-30s.
COOPER: He doesn't come into it, really, until 1947, and he dies in '56. So it's less than a decade. And in fact, by the end of '50 and '51, he's not doing the drips anymore.
RAZ: But the splatter work remains the focus of everyone's attention, even though it's always been divisive. From the very beginning, there were two camps: those who loved it, and those who hated it.
He had some dealers behind him, important people like Peggy Guggenheim. But in the popular mind, he was Jack the Dripper - you know, my child could do this. I think all of those feelings and associations have remained with the work, no matter how many books and how many retrospectives he has.
Yet in 2006, one of Pollock's paintings sold for $140 million. That made it the most expensive painting ever sold. So why does this man, whose work is as derided as it is desired - why does he have this lasting popularity?
COOPER: De Kooning said Jackson broke the ice. He put the canvas on the floor. He stopped using brushes in the normal way. Yes, there's a randomness to it, but there's also a great order to it as well. He is a colorist, arguably in a great tradition of romantic painting, evoking atmosphere.
RAZ: Would you say he is one of - or, among the five or six most important American artists?
COOPER: One of the three or four, yeah, I would say.
RAZ: That's Harry Cooper. He is the curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art, here in Washington, D.C. They've got two Jackson Pollock pieces on display there. You can see them both at our website, npr.org.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
General Motors' turnaround, as we just heard, has been described as something akin to a miracle. And an achievement touted by President Obama Tuesday night in his State of the Union address.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Today, General Motors is back on top as the world's number one automaker.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
RAZ: Now, in some circles, GM is still derided as Government Motors. American taxpayers own about a quarter of GM's stock. But after a near-death experience in 2008, few would have predicted GM, just three years on, would once again become the world's biggest automaker.
Daniel Akerson became CEO and chairman of GM in 2010. He's already shaken up the car company. And when I spoke with him, I asked why he's been reluctant to trumpet the good news that GM is now back on top.
DANIEL AKERSON: Well, I mean, for a couple of reasons: A, I think humility is a nice trait for a corporation to have. And as I said, publicly, that wasn't a goal we set out. It is a metric. It's a milestone toward to a broader agenda, which includes - we want to produce the world's best vehicles, improve our margins, our cash flow and our profitability. So it's a good indicator of potential of future success, but we have a long, long road to walk.
RAZ: Now, I know and I've read that you really don't like what I'm about to say, this moniker, Government Motors that some people call GM. And I understand why you wouldn't like that. So here's my question: What do you think it will take to free GM of government ownership?
AKERSON: Well, I don't like that because it implies that somehow the government is calling us on Monday and telling us that we're going to paint models coming off the production lines a certain color, or we're going to develop or prioritize vehicle development differently than we would if we were a profit-oriented organization.
The objective of the government was not to act as, if you will, a private equity firm and try to maximize returns. Their objective, as I understood it at the time, and I think this is true to this day, was a broader agenda. It was for the industrial policy of the country and for the well-being of its citizens. And that, I think, has been an unqualified success. And at some point in time, they will determine when they feel their mission has been accomplished, and they will sell their shares.
RAZ: Before you took this job, you were in private equity. And I've read that you are or you were a Republican - and I don't know either way if that's the case. But I'm curious about your view philosophically about this idea of the government intervening to bail out an industry. I mean, at the time, did you find it troubling, as many proponents of free enterprise have argued, it was?
AKERSON: I think sometimes people stylize the image of how the economy works, because we have never been a truly 100 percent unadulterated capitalist system. Otherwise, your mother, as she aged in time or your father and could not produce, you don't kick them to the curb. You take care of your senior citizens, you take care of those among us that are unable to do as well as others, and you take care of your youth.
And so there's this kind of hybrid, if you will, of our capitalist system. So there are times when government has a role, in my opinion, and there are times it should let the market ultimately determine winners and losers. In this particular instance, to be - have uncertainty surrounding a company of this size and this magnitude for a long period of time, I think, would have been just devastating and probably have condemned it to the heap.
RAZ: I want to ask you about the Volt, GM's plug-in electric hybrid. Firstly, it still accounts for a small fraction of sales. GM, of course, still makes most of its money in luxury brands, in trucks and SUVs. So, to what extent is electric really the future of the company?
AKERSON: This is a critical decade or two for the automotive - for the transportation industry because of social needs. Do we want to leave an environment, a planet that's better than the one we inherited from the prior generations? I have children and grandchildren, and indeed I want that. And so advanced propulsion is critical to the evolution of our means of transportation. And it will come.
We are spending money, research and development dollars. We never abated on that. We spend on the order of $7.5 billion a year on advanced engineering. And it's all in an effort to prepare for the future where you are propelling different forms of transportation and there's no carbon footprint.
RAZ: The federal investigation looking into whether the Volt's battery could catch fire, of course, has been closed. GM has been cleared. But I wonder whether it's still did some damage to the brand. And if so, how do you recover?
AKERSON: I think it did have some collateral damage because it was a situation that ran on for 45 to 60 days, and a lot of negative press. And it's kind of like you can do everything great, but the negative always gets amplified.
RAZ: Dan Akerson, how fragile is the comeback for GM?
AKERSON: Well, I think it's pretty solid. (Unintelligible) with you, I think we're doing well. This company sold over nine million vehicles worldwide. And two and a half million of those were sold in the United States. GM has the largest market share of any one company in the world as well. We are a great exporter of technology. We have good diversified operations around the world, and indeed I think we are producing, we're designing, building and selling some of the world's best vehicles.
RAZ: That's Daniel Akerson. He's the chairman and CEO of General Motors, now, once again, the world's number one selling automaker. Daniel Akerson, thank you so much.
AKERSON: Thank you, Guy.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
From NPR News, it's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz.
Last week, a public radio producer named Rachel Ward and her colleagues at WXXI in Rochester started to record testimonials from people all around the city.
MICHAEL SPETOMACK: My name is Michael Spetomack(ph). I've lived in Rochester since 1959. Before that, I was raised in Hornell, New York.
RACHEL WARD, BYLINE: And what brought you up to Rochester?
SPETOMACK: Kodak.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: Right at the center of Rochester skyline, a majestic building still dominates. The word Kodak still shines brightly from the top. It's George Eastman's legacy right there in brick and mortar. And yet today, Kodak is barely a shadow of its former self. Last week, it filed for bankruptcy protection. A company that in 1982 employed more than 60,000 people in Rochester has fewer than 7,000 workers today.
The company basically invented digital photography, but it couldn't figure out how to make the transition from film quickly enough to out-compete its Asian rivals. And today, of the 10 best-selling digital cameras in the U.S., not a single Kodak.
Just three years ago, two other iconic American brands, GM and Chrysler, were also on the ropes. Not anymore. And that's our cover story today: making things in America and saving the American brand. But first, more memories from Rochester.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SPETOMACK: When we're young and not so well off, Kodak was our place for recreation. And we went there for bowling, for dining. They have subsidized my education.
BILL JAMES: Yeah, I met my wife there, and I was way in the back and I had to walk through the production areas to get to the cafeteria. And every day, I walk by and...
KATIE JAMES: He was this cute guy. He'd walk by with the coffee. And one day, he came by and says hi and asked me to go get a cup of tea. And that's how we started talking.
JAMES: Been together for, 32 - 32?
JAMES: Mm-hmm.
JAMES: Thirty-two years.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SPETOMACK: We're here to talk our memories, and Kodak was, you know, it was just the thing - my dad love softball.
WARD: Did he play softball with Kodak?
SPETOMACK: Oh, yeah.
WARD: What position did he play?
LARRY ARNON: Center. He used to teach me a special way of catching the ball and I stuck into it today. And the old Willie Mays, (unintelligible) catch in front. And he like - he thought that was the best way to catch the ball.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ARNON: The Kodak meant so much to everybody here. I mean, we did everything around Kodak. I look at - General Motors two years ago was in bankruptcy, (unintelligible) out. And now, I understand that they're one of the strongest companies in the world now. Back to being number one in auto. We can turn this around. We just got to come up with some better way for doing things.
SPETOMACK: There are still good people at Kodak. (Unintelligible) these men associated with quality and quality products. And who knows? Maybe it'll never be the company that it was, but still may become a viable company.
RAZ: That's Rochester resident Michael Spetomack. We also heard from Larry Arnon(ph) and from Bill James and his wife, Katie. And that point that Larry made about GM, that was the centerpiece of President Obama's State of the Union speech on Tuesday.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We bet on American workers. We bet on American ingenuity. And tonight, the American auto industry is back.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
RAZ: Now, just two years ago, many people in this country and around the world assumed that the age of the American car manufacturer was over. And yet, when you come here to the Washington Auto Show, which opened this weekend, what's clear is how confident American automakers have become.
There are hundreds of new models all across the showroom floor, and there are innovative cars in terms of their design and their prices. And probably, one of the best slogans is Chrysler's. There's a huge sign above its newest sedan. And it reads: Imported from Detroit.
This month, GM and Chrysler are expected to post their best results since the start of the crisis. On Friday, Ford posted its biggest profit since 2009. And no one at the auto show sounded more confident about American manufacturing than Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.
SECRETARY RAY LAHOOD: When I was here three years ago and when I was in Detroit three years ago, it was like being at a funeral. Detroit this year was like being at a wedding. One of the best celebrations I've ever been at. The automobile industry is back. And it's back because President Obama decided he was going to make an investment. He was going to invest taxpayer dollars and very skilled workers. And GM and Chrysler are back. Chrysler has paid all the money back. And GM's paid almost all of it back.
RAZ: Do you think those companies, particularly GM, had to kind of hit rock bottom, you know, in order to get to the point...
LAHOOD: Look, I'm a forward-looking person. What I'm saying is GM is back. It's a great American story. It really is.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: But how did American auto companies bounced back? And what can other American companies learn from that story?
BILL VLASIC: It was an extraordinary story. Summer of 2008, it was shocking to realize how much trouble GM really was in.
RAZ: That's Bill Vlasic. He is the Detroit bureau chief for The New York Times. Think back to 2008, he says. GM, once the largest private sector employer in the country, was on the path to insolvency by the end of the year. No bank would lend GM money. So the Obama administration insisted the company declare bankruptcy. And with a giant federal bailout, they began a massive overhaul.
VLASIC: It was interesting that the leadership of General Motors had resisted Chapter 11, saying that people wouldn't buy a car from a bankrupt car company. Well, that was proven wrong. But more importantly, for the longest time, it was considered, well, we can't lose Pontiac, the storied brand with all this history that people care about. Guess what, when they closed the division, nobody cared.
RAZ: Same with Saturn, right?
VLASIC: Same with Saturn. They resisted giving this up. But once they did, the company became more streamlined, more focused. Like they say, nothing focuses the mind like the noose. There's a humility there now that perhaps wasn't there before.
That being said, did the American taxpayer get a good deal? Was it worth it? The estimates of the number of jobs that would have been lost in this country if GM had been allowed uncontrolled bankruptcy, earned hundreds of thousands, you know, are these - saving these jobs in the communities and the manufacturing base worth 10 or 15 or $20 billion it'll ultimately end up costing? I think that's for your listeners to judge.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: Humility, restructuring, tough decisions and billions of government dollars to fall back on - it was enough to save American automakers. But what about smaller companies like Kodak in Rochester? Bill Vlasic says only one thing is certain: Kodak will come out of its bankruptcy a different kind of company.
VLASIC: They can't expect sentiment to save them. It has to be based on their ability to compete with not just companies around the world, but companies here in the United States. And whether or not they can tap into their sort of historical ingenuity and success and come up with the kind of products that can get them back on track.
RAZ: Then there's the question of why it matters whether these iconic American brands survive or whether there's a good economic reason to make things in this country. Why does it matter whether our cameras or cars are made here? I put that question to Jennifer Granholm, the former governor of Michigan.
JENNIFER GRANHOLM: I mean, if we want, as a nation - if we decide that we don't want to make things, you'd have to deal with the huge fallout, the massive job loss that would have ensued. But you would also have to deal with the consequence of a country that doesn't make anything. If we rely on other countries to build the stuff that we use, then we are completely at the mercy of others. If you want to have a strong country, you have to make things.
RAZ: Jennifer Granholm, you may have seen some stories in The New York Times recently about why the iPod and the iPad were not being built in the United States. They're designed here, they're not built here. And one of the arguments raised was not because American workers are necessarily less efficient than Chinese workers, but simply because if you've got a factory in Zhejiang, China, and you need a part, you just go down to the factory next door and they can manufacture the part for you within hours.
GRANHOLM: Exactly right, because China has decided to get aggressive on attracting job providers. What we have done in the United States is we've decided that economics, strategizing or planning or offering assistance to businesses to locate here is not what we do. This blind fealty to laissez-faire, hands-off economics might be nice in theory, but it no longer applies in a global economy when our economic competitors are not playing by the same rules. We cannot bring a knife to a gunfight, and that's exactly what we've done.
RAZ: Have we missed the train, though? I mean, is there a way to revive manufacturing in America, or is that story pretty much over?
GRANHOLM: Absolutely not. We will not get back the investments that have been made by companies overseas because it's too expensive to bring those investments back. But we do have an incredibly innovative country. Products are being made all the time, and decisions are being made even as we speak right now by CEOs of manufacturing firms about where to locate. I think advanced manufacturing, we can be competitive in. The lower-skilled manufacturing with repetitive motion, we probably won't get that. But advanced manufacturing, you better believe, we can do it.
RAZ: I guess you would argue the best evidence for that is the auto industry. I mean, they are making a product that Americans are buying.
GRANHOLM: Amen, brother.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
GRANHOLM: The auto industry has been saved because there was a smart, strategic, active partnership with the federal government. Those who are running against President Obama would have let the industry die. That would have made us a weak nation. It would have been terrible strategy. We would have lost the manufacturing backbone. And that philosophy will harm our nation.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: That's Jennifer Granholm. She is the former governor of Michigan. We also heard from Bill Vlasic of The New York Times. His book about the 2008 auto bailout is called "Once Upon A Car."
Thanks to the production staff of member station WXXI in Rochester, New York, for helping us tell the story of Kodak. By the way, we should point out, Rochester, in a lot of ways, the city is doing great despite Kodak's bankruptcy. The University of Rochester is now the largest employer in town, and its medical research center is growing very quickly. There's even a budding music scene, including the music we've been hearing. It's by Rochester-based band, Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad. This track is called "Sunshine."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SUNSHINE")
(SOUNDBITE OF CAMPAIGN AD)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Newt has a ton of baggage.
NEWT GINGRICH: It'll be nice not to have orchestrated attacks to try to distort the history of that period.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAMPAIGN AD)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: RINO Romney is the least electable.
MITT ROMNEY: Over-the-top rhetoric that's characterized American politics too long.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich from Thursday's debate and some of the superPAC ads that provoke them. James Fallows of The Atlantic joins us now, as he does most Saturdays, for a look behind the headlines. Jim, hello.
JAMES FALLOWS: Hello, Guy.
RAZ: Jim, I want to get to some of the things we've been talking about on the program in a moment. But first, Thursday's debate. Of course, all eyes were on the Gingrich-Romney showdown. But there was a moment, slightly less noticed, I think. It was when Rick Santorum called Romney out on his health care plan when he was governor of Massachusetts.
FALLOWS: Yes. I thought that if Mitt Romney goes ahead to become the nominee, which is what the odds are favored all the way along, I thought that exchange might prefigure something we're going to hear a lot more about in the summer and the fall. Because what Rick Santorum was able to do was to induce Mitt Romney to give a better, shorter definition of the need for an individual mandate in health care insurance than Barack Obama has ever done.
Essentially, Governor Romney is saying, if you're going to care for people eventually in emergency rooms, you can't have them free riding on the system. So people either have to get covered or they have to pay to be exempted from the system, which is essentially the national plan, known pejoratively as Obamacare by the Republicans, and it's what Governor Romney enacted in Massachusetts.
And so squaring that in equation that why something was great in Massachusetts, and as Governor Romney pointed out, is still very popular with people there, but would be a terrible socialist menace for the country, I'm sure that this won't be the last time we're going to hear it.
RAZ: Probably not. I want to ask you about this other issue, this anti-Newt Gingrich phenomenon. Recently, as you know, the conservative establishment has been circling the wagons against him, you know, from Bob Dole to John Sununu to opinion shapers in the conservative press. I mean, they are all on the attack against Newt Gingrich. What do you make of all that?
FALLOWS: I think it is a real challenge to Newt Gingrich. And the two most problematic aspects of the attack being made against him by other people in the party are, number one, the people who know him best and have worked with him most closely, whether it's Tom DeLay or Bob Dole say, we know this man and we don't like him and he'll be bad for the party.
Second, there's an argument from a lot of the sort of (unintelligible) of the party saying that if you nominate Newt Gingrich, you re-elect Barack Obama. Republican primary voters seem to feel that Newt Gingrich would be as electable as any other candidate, including Mitt Romney. But polls of the general electorate do not show that. And he trails Barack Obama badly.
RAZ: Let me ask you finally, Jim, about the president's State of the Union address. We've been talking about American manufacturing on the program today. President Obama's tone was America is back. You know, we are full steam ahead here. What did you make of that tone?
FALLOWS: I thought the tone was probably the most significant aspect of the speech, because of the positioning for the president in a re-election year. Over time, Americans may be angry, they may be dissatisfied, they may grumble. But finally, we like happy candidates.
We like the happy, confident Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter in 1980 or Walter Mondale in 1984. We like the happy, confident Bill Clinton in 1996 against the more acerbic Bob Dole. And so if the president can be the happy warrior this year and the Republicans are the more negative-sounding ones, that puts him just in a better position.
RAZ: That's James Fallows. He's national correspondent for The Atlantic. You can find his blog at jamesfallows.theatlantic.com. Jim, thanks so much.
FALLOWS: My pleasure, Guy.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
So a lawyer, a doctor and an engineer walk into an orchestra rehearsal, which actually happens every week at the National Institutes of Health Community Orchestra. It's the kind of place where CIA operatives and political operatives make up the string section. NPR's Serri Graslie is a member of the group, and she sent us this audio postcard.
SERRI GRASLIE, BYLINE: A few weeks ago, Dan Walshaw took the podium to conduct his fourth concert with the group.
DAN WALSHAW: Good afternoon. Welcome to our winter concert.
GRASLIE: If he sounds a little nervous, it's probably because he's worried about how to effectively conduct a group that's grown so big it spills into the wings of this high school stage.
WALSHAW: All right. Enjoy. Here's the (unintelligible).
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GRASLIE: Despite the National Institutes of Health name, the group is open to everyone. In fact, it has nearly tripled in size in just a year thanks to word of mouth and a flood of 20-somethings looking for a place to play after college. Its members range from interns to high-level government employees with top secret security clearances.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: I'm a lawyer...
...like many people in D.C.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: I work as a lawyer for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: We're not all lawyers.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: I am an engineer, and I manage research for the National Science Foundation.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: I'm a paralegal moonlighting as a bartender.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: I'm a consumer safety officer. I protect the nation's food supply.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: My day job is I'm a toxicologist, chemist in the National Cancer Institute (unintelligible) cancer prevention.
GRASLIE: In a city that's all about who you know and what you do, this is one of the few places where neither seems to matter. Walshaw says it's one of the things he loves about the group.
WALSHAW: The thing here, we have so many brilliant people who do amazing things with their lives, and then they come here every Wednesday night and play music. It's really wonderful.
GRASLIE: I talked to some of the orchestra members after the concert about what brought them here and why they stay.
TOM HOLTZMAN: I'm Tom Holtzman(ph). I'm a biologist.
JANE CODA: I'm Jane Coda(ph), and I play second violin.
ANGELA GARONEY: My name is Angela Garoney(ph) and I play the upright bass. I wasn't able to play in law school, and I missed playing. I felt law kind of drains any creativity.
JAY CODA: I played as a kid in elementary school. But I gave it up, and I always regretted it. I said, when I'm retired, I was going to do that as my hobby. So, I did.
GARONEY: And I like that it's all ages because to me it's kind of precious to look over and see like a little old person playing with you. And...
HOLTZMAN: You know, at my age, I don't get to interact a lot with younger people, and they're a lot of fun.
CODA: It really reminds me that you can keep playing your whole life.
GRASLIE: For its conductor, the orchestra is more than just a creative outlet for Washingtonians.
WALSHAW: To me, this represents the future of classical music in America.
GRASLIE: Again, Dan Walshaw.
WALSHAW: Major orchestras are losing their budgets. And because of that, if we don't have the community orchestras, the smaller ensembles, the amateurs playing, classical music will die because professionals out there won't have other classical music lovers to play for. So groups like this are the only thing that will save music in this country.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GRASLIE: For NPR News, I'm Serri Graslie.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Time now for music and a film score 110 years in the making.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: In 1902, the very genesis of filmmaking, director Georges Melies released his magnum opus: "Le Voyage Dans La Lune," "A Trip to the Moon," the first science-fiction film ever. You know, the famous shot of the moon with a human face and then it grimaces when the spaceship lands right in his eye? That's the movie I'm talking about.
Melies hand painted each frame of his movie for special screenings. It was once in color. But those hand-painted reels were lost for decades, that is, until they were discovered in Barcelona back in 1993. Archivists worked for years to restore the badly damaged film. And for its soundtrack, they asked the French duo known as Air to write the score.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: The restored version debuted at the Cannes Film Festival back in May, and the soundtrack album is coming out in a few days. Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel are Air. They heard rumors that the long-missing colored reels had been found, and Nicolas Gordin could hardly believe it.
NICOLAS GODIN: It was like a legend. It was like the Loch Ness monster.
RAZ: They didn't know what colors these characters were.
GODIN: No. When it was done in 1902, they were setting the film to some theaters, and the theaters would show the movie until destruction. So, really, none of them have been survived. So we were - it was like, oh, my God. I can't believe we're going to see it. You know, it was like a big moment because many people heard about that movie, but no one in the world have seen it.
RAZ: They saw, of course, a black and white version of it but never a color version.
GODIN: Yeah. It's very different.
RAZ: Right.
GODIN: The black and white version is more like a piece of a museum, you know? The colored version is more like you watch it like you would watch a normal movie. You know, it's very cool.
RAZ: It's also terrifying. And you could imagine watching that in 1902. Of course, the basic story is a spaceship lands on a moonscape and all these men emerge from the spaceship wearing, obviously, period clothing, so top hats and long-tailed coats, and out pop mushrooms in this landscape, these sort of Technicolor mushrooms, and then aliens begin to attack them, and they fight against the aliens, and the aliens disappear in puffs of smoke. It's a very psychedelic film, actually.
GODIN: Yeah.
RAZ: You know, I think I would get the fear if I watched that film back in my college days.
GODIN: Yeah. That's the reason why we wanted to do some fear sounds. And that's why we didn't choose to use like a traditional soundtrack, you know, like it used to be in 1902 with the piano like the (unintelligible).
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: And by the way, for folks listening to this conversation, obviously, this is very visual. And you can see what we're talking about if you go to our website, npr.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: There's a piece on this record, it's called "Decollage," and it seems to hint at Stanley Kubrick's use of Strauss in "2001." And I don't know whether you thought of that, but did you sort of borrow from other science fiction scores in your compositions?
JEAN-BENOIT DUNCKEL, MEMBER, AIR: No. But talking about Strauss and other artists try it (unintelligible), you know? And this is the main instrument we experiment on this album. We - it's been a long time where we wanted to try to recall the tympanis, and so we crossed the line this time. We rented some big tympanis and we put them on a lot of the songs.
But I think all the other references to science fiction (unintelligible) is more like in our subconscious because we do music in very instinctive and spontaneous way, and then when we listen to the record, it's, oh, this reminds me of this movie, this reminds me of this movie. You know, it's in our blood.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: My guests are Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel. They're the electric duo known as Air, and their new record is a score to the century-old silent film "Le Voyage Dans La Lune." You guys have obviously done film scores. You've done work for Sofia Coppola's films "The Virgin Suicides" and "Lost in Translation." How did you do the music for this? Did you watch it over and over and over again, you know, with instruments in front of you?
AIR: Yeah. We watched the movie all day long for like one month. It was, like, very intense. At some point, I remember where I was so familiar with the movie that I feel part of the team back in 1902. And I can see how much fun they had to shoot that movie. I can feel the energy, the fact that they were so young by the time.
I discovered that with "Virgin Suicides" because when you look at a movie all day long, you start to know all the moves of the actors and you know exactly what they are doing, and so you feel part of the set at some point. So I really felt after one week I'd been hired by George Melies to compose the music of his movie, you know?
RAZ: Wow.
AIR: I felt part of the whole process. It was very strange.
RAZ: And Melies did not write a soundtrack for this film in 1902, right?
AIR: No. He was not thinking of music when he was doing this movie because cinema was not associated with sound. And when they asked us to do that, we wanted to be sure that really he had no indication, no recommendation, he really had no thought about any music on the top of it because we never wanted to take the place of someone else or to betray the work of a composer.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: You have worked together, the two of you, a long time. And clearly, you have a strong partnership and presumably a strong friendship. Is it easy to work together? Does it - is just kind of flow?
GODIN: Oh, we are like a couple. You know, we have good moments and bad moments.
AIR: And part of the thing is that we are different. We like to kill a lot of the other ideas. It's a lot like the melody that you hear on the record are the surviving things. It's like evolution, you know? I mean, the species that survive are the most adapted to the situation. And we are playing this kind of record to our music, so it's sort of an artistic fight.
RAZ: I read that you guys worked on a very tight schedule to finish this music. Why?
GODIN: Because I think they were so scared not to be able to achieve such ambitious restoration process. And when they were close to finish, there were so much buzz around this movie that they decided to show it at the Cannes Film Festival. So they were not expected such a short deadline. So when they called us, they said, look, sorry, but one month from now, it's going to be shown at Cannes in the South of France. And that's it. There's nothing we can do about it.
So we were pretty scared because we just finished the day or two days before. You know, we were scared of the reaction of the audience. We were thinking, oh, my God, how can they dare to touch such a monumental cinema? So when we were in Cannes, I was very stage fright. And the light went dark and it was the giant screen - because we worked on a computer - I saw what we have done. And I said, oh, my God, this was much more like spectacular than I imagined.
And after 15 minutes, people start to applause, and that was such a relief for me. I was like - it was - I didn't enjoy that night because I was so terrified.
RAZ: You were terrified because of course you did take on this sacred film and you're worried that people are going to say, what is this music?
GODIN: Yes, exactly.
RAZ: And, of course, they didn't.
GODIN: No, because we helped the movie. We served the movie. We made the movie entertaining. And that's what the dream of Melies (unintelligible). And now, with the color and the music, this movie is really - it's such a good piece of art. And people have fun, people are entertained. You know, it's great.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: All of you will be back home safely. So join us with no fear on our fantastic trip to the moon.
RAZ: Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel are the duo known as Air. Their new record is an imagined score to the 1902 silent film "Le Voyage Dans La Lune." You can hear a few tracks and see a snippet of the film at our website, nprmusic.org. Gentlemen, thank you so much.
GODIN: Thank you.
AIR: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GUY RAZ, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing platform is already revolutionizing the world of self-publishing. A few weeks ago, on this program, we spoke with a paranormal romance fiction writer Amanda Hocking. She's made more than $2 million selling her e-books through sites like Amazon's. And every day, thousands of budding authors are uploading their work to the site, creating a bookstore to rival the biggest libraries in the world. But with that, there are problems, and one potentially huge one.
SHARAZADE: OK. My name is Sharazade, and I go by Shar, usually. That's a pen name.
RAZ: Tell me what your books are about.
SHARAZADE: Well, they're about sex.
RAZ: Shar is a rising star in Amazon's erotica section.
SHARAZADE: I do a lot of travelings. And most of my stories are travel-based in some way, either set in an exotic location or having to do with modes of transportation, trains, airplanes, buses.
RAZ: But Shar is also an entrepreneur. She publishes erotica for other writers as well, including a story she put up on Amazon recently called "Taking Jennifer."
SHARAZADE: So I was there watching Jennifer climb up in the rankings. And on the US site, it eventually got to number 21 in the free erotica, and on the UK site, it got to number three. When you're that close to the top, then you - I think it's natural that you look around to see what the competition is like.
So I took a look at the book that was holding fast at number one, which is a book by an author called Maria Cruz, and the book was called "My Sister Bestfriend.
RAZ: "My Sister Bestfriend."
SHARAZADE: I was being beaten by a book with an ungrammatical title. I mean, it's one thing to be beaten by "My Sister's Best Friend," but, you know, "My Sister Bestfriend"? So I clicked on the author to see what else she'd written, and there were, I think, 42 titles of which 41 were erotica, also, many of them with ungrammatical titles: "My Stepsister Pretty Little Mouth," "Domenating Her" but spelled D-O-M-E-N-A-T-I-N-G, "Lesbian MILF Seductress: Bride Vol. One."
RAZ: Maria Cruz was clearly prolific and successful. But one title seemed out of place. It was called "Dracula Amazing Adventure."
SHARAZADE: And, you know, I've worked as a college professor, and my spidey senses were tingling. So I took a sentence from the description and I put it between quotes and dropped it into Google and Bram Stoker's "Dracula" came up. It was word for word "Dracula."
RAZ: Word for word.
SHARAZADE: Word for word, down to the correct punctuation.
RAZ: And once she realized "Dracula" was plagiarized, Shar became curious about Maria Cruz's other books.
SHARAZADE: So I opened up their previews, as well, and began dropping sentences into Google, and every single one of them turned up somewhere else, mostly from the website literotica.com.
RAZ: Maria Cruz was a fraud. Shar also came across another fraudulent and prolific author in the erotica category. He sold his books under the name Luke Ethan. He was selling a book called "My Stepmom Loves Me," and it, too, was lifted from literotica.com. The original story was written by a man named Dave Springer who lives in San Francisco. So it was the same exact story.
DAVE SPRINGER: Even the misspellings.
RAZ: Except Luke Ethan changed the title. Originally, it's called "I Remember Mother."
SPRINGER: I thought it was funny. I was complimented. To think that somebody felt my writing was good enough to try to sell to other folks, and I thought it was funny that the poor souls who were paying $3 for 28 pages online could have gotten it from several different places for free.
RAZ: Amazon sold 187 copies of the book for a total of $559.13. And who is Luke Ethan? Well, not surprisingly, a made up name. Turns out, the man behind the name lives in Kuwait. He claims he purchased the rights to the book through a third party. The person who tracked Luke down and who wrote about Shar, Dave Springer and other writers who were plagiarized on Amazon is Adam Penenberg. His article appeared in the January issue of Fast Company magazine. How big is this problem?
ADAM PENENBERG: If you get in there and start checking out some authors, some authors will have 30, 40, 50 different e-books that they'll post over a very short period of time, and - you know, in the erotica world - and the numbers just keep growing every day. And then eventually, maybe Amazon shuts them down because they find out that they're plagiarized works, and then they just start up again, sometimes under the same name and other times under different pen names.
RAZ: OK. Now, why does erotica seem to be sort of ground zero of all this plagiarism?
PENENBERG: You know, I think other genres are afflicted by this. There are a lot of plagiarized books on how to. You know what they do, they find a how-to guide on the Internet, they copy and paste it, and all of a sudden, all these different books with that same exact information are being sold under different names, business books, or like how to invest in insurance funds or something like that, you know, books that are targeted for a specific market, they're ripe for plagiarism as well.
RAZ: What responsibility does Amazon have, you know, legally speaking, for this? Any?
PENENBERG: Well, that is a very good question. Some might say you could point to Amazon-Kindle's agreement. And in it, it does say, in one of the clauses, if you believe that your work was illegally infringed, then Amazon-Kindle will pay you the royalties for that. Now, there's also law that govern this. There's the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and that has some complexity as well.
RAZ: Well, if Amazon says they're going to pay you the royalties, then they should be paying David Springer the royalties that Luke Ethan received, right?
PENENBERG: You would think so. But then, it gets down to, well, who gets to decide it's copyright infringement? And the only one who can do that is a judge. And that's a pretty high standard. And so Amazon could hide behind that.
RAZ: And David Springer's clearly not going to go to court for a few hundred bucks.
PENENBERG: No, he's not.
RAZ: This seems to me like it's going to be a bigger and bigger problem, right, I mean, as e-publishing becomes more and more dominant and more people start to self-publish online.
PENENBERG: I think it's equivalent to spam. You know, the vast majority of spam is intercepted by ISPs and gateways, but a lot does get through. That shows you just how much is sent. And, you know, the same thing is happening with e-books where it's much easier to make money.
All you got to do is steal some content or make up some content, induce someone to buy it. If there's shame attached to erotica, that makes it even easier because people are less likely to complain about it. And so you end up with a situation where you can make some money, and it comes in whether you do anything or not.
So you just post it once, Amazon doesn't see it for a while, and you get four, five, six months' worth of royalties and, you know, make a few hundred bucks. And if you do that enough, you do have enough books on there, you can make some good money.
RAZ: That's Adam Penenberg. He teaches journalism at NYU. His article "Amazon's Plagiarism Problem" appeared in the January issue of "Fast Company" magazine. We also reached out to Amazon to be part of the story. The company provided a written statement that says it's worked steadily to detect and remove books that violate copyright. Amazon's agreement with authors indemnifies the company for damages against copyright violations. And once you agree to the terms, Amazon isn't responsible.
By the way, those books by Maria Cruz and Luke Ethan? They're no longer available on amazon.com.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Try this experiment with me. Go to a computer that you normally use and type in google.com/ads/preferences and hit enter, of course. And there, you will see just a hint of the profile that Google has built around you.
So in my case, the computer knows I'm male. It gives me a range for my age. It says I'm interested in song lyrics, in arts and culture - and clothing? That's interesting. All pretty innocuous stuff, right?
But Google has hundreds - probably thousands of data points with which they've built a much, much more detailed profile of me - and of you, too. We just don't know what that looks like/ And the question is, should we?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. And our cover story today: Google and privacy: what they know, what they don't know -and what's the big deal, anyway?
RYAN PAUL: If you're a Gmail user, they scan all of your email. If you're a YouTube user, they track all of the videos that you watch. So they have a large amount of information that they collect, that they aggregate, and that they use.
RAZ: That's Ryan Paul. He's an editor at the technology journalism website Ars Technica.
PAUL: This is really just part of what they track because they collect a lot of data on the back end, including search queries, which they keep for 18 months.
RAZ: Did you get that? Every search inquiry going back 18 months. Now, Google doesn't do this to spook you but rather, they say to help make your online experience better. The most obvious example, they say: targeted ads for things you buy or like.
But last week, Google stepped it up a notch by announcing a new privacy policy. All Google services like Gmail, YouTube and the Google search page will essentially track the way you use the Internet and send that information to one, central place.
You can opt out, but it means you can't use many of Google services - no Gmail, no YouTube, no Picasa. And if you have an Android phone, it basically becomes useless. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: Users will still be able to see videos on YouTube, and Android phones will still have some functionality.] But Google insists there is nothing to fear. The company will protect your privacy. Here's Rachel Whetstone, Google's senior vice president for public policy.
RACHEL WHETSTONE: There's lots of different ways, magic little ways, that we can use information to improve your services - whether it's, you know, better spelling corrections; whether it's enabling you to, you know, add things from your Gmail to your calendar. Whatever it might be, it's all really about you, and it's about your information.
RAZ: But regardless, Google's new policy is getting a lot of not-so-good attention on Capitol Hill, in part because the company now allows kids as young as 13 to sign up for its services. That means Google can, in theory, build a profile of you over several decades.
All of this worries Massachusetts congressman Ed Markey. He's a senior Democrat on the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. But what he finds most objectionable is that users don't seem to have much say in all of this.
REP. ED MARKEY: It is imperative that users will be able to decide whether they want their information shared across the spectrum of Google's offerings, even if Google thinks they can make a profit by doing that.
RAZ: They're arguing that this is no different from what they've been doing all along. It's just simplifying it. They're saying that by doing this, they can make Google more consumer-friendly.
MARKEY: In my opinion, it's a precursor to a privacy nightmare. So let's just -
RAZ: How so?
MARKEY: Well, let's just take kids and teenagers. You know, for them, Googling is like breathing - they can't live without it. What business does Google have to not give a parent any rights whatsoever to opt out; to say, I don't want my kid's information to be aggregated this way, to market back to my kid.
RAZ: Well, Google presumably has a profile on Ed Markey and Guy Raz and everyone listening, people who use Google. They say, that doesn't matter. I mean, they may sell that information to marketers who will then target you, but the marketers don't know you. They don't know that that profile is connected to you or to me or to anyone else. Google says they protect that privacy.
MARKEY: They protect that privacy until they don't protect our privacy.
RAZ: You're saying you don't trust them.
MARKEY: What is the basis for that trust?
RAZ: Do you think that most people in America have kind of quietly resigned themselves to this reality? I mean, there isn't mass public protest over this new Google policy. Are you surprised?
MARKEY: I think that the only thing that is lacking is a full understanding by the public of the policy. I think there's a ticking time bomb here of public outrage about what Google and other companies are trying to do. They're saying, you can't understand it and as a result, we can get away with it.
But it's no different than what Wall Street said about derivatives - are credit to false swaps. Because you can't understand it, of course you don't care about it - until it comes back into their own home, till it destroys their job, huh? And so part of this debate is that - getting it elevated.
RAZ: Well, the train apparently has left the station. Google is planning on introducing this policy on March 1st. What are you planning to do in Congress to legislate either against this or other laws, to protect consumers against some of these things you're warning about?
MARKEY: My good friend congressman Joe Barton, from Texas, is going to introduce legislation with me - Ed Markey, from Boston - in order to ensure that there is a comprehensive child privacy bill. I think that once we win on children, we'll win on the other issues. But this debate should first of all, be about teenagers and children.
RAZ: That's Massachusetts congressman Ed Markey; he's a Democrat. He's also a senior member on the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, speaking about Google's new privacy policy. Congressman Markey, thanks.
MARKEY: Thank you for having me on.
RAZ: Joining us now for more on the upside, and the potential downside, of Google's new privacy policy is Chris Dawson. He's a contributing editor at ZDNet. Chris, welcome to the program.
CHRIS DAWSON: Thanks for having me.
RAZ: Also with us is Lori Andrews. She is the author of the book "I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy." Lori, welcome to you as well.
LORI ANDREWS: Thanks.
RAZ: Let me start with you, Chris, because I know you consider yourself a Google junkie. You use Picasa and Gmail and YouTube, and all the other services they have to offer. And you are not at all bothered by these new privacy rules.
DAWSON: I'm not. Honestly, I've chosen to opt in. I find that it actually makes my life a lot easier.
RAZ: How does it make it easier for you? Give me an example.
DAWSON: Well, so let's say that I am searching for something. And an example I gave in an article I wrote was, I have been searching for electric guitars lately. So now, of course, everywhere I go on the Web, I have ads displayed to me for guitars ...
RAZ: OK.
DAWSON: ...because Google knows that I'm searching for it. I'm logged into my account. And so then, AdSense users - basically, independent websites that allow Google to place ads on their site - are going to display ads relevant to me. That's actually not a bad thing because I found a cheaper deal on my guitar.
Ultimately, though, I think what this can lead to is some much greater integration of services. So let's say on my Android phone, I have my GPS turned on. Google knows that every Friday night, I search for a pizza place. And I'm hoping that on my Android phone, my GPS will trigger an alert along about 4 o'clock that afternoon, when I happen to be driving past a well-reviewed pizza place that just happens to have a Google offer available - because now, these services are talking to each other.
RAZ: Lori Andrews, the pizza and electric guitar theory, it sounds pretty good. I mean, what's your objection?
ANDREWS: Well, assumptions are made about you based on what you do on the Web, and your digital self is getting to be more important than your offline self. So it may turn out that if other guitar players are more likely to renege on paying off their credit cards, that the next time Christopher searches for a credit card, he won't be able to get one at a good rate.
Sometimes, these things also push negative behavior. For example, when teens Gmail that they're thinking of committing suicide with X chemical, or talk about that on a Google suicide chat room, it turned out that AdWords actually popped up and said, call 1-800 now for a deal - two for one on that chemical.
RAZ: Hmm.
ANDREWS: Even the GPS. Think about Justice Sotomayor in this decision recently about GPS on your car. She says it tells a lot about you - your family associations; whether you're going to a psychiatrist, an abortion clinic. This is information we might want to keep private.
RAZ: But Lori, let's be clear. I mean, Google is building a profile of you, but they don't necessarily associate it with Lori Andrews, the person. I mean, they may be selling that information to advertisers, but the advertisers don't know who you are. They just know a profile of you.
ANDREWS: They do know who you are because Google now says it can change your screen name. So if I've got a YouTube account under one name, and then my Gmail account under something else, it will make it the same. So if you've ever Googled something that you don't want your spouse or boss to know - maybe for a divorce lawyer, a medical condition, or you've applied for another job - you could be watching a YouTube with your family and friends, and an ad based on this private email will appear, about this other job or your medical condition. That's a big problem.
RAZ: Chris, I guess you would argue that you put your trust and faith in a company like Google. You don't think that they are going to abuse your information. But to Lori's point, I mean, many people who use Google services, they really don't know the extent to which they're being tracked. They just don't know.
DAWSON: No, and that's entirely true. And there's a couple of things I'll point out here - is one, you're right; they do need to be thoroughly educated. They need to understand how they can turn off the tracking, how they can shut things down in such a way to maintain a degree of privacy.
ANDREWS: But Google has said if I turn off the GPS on my phone, they can still collect that information.
RAZ: Yeah.
ANDREWS: And so I think there's a kind of bait and switch going on, where we got addicted to all these services. It's kind of the same thing that happened in 2009 with Facebook - where if you look at the original things that Facebook told people, they said, we will only give your information to those people who you've indicated are your friends. And then in 2009, they made public who people's friends were in their pictures. They changed the rules after people had gotten addicted.
RAZ: You could argue that Google, Facebook - these companies now have databases to rival the Social Security Administration. I mean, they have a lot of data about individuals in the U.S., around the world. What is to stop Google from - you know, from one day in the future saying, all right, we're going to just dump this and sell it, and we don't care how people use it?
DAWSON: Money. Money is - this is what actually gives me some faith in Google - is, it's good old capitalism, because Google relies on the fact that there hasn't been a big public outcry over this. Overall, Google's done a pretty good job of being this trusted broker.
And the minute Google steps aside from that role, the minute that people do understand fully that now Google is just selling our data to the highest bidder, they lose that trust. And then they lose their ability to sell ads and generate ad revenue. All of a sudden, their business model goes away. So their billions of dollars a year in profits drop off the earth.
RAZ: That's Chris Dawson; he's a contributing editor to ZDNet. Chris, thanks so much.
DAWSON: Thank you.
RAZ: Also, Lori Andrews. She's the author of the new book "I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy." Lori, thank you as well.
ANDREWS: My pleasure.
RAZ: And as we mentioned earlier, Google's new changes go into effect March 1st. If you have an Android phone and you don't want your data recorded, well, you're out of luck.
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, from NPR News.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
In northern Nigeria, a radical Islamist group known as Boko Haram claimed responsibility for a series of deadly bombing attacks last week that left more than 200 people dead. The campaign of violence targeted churches as well as government institutions in the city of Kano and has left the minority Christian community there on edge. But as NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton reports now, Muslims and Christians are responding to the troubles by bonding and protecting each other.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHANTING)
OFEIBEA QUIST-ARCTON, BYLINE: Muslims gather for Friday prayers at the Al-Furqan Mosque here in Kano, which many describe as a progressive house of prayer.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken)
QUIST-ARCTON: In his settlement, the imam, Bashir Umar, makes specific mention of last week's bloody attacks in Kano, which Boko Haram Islamists say they're responsible for. Both Muslims and Christians lost their lives. The imam tells the Friday worshippers these tragedies happen when people deviate from the path of God. Many Kano Muslims are quick to dissociate themselves from the violent actions of the insurgents. Book Haram is warning Christians to leave the north. And before the Kano bombings, threatening text messages were doing the rounds.
SALIHU TANKO: We said what are we going to do, you know, take that bold decision and visit this church, which is unprecedented in the history of Kano's state?
QUIST-ARCTON: Some Muslims, like Salihu Tanko, are so upset by anti-Christian threats and hate texts, that they've created a group called Concerned Citizens of Kano. The week before the multiple bombings on January 20th, they took the initiative to reach out to Christian leaders to tell them we're standing by you.
TANKO: And this particular effort was the one that really went straight to their hearts, the whole of the Christian community in Kano state. There was a little panic.
(SOUNDBITE OF SINGING)
QUIST-ARCTON: Tanko says Muslims visited churches all over the city, making speeches of friendship, solidarity and confidence building.
TANKO: We got a very warm welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
TANKO: They stood up, they were clapping, they were rejoicing. And you could see the happiness, the relief, in all their faces.
QUIST-ARCTON: In turn, Christians were also invited to visit the mosques. Apostle Isaac Bello, the general secretary of the Christian Association of Nigeria in Kano, says in a period of strife and suspicion, the exchange is a welcome development.
ISAAC BELLO: In the past, nobody had come out to say anything. Now, we had groups of people coming out to say, look, this is not right. This is not part of the Islamic faith. This is not who they are.
QUIST-ARCTON: Even before last week's attacks in Kano, Christians shielded Muslims as they prayed, and Muslims protected Christians in churches while they worshipped, not only here in Kano, but in the capital, Abuja, and in other towns and cities in northern Nigeria.
(SOUNDBITE OF SINGING)
QUIST-ARCTON: At Sunday Mass in Our Lady of Fatima, Roman Catholic cathedral of Kano this morning, the congregation sung lustily but were still on edge. There are security checks and metal detectors and barriers to stop cars driving right up to the church gate. Father Emmanuel Mbah tells his flock to take heart in the aftermath of the fatal bomb blast and to come out of their cages of fear.
FATHER EMMANUEL MBAH: Stop trying to wait until it is safe for you to live. Get a life and start living. Touch somebody and say: Come out of your cave.
QUIST-ARCTON: For Salihu Tanko - his eyes moist with emotion - entering a church for the first time has been a revelation.
TANKO: It was overwhelming, you know, because no matter how you try to be liberal, you know, open-minded, in a society like ours, it's really difficult.
QUIST-ARCTON: Tanko says this is just a first step, but he's confident they're succeeding. Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, NPR News, Kano.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
Just a little more than a day left before voters in Florida have their say in the GOP primary. The latest polls by the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times show Mitt Romney with an 11-point lead over Newt Gingrich, with Rick Santorum and Ron Paul trailing far behind. Newt Gingrich, who's had trouble getting support from establishment Republicans, picked up a nod from a decidedly non-establishment figure - one of his former rivals, Herman Cain.
HERMAN CAIN: I hereby officially and enthusiastically endorse Newt Gingrich for president of the United States.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
RAZ: Gingrich has been campaigning hard this weekend, so has Romney, both men fixing the other in his sights. This morning at a news conference, Gingrich had this to say about the latest polls.
NEWT GINGRICH: The most significant thing in both the polls this morning is that when you add the two conservatives together, we clearly beat Romney. And I think Romney's got a very real challenge in trying to get a majority at the convention. We will go all the way to the convention. I believe the Republican Party will not nominate a pro-abortion, pro-gun control, pro-tax increase moderate from Massachusetts.
RAZ: Meanwhile, in Naples, Florida, Mitt Romney explained why he thought Gingrich was losing support.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
MITT ROMNEY: So, Mr. Speaker, your trouble in Florida is not because the audience is too quiet or too loud, or because you have opponents that are tough. Your problem in Florida is that you worked for Freddie Mac at a time that Freddie Mac was not doing the right thing for the American people.
RAZ: We're joined now by our correspondent Don Gonyea. He's in The Villages. It's north of Tampa in Florida. Don, describe first of all what The Villages is.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: We're in the central part of the state, and one of the guys who's doing security outside the Gingrich event here, he says there are 85,000 retirees who live here. He said it's the biggest such community in the world. Everything you need is here. A lot of people driving around in golf carts. There's one going past me right now. Single family homes. And you have to be 50 years old, I'm told, to move in here.
RAZ: Got to be a pretty significant, politically powerful place, right, especially at this time of year. I'm assuming all the candidates at some point have been through there.
GONYEA: This is not my first visit to The Villages, this year or in past years. I came through here with George W. Bush. I came here with John McCain. This is a place where you have this concentration of senior citizens, and, of course, that's a very important voting block in Florida. They are active, they vote. A good many of these people here I've talked to have already voted. They've already mailed in their ballots, because they have early voting here. But it's a place where a politician can get a lot of bang for their buck with an appearance.
RAZ: Don, we can hear Newt Gingrich speaking behind you. What are people there telling you about Newt Gingrich? I mean, is the momentum still there, or is it kind of dying down?
GONYEA: This is a friendly crowd here, of course. It's a rally. They've turned out to see Newt. So overwhelmingly, they're Gingrich supporters. But you can feel the momentum that he had coming out of South Carolina has really waned. It's a much different scene here than it was in South Carolina.
RAZ: OK. If Gingrich loses as badly as the polls predict he'll lose in Florida, I mean, is this going to be his waterloo? I mean, I'm not talking about Waterloo, Iowa, Don.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
RAZ: We have seen him rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and fall again. But if he crashes in Florida, I mean, is it different than losing Iowa or New Hampshire?
GONYEA: He can say he's going to go on from here, but he does have to prove that South Carolina was not a fluke for him. And he does not have a lot of money. He does not have a lot of organization. That's been evident here in Florida. And from here, we start to move into caucuses. And we move towards Super Tuesday, where you have multiple contests scattered around the country in multiple states. And you just can't do that by turning in a winning debate performance or by holding town halls. You really have to have the money and organization to speak to people. So once we get out of Florida, it gets a lot harder to do the kind of thing he did in South Carolina.
RAZ: And, of course, the winner of Florida gets a lot of delegates, all of the delegates in Florida.
GONYEA: This is a winner-take-all state, though there is some dispute over how the delegates will be apportioned with the national party. Florida has been kind of butting heads with the national party, both in terms of the delegates and in terms of when they would go on the calendar. But, yes, this is the biggest state to go yet, the biggest prize yet, and the biggest test of an organization and the kind of cash one has on hand.
RAZ: I know that you are with the Gingrich campaign right now, Don, obviously, but you're also following the Romney people. What are they up to today?
GONYEA: Governor Romney has been in Naples and Hialeah, and he ends his day in Pompano Beach. So he's working the state hard, too, and he's being joined by surrogates. He's had John McCain with him. And what we've seen from Romney is much tougher rhetoric aimed directly at Newt Gingrich than we've seen in any of the prior states. And it seems to be paying off big-time for him in the polls, at least.
RAZ: He seems to have shaken off the South Carolina fright. He seems very confident.
GONYEA: It does feel like it is a different Mitt Romney. And again, if Mitt Romney goes on and gets the nomination, we may look back to Florida as the place where he figured out kind of what Mitt Romney the candidate has to look like, has to act like, has to talk like on the stump.
RAZ: That's NPR's national political correspondent Don Gonyea joining us from The Villages in Florida. Don, thanks so much.
GONYEA: It's my pleasure.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
And sticking with presidential politics for a moment, speaking a second language has recently become something of a liability for those aspiring to live in the White House. It turns out very few American presidents have had a strong command of a second language, most of them in the early days of the Republic, and that language, it was French.
John McWhorter wrote about this recently in The New Republic, and he's with me now. John, bonjour.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
JOHN MCWHORTER: Bonjour, Guy. How are you doing?
RAZ: Fine, thank you. There was a time in the not-too-distant past when it was actually a virtue for a president, or somebody who aspired to be the president, to speak a foreign language, right?
MCWHORTER: Or at least to pretend. And so for example, as little known as it is now, Herbert Hoover and his wife, Lou, actually spoke Chinese well enough to speak it with each other when they didn't want people to know what they were saying, and no one held it against Herbert that he spoke Chinese.
RAZ: He was the original Manchurian Candidate.
MCWHORTER: He...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
RAZ: I had no idea he spoke Chinese.
MCWHORTER: It's hard to imagine, isn't it?
RAZ: Indeed. In a recent ad put out by Newt Gingrich, an anti-Romney ad, the ad is called "The French Connection." Let's hear it.
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWT GINGRICH POLITICAL AD)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Mitt Romney. He'll say anything to win. Anything. And just like John Kerry...
JOHN KERRY: Laissez les bon temps roulez.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: ...he speaks French too.
MITT ROMNEY: Bonjour. Je m'appelle Mitt Romney.
NARRATOR: But he's still a Massachusetts moderate.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
MCWHORTER: Mon dieu.
The point is that there's this notion that if he actually has some command of another language that it's somehow possibly disloyal or it's dishonest or it's phony. And I think some of this depends on what language you're caught speaking.
RAZ: Now, Newt Gingrich apparently speaks some Spanish as well. A couple of years ago, he had to apologize for some comments he made about Spanish, calling it the language of the ghetto. Here he is speaking in Spanish.
NEWT GINGRICH: (Spanish spoken)
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
RAZ: He's correct.
He's actually not doing that badly.
He's not bad. No.
MCWHORTER: And I hear that he actually has been working on learning some Spanish. But then on the other hand, he has this notion that people who speak it in front of him who are not him are somehow condemned to a ghetto life or doing something that's kind of low rent, which is a bizarre way of looking at these things.
RAZ: And now Jon Huntsman, who I don't know if it was this reason that sunk his candidacy, but some - cast some suspicion on the fact that he actually speaks very good Mandarin. Here's Jon Huntsman.
JON HUNTSMAN: (Mandarin Chinese spoken)
RAZ: Now, that's pretty impressive, I mean, I got to say, listening to that. And yet, in some ways, it was a liability for him, right?
MCWHORTER: Well, the funny thing about Chinese is that you have to be careful because since it's so unfamiliar to us and so exotic, if you're too showboaty about the fact that you know it, it might put some people off as putting on the dog, somewhat. And I think that did not help Huntsman, although, of course, there were many larger issues than that.
RAZ: OK. You write about the one president in the history of the republic who actually was raised bilingual. That is Martin Van Buren. Tell me about...
MCWHORTER: Yeah.
RAZ: ...Mr. Van Buren.
MCWHORTER: Martin Van Buren was raised in Dutch in New York when that was not uncommon, and English was his second language. Like many people, when they get upset, they revert briefly to their original language. When Martin Van Buren was in a tizzy, he would start cursing a little bit in Dutch. So he was our one truly bilingual president, and no one held it against him.
RAZ: So when was the last time we had a president who spoke a passable second language?
MCWHORTER: I think that the answer to that question, if you don't count that right now we have a president who could hold a basic conversation in Indonesian, as quiet as he keeps this, I think that the last one really was Herbert Hoover...
RAZ: Yeah, in Chinese.
MCWHORTER: ...who could speak Chinese with his wife. That was the last president we've had who could go to another country and make his way around in the language and raise eyebrows with his rather fluent abilities.
RAZ: There you go. I guess it's truly a virtue only to speak English if you want to make it to the White House.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
MCWHORTER: That's the historical lesson that we can learn from all this. That's right.
RAZ: John McWhorter is a contributing editor for The New Republic. He spoke to me from New York. John, merci.
MCWHORTER: Merci beaucoup, Guy.
GUY RAZ, HOST:
And speaking of French, a small French revolution is underway in the town of Cesson - sorry. How do you say it?
LAUREN: Cesson-Sevigne.
RAZ: Thankfully, our intern Lauren Benichou is French. Anyway, as I was saying, in that town, the mayor, Michel Bihan, has banned the use of the word mademoiselle.
MAYOR MICHEL BIHAN: (Through translator) In France, mademoiselle is a condescending term. We believe that it's more natural and fair to call women madame.
RAZ: Mademoiselle is the equivalent of miss in English. And on official documents in France, including credit card applications, for example, women must identify themselves as either madame, which means she's married, or mademoiselle, which means she's not. Mayor Bihan was actually elected on a platform of gender equality back in 2008, and one of his campaign promises was to eliminate mademoiselle from the city limits.
BIHAN: (Through Translator) As men, we don't have to worry about that. In letters and in everyday conversation with a woman, we don't need to know whether she's married or not. It's a private and personal choice. We respect the person's private life so we call all women madame.
RAZ: Feminists groups in France have long campaigned to get rid of the word. Germany officially threw out the title fraulein which means the same thing back in 1972. Cesson-Sevigne is now the second town in France to ban any reference to mademoiselle on official municipal documents. No word on whether the central government in Paris has received the message.
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This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
And I'm Audie Cornish. From Gandhi and Joe DiMaggio to Mother Teresa and Bill Gates, introverts have done a lot of great things in the world. But being quiet, introverted or shy was sometimes looked at as a problem to be overcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: If you're what they call a shy guy, you're standing on the outside looking in. You might have something to contribute to their conversation, but nobody cares whether you do or not. There's a barrier, and you don't know how to begin breaking it down.
CORNISH: In the 1940s and '50s, the message to most Americans was, don't be shy. And in the era of reality television, Twitter and relentless self-promotion, it seems that cultural mandate is in overdrive.
A new book tells the story of how things came to be this way, and it's called "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking." The author is Susan Cain, and she joins us from the NPR studios in New York to talk more about it.
Welcome, Susan.
SUSAN CAIN: Thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here, Audie.
CORNISH: Well, we're happy to have you. And to start out - I think we should get this on the record - do you consider yourself an introvert or an extrovert?
CAIN: Oh, I definitely consider myself an introvert, and that was part of the fuel for me to write the book.
CORNISH: And what's the difference between being an introvert versus being shy? I mean, what's your definition?
CAIN: So introversion is really about having a preference for lower-stimulation environments - so just a preference for quiet, for less noise, for less action - whereas extroverts really crave more stimulation in order to feel at their best. And what's important to understand about this is that many people believe that introversion is about being antisocial. And that's really a misperception because actually, it's just that introverts are differently social. So they would prefer to have, you know, a glass of wine with a close friend as opposed to going to a loud party full of strangers.
Now shyness, on the other hand, is about a fear of negative social judgment. So you can be introverted without having that particular fear at all, and you can be shy but also be an extrovert.
CORNISH: And in the book, you say that there's a spectrum. So if some people are listening and they think, well, I, too, like a glass of wine and a party. It's like we all have these tendencies.
CAIN: Yeah, yeah. That's an important thing. And, in fact, Carl Jung, the psychologist who first popularized these terms all the way back in the 1920s - even he said there's no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert, and he said such a man would be in a lunatic asylum.
CORNISH: That makes me worry because I took your test in the book and I'm like, 90 percent extroverted, basically.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CORNISH: Now, you mentioned going back into the history. And I want to talk more about that because I was really fascinated by how you showed how this extrovert ideal - you call it - came to be. When did being introverted move from being a character trait to being looked at as a problem?
CAIN: Yeah. What I found is, to some extent, we've always had an admiration for extroversion in our culture. But the extrovert ideal really came to play at the turn of the 20th century, when we had the rise of big business. And so suddenly, people were flocking to the cities, and they were needing to prove themselves in big corporations - at job interviews and on sales calls.
And so at that moment in time, we moved from what cultural historians call a culture of character to a culture of personality. So during the culture of character, what was important was the good deeds that you performed when nobody was looking. You know, Abraham Lincoln is the embodiment of the culture of character, and people celebrated him back then for being a man who did not offend by superiority.
But at the turn of the century, when we moved into this culture of personality, suddenly, what was admired was to be magnetic and charismatic. And then at the same time, we suddenly had the rise of movies and movie stars. And movie stars, of course, were the embodiment of what it meant to be a charismatic figure. And so part of people's fascination with these movie stars was for what they could learn from them, and bring with them to their own jobs.
CORNISH: Now, how does this thinking affect the workplace today?
CAIN: Well, you know, I would say it's quite a problem in the workplace today because we have a workplace that is increasingly set up for maximum group interaction. More and more of our offices are set up as open-plan offices, where there are no walls and there's very little privacy. And in fact, the average amount of space per employee actually shrunk from 500 square feet in the 1970s, to 200 square feet today.
And also, introverts are much less often groomed for leadership positions, even though there's really fascinating research out - recently, from Adam Grant at Wharton - finding that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes. When their employees are more proactive, they're more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extroverted leader might almost unwittingly be more dominant and be putting their own stamp on things, and so those good ideas never come to the fore.
CORNISH: Of course, getting to that theory of like, the loudest ideas aren't necessarily the best ideas.
CAIN: Right, right.
CORNISH: Except in brainstorming sessions, right? It sounds like some of these team- building things, in a way, don't stamp out good ideas, but certainly make it hard for those of us who aren't as loud.
CAIN: Yeah. And none of this is to say that it would be a good thing to get rid of teamwork and to get rid of group work altogether. It's more just to say that we are at a point in our culture and in our workplace culture, where we've gotten too lopsided. And we tend to believe that all creativity and all productivity comes from the group when in fact, there really is a benefit to solitude, and to being able to kind of go off and focus and put your head down.
CORNISH: Susan, I have to admit, as I read the book more and more, I became more and more offended as an extrovert. I felt like, wait a second. I listen to people in meetings. You know, I, like, felt sort of sheepish.
CAIN: Oh, gosh. Well, you know, that's so not the intention. My criticism in the book is not of extroverts at all, but rather the extrovert ideal. I actually find extroversion to be a really appealing personality style. And this sounds like a funny thing, but many of my best friends truly are extroverts, including my beloved husband.
CORNISH: All my best friends are extroverts. OK. Well, I believe you, and I had a great time talking with you, so thanks so much.
CAIN: Thank you, Audie. I appreciate it.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CORNISH: That's Susan Cain, author of "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking." And if all this talk has you thinking, who am I? Introvert, extrovert, ambivert – yes, that's really a thing. Well, you can take Susan Cain's quiz at NPR.org.
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This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: And I'm Audie Cornish.
Mitt Romney has undergone a transformation in the last week. For almost a year, he tried to portray himself as the grownup, above the fray in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Now, over the course of two debates and countless Florida campaign stops, the buttoned-up businessman is showing he can get tough, too. This shift has upended the dynamic that's been playing out for weeks between the staid and steady Romney and the passionate, fiery Newt Gingrich.
On this eve of the Florida primary, NPR's Ari Shapiro reports that the new Mitt Romney seems to be winning over many more voters than the old one.
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: Here's a game. I'll play a quote, you guess whether it comes from a supporter of Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney. Ready? OK. Here's the first one from Christopher Miller at a rally in Jacksonville, Florida.
CHRISTOPHER MILLER: And I think somebody whose main vice is a Diet Coke as a leader of this country is a very interesting concept.
SHAPIRO: He supports Mitt Romney. Ready for the next one? Cliff McKilley attended a rally with his buddy who wore a fed up T-shirt.
CLIFF MCKILLEY: All of them have good qualifications and are capable. But I just step right back there. He's got the fire. He's got the tenacity.
SHAPIRO: McKilley attended a Veterans for Newt rally in Jacksonville. Now to Orlando, and legal researcher Elizabeth Item.
ELIZABETH ITEM: I don't think he'd control himself very well if he became president.
SHAPIRO: She's describing her fears about Gingrich. OK, final round. At this rally in Sarasota, one of the warm-up speakers asked if the crowd was ready to send President Obama back to Chicago. The crowd had someplace else in mind.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Kenya. Kenya. Kenya. Kenya.
SHAPIRO: Kenya, they shouted, as they waited for their man Newt Gingrich. Those supporters reflect the tone and emotional pitch that the candidates themselves have been projecting through the race. Romney attacks Gingrich as unstable.
MITT ROMNEY: It's been highly erratic.
SHAPIRO: And describes himself as a vetted leader. Gingrich attacks Romney as an establishment elitist and brags about his own history of shaking up the status quo.
NEWT GINGRICH: I frankly don't care what the Washington establishment thinks of me because I intend to change them.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
SHAPIRO: University of Central Florida political scientist Aubrey Jewett says a lot of Republicans get excited about Gingrich's bare knuckle approach, especially this year.
AUBREY JEWETT: There's a certain segment in the Republican base that still really, really wants someone that's just a fire breather to call Obama out on everything that he's done while in office. And they want also, quite frankly, they want someone that can match the excitement that Obama seemed to bring into his election last time.
SHAPIRO: Like the straight A student who wishes he were the quarterback, the Romney campaign has envied Gingrich's ability to work an audience into a lather. And it's not just Gingrich. Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and other candidates have the same talent. Gingrich just happens to be the most formidable challenger left. Still, Jewett says Romney has done well enough because voters like the straight A student, too.
JEWETT: Ideally, Republicans would like a candidate that would take sort of both those traits.
SHAPIRO: And that's what Romney has been trying to deliver in Florida this past week. His relentless attacks against Gingrich suggest an act of political jujitsu, redirecting Gingrich's strength, his anger, back against the former House speaker. It even plays out on specific issues such as investments in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This was Romney at last Thursday's debate.
ROMNEY: But have you checked your own investments? You also have investments with mutual funds that also invest in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
SHAPIRO: And on the eve of the Florida primary, that strategy seems to be working. Romney has risen in the polls dramatically. It may have something to do with the millions of dollars his campaign has dumped into statewide advertising here. But it could also reflect this change, that after a year campaigning as the grownup in the race, Romney is telling voters that they don't have to choose between anger and stability, that the former Massachusetts governor can throw a punch, too.
Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Dunedin, Florida.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
This week, the debut album drops for one of the biggest artists of 2011 you may not have heard of. Lana Del Rey. After months of online hype and a handful of YouTube videos to accompany her songs, Del Rey recently made her "Saturday Night Live" debut.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "VIDEO GAMES")
LANA DEL REY: (Singing) Heaven is a place on earth with you. Tell me all the things you want to do. I heard you like the bad girls. Honey, is that true?
CORNISH: Even though that performance earned her heaps of Internet scorn, Lana Del Rey's album, "Born to Die," is considered one of the most anticipated for 2012, and she's not the only one. 2012 could be the breakout year for many other artists who have enjoyed magazine covers and rapturous music reviews long before their debut albums hit stores.
Here to talk more about who they are and how they get there is NPR's music critic and correspondent, Ann Powers. She also writes for NPR's music news blog, "The Record." Welcome, Ann.
ANN POWERS, BYLINE: Hi, Audie. How you doing?
CORNISH: Pretty good. So, talk to me a little bit about why people hate Lana Del Rey so much. I mean, I've heard people from the actress Juliette Lewis to news anchor Brian Williams kind of diss her. I mean, Williams reportedly called it one of the worst outings in SNL history, which is sort of hard to believe. Who is Lana Del Rey and why do people hate her so much?
POWERS: Lana Del Rey is the alter ego of a woman named Lizzy Grant who's 25 years old. She's from New York. She was a struggling singer/songwriter before she kind of hit on this character she's created. The music itself sounds like kind of Julie London, that torch singer thing, but done with this futuristic ghost story.
CORNISH: Yeah. She called it Hollywood's sad corp.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
POWERS: Yeah. She comes up with a lot of great phrases that aren't always accurate, but that one actually is pretty good. And she looks like she walked out of a film noire. So, she became controversial because, as much as people liked this song, they doubted her authenticity, I guess, as if that really matters for a pop star. But they thought she was too self-created. And many people also doubted that she was an Indie artist.
CORNISH: And, Ann, what's interesting about that is everywhere you went online, on Twitter, on random music blogs, people were talking about her so much. And essentially, she's this artist who really benefits or is suffering from what you've called the hype cycle. What exactly is the hype cycle?
POWERS: Well, the hype cycle's been with us for as long as pop has existed. But in the Internet age, it's been wildly accelerated. Basically, an artist puts forth product. It is quickly absorbed by many different people online. They become the talk of the Internet. And suddenly, this complete unknown goes to, you know, center stage of the pop consciousness, sometimes in a week or less. And that's what happened with Lana Del Rey. So much talk, so little product. That's the hype cycle.
CORNISH: What's the danger for the musicians involved? Because I'm thinking of something like an artist like Del Rey isn't going to benefit from the 10,000 hour rule. Right? I remember this from the book, "Outliers," this idea that The Beatles had performed for 10,000 hours in shows and practice in Germany before they hit it big in England.
POWERS: Absolutely. That is something that gets talked about a lot with these new Internet sensations, that they haven't had time to hone their crafts. In truth, some Internet sensations have been around for a while. A great example is Frank Ocean, the R and B singer. He's someone who is a professional songwriter, redid his image and is quite seasoned and you can really hear it in his music.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SWIM GOOD")
FRANK OCEAN: (Singing) I'm about to drive to the ocean. I'm 'a try to swim from something bigger than me.
POWERS: That's an example of the hype cycle working and kind of in a good way, giving someone a chance, you know, to break through.
CORNISH: At the same time, how much of this is a change from, say, the old music business model where it was DJs and singles that would sort of rev up the hype cycle versus music bloggers and downloads who are the taste makers now?
POWERS: Well, Audie, it's not like hype is at all new. You mentioned DJs and singles, which takes me back to, say, the dawn of rock and roll. I think this is kind of a similar time. The artists who capture our imagination are hitting hot buttons. The rapper, Kreayshawn.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GUCCI, GUCCI")
KREAYSHAWN: (Singing) Gucci, Gucci, Louis, Louis, Fendi, Fendi, Prada. I'm looking like Madonna, but...
POWERS: She's a white girl from Oakland. She adopts African-American styles. This hits the hot button of race.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GUCCI, GUCCI")
KREAYSHAWN: (Singing) I'm yelling, free V-Nasty, 'til my throat is raspy. Young, rich and flashy, I be where the cash be.
POWERS: So these artists - they start arguments. They raise our passions because they're somehow getting to the deepest issues that we're dealing with every day, even if they're doing it with music that may not be that great.
CORNISH: And in the end, some of these artists, I hope, there's a nugget of talent there, right, including Lana Del Rey?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
POWERS: Absolutely. We don't talk about just air. We don't care about things that are totally hollow. And even with Lana Del Rey, she has a talent. Perhaps it's not quite clear how she can hone that best, but it's there. It's hitting us on some level, and we need to respect that that's happening.
CORNISH: Ann Powers, critic and correspondent for NPR Music and for NPR's music news blog, The Record. Ann, thanks so much for talking with us.
POWERS: Thank you, Audie.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "KITTY'S X CHOPPAS")
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Scientists are reporting that aliens are wiping out the animals in Florida's Everglades. Those aliens are Burmese pythons from Asia. They've been slithering around south Florida for decades. But scientists now say the constrictors are so bad, they're eating their way through the swamps.
As NPR's Christopher Joyce reports, the federal government has decided to do something about it.
CHRISTOPHER JOYCE, BYLINE: Michael Dorcas has been catching snakes since he was a kid in Texas. But a 15-foot Burmese python is a handful, or two.
DR. MICHAEL DORCAS: You typically try to grab them behind the head, get somebody else to grab the back end of them. But often, still they defecate all over you even if they can't bite you. So it's always an unpleasant thing when you catch a wild python.
CORNISH: Dorcas is now a biologist at Davidson College in North Carolina. For the past eight years, he's been driving through the Everglades counting animals, specifically midsized mammals. Dorcas wanted to know how big a bite the pythons are taking out of the mammal population. When he compared the number of mammals now to the 1990s, when pythons were less common, he was shocked.
DORCAS: Once we calculated the percentages, we had no idea they were going to be this dramatic.
JOYCE: How dramatic?
DORCAS: Let's see, 99.3 percent decrease in raccoon observations, decreases of 98.9 percent in possums, 94 percent white-tailed deer, 87.5 percent in bobcats.
JOYCE: Nearly all the raccoons, possums, deer and bobcats gone. Now, counting animals by sight from a car isn't foolproof, but it is an accepted practice in wildlife research. Dorcas reports his findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He blames pythons because in areas known to be thickest with the snake, the mammals are scarcer. And where there are fewer pythons, there are more mammals. And there's no evidence it's some disease, either.
DORCAS: This is the first study to show actual effects on populations, and that's why it's remarkable in the fact that those effects are extremely severe.
JOYCE: The onset of the python invasion is often blamed on snake owners who release their pets when they get too big for comfort. Lawyer Marshall Meyers represents the pet industry. He says maybe, but it's more complicated than that.
MARSHALL MEYERS: I think it's habitat loss. I think it's - pythons are, obviously, some of it.
JOYCE: Meyers notes that there's less water now in the Everglades, and that could lower animal populations. But he acknowledges that the python invaders and other exotic animals that escape or are released by owners give the pet trade a bad name.
MEYERS: There are species that are not in this country, that we do not want in this country, because if they came in through the pet trade or through the zoos, they can cause a lot of environmental harm, and that's just a big black eye.
JOYCE: The federal Fish and Wildlife Service has been watching the python explosion and is now taking action. This month, they made it illegal to import these snakes or transport them across state lines. That includes three other constrictor species from Africa and South America. Biologist Susan Jewell at the service studies injurious species that invade the U.S. - things like zebra mussels and poisonous lionfish. She says it's possible Florida's pythons could spread if they learn how to survive in colder weather.
SUSAN JEWELL: I think that it's a good heads-up for everybody. This can happen anywhere and most likely will if these snakes get established.
JOYCE: Jewell says the ban allows people who now own these snakes to keep them, and you can still buy and sell them within a state. She says the new rule does not mean you have to give up your snake. Christopher Joyce, NPR News.
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The FBI raised eyebrows in the tech world recently. It put out a call for advice on how to harvest information from Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites. The bureau wants to troll these sites for signs of a national security threat.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
That means scanning public posts, past and present, to learn about breaking news or to find patterns by so-called bad actors.
Here to talk more about this kind of intelligence work is Sean Gourley. He's worked with defense agencies in the past and now heads the high-tech intelligence firm called Quid. Hello there, Sean.
SEAN GOURLEY: Hi. How are you doing?
CORNISH: Good. So to start, on a technological level, what exactly does the FBI and the Justice Department want to do here? And how would such a program work?
GOURLEY: Well, what they're really trying to do is to try and gather what's called open-source intelligence. Now, open-source intelligence has been around since the time of the Second World War when you would look at the price of oranges in Germany, and try and understand if the fluctuation in the price of oranges would mean that a bridge had been bombed.
And now, it's kind of taken that into kind of the world that we live in today and saying, well, you know, does a stream of tweets mentioning, you know, the word bomber explosion mean that there's been an activity that's happened that we should be aware of?
Now, what they're trying to do is take this information and turn it into intelligence that they can use to guide emergence of threats or bombings or terrorist activities or, indeed, any other kind of thing that the FBI would want to do with it.
CORNISH: Now, let's get some examples here. What kind of security profile could they create on a person or a group based on the information that the average social network user already makes available?
GOURLEY: So, I think, you know, the first thing that they'll probably want to do with this kind of stuff is to see and get intelligence oversight to what's going on. So, if there's an attack that's sort of just being carried out in northern Afghanistan that they weren't aware of, there might be reports of that on the social media channels that they're watching. And they start to recombine this mosaic back together to say, yeah, we can be pretty sure that something happened here and here's what we think it is.
CORNISH: Now, in their call for information, they definitely mentioned that they'd want to be able to search terms like lockdown or bomb or white powder. And that seems pretty easy. You could do that on Twitter right now. But there were some other things that seemed a little bit more complicated, like one quote here, "to predict future events taken by bad actors." Now, what does that mean?
GOURLEY: So, the idea there is what we (unintelligible) again to statistical modeling. Then we can look at the statistical profiles of their social media postings or their geolocations from foursquare check-ins or something along those lines. And what they can do with that is then say here's a kind of profile of somebody that we'd potentially be interested in, even if we don't know that they're already a bad actor.
And so, you start to get into the kind of predictive modeling space. Now, I should, you know, kind of say that this stuff is all very experimental at the moment and by no means does it exist today.
CORNISH: The FBI says that this - said specifically in a statement that this would not focus on specific people or protected groups. But, you know, I have to wonder in an era where there's - where the privacy policies for Google or Facebook seemed like they're changing all the time, how do you really protect yourself as a citizen?
GOURLEY: Look, the world that we live in now is really one where we've sort of become accustomed to sharing little snippets of our lives. Now, we're sort of OK with this as long as it's just serving us ads and we can buy a pair of trainers. But I think we'll start to find in the coming years that the information trails that we leave behind will also start to define us.
CORNISH: So, where you spend your money, how you spend your time could sort of paint a picture of what you like to do, what kind of person you would be, how likely you are to attack someone else? I'm not sure which are saying.
GOURLEY: I mean, so at the moment, that information is being collected and is being used to serve the ads that you see on Facebook. You know, Facebook will serve you up an ad based on the history of things that you have done. What it really hasn't been applied to in any great sort of systematic way is looking to see if you're a terrorist. Now, it's still a moot point as to whether that can be done. Because, indeed, serving up a book recommendation is a lot more simple than serving up a kind of a warrant for an arrest.
CORNISH: Right. And even some of those companies don't do that very well when you think about it.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
GOURLEY: Right. Now, we've all seen the kind of people like you might like this book and we've seen that go wrong. And that's OK when it goes wrong with a book recommendation. It may not be OK if it goes wrong and you end up in jail.
CORNISH: Sean Gourley, thanks so much for talking with us.
GOURLEY: Thank you.
CORNISH: Sean Gourley, he's head of the high-tech intelligence firm Quid.
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To Madrid now, where Spain's most famous judge has found himself on trial. His name is Baltasar Garzon. Thousands of Spaniards marched yesterday to support him.
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CORNISH: He is best known as a human rights crusader who indicted the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. But as Lauren Frayer reports from Madrid, the judge found himself in the defendant's chair when he started looking into Spain's own Fascist past.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Dateline Spain, July 18, 1936.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: There are more than 100,000 unsolved cases of deaths or disappearances from Spain's 1930s civil war. Mass graves keep turning up across Spain, but no one has been prosecuted, except for the man who tried to investigate them.
Baltasar Garzon was allowed to indict Augusto Pinochet. He was even allowed to start investigating U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for allegedly authorizing torture.
BALTASAR GARZON JUDGE, SPAIN: (Foreign language spoken).
FRAYER: But when Spain tries to investigate its own actions, Garzon told Democracy Now last year, it denies access to the facts and puts the judge himself on trial. In 2008, Garzon ordered mass graves exhumed and charged the late dictator Francisco Franco with murder. Two far-right groups then sued, accusing Garzon of violating a 1977 amnesty. That law, passed two years after Franco died, makes it illegal to revisit political crimes from that era. But Garzon says some atrocities are just too horrible to have a statute of limitations.
Reed Brody from Human Rights Watch agrees and points out that Spain didn't object when Garzon ignored amnesty laws in other countries.
REED BRODY: There were amnesties in Chile, in Argentina, in Peru and Guatemala. And in all of those cases, international law required an investigation of these crimes. Judge Garzon attempted to do the same thing, and he's being prosecuted for it.
FRAYER: As an investigative judge, Garzon's job is like that of a U.S. district attorney. He's put drug barons, Basque terrorists and corrupt politicians behind bars. He leapfrogged his colleagues to stardom. Now they're the ones passing judgment on him.
José Ignacio Wert is a Cabinet minister in Spain's new conservative government. He acknowledges there's been some resentment of Garzon inside Spain's halls of power. He says his colleagues have coined a term: Garzonada.
JOSE IGNACIO: It's derogatory. Garzonada means taking decisions that are very - I mean have a great appeal to the media, great visibility but that are not compliant with laws. That's a Garzonada.
FRAYER: Garzon may be the darling of human rights groups abroad, but Spaniards are divided. Seventy-five years after its civil war, Spain still hasn't had a truth and reconciliation process. In 2007, the socialists passed a Historical Memory law recognizing victims on both sides.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Foreign language spoken)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken)
FRAYER: On the steps of a law school in Madrid, students smoke and argue over whether Garzon should be their role model.
FRANCISCO REYNA: He's taken so many steps forward. Too forward, I would say.
FRAYER: Student Francisco Reyna says the famous judge is wrong to reopen wounds from the past.
The Franco case is just one of three trials against Garzon. A verdict is pending on the legality of wiretaps he used to record inmates and their lawyers in 2008. It was part of a larger probe into alleged corruption involving Spain's now ruling conservative party.
If Garzon is convicted, a whole lot of evidence against the conservatives could be thrown out. A third case involves alleged payments to him from Spanish banks. The confluence of all these trials, just after conservatives took power here last month, raises eyebrows for Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch.
BRODY: Garzon's enemies are trying to cut him down to size. This is a reprisal against Judge Garzon for taking on controversial cases against vested interests.
FRAYER: If he's convicted on any of the charges, Garzon would be barred from the bench in Spain. But he could retain a high profile abroad with his consulting work at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. For NPR News, I'm Lauren Frayer in Madrid.
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While California wants car companies to make more electric cars, automakers are trying all sorts of things to meet tough fuel economy standards. They're not just turning to new technologies. They're also taking a second look at an old one. NPR's Sonari Glinton reports on the return of the diesel engine.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: I want to find out exactly what a diesel engine is, so I've come here to the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan, and I'm here with Professor Margaret Wooldridge.
DR. MARGARET WOOLDRIDGE: Good afternoon.
GLINTON: So tell me what a diesel engine is.
WOOLDRIDGE: OK. A diesel engine is an engine that runs on diesel fuel. And because it runs on that fuel, the strategy for introducing the fuel into the engine is you inject it directly into the engine. And for a gasoline engine, it needs a spark plug to ignite the fuel. A diesel engine doesn't have a spark plug.
GLINTON: The spark plug, however that works, is not the only difference between the two engines.
WOOLDRIDGE: Pound for pound, in terms of fuel economy, the diesel engine wins. So that's the primary advantage. So if you sit down and do the math and look at the fuel cost - and it really depends on where diesel fuel is relative to gasoline prices - you can come out with a benefit.
GLINTON: Diesel fuel is a cousin of gasoline. It's still a fossil fuel.
WOOLDRIDGE: They all come from the same sweet light crude - that's what we like most - and same with jet fuels. It's just a different refining process to get you to a different mixture, a different set of hydrocarbons.
GLINTON: In passenger cars, the difference in technology between diesel and gasoline is essentially cost. Diesel engines cost more to engineer and build. And right now, the cost of diesel fuel in the U.S. is higher, and their exhaust contains more soot. Most trucks use diesel already. Wooldridge says diesel has several advantages to gas-powered cars. They go from zero to 30 faster, they tend to last longer, and there's the fuel efficiency. So if diesel has all these good qualities, why are there so few diesel passenger vehicles in the U.S.?
The answer is history. During the oil crisis in the '70s, car companies looked to diesel to help solve fuel economy problems. John O'Dell is with edmunds.com. He'll pick up the story from here.
JOHN O'DELL: GM took an internal combustion gasoline engine and heavily modified it to make a diesel out of it very quickly. It was an absolute disaster of an engine. It broke, it smelled bad, it was noisy, it was unreliable, and it left most Americans with an incredibly bad taste in their mouth or in their mouth memory about diesels.
GLINTON: The U.S. essentially gave up on diesel cars. The European carmakers, though, kept making them and making them better. In Europe, diesel is one of the primary ways of getting more miles to the gallon, about 20 percent more. A lot has changed since GM first launched its diesel. The kind of diesel fuel sold for passenger cars in the U.S. is now cleaner, and diesel could be a way carmakers gets a higher fuel economy. The Obama administration has proposed aggressive new fuel rules. They give incentives for hybrids and electrics but not diesel.
David Geanacopoulos is general counsel with Volkswagen Group of America. VW has bet a lot on diesel. Geanacopoulos says the new fuel standards shouldn't favor one technology over another.
DAVID GEANACOPOULOS: Let the customers and the marketplace and future technical and scientific developments determine which are the winners. In a technology-neutral approach, the regulations can maximize innovation and improve our chances of achieving efficiency throughout the product range.
GLINTON: Meanwhile, Gina McCarthy with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says diesel engines don't get the same incentives because they're already in the marketplace.
GINA MCCARTHY: They are available, and the infrastructure is there to support them. So we think they're available to customers right now. We want to get the customers an ability to get these other advanced vehicles as well and get them into the market sooner, and that's the reason for the incentives.
GLINTON: Even without government incentives, you're going to see more and more diesel cars on the road. The biggest car company in the world, General Motors, is making a diesel version of its best-selling car, the Chevy Cruze. This time, the executives say, they'll get it right. Sonari Glinton, NPR News.
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(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BLOCK: Many investors expect Facebook to file papers this week for an initial public offering. The company, founded in a Harvard dorm room less than a decade ago, is expected to be valued at 80 to $100 billion.
From Silicon Valley, NPR's Steve Henn reports.
STEVE HENN, BYLINE: If the early reports are true, this is shaping up to be the biggest Internet IPO ever.
KATHLEEN SMITH: It'll be larger than the Google IPO, larger than the Amazon IPO, and the largest Internet IPO in history.
HENN: Kathleen Smith tracks initial public offerings at Renaissance Capital.
SMITH: It's rumored that they will seek to raise 10 billion in their IPO.
HENN: And Smith expects the deal could value Facebook at something close to $100 billion. It could create something like a thousand new Facebook millionaires and give Marc Zuckerberg, Facebook's 27-year-old CEO, a net worth north of $20 billion, at least on paper.
So this leads to the question: Is Facebook really worth this? Or is this another Internet bubble in the making?
SAM HAMADEH: This is very expensive company, let's face it.
HENN: Sam Hamadeh follows the tech industry and Wall Street at PrivCo.
HAMADEH: So, at $100 billion, you're talking about one of the largest companies in the United States, or the most valuable companies in the United States. The upside is reasonably limited.
HENN: Hamadeh says Facebook would have to grow like a weed for years to justify its stock price, and other analysts agree. They say investors who by shares are betting that it will more than quadruple in size. The reason investors and Wall Street are optimistic is that the company actually has been growing like a weed for years.
Debra Aho Williamson is an analyst at eMarketer. She estimates last year Facebook's revenue more than doubled. They year before that, it tripled. But she thinks this year that 100 percent growth rate will fall by half.
DEBORAH AHO WILLIAMSON: But that doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, Facebook is a failure or that Facebook has done something wrong. I mean, you know, 50 percent revenue growth in advertising is still huge and enormous, and something that most media properties would salivate over. Right?
HENN: And Williamson believes there will be myriad ways for Facebook to make money down the road.
WILLIAMSON: The real reason why investors are valuing Facebook so highly is because of the promise. They think that Facebook may be the future of how we use the Internet.
HENN: Investors seem eager to bet billions that Facebook's grand future actually comes to pass.
Steve Henn, NPR News, Silicon Valley.
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There is a movement on to overturn the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling with a constitutional amendment. One vocal proponent of that movement is Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana. He's finishing up his first term and facing a tight race for re-election. Tester says Citizens United allows corporations to secretly buy American political elections. And he takes issue with one fundamental part of the Court's decision - the idea of corporate personhood. That corporations, like people, have a right to political speech.
SENATOR JON TESTER: Well, I think corporations are a whole lot different than people. I mean, I don't know a corporation would be put in prison. I do know people would be put in prison. And that's really what's sad about it. As a policymaker, as a public servant, I come to Washington, D.C. and I make difficult decisions and I make difficult decisions every day. And sometimes those decisions upset people.
Well, if you've got corporations out there that have got hugely deep pockets - and I'm concerned about re-election, which isn't the top thing on my mind. The top thing on my mind is to make good policy. Well, they're going to come in, in a state like Montana, throw $1 million down the year before an election and probably put 15 to $20 million in during the election, which is what we figure they're going to do this cycle.
And whether it beats me or not, I don't know. I have great faith in the people of Montana, they can't be bought. But if it is, what a travesty. That's ridiculous. And it's not with the forefathers sought. And it just really goes against what this country is built upon.
BLOCK: Conceivably, though, some that corporate money could benefit you or certainly labor union money on behalf of political ads, which has traditionally favored Democratic candidates, that could also benefit you.
TESTER: Well, in the end, I don't think it benefits anybody. I mean, I think in the end, this decision hurts Democrats and hurts Republicans. Regardless if I have my third party people or what happens, I think in the end when you have no transparency, when there's no accountability, it's not good for government.
BLOCK: Senator Tester, I want to ask you about some of the constitutional amendments the Democrats have introduced into Congress that would reverse the Citizens United decision. You signed on as a co-sponsor. To say that this is an uphill struggle would be an understatement. I mean, the pass to get a constitutional amendment ratified means you have to pass it with a supermajority in both Houses of Congress. It then has to be ratified by three quarters of the states.
Is this really, do you think, a symbolic move more than anything that has a practical chance of getting passed?
TESTER: Well, I think you have to fight for what you believe in. And I don't see this as symbolic. I think it can happen. Whether - it's certainly not going to happen before this election is over with in 2012. But I think this is a direct attack on our election system. And I think people will see it as that, and they'll move forward in a way that, you know, keeps his country a great country and keeps our elections free.
BLOCK: I gather that the race, your re-election race, for your seat in the Senate is looking really pretty close. How much of an effect do you think corporate spending is having on that campaign?
TESTER: Well, as I've said, the authority put $1 million in all on attack ads on me. And I think that's just the beginning. Our challenge is, is to make sure we get the facts. If we get the facts out, we win the election. If fiction trumps fact - and that's exactly what these third-party folks are trying to do, is make fiction from fact - then it becomes a real problem.
BLOCK: You know, Senator Tester, that your opponent's campaign says that you're hypocritical for talking about restricting campaign finance. They call you the number one recipient of lobbyist campaign cash out of any Washington politician this election cycle. How do you respond to that?
TESTER: Well, first of all, I've put up incredible standards in my office for lobbyists; went far, far, far above the Senate standards, number one. Number two, the fact that you know that people give money to my campaign shows that there's transparency there. But the fact is you know about it.
The problem with these third party folks is that you don't know who they are, where they come from. And yet, they're going to put as much money into this campaign potentially as either one of the candidates put together.
BLOCK: Conceivably, there would be a third-party group, a superPAC that would say, you know, we're going to back Senator Jon Tester. If that's the case, what do you do? Do you say, no, I don't want that? Do you...
TESTER: First of all, I wouldn't know who to go to, number one. And number two...
BLOCK: Because you're not supposed to go to them, right?
TESTER: Number two, if there was listening to this program, I would just a deal with the facts. Deal with facts. Don't make stuff up.
BLOCK: Senator Tester, thank you very much.
TESTER: Thank you.
BLOCK: That Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, talking about why he's backing a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling.
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The police chief in the embattled town of East Haven, Connecticut, is retiring. That was the announcement today from the town's mayor. The police chief is stepping down amidst a barrage of criticism for the way he handled allegations of racial profiling, excessive force, harassment and intimidation of Latinos in that community.
Diane Orson, of member station WNPR, has our story.
DIANE ORSON, BYLINE: Speaking in Town Hall on Main Street, East Haven Mayor Joseph Maturo Jr. praised police chief Leonard Gallo, and called his retirement a selfless act designed to start a healing process.
MAYOR JOSEPH MATURO: Chief Gallo has always been an unwavering supporter of the town of East Haven. He has been a devoted public servant, and performed admirably in both his personal and professional life.
ORSON: Gallo was named as co-conspirator in an a grand jury indictment that charges four East Haven police officers with violating the civil rights of Latinos in the community. The FBI details more than 30 instances of abuse, including unreasonable search and seizures, raids on Latino businesses, and beatings of Latinos taken into custody. The officers have pleaded not guilty. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: Gallo was not named in the grand jury indictment, although his lawyer has said Gallo is considered an unindicted co-conspirator. Accusasions against Gallo are in a civil complaint; he has not been accused of any crimes.]
Chief Gallo had been placed on paid administrative leave in April 2010 by the previous mayor, when the FBI began its criminal investigation. But he was re-instated when Mayor Maturo was elected last November.
Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy spoke to reporters today.
GOV. DANNEL MALLOY: One could reasonably question why he was reinstated. But, you know, this community has a lot of work to do. And it has a lot of work to do to reach out to its constituents.
ORSON: Gallo faces civil charges and possible criminal charges. Jonathan Einhorn is his attorney.
JONATHAN EINHORN: Chief Gallo has never engaged in, participated in, or condoned any racial profiling of any nature whatsoever.
ORSON: At the Oasis Restaurant in East Haven, resident Ralf Gargano says it's time for Gallo to go.
RALPH GARGANO: I believe it's a step in the right direction for our town. Ninety-nine percent of the police department are good people. And it's sad, very sad - for what the town is going through.
ORSON: The officers' arrests followed a federal investigation that found a deeply rooted pattern of discriminatory policing in East Haven. Then last week, East Haven's mayor was roundly criticized for saying that he might have tacos as a way of doing something to help Latinos in the wake of the arrests; he later apologized. The federal investigation is ongoing.
For NPR News, I'm Diane Orson in New Haven.
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There's new evidence of the power of superPACs, the political committees that can raise unregulated money. Researchers examined the flood of ads in early voting states in the Republican primaries.
They found nearly half are coming not from the candidates but from superPACs, as NPR's Peter Overby explains.
PETER OVERBY, BYLINE: If someone could add up all the TV ads in the Republican primaries - well, actually somebody did add them up, the Wesleyan Media Project at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. The political scientists there found that so far there have been about the same number of GOP primary ads as there were four years ago.
Erika Franklin Fowler is the director of the Wesleyan project. She says what's different - and different in a big way - is the role of outside money groups, mostly superPACs.
ERIKA FOWLER: They went from about 3 percent of total ad airings in the 2008 race to almost half, about 44 percent in 2012.
OVERBY: SuperPACs are creations of several recent legal rulings, including the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision in 2010. A superPAC can raise unlimited money from corporations, unions and the wealthy. The candidate can help raise that money, but the candidate and the superPAC cannot coordinate their messages.
Fowler says that once superPACs became possible, they changed the game in the 2010 congressional races
FOWLER: 2010 was a record-breaking year in terms of political advertising. And we expect 2012 to shatter those records.
OVERBY: Right now, the records are being tested by a superPAC supporting former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Take Florida where the GOP primary is tomorrow, and where the pro-Romney superPAC has been on the air 6,900 times. Here's the tone of the ads.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: On leadership and character, Gingrich is no Ronald Reagan. Restore Our Future...
OVERBY: The superPAC accounts for more than half of all the pro-Romney ads. And it compares to 210 ads total from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and a pro-Gingrich superPAC. These ad totals come from a media group called Kantar Media/CMAG.
Again, Erika Franklin Fowler.
FOWLER: The voters there are getting primarily one-sided flows of information with pro-Romney arguments, and very little on the Gingrich side to counteract those.
OVERBY: But at the pro-Gingrich superPAC, consultant Rick Tyler says Gingrich is still better off with friends who are not bound by the $2,500 limit that applies to old-fashioned, direct campaign contributions. Friends like Sheldon and Miriam Adelson who recently gave the superPAC $10 million.
RICK TYLER: Let's say we were to get rid of superPACs and keep everything the same where the candidates couldn't raise money. There is no constitutional reason why Mitt Romney couldn't just write a check.
OVERBY: But even with that kind of money flying around in the GOP primaries, other political messengers are also going on TV.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Tell President Obama, American workers aren't pawns in your political games.
OVERBY: That's from Americans for Prosperity, not a superPAC but a nonprofit group backed by conservative industrialists David and Charles Koch. Nonprofits don't have to disclose their donors.
Over the past 13 months, Americans for Prosperity has run 5,200 in battleground states. The Obama re-election campaign has also been on the air a little bit, in fact, referring to the Koch brothers as secretive oil billionaires.
Fowler says those ads also appeared in battleground states where the general election will be decided.
FOWLER: The Obama campaign likes to talk about they take a national approach to the campaign. But, you know, early advertising placement certainly tells a little bit about their hand.
OVERBY: And tomorrow, we'll get a better look at the hand of the superPACs. It's time for them to disclose their donors to the Federal Election Commission. For most of the superPACs, it will be the first time they reveal where their money has been coming from.
Peter Overby, NPR News, Washington.
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It's a case that has shocked the conscience of Canada. And it ended yesterday when a jury in Ontario found three members of an Afghan family guilty of murder. The deaths have been referred to as honor killings. Yesterday, the judge described them as murders motivated by a completely twisted sense of honor; heinous, despicable, cold-blooded and shameful.
Here are the basics of the case. In June of 2009, a woman and three teenage sisters were found dead in a car, submerged in a canal. Those now convicted of their murder are the girls' father, his second wife - who is the girls' mother - and their son.
For more on the case, I'm joined by CBC Radio reporter Justin Hayward. And, Justin, at first this was thought to be a case of accidental drowning. But then, investigators started looking at the family and hearing troubling stories about the three girls - ages 19, 17 and 13 - and their situation at home. What did they hear?
JUSTIN HAYWARD: Well, of the 58 witnesses that came and spoke to the court, a number of them were there to illustrate the situation of the young women at home. There were teachers from their school, officials from youth protection here in Quebec. And if you take all of their testimony together, it paints a picture of three young women who were normal, relatively rebellious North American teenagers who were bumping up against sort of these more traditional beliefs that they should be more tightly controlled.
And the teachers were telling stories of sometimes seeing bruising on them. So, you certainly got a picture of a very controlling family, traditional family atmosphere that was at odds with what the average North American teenager wants to have as freedoms.
BLOCK: And I gather there was also physical evidence that indicated that this car didn't just fall into the canal, but that another car may have pushed it into the canal.
HAYWARD: Yeah. Police put together evidence that there was damage on the family Lexus that matched damage on a recently bought Nissan Sentra, which was the car that was found in the canal. And the police's theory that they pieced together with the damage from those two cars was that the Lexus pushed the Sentra into the canal.
BLOCK: Investigators ultimately put a wiretap in the family's minivan and got what turned out to be some damning evidence. They heard the father, Mohammad Shafia, say this about his daughters: Would they come back to life 100 times, you should do the same thing again. May the devil defecate on their graves. This is what a daughter should be. Would a daughter be such a whore?
How did the defense try to explain or account for what the father said?
HAYWARD: Yeah. That was extremely shocking evidence. And I remember being in court when they were playing it, and you could hear people audibly gasp when those translated tapes were played in court. What the defense did is they brought in an expert in Afghan culture who said that Afghans, when they're upset or grieving, will swear a lot. And this kind of swearing is not to be taken literally. For example, that quote that you just said, may the devil defecate on their graves. He said that that's no stronger than a North American saying, to hell with them, and that the father, Mohammad Shafia, was just trying to make himself feel better by blowing off steam.
BLOCK: Justin, this story has generated a lot of coverage there in Canada. Talk a bit about how it's been received by the Canadian people and this whole notion of honor killings.
HAYWARD: Yeah. It's certainly an ongoing debate. I mean, our House of Commons is just sitting again today for the first time since around Christmas. And we're expecting that this will probably come up in the House, that something will be said. But there hasn't been a lot of public forum other than radio call-in shows and the like. And you can imagine how vitriolic some people can be about this sort of thing.
Certainly, there's also a debate where cooler heads are prevailing, where they're trying to say - for example, even outside the court yesterday, there was an imam and there was a young Afghan who's a student at a nearby university to where the trial was taking place who came that day because they knew the media would be there en masse and they wanted to make sure that everyone understood that it's not all Afghans, it's not all Muslims that are like this.
BLOCK: And is that the fear, that there will be a backlash toward the Afghan-Canadian, the Muslim-Canadian community because of this?
HAYWARD: We've spoken to a number of people about that, and that's absolutely what they're concerned about. So, they're already out in the streets, so to speak, trying to make sure that that doesn't happen.
BLOCK: I've been talking with CBC Radio reporter Justin Hayward. Justin, thank you very much.
HAYWARD: My pleasure.
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Now, poetry and Oreos or your comments about Friday's program and two stories that seem to have caught your collective attention. First, how the Chinese came to embrace that American classic, the Oreo.
LORNA DAVIS: In the early days, people said, there's no way that Chinese consumers will twist, lick and dunk because that's a very strangely American habit.
BLOCK: Well, as we learned on Friday, a savvy marketing campaign and a crafty redesign have made Oreos the number one cookie in China. Chinese Oreos are more chocolatey, the filling less sweet. They're also not necessary black and white or even round. Think rectangular or sticks. Meet the Chinese Oreo.
Well, some of you were intrigued and wanted...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Cookie.
CORNISH: Others still couldn't get past how unhealthy Oreos are. Between these two factions, Patrick Consadine(ph) of West Jefferson, North Carolina is a man of peace. He writes: Following the story, I went into a wellness center where I swim. Jennifer was at the front desk and I said, twist, lick and dunk is the essence of what cookie? She thought for a minute and said, it must be the Oreo. What else do you twist, lick and dunk? I proceeded to tell her about the NPR story I'd just heard. And she said, maybe you can get us a taste of those Chinese Oreo cookies. So, this is my attempt to get a sample of those new Oreos. I'll share them at the Mountain Hearts Wellness Center, but only after people workout.
BLOCK: Alas, Patrick, our cookie jar is empty. From the essence of an Oreo now to the essence of a news story. On Friday, we debuted a monthly experiment. We asked poet Tracy K. Smith to turn the day's headlines into verse. She was taken with the story of Nigerians fleeing the country's north to escape violence and here is some of what she wrote.
TRACY K. SMITH: History is not a woman and it is not the crowd forming in a square. It is not the bright swarm of voices chanting, no and now or even the wrapped silence of a room where a film of history is right now being screened.
CORNISH: Candace Pierce(ph) of Grand Rapids, Michigan writes: I love your poem. And Kathleen Dixon(ph) of Casper, Wyoming called Smith's poem, "New Road Station," vivid, moving and touching. She adds, this unexpected Friday evening gift left me with a haunting and much clearer perspective.
BLOCK: We enjoy reading your letters. Please, keep them coming. You can write to us at NPR.org. Just click on Contact Us at the bottom of the page.
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It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Audie Cornish.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
I'm Melissa Block. And we begin this hour with escalating violence in Syria. Forces loyal to the Syrian government are mounting an offensive. The move comes as an increasing number of army defectors are fighting back. Over the weekend, these defectors gained control of some suburbs surprisingly close to the Syrian capital, Damascus, but NPR's Kelly McEvers reports from Beirut that government troops are now storming those towns.
KELLY MCEVERS, BYLINE: Activists and witnesses in Syria say government troops have stormed into the east of Damascus where they faced fierce resistance from rebel fighters before those fighters fell back. Witnesses say the rebels, armed only with rifles, are no match for the much more powerful army.
(SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE)
MCEVERS: This video from the town of Kafar Batna shows smoke rising from residential areas as shelling and gunfire echo in the streets. Witnesses say security forces are going house to house and rounding people up and arresting them.
Rebels had been manning checkpoints, claiming to be protecting unarmed protesters. These rebel checkpoints reached within just a few miles of Damascus before government troops launched the offensive. The fighting comes as the Arab League has decided to suspend the work of its monitors in Syria. The monitors had been in the country to determine whether Syria was complying with the peace plan, but they deemed the situation too dangerous to continue. The past two days have been some of the most violent yet in the 10-month antigovernment uprising that's beginning to look more and more like a civil war.
The United Nations says at least 5,400 people have died since March. The U.N. Security Council will meet tomorrow to discuss a new draft resolution on Syria. That draft supports an Arab League initiative calling for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to abdicate power to a deputy, who would then help form a new national unity government. But Russia says it will not support a measure that basically calls for regime change. The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, urged Russia to change its position.
AMBASSADOR SUSAN RICE: We have seen the consequences of neglect and inaction by this council over the course of the last 10 months, but we certainly think that it's vitally important for the council to stand up and support a process that the neighboring states all have come to us and said please support.
MCEVERS: Russia, today, proposed that members of the Syrian government and opposition should come to Moscow to negotiate an end to the crisis. The opposition said it refuses to negotiate with a killer. Rice said the time has passed for such negotiations.
RICE: More and more innocent people are dying. We've seen horrific reports of women and children and their bodies on display as a consequence of government sponsored violence. That needs to end.
Kelly McEvers, NPR News, Beirut.
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While many political observers believe that Assad's regime's days are numbered, Joshua Landis says it's likely to hang on far longer than anyone could have predicted when that uprising began last March. Landis is director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Hello there, Joshua.
DR. JOSHUA LANDIS: It's a pleasure being here.
CORNISH: You know, you've called the U.S. State Department estimates that Assad would soon go wishful thinking. How come?
LANDIS: Well because Syria has a professional army that's holding together. The Alawite minority, which is sitting at the top of this military structure, has a very bleak future in Syria should the revolution win. And the opposition is very fragmented and scattered. They're getting guns and they're developing a military option, but it's still very weak. And to take on a professional army is going to be very difficult. And third is foreign intervention. The foreign community is not ready to intervene in Syria. This is not Libya.
CORNISH: To break down some of your answers a little bit, let's take the issue about the military. Why hasn't it turned on the Syrian leader, and why are we seeing such an extended violence in the country there?
LANDIS: Well, the Syrian military is really an expression of the president. It's been very well-groomed. Bashar al-Assad and his father before him, Hafez al-Assad, for 40 years, have focused on the military and its loyalty. They didn't make the mistake that Mubarak made. Mubarak made his son go into - let his son go into international banking. Assad's sons went into the military and got military training. The upper ranks of the Syrian officer corps are largely populated with Alawites from the same religious sect and people who are related to regime figures. So the military is not going to turn on the president, and that's the big difference between Egypt and Tunisia and Syria. And as long as the military doesn't take out the president, then the people have to get organized in order to defeat the Syrian military.
In Egypt and Tunisia, the people could be a leaderless revolution because the military did all the heavy lifting. In Syria, they don't have that luxury. They're going to have to get a hierarchy with a real leadership that's unified and somehow figure out how to deal with the Syrian military.
CORNISH: And lastly, one of the issues you discussed about foreign powers not wanting to get involved, at the same time you do have the Arab League trying to be active in someway in Syria. Why isn't that having an effect?
LANDIS: Well, the Arab League doesn't want to intervene militarily for the same reasons that the West doesn't want to intervene. And I was just recently in Saudi Arabia and spoke to a number of princes there, and they said Saudi Arabia is not going to vote to intervene militarily in a fellow Arab country. Logically, it doesn't make sense to do that. Saudi Arabia is the one country that has an air force and could do this. You know, of course, America would help and lead from behind in that situation.
But they need either Turkey or Saudi Arabia to go in first, and they're not going to do it because Syria is a big country. It's 24 million people. The opposition has been fragmented, and they'll get stuck in an Iraq-type situation, and that's the fear.
CORNISH: You've talked about the reasons why Syria is different from the other countries that have seen changes since the Arab Spring. Is there anything that it has in common with these countries that could lead to the end of Assad's regime?
LANDIS: Like the other Arab countries, the dictatorship has failed to deliver high growth, and you've got this exploding poverty belt. You've got a youth bulge. They're people who don't have many options. And the young unemployed, people who are leading this revolution are really from the countryside, in cities like Homs and Idlib and Daraa, represent this countryside for which government has failed. And that's the same in Egypt and Tunisia, and that's not going to go away.
CORNISH: Joshua, is there anything in particular then we should look for, any sign that would indicate when Assad's regime is ending?
LANDIS: Well, when a Syrian military can no longer project its force and walk into towns like Douma and so forth and round up the opposition, then things will be going south for this regime because ultimately this is going to come down to a military contest.
CORNISH: Joshua Landis, he's director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Thanks so much for talking with us.
LANDIS: It's a pleasure.
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A judge's decision in Guatemala last week means that former dictator Efrain Rios Montt will stand trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Prosecutors say Rios Montt is responsible for a scorched-earth campaign of mass murder, rape and terror in the Guatemalan highlands from 1982 to '83. Rios Montt is 85 years old and is now under house arrest awaiting trial.
Human rights scholar Jennifer Schirmer is an expert on the war in Guatemala. She's interviewed both Guatemalan military officers and former guerilla fighters about this time period. Jennifer Schirmer, welcome to the program.
DR. JENNIFER SCHIRMER: Thank you very much.
BLOCK: The war in Guatemala went on for decades, but it's this period under Rios Mont that is especially notorious for its brutality. Why don't you describe what happened in this scorched-earth campaign that we're talking about?
SCHIRMER: Well, during this period of the scorched-earth, the army argued it wanted to rescue the civilian population from the guerrilla and try to separate them in certain areas. So what they did was they targeted for what they call killing zones, matazonas, and treated civilians they were to rescue as though they were combatants. And so what you find is that all living things were killed and burned within these matazonas. And so no distinction was made between combatants and noncombatants.
BLOCK: And when you think about the fact that Rios Montt is now being ordered to stand trial for these crimes, how much of a seismic shift is that in Guatemala? How much of a shock would that be two people to - that this day has come?
SCHIRMER: This is an enormous paradigm shift for Guatemala. It's the first time a former head of state and former commander of the army has been charged with genocide. The army has maintained an extraordinary control over people's lives, has created a culture of fear and a culture of impunity. Rios Montt himself, as a member of Congress, helped push through self-amnesty laws to avoid precisely what is happening today.
BLOCK: What changed? Why is he now able to stand trial?
SCHIRMER: Well, he lost his immunity as he stepped down as congressman. He has been congressman for 12 years, and he has stepped down on the 14th. And by 26th of January he was being brought into court.
BLOCK: when Rios Montt does stand trial in Guatemala, do you see that as a moment toward truth and reconciliation in that country, and perhaps in other Latin American countries?
SCHIRMER: Even at the hearing that Rios Montt attended, there were, I understand, numerous family members from the indigenous highland areas who wanted to see it for themselves and to make certain that this fear of the impunity - the breaking of the tradition - was actually real. So many people, Guatemalans I know, never believed that this day would come. Any trial against the military would have to be done outside the country. But now, we have seen that that's not the case.
BLOCK: And what would you expect Rios Montt's defense to be at the trial?
SCHIRMER: His defense has been he is not responsible for what happened because he didn't know what was happening during the campaign, that the commanders in each region were given some autonomy in what they did. But we also know that this chain of command was such that no one took decisions on their own. They always went up the chain of command. His defense, giving his subordinate commanders the blame for whatever happened, is not credible.
BLOCK: Jennifer Schirmer studies peace and conflict in Latin America at the University of Oslo in Norway. Jennifer Schirmer, thanks for talking with us.
SCHIRMER: Thank you so much.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
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And I'm Melissa Block. We end this hour with two approaches to solving one intractable problem: vehicle emissions and how to cut them. In a moment, we'll hear about new efforts to rally around an old technology, but first, the state of California is trying to jump-start the market for clean cars, like the new electric models that run on batteries.
CORNISH: The state has a 40-year legacy of passing tough car regulations. Now, under rules passed Friday, 15 percent of new cars and trucks sold in the state by 2025 must produce little or no air pollution. Lauren Sommer from member station KQED has that story.
LAUREN SOMMER, BYLINE: More and more, you overhear certain comments at Nissan car dealerships in California now that the all-electric Leaf is on display.
RENEE TRESTA: Well, number one, its price. And number two, it's kind of new.
SOMMER: Renee(ph) and Shannon Tresta(ph) are car shopping in the Bay Area. They've decided against the light-blue Leaf charging nearby and are leaning towards a gas-powered Altima.
SHANNON TRESTA: At this time, there's not a lot of charging stations, so we would never know where we would be able to charge it, if we could charge it somewhere.
TRESTA: Right.
SOMMER: It's this conversation that a California state agency wants to change.
TOM CACKETTE: We have been at the forefront of encouraging, and some people would say forcing new technologies.
SOMMER: Tom Cackette is with the California Air Resources Board. That's the agency responsible for meeting a dramatic climate change goal, and transportation accounts for 40 percent of the state's greenhouse gas emissions. So they're requiring automakers to cut those emissions from all new vehicles in half by 2025. On top of that, they're telling automakers that by that date, they'll have to sell almost a million and a half vehicles that run on electricity or hydrogen fuel cells, the kind that produce zero emissions. The thing is California tried this before, and it didn't work.
CACKETTE: I guess I would call it a little too visionary perhaps.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SOMMER: In 1990, the Air Resources Board mandated 10 percent of new car sales be zero emission by 2003.
CACKETTE: Obviously, that didn't happen. You know, the price of gas was cheap in those times. The price of the technologies were high.
SOMMER: Now, he insists the technology has come of age. Automakers have already announced more than a dozen new models of all-electric or plug-in hybrid cars, and there's another big difference this time around.
CACKETTE: The car manufacturers were adamantly opposed to the concept of government telling them they needed to build a new type of technology. That's changed.
GLORIA BERGQUIST: You are seeing more agreement between automakers and California and the federal government.
SOMMER: Gloria Bergquist is a spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which represents a dozen car companies.
BERGQUIST: Automakers have invested billions of dollars in these technologies, and so in some ways, we have similar interests. Our interest in recouping our investment is now, you know, aligned with the societal imperative to get more of these vehicles on the road.
SOMMER: Bergquist says meeting the sales mandate isn't ultimately up to the carmakers. It's up to customers. It's estimated that California's new rules will raise all new car sticker prices by $1,900 on average, though the projected savings on fuel costs will offset that.
BERGQUIST: There's still concern about what the consumer acceptance of these technologies is going to be, and that can make a mandate very scary.
SOMMER: California regulators say they're doing all they can to encourage customers to buy the vehicles, including funding a popular rebate program that gives buyers up to $2,500. They're also trying to ease customers' charging anxiety by working with companies to build an electric car charging infrastructure in the state. With those incentives in place, government officials are confident they can drive consumer demand. For NPR News, I'm Lauren Sommer in San Francisco.
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In Jacksonville, Florida today, Newt Gingrich described the difference between himself and President Obama this way.
NEWT GINGRICH: I believe in the Constitution. I believe in the Federalist Papers. Obama believes in Saul Alinsky and secular European socialist bureaucracy. He wants power...
BLOCK: We're going to spend the next few minutes now on the name that Gingrich dropped there, Saul Alinsky.
NPR's Ina Jaffe reports on who he was and why Newt Gingrich seems to mention him every chance he gets.
INA JAFFE, BYLINE: Here's the connection Newt Gingrich wants you to make. Barack Obama proudly talks about his days as a community organizer in Chicago. And the late Chicagoan Saul Alinsky wrote the book on community organizing. Two books actually. The most famous is "Rules For Radicals," published in 1971. Despite that title, there was really nothing terribly ideological about Saul Alinsky, says his biographer, Sanford Horwitt.
SANFORD HORWITT: He wanted to see especially lower income people who were getting pushed around to exercise some influence and even power over decisions that affected their lives.
JAFFE: Alinsky began that work in the 1930s and kept at it until his death 40 years ago. In an interview with the late Studs Terkel, Alinsky said he was much more concerned with the how of politics than the what. He explained this by way of an imaginary conversation with the ancient Greek Oracle at Delphi, whose advice in this story was: know thyself.
SAUL ALINSKY: A smart organizer would look at her and say: OK, Oracle, now how the hell do I go about doing it? Don't tell me what I have to get, tell me how to get it because unless I know the how, the what is just rhetoric, you know.
JAFFE: Still, plenty of people predominantly on the right view Alinsky as an ideologue. You can find him described as a Marxist on some conservative websites, though Horwitt says Alinsky had an aversion to Communists.
HORWITT: Part of his turn-off was the rigid ideology and really the lack of humor that he saw in almost all of the Communists that he even got to know briefly.
JAFFE: Humor of a sort or at least theatrics played a big role in Alinsky's organizing technique. So says the Reverend Dr. Leon Finney, who started his career as an organizer in a Chicago group that Alinsky helped found in the early 1960s, the Woodlawn Organization. There were a lot of slums in Woodlawn, says Finney, and their organization had gotten no help from the city, the courts or the landlords.
REVEREND LEON FINNEY: So, Saul's idea was we're going to get some of our black, our Negro people, to drive to the suburbs where the property owners lived. And we're going to go door to door and we're going to say to the neighbors, will you call Joe Adams and tell him to fix up his building?
JAFFE: The tactic is still used today and sometimes by conservatives. Opponents of abortion rights, for example, have picketed the homes of abortion providers. Over time, the Woodlawn Organization has grown and prospered and is now being investigated for playing fast and loose with government grant money. Finney has denied personally profiting from his work with the group.
But back in the 1960s, picketing the slumlord's home worked, he says, by pushing the neighbors of the fictitiously named Joe Adams to take action when no one else would.
FINNEY: His neighbors that really care about blacks that were marching around, they didn't want those blacks in their neighborhood doing anything. And so, they would call Joe Adams up and say, look, we don't care what you got to do, you get these blankety-blanks out of our neighborhood.
JAFFE: This is a classic Alinsky principle, says Finney, take a negative, like the neighbors' racism, and turn it into a positive for your cause. But Dan Schnur, a political analyst at the University of Southern California, says when Gingrich mentions Alinsky's name, his audience doesn't know these details and doesn't particularly care.
DAN SCHNUR: They know that he represents a liberal viewpoint and, from the context of Gingrich's remarks, they know that he's someone to disapprove of.
JAFFE: Schnur says Gingrich has two goals in mind when he brings up Alinsky.
SCHNUR: Not only does he get to link Obama to a noted liberal activist, but he gets to remind voters what Gingrich considers to be one of his own greatest strengths, his intellectual firepower.
JAFFE: But in a debate in Florida last week, Gingrich's claim to be the big ideas candidate was belittled as grandiose by rival Rick Santorum. Gingrich embraced the criticism.
GINGRICH: I accept the charge that I am an American, and Americans are instinctively grandiose because they believe in a bigger future.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
JAFFE: So, Gingrich took Santorum's attack and turned it into something positive for himself - a page right out of the Saul Alinsky playbook.
Ina Jaffe, NPR News.
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Freddie Mac is a gatekeeper in the mortgage market. In many cases, the taxpayer-owned mortgage company controls who qualifies to refinance a mortgage and who doesn't. Well, NPR has learned that Freddie Mac has been making financial wagers, betting against American homeowners being able to refinance. And now some lawmakers want to put a stop to it. NPR's Chris Arnold has been reporting this story in partnership with ProPublica.org. He has this report.
CHRIS ARNOLD, BYLINE: A home loan has two payment streams: the more stable principal payments and the interest payments. Freddie Mac here has tied up billions of dollars on investments that isolate just those interest rate payments. So that means that if somebody refinances, they stop paying Freddie Mac anything, and Freddie loses money. Freddie Mac has also been making it harder for Americans to refinance through tighter rules and higher fees. No evidence has emerged that these two actions have been coordinated, but the trades raised concerns.
SENATOR ROBERT CASEY, JR.: I was outraged that this basic conflict of interest existed.
ARNOLD: That's Democratic Senator Bob Casey from Pennsylvania. He sent a letter to President Obama today asking him to direct Freddie Mac to put an end to these practices immediately. And Casey says he supports legislation to direct Fannie and Freddie to allow millions more people to refinance.
JR.: There are a lot of families out there that can benefit tremendously from a policy that encourages and gives more opportunities for refinancing.
CHRIS MAYER: There are tens of millions of Americans who are paying too much for their mortgages.
ARNOLD: That's Chris Mayer, an economist at Columbia University, who for years now has been pushing for what's termed a mass refi program.
MAYER: A widespread refinancing program would have many benefits, not only helping the economy and putting tens of billions of dollars of money back in consumers' pockets, the equivalent of a very long term tax cut, but it also is likely to reduce foreclosures.
ARNOLD: Scott Simon heads up mortgage securities trading for the giant bond investment fund, PIMCO. He says he was shocked by Freddie Mac's investments. Simon says the investments are risky and they give the company an incentive against large scale refinancings.
SCOTT SIMON: If there was a mass refi program, the bets they made would get absolutely wiped out. The way these bets do the best is if the homeowner is barred from refinancing.
ARNOLD: Freddie Mac is now controlled by its regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The FHFA late today said in a statement that Freddie is not doing anymore of these controversial trades, but it acknowledged that Freddie Mac still holds $5 billion worth of these bets. Freddie Mac says it refinanced loans for hundreds of thousands of borrowers last year and says that there is a firewall between its investments and its lending policies.
But, economist Chris Mayer says...
MAYER: It's really outrageous, the idea that three years into the crisis, under government conservatorship, that the government would allow this kind of behavior to occur.
ARNOLD: Freddie Mac and other parts of the mortgage industry have been tightening credit on homeowners in recent years and no one disagrees that some of that is definitely justified. Lending standards were clearly too loose, leading up to the housing bubble. Chris Mayer thinks that the pendulum has now swung too far, but not all economists think that Fannie and Freddie should be allowing millions more Americans to refinance.
ANTHONY SANDERS: It's a cost to the taxpayer.
ARNOLD: Anthony Sanders is an economist at George Mason University. He disagrees with Chris Mayer. He thinks a mass refi program would cost taxpayers much more money than Mayer says, even setting aside these bets by Freddie Mac.
SANDERS: This means Fannie and Freddie are going to suffer even greater losses and so that's one of those public policy decisions that is very, very difficult.
ARNOLD: But when it comes to Freddie's trades, even Sanders sees a conflict there. He says his email inbox has been getting hit all day with economists and policy experts reacting.
SANDERS: Everyone is in various degrees of rage. They've been writing back saying terrible debacle by Freddie Mac.
ARNOLD: Sanders says this is further evidence that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae should be forced to quickly sell off the large investment portfolios that they hold worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
SANDERS: They don't need these staggering Chernobyls sitting over there on both sides of the Potomac.
ARNOLD: Sanders says there are just too many potential conflicts there for regulators to keep track of. Chris Arnold, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Pianist Garrick Ohlsson has been in the classical music spotlight for more than 40 years, but he had never recorded one of the most famous works for piano - Sergei Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto Number Three - until now.
Ohlsson has teamed up with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and our classical music critic Tom Manoff can't stop listening.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
TOM MANOFF, BYLINE: All my piano heroes share a common tradition that showmanship can hinder the honest interpretation of the composer's intent. That kind of pure music making is what most characterizes Garrick Ohlsson.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MANOFF: At one time, it was fashionable to dismiss Sergei Rachmaninoff as a second-rate composer who wore his heart on his sleeve, but this pianist shows that there's plenty of muscle in Rachmaninoff's musical craft.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MANOFF: When Garrick Ohlsson walks on stage at six foot four, he's an imposing figure. He looks like he could crush the piano with one big chord and he does have a massive technique that makes short order of Rachmaninoff's famously difficult passages. But Garrick Ohlsson can move from thunder to silk with extraordinary ease.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MANOFF: This is music composed on a grand canvas. Its opulent textures and rhapsodic melodies require exquisite interactions among pianist, conductor and orchestra. And the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, with conductor Robert Spano, joined Ohlsson in this deeply inspired collaboration.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MANOFF: Garrick Ohlsson's recording has given me new interest in this very familiar concerto and I can't stop myself from repeating movements, even skipping around to various sections just to get another taste of their emotional impact.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MANOFF: Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto is a heroic work, certainly, and Garrick Ohlsson is the piano hero who has brought us one of its finest performances.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BLOCK: That's Tom Manoff. He reviewed Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto Number Three, performed by Garrick Ohlsson with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Finally, this hour, a Mexican guitar duo that is nearly unknown in Mexico. The duo Rodrigo y Gabriela has developed an avid following in the U.S. and Europe. Last year, their music was even featured on the soundtracks of two major Hollywood movies: "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Puss in Boots." Now, they have a new album out, and they're trying to raise their profile in their native country. NPR's Jason Beaubien caught one of their shows in Mexico.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
JASON BEAUBIEN, BYLINE: It's a Monday night at an old movie theater that's been renovated into a nightclub in the heart of Mexico City. Rodrigo y Gabriela are on stage with their signature nylon string acoustic guitars. Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero are natives of Mexico City. They started playing music together here as teenagers in a heavy metal band in the 1990s. But more than a decade ago, they went off to Europe to play in the streets. It was in Europe that they developed into Rodrigo y Gabriela, an acoustic guitar act that hit the top of the Irish music charts in 2006 and has sold more than a million albums worldwide. But they've been gone from Mexico for so long that on stage here, Rodrigo lightheartedly plays the role of a foreigner in a foreign land.
RODRIGO SANCHEZ: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: This is not a place we're used to coming, he says. Then he adds wryly of what used to be his hometown: It's very pretty. Rodrigo y Gabriela have performed all over the world. They've sold out the Radio City Music Hall in New York. Last fall, they played the Hollywood Bowl backed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. They've been on Jay Leno and MTV. But in 2010 when they were invited to the White House for a state visit by Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Calderon appeared to have no idea who they were.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BEAUBIEN: On stage in Mexico City with just two guitars, Rodrigo y Gabriela produce intricate arrangements that draw from a wide range of musical styles. Gabriela provides the percussion and what at times can be furious rhythms banged out on the strings and body of her guitar. Rodrigo's fingers fly up and down the frets, plucking out riffs and melodies. The physically grueling intensity of their playing took its toll in 2010 when under doctor's orders, they had to cancel much of their U.S. tour. They often get slotted into the world music genre, but Rodrigo says categories are something they try to avoid.
SANCHEZ: We come from a rock, you know, background, heavy metal background. We don't play heavy metal, but we don't play Latin straight music or Mexican music.
BEAUBIEN: Rodrigo calls what they do acoustic rock with a few extra twists thrown in.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BEAUBIEN: Gabby Gomez, who books the El Plaza Condesa, where Rodrigo y Gabriela are playing on this night, says it's unusual to have a rock act that's just two acoustic guitars. Until just recently, she says Rodrigo y Gabriela weren't getting any airplay on Mexican radio, and Gomez says she first heard about them in the foreign press.
GABBY GOMEZ: At least, to me, it was funny to see a Mexican or a Spanish name all over, you know, Rodrigo y Gabriela, which was kind of, mm, I don't know. It was surprising to see that they were Mexican, like where are they from that we just didn't know about them?
BEAUBIEN: And to add to their confusing cultural identity, Rodrigo y Gabriela's new album, "Area 52," was recorded in Havana with a full Cuban orchestra.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BEAUBIEN: Gabriela says the Cuban project made sense for various reasons. Their record label was pressuring them to come up with a new album. They both grew up listening to Cuban music, but they'd never been to the island.
GABRIELA QUINTERO: I remember I said to Rod, we need to go to Cuba, man. We need to go to Cuba and go there as a musical experience. One day, one day, one day, and that day, it just passed by, you know? But for us to be in this room with all these musicians, it was just incredible. We were like in heaven, you know?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BEAUBIEN: Her only regret is that they were working constantly and didn't get to see much of the country. Gabriela says they did manage to go out for dinner once in Havana for her birthday.
QUINTERO: And we got mojitos and all, but that was it.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
QUINTERO: Just one night out ofâ¦
SANCHEZ: It was pretty full on, and it was like 12 hours in the studio, you know? It was crazy.
BEAUBIEN: Their musical success abroad has allowed them to buy a house in Zihuatanejo on Mexico's Pacific coast, northwest of Acapulco. But that same success also has meant that they don't spend much time there. On February 19th, Rodrigo y Gabriela kick off a four-month tour to promote their new album. Along with a Cuban orchestra, they're scheduled to play concerts across Europe, United States and Canada, but not Mexico. Jason Beaubien, NPR News, Mexico City.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
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Many Americans these days are struggling to pay off mortgages worth more than their homes. The problem is the same in Hungary, only far more complicated. That's because almost two-thirds of the country's home mortgages were taken out in foreign currencies, mostly Swiss francs. And here's the real problem, the value of all those Swiss francs has skyrocketed but Hungarian paychecks aren't issued in francs, they're issued in the national currency, which is weak and getting weaker. It's the plight of more than a million Hungarians.
And NPR's Eric Westervelt spent a day with one of them.
ERIC WESTERVELT, BYLINE: The gorgeous buildings of central Budapest glisten at night. But drive away from the 19th century neoclassical charm, and you quickly run into a labyrinth of Communist-era high-rise apartments.
LEVANTE JANCOVICS: It's nearly impossible to live on...
WESTERVELT: Forty-two-year-old Levante Jancovics lives in one of these rundown cement behemoths. Jancovics, a slightly unkempt teacher with shaggy Jerry Garcia beard and hair, welcomes me with a smile out of the winter rain into his chilly two-bedroom flat.
JANCOVICS: A lot should be spent on the insulation and the heating system and so on. And nobody can afford it because quite poor people live here.
WESTERVELT: The working poor. Jancovics has a job - at least three, in fact. He teaches English at a Budapest school for kids with behavioral problems. And he has several private contracts to teach English. The divorced father of two is raising his teenage sons on his own and he's struggling to pay his bills.
JANCOVICS: Our basic costs, like heating and food - everything went up. And our income has not.
WESTERVELT: Adding to his pain, the Hungarian currency, the forint, has plummeted to record lows. All the ratings agencies have slashed Hungary's credit to junk status. Oh, and Hungary's sales tax went up again on New Year's Day. It's now at 27 percent, the highest in the European Union.
Happy New Year, Jancovics says with a slight chuckle.
JANCOVICS: It is quite hopeless, to tell the truth. I can work maybe 50 hours or 60 a week, and still cannot live on. So that's the situation.
WESTERVELT: A situation made far worse by the fact that he took out three loans, including a mortgage to buy this apartment, in Swiss francs. The first, a consumer loan he took out in 2007, seemed like a good deal at the time, he says. He badly needed money to pay bills. And when had a chance to buy his apartment at a good price, he took out a mortgage, also in Swiss francs.
He says he didn't qualify for a mortgage in forints. But banks, both foreign and Hungarian, were pushing loans in Swiss francs with much lower interest rates.
At the time, the exchange rate was about 196 forints to the franc. Then as debt mounted in Greece and elsewhere in the eurozone and the euro began to look shakier, the Swiss franc became a safe haven for investors and soared. One franc is now worth 250 Hungarian forints.
Jankovics's mortgage burden has gone up nearly 30 percent. His other two loans have gone up even more.
JANCOVICS: I knew that they were risky because I knew that there was a risk of the exchange rate changes. But nobody expected such a big change in the exchange rates.
WESTERVELT: Today he says he's not really sure what he owes.
JANCOVICS: It's a lot. I don't know exactly how much it is.
WESTERVELT: Jancovics flips through a small mountain of envelopes containing bank statements he hasn't opened.
JANCOVICS: Ah, I didn't dare...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
JANCOVICS: ...because it's been changing a lot, and I was just struggling with my monthly payments.
WESTERVELT: More than one million Hungarians are in similar straits. Nearly 65 percent of the country's household mortgages were denominated in foreign currencies - mostly Swiss francs - according to the National Bank of Hungary. At the same time, home values have declined. The government offered underwater homeowners a deal. They could pay back the Swiss franc loans at a much lower rate if they paid it all off at once. The banks howled in protest that the government was illegally forcing them to swallow huge losses.
Anyway, the scheme was worthless to Jancovics.
JANCOVICS: For that you needed a lot of cash, or a huge family who put the money together that I don't have.
WESTERVELT: Friends sometimes helped out, he says, but it wasn't nearly enough - even with three jobs. Jancovics implored his bank to help. It agreed to give him a six month reprieve on any payments.
JANCOVICS: When it finished, I had to realize that I need another half year. And that's the last time. I will have to pay the first monthly payment from February.
WESTERVELT: Your loans are going to come due in February. You have to start paying them again. What are you going to tell the bank when you go in?
JANCOVICS: So, I'm going back and I will ask them again whether it will be possible to reduce my payment or not, or how. And I want to live a normal life. That's what I really want.
WESTERVELT: That, my kids and help from friends, he says, are what really keep me going.
Eric Westervelt, NPR News, Budapest.
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Talk of gold has added some luster to the Republican presidential race. On the campaign trail, Newt Gingrich has suggested it might be a good idea for the U.S. to return to the gold standard. NPR's John Ydstie reports on the long-running debate over linking gold and the value of the dollar.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: Of course, Newt Gingrich isn't the first of the Republican candidates to suggest a return to the gold standard. That distinction goes to this man.
RON PAUL: Since 1971, since we lost our link to gold, the dollar has lost 85 percent.
YDSTIE: That's Texas Congressman Ron Paul.
PAUL: So if you were a saver and wanted to take care of your kid's education, you put money away in the '70s, even if you made a little interest, you're going to lose money.
YDSTIE: For decades, Congressman Paul has argued for a return to the gold standard, a link most recently broken by President Richard Nixon back in 1971. In fact, Paul was a member of Ronald Reagan's gold commission in 1981. Despite his advocacy, it voted against a return to a monetary system based on gold. Newt Gingrich embraced gold most recently while campaigning in South Carolina.
NEWT GINGRICH: I would appoint a commission to look into gold and to look into hard money, because the truth is, a dollar you save today ought to be worth a dollar 30 years from now.
YDSTIE: Pundits have suggested Gingrich came to appreciate the glitter of gold just to attract Ron Paul supporters. But the former speaker's support for the idea goes back to his days in Congress, when he co-sponsored the 1984 Gold Standard Act. Gingrich has said his commission would be co-chaired by investment banker Lewis Lehrman and Jim Grant, the iconoclastic publisher of "Grant's Interest Rate Observer."
JIM GRANT: I have no idea about what Mr. Gingrich is thinking. So I simply don't know his political calculus in this.
YDSTIE: This is Jim Grant.
GRANT: But I think it's high time that someone in American politics raised the question and helped us form a debate about fundamental monetary change.
YDSTIE: Grant says the argument for gold begins with its role as the original money.
GRANT: People recognize it as such. You don't need a Ph.D. in economics to have it explained to you. Gold is kind of the Muhammad Ali of monetary substances. The world over, you look at it, you know what it is.
YDSTIE: Grant says pegging the dollar to gold would limit inflation and force greater fiscal constraints on governments because they couldn't simply print money to pay their debts or bail out bankers. And, he says, it would bring the kind of stability the monetary system had a hundred years ago.
GRANT: The proof that the monetary system was well served by a gold standard is simply the story of American growth and dynamism and enterprise during the high noon of gold money.
YDSTIE: But economist Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF, reads the history of gold differently.
SIMON JOHNSON: Saying, aha, just go back on gold, that will solve our problem - that's magic, and in the real world, magic doesn't really exist.
YDSTIE: First, says Johnson, there's a fallacy in the idea that your dollar would have a fixed value relative to gold.
JOHNSON: First of all, the supply and demand for gold around the world changes. It changed a lot during the 19th century, so there were big fluctuations in value from that. Secondly, the dollar was convertible into gold at all times, except when it wasn't.
YDSTIE: In the 1800s, before the U.S. greenback became dominant, banks issued currency backed by gold, but in financial panics, that convertibility was often suspended. And, says Johnson, being under the gold standard doesn't necessarily force governments into fiscal rectitude. That was obvious back in 1812, when the British attacked Washington and burned the White House and the U.S. Treasury.
JOHNSON: The only good news for the Americans the day the British burned the Treasury was that there was nothing in the Treasury 'cause the country was completely broke. You could absolutely drive the country into the ground, ruin public finances and face the awful consequences even under the gold standard.
YDSTIE: Still, says Johnson, he welcomes the debate over the country's monetary policy sparked by the call for a return to the gold standard. While he argues gold is not the answer, he says U.S. monetary policy needs to be reformed so powerful interests like the big banks can't take advantage of it.
John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
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And now a Winter Song story from a listener who responded to our request for memories of music that evokes winter. This memory goes back to the winter of 1958.
ALICE SWERSEY: I'm Alice Swersey and the winter piece of music is Schumann's "Piano Concerto in A."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, SCHUMANN'S "PIANO CONCERTO IN A")
A. SWERSEY: I was a freshman at Ithaca College Conservatory of Music in Ithaca, New York and I was dating a guy from up the hill from Cornell, and on my birthday, December 2nd, I received at my dorm a dozen sweetheart roses and an album of Rudolf Serkin and the Philadelphia Orchestra playing Schumann's Piano Concerto.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, SCHUMANN'S "PIANO CONCERTO IN A")
A. SWERSEY: Which I was totally in love with and I think I casually mentioned that to my date a few weeks before.
BLOCK: And your date was your now husband?
A. SWERSEY: My date was my now husband, Bert Swersey, and at the time that he sent it to me, he was sick and he was in the Cornell infirmary with mono.
BLOCK: Oh, my goodness. But he still managed to send you a birthday present?
A. SWERSEY: He certainly did.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, SCHUMANN'S "PIANO CONCERTO IN A")
BLOCK: Bert, you had remembered that Alice had mentioned in particular this piano concerto in A?
BERT SWERSEY: I sure did. I think I remembered everything about Alice at that time. I was just smitten with her, so whatever she told me I think I remembered very well.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, SCHUMANN'S "PIANO CONCERTO IN A")
BLOCK: Alice, what is it about this particular piano concerto that is so important to you?
A. SWERSEY: Well, you know, a piano concerto is a conversation between a soloist and the orchestra and this is just the most romantic piece. I mean, there's something about Schumann, the emotion that he conveys.
BLOCK: This is dramatic, romantic music here.
A. SWERSEY: Yeah. Very lush and with swelling passages and then the most delicate little piano responses to the orchestra and it's really very, very beautiful.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, SCHUMANN'S "PIANO CONCERTO IN A")
BLOCK: So you got the roses and the recording. There was a card, too, I think. Right?
A. SWERSEY: The card said: Golly, you're nice. Bert.
BLOCK: Golly, I love that.
A. SWERSEY: Well, I did, too.
BLOCK: Bert, do you remember writing that card?
B. SWERSEY: I do. Yeah. We actually had been going out just since the end of October and I just - the minute I saw Alice for the first time, I just was smitten and actually before that because my friend, Bernie Kriegsman(ph) at Cornell, told me that he has a girl for me, and if I meet her I'll probably marry her. And I said, OK.
BLOCK: What was it about her that made you so smitten?
B. SWERSEY: Oh, when she walked down the stairs the first time I saw her, my heart really skipped a beat. She bounded down the stairs with her ponytail swinging and with her little skirt and little sweater and so on and I just - wow - took a deep breath.
BLOCK: And the Schumann was sort of just the icing on the cake, I guess.
A. SWERSEY: It certainly was and it is. It still is. It's still such a beautiful work.
BLOCK: Bert, what do you think? Was that the magic?
B. SWERSEY: I think that was the magic. Absolutely. I had it all planned out. Well, I had to find some magic to capture this incredible young woman, so I guess it worked.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, SCHUMANN'S "PIANO CONCERTO IN A")
BLOCK: Alice and Bert Swersey of Stephentown, New York. They've been married for 52 years.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, SCHUMANN'S "PIANO CONCERTO IN A")
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The nation's intelligence agencies delivered their annual assessment of major security threats today to lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Among the highlights, Iran is moving toward a nuclear capability but its intentions are unclear; al-Qaida is seriously weakened but still dangerous; and in Afghanistan, the Taliban remained a determined adversary, but it may make sense to negotiate with them.
NPR's Tom Gjelten listened in and has this report.
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: Al-Qaida consistently ranks near the top in the annual list of security threats; so it is again. But this year, the director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, was able to list some accomplishments, beginning with a big triumph: tracking down and killing Osama bin Laden.
JAMES CLAPPER: With Osama bin Laden's death, the global jihadist movement lost its most iconic and inspirational leader. The new al-Qaida commander is less charismatic, and the death or capture of prominent al-Qaida figures has shrunk the group's top leadership layer.
GJELTEN: But the big concern this year is Iran. This past year saw the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador right here in Washington. The intelligence agencies reported that Iranian leaders are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States if they feel U.S. actions are threatening their regime.
Director Clapper said there is more to unfold here.
CLAPPER: Consistent with their outreach elsewhere, they're trying as well to penetrate and engage in this hemisphere.
GJELTEN: As for possible nuclear plans, the spy agencies told the Senate Intelligence Committee, as they have before, that Iran is keeping open the option to develop a nuclear weapon. Director Clapper said, for example, they are developing the capabilities Iran would need to produce a nuclear bomb.
CLAPPER: They are certainly moving on that path but we don't believe they've actually made the decision to go ahead with a nuclear weapon.
GJELTEN: The prospect of Iran becoming a nuclear power and how the U.S. and Israel should deal with that danger was clearly the top concern of the senators who heard today's testimony. Several asked what might actually persuade Iran's leaders that developing a nuclear weapon might not be in Iran's interest. The only answer the intelligence officials could offer was that economic pressure might work.
Here's David Petraeus, the CIA director.
DR. DAVID PETRAEUS: Sanctions have been biting much, much more, literally, in recent weeks than they have until this time. So, I think what we have to see now is how that does play out. What is the level of popular discontent inside Iran? Does that influence the strategic decision making of the Supreme Leader and the regime?
GJELTEN: On Afghanistan, the intelligence agencies gave a guarded assessment. The Taliban have been set back in some places, but only where U.S. and allied forces are well-positioned. The Taliban remain, in James Clapper's words, a determined adversary. But some diplomatic outreach to them, he said, could soon make sense.
CLAPPER: I don't think anyone harbors any illusions about it, but I think the position is to at least explore the potential for negotiating with them, as a part of this overall resolution of the situation in Afghanistan.
GJELTEN: Clapper found little good news to report. In Syria, where the regime of Bashar al-Assad has been waging a bloody fight against its opposition for months now, Clapper did say he thinks it's just a question of time before Assad falls, though it could be a long time.
CLAPPER: The opposition continues to be fragmented, but I do not see how he can sustain his rule of Syria.
GJELTEN: Of course, there's still the question of who would follow Assad. Clapper could not promise the successor regime would be any better; one more indication of the uncertainty characterizing the threat landscape these days.
Tom Gjelten, NPR News, Washington.
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Speculation is mounting over the likelihood that Israel would attack Iran's nuclear facilities within the next few months. Iran insists its robust nuclear program is solely for civilian purposes, but Israel believes it is trying to build a nuclear bomb. NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports from Jerusalem on the debate inside the country over whether or not to attack.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, BYLINE: The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence today asked America's top intelligence officials the question on everyone's mind: Is Israel preparing to strike Iran's nuclear facilities? While the director of national intelligence declined to make his assessment of that likelihood public, James Clapper did says that, quote, "Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity to eventually produce nuclear weapons, making the central issue its political will to do so." That echoes an earlier American estimate that Iran could cross the nuclear threshold this year.
The United States and the European Union have agreed on tough new sanctions against Iran's oil industry and central bank, aimed at curbing Tehran's nuclear ambitions. That was welcomed here in Israel as a sign of the international community's recognition of the seriousness of the Iranian nuclear threat. But still, the general feeling here is that sanctions aren't enough.
BRIGADIER GENERAL YOSSI KUPERWASSER: The reason I'm skeptical about it is that for the Iranians the idea of getting a nuclear weapon is so important that even if these sanctions are causing them a lot of trouble, they would still be more inclined to continue the project in spite of the sanctions.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Brigadier General Yossi Kuperwasser is the director general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs in Israel. He's been deeply involved in assessing Iran's nuclear capabilities.
KUPERWASSER: They are getting closer and closer. They build better and better capability to produce a nuclear weapon.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: In recent days, there has been a flurry of high-level meetings between the U.S. and Israel, including most recently a visit to Washington by the head of Israel's intelligence agency, Mossad. Some analysts here believe all the signs are that Israel is preparing to attack Iran's nuclear facilities soon.
DR. RONEN BERGMAN: There's a high probability that Israel might strike in 2012.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Ronen Bergman is one of Israel's foremost military experts whose prediction of a strike on Iran this year appeared in the weekend edition of The New York Times Magazine. Others disagree with him and say Israel is using the threat of an attack to push the international community towards tougher sanctions and galvanize a reluctant America into action. They also question whether Israel actually has the capability to inflict serious damage. Iran has been moving some of its critical nuclear facilities say analysts and military officials deep underground. And not only are Iran's installations protected, they're also scattered. But Bergman says the objective of an Israeli strike is limited in scope.
BERGMAN: According to the Israeli assessment a successful strike, a strike that would be conducted according to planning, would be able not to destroy the project, nobody thinks that that Israel is able to destroy it, even are the Americans, but to inflict a significant damage that would end with a delay of three to five years.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And that has led some to go beyond the questions of will they or won't they and can they, to should they.
MEIR JAVADANFAR: How long would an attack set the Iranian nuclear program back by? The longest estimate I've heard is two to three years. This is not long enough in any way shape or form to justify a military strike against the Iranian nuclear program.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's Meir Javadanfar, an Iran analyst in Tel Aviv.
JAVADANFAR: A military strike would rally people around the nuclear program, and it would push this regime to rebuild the nuclear program, which means that Israel may have to keep bombing Iran every three years. Is this the scenario that we want to live?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Israel has bombed the nuclear facilities of two countries already: Syria and Iraq. Neither government retaliated. But Bergman says there are several doomsday scenarios out there if Israel goes to war with Iran.
BERGMAN: A rain of rockets from Hezbollah in the north, Iran and Hamas in the south that the Israeli population is not really protected against.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And he says that more than anything else may stay Israel's hand. He says despite all the recent drills preparing the Israeli population for possible attack, the country isn't psychologically prepared for what a war with Iran could unleash.
BERGMAN: If it wasn't for this consideration, Israel would have attacked long ago.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, Jerusalem.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. Polls begin closing in Florida in just one hour. It's the biggest and most diverse state to have voted so far in the Republican presidential nominating context and soon, we'll know who the victor is. Joining us to talk about the state of the race is NPR's Mara Liasson. Hi there, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Audie.
CORNISH: So, Mitt Romney has sounded confident campaigning in Florida these past few days. What would a win in Florida mean for his campaign?
LIASSON: Well, it would be a very big victory because it would put him back to being the virtual nominee. And a loss in Florida would have been absolutely devastating for him, and would've called into question the inevitability that he's tried to create for himself. That said, once we finish with Florida, only 115 delegates will be distributed. And that's about 10 percent of the 1,144 that you need. So, he's still a long way from actually being the nominee.
CORNISH: And what would - how big a setback would it be for Newt Gingrich if he was to lose this race, coming out of that big win in South Carolina?
LIASSON: Well, I think it would be a very big setback, not only because Gingrich would not have been able to capitalize on his momentum from South Carolina, but also because the road ahead - Nevada, Michigan, Arizona - look so Romney-friendly. The next debate - and debates are oxygen for an underfunded candidate like Gingrich - isn't until February 22nd, and we don't even know if Romney is going to show up to debate Gingrich then. But there aren't a lot of opportunities coming up for Gingrich to recoup. And that being said, there's also not a lot of incentive for him to drop out of the race as long as he can get himself around the country, keep talking on television.
CORNISH: Well, the race in Florida has featured a lot of negative advertising. According to one media analysis, more than 90 percent of the ads were negative. So what kind of impact is this likely to have going forward?
LIASSON: Well, the negative ads worked. Romney outspent Gingrich about five-to-one. At one point, he had 13,000 ads on the air in Florida, Gingrich had 200. So, the moral of the story is negative ads work. So, that means we're going to see more of them, a lot more of them. But there is an argument to be made that Romney's win came at a cost to him, not just because he might be seen as a negative campaigner but also because as he's been battling Gingrich and his other opponents, is negatives have gone up.
His favorability rating in the last Wall Street Journal poll dropped from 30 to 24. And in the Washington Post/ABC poll, among independent voters, his unfavorability has gone up 17 points. So, a lot of vulnerabilities of Romney's have been exposed during this campaign. That being said, he's still doing very, very well against the president in the hypothetical head-to-head matchups, particularly in swing states.
CORNISH: Mara, lastly, Florida held its primary earlier than Republican Party officials wanted. I believe it was penalized for that. Is this going to be the new normal in the primary schedule?
LIASSON: Well, I think so. I think that Florida was determined to have a place in the early states. It believes it's a battleground state. It's more representative of voters at large and Republicans than the other early states. Obviously, losing half their delegates didn't bother them at all.
CORNISH: They're down to 50 from 99, right?
LIASSON: They're down to 50. But this is internal Republican National Committee politics. And I don't see, going forward, how you're ever going to keep Florida down. The only thing the Republican Party hasn't tried is saying you don't get any delegates. But Florida believes that, in the end, delegates will be restored. So I think Florida is here to stay in the early lineup.
CORNISH: And either way, this would be far more delegates than we've seen in previous states.
LIASSON: Yes. And it really shows you that the Republican Party wasn't really willing to pull the trigger and say you can't have any delegates. It still left them with a big treasure trove. And candidates - in particular, Mitt Romney - really wanted Florida as a firewall, worked hard to get Florida to move up and now he's reaping the benefits.
CORNISH: NPR's national political correspondent, thanks so much, Mara Liasson.
LIASSON: Thank you, Audie.
CORNISH: And you can follow results of the Florida primary tonight on many NPR stations and at NPR.org.
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Here's the good news for the many fans of U.S. women's soccer. The U.S. national team has secured a spot at this summer's Olympics with a commanding victory in the regional qualifying tournament. But now, the bad news. The top U.S. women's league, women's professional soccer, or WPS, has cancelled its 2012 season. League officials blame an ongoing costly legal battle with the renegade owner of Magic Jack, that's one of the WPS teams. The league voted to terminate that franchise after fights over everything from sponsor signs to uniforms to player grievances.
We called former national team star Julie Foudy for her take on why the WPS season was canceled. She's now a commentator with ESPN. And she says a number of factors came into play.
JULIE FOUDY: It's no secret that, you know, the league had had its struggles - they were down to five teams, for example. Four had already folded. You know, when the league was created, had wanted to create a national footprint. They were on both coasts and in the Midwest. And now they were down to five teams on just the East Coast. They had ongoing issues the players in terms of no collective bargaining agreement being signed. So, things weren't all rosy and then this lawsuit came along, I think is the fair thing to say.
BLOCK: It's interesting to think, you know, women's soccer was coming off that high from last year's World Cup, which had a huge - the final had a huge TV audience. And then there was all this attention, all this support and now this. What do you think the long-term effects will be?
FOUDY: That, I think, is the saddest part of it all is we were finally seeing the potential for this league coming off this exciting summer. I mean, attendance was great. They were playing fun, competitive soccer. Then, you know, this happens and what will be the long-term results is you just diminish your player pool that you're able to pull from, from our country. You have less meaningful games. You're not training as large a number of players and developing them.
And, you know, as we've seen in the past, once you get out of college, if there's no league to play in, you know, all these really good players that are on the bubble of the national team that typically would play in the league and would have another chance of making it to the next level, they just fall through the cracks, 'cause they have to continue on with life and work and careers and so forth.
BLOCK: Julie Foudy, why do you think it's been so hard for women's soccer to get on a sound financial footing? And would it be better for them to be attached, say, to the men's team in major league soccer, to be partners with those teams?
FOUDY: Well, I think having lived through now two leagues collapsing - our WUSA, which was the league we started after the 1999 World Cup and now this one - I mean, the model may be to link, as the WNBA did, with the men's side. And especially, I mean in the past, the MLS has been trying to just get its men's teams off the ground and building stadiums, and building their fan base.
And now you're seeing MLS has, I think, turned a corner on a lot of fronts in terms of having their own soccer-specific stadiums and creating models that work. So they're in a much better place to even consider it. Who knows if they will for the future?
BLOCK: Well, in the shorter term, the WPS says it hopes to be back with eight teams, up from five, in 2013. What do you think the chances are of that?
FOUDY: I am always optimistic - you know, and I say some will call me hopelessly optimistic. And I don't care.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FOUDY: That there is an environment where women's soccer can survive in this country, I think there's no question about that. So, you know, whether it's up again in 2013 and what it looks like, who the owners are, I don't know. But I'm still optimistic a pro league of first-class quality and professionalism will exist in this country.
BLOCK: Well, Julie Foudy, thanks so much for talking with us today.
FOUDY: My pleasure, Melissa. Thank you.
BLOCK: That's Julie Foudy, formerly with the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team and current ESPN commentator.
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A top-rated liberal arts college admits it lied about its students' SAT scores. The school is Claremont McKenna College in California, and it submitted inflated scores to a national ranking service and to the federal government.
As NPR's Larry Abramson reports, the incident could threaten the school's U.S. News and World Report ranking.
LARRY ABRAMSON, BYLINE: Claremont McKenna is a rising star among the nation's liberal arts colleges. But late yesterday, the school had to notify staff and students that a senior admissions official had deliberately falsified the SAT scores of students entering the school. The difference was relatively small, adding only 10 to 20 points to the average score.
But Robert Morris, director of data research for U.S. News, says it still could have an impact on the school's ranking.
ROBERT MORRIS: It's certainly not going to drop the school to 20th place, but I guess there's some chance that it could drop out of the top 10.
ABRAMSON: School president Pamela Gann recently touted the school's number nine ranking in a list of achievements. In her message to students yesterday, Gann try to limit the damage, saying this was the act of one person - no one else was involved. The school's accrediting body, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, accepted this explanation and indicated there would be no negative consequences if the school handled the matter appropriately.
But critics of the U.S. News ranking saw this episode as another sign the ratings race has gotten out of hand. Bob Schaffer, with the organization FairTest, says it shows how silly it is to parse fine distinctions between similar schools.
BOB SCHAFFER: To have single points separating schools between nine and 11 on a ranking scale encourages them to manipulate the data to boost their ranking.
ABRAMSON: That same false data went to the U.S. Department of Education. The department said the school could face fines, but that is unlikely if this is, in fact, an isolated incident; the act of an admissions official gone rogue.
Larry Abramson, NPR News.
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The state of Florida is having a big year for politics - today's primary of course. In August, Tampa will host the Republican National Convention. And then there's the usual business of Florida's state government, conducted in Tallahassee.
The lawmakers have gathered for their annual session, knowing they'll be watched over once again by 71-year-old veteran journalist Lucy Morgan.
NPR's Noah Adams has this profile.
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NOAH ADAMS, BYLINE: A Monday night in Tallahassee, the eve of the new session, an outdoor reception to honor the Florida lawmakers. The alcohol is top shelf, the food sumptuous, the invitation specified business attire. This party is put on every year by a large lobbying association. And there are 2,000 people here - the governor, senators and representatives, lobbyists, and Lucy Morgan from the Tampa Bay Times.
LUCY MORGAN: It's a social occasion the night before session starts. The only business that would be conducted here tonight would be kind of surreptitious. And it would be lobbyists handing checks to legislators who, after tomorrow morning, can no longer collect.
ADAMS: Those checks would be campaign contributions - all legal. The legislators can take the money year-round, just not during the session.
Lucy Morgan has often written about the lobbyists in Tallahassee, about their beach houses and Porsches, the millions they can earn; their power, their deep insider status at the capitol.
MORGAN: The lobbyists are the most fascinating part of it to me. And have always been, in my coverage here, something I've paid major attention to because, first of all, they know more than the legislators do about what's going to happen. They usually know when it's going to happen. And they are the best predictors of exactly what is going to come out on the other end of the legislative train.
ADAMS: On the last day of the 2007 session, a bill was passed that included millions for an ultra-fancy state courthouse in Tallahassee. It was a last-minute addition to a 142-page bill. It did not attract attention.
Then, last year, with the courthouse about to be finished, Lucy Morgan put the story on the front page of her paper. The headline was: Taj Mahal of a Court, Approved Without Legislative Scrutiny. Later the Florida Senate, embarrassed by the courthouse, embarrassed even more by Lucy's follow-up stories, had questions for the judges who had been lobbying for the fancy building.
STATE SENATOR MIKE FASANO: It's been determined that the legislature is totally at fault here for allocating the dollars. But we didn't put the African mahogany in there. We didn't put the granite countertops in there. We didn't decide that there was going to be two robing rooms. Who made those decisions?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The African mahogany...
FASANO: Whom? Please tell us. Go ahead.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The African mahogany decision was actually made...
ADAMS: The judge trying to get to answer that question has now resigned, avoiding trial on misconduct charges. He has denied wrongdoing.
Lucy Morgan's story had started with a tip. Somebody said, look at the email traffic from the judges about their new building. Soon she was searching through 1,300 messages.
MORGAN: And then I found, buried in the middle of those emails, one email from a judge that said: We got it. It's in House Bill 985 on its way to the governor. It was a lengthy transportation bill. And tacked on to the very end of it was a clause authorizing a $32 million bond issue to help pay for this court house, stuck in the middle of a bill that had nothing to do with courthouses or bond issues.
FLORENCE SNYDER: As we sit here today I'm hard pressed to think of any reporter who can run a story like that other than Lucy Morgan.
ADAMS: That's Florence Snyder, a Tallahassee attorney who writes about media issues. Snyder says the Taj Mahal story was leaked to several news organizations, but Lucy Morgan was the one who had the ferocious, youthful curiosity necessary to take it on.
Morgan is an investigative reporter. She's semi-retired, working half time. Her newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times, was until recently called the St. Petersburg Times. For 20 years, she was the capitol bureau chief - she was the boss. And when she left that job they had a party and gave her a quilted wall hanging - looks like newsprint - with words sewn in. And this is how her colleagues described Lucy Morgan. Now every day she can look up from her desk and usually laugh.
MORGAN: Well, let's see: muckraker, ball-buster, force of nature, cat lover, red-wine-please, bitch. Unfortunately most of it's true.
ADAMS: Morgan was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, raised by her mom in a house that was full of music and books. Her sister went off to college at 15 and became a Harvard-trained psychologist. Lucy, at 17, was married. By the time she was 25, she had three children and was settled in Florida in the small town of Crystal River.
MORGAN: I was married to a high school football coach. And like anyone who is married to a coach or teacher, there was never any money
ADAMS: And like any good life story, this one has a knock on the door. April 1965, an editor with the Ocala Star-Banner was standing there. She'd come to ask Lucy if she wanted to be a local correspondent.
MORGAN: And I said, well, I've never written anything. Why would you come to me? And she said, well, the local librarian had told her that I read more books than anybody else in town and, since I read so much, maybe I could write.
ADAMS: She signed on as a stringer earning 20 cents a word. The city commission was on her beat. Those men were accustomed to sometimes telling reporters, y'all don't write this.
MORGAN: And the very first meeting I covered, I got in trouble with all of them because they went into - not a private session, but just some discussion of whether they should fire the police chief and I wrote it. It did not seem to me that you should let something like that go unreported.
ADAMS: Lucy went on to a full-time job with the St. Petersburg Times. She divorced the coach, married the editor, Dick Morgan of the Times.
RICHARD MORGAN: I can tell you, unequivocally, she is the best reporter that I've ever worked with or that I've ever known.
ADAMS: In 1985, Lucy won a Pulitzer Prize for a series on corruption in a sheriff's office and then, in 1986, she moved to Tallahassee to run the newspaper's capitol bureau. She did all this without ever taking a journalism course.
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ADAMS: A protest inside the Florida capitol. The young people will make the evening television news. Lucy Morgan walks on past. She moves more slowly on the marble floors these days and with a limp. She fractured an ankle in the House Press Gallery 12 years ago. She takes me along to a back door of the Senate chamber.
MORGAN: Reporters used to stake this hall out all the time. I don't know where they all are now, but there's a bell that rings a couple of times to warn the senators that there's a quorum call.
ADAMS: The senators move past and the lobbyists are also in the hallway. Everybody smiles when they see Lucy, especially the lobbyist Ron Book, said to be the most powerful in the state. And Book knows Lucy is always looking for a story.
RON BOOK: And she has been known to walk over and simply open up my pocket and take the paperwork out of my pocket. You see that I'm holding my notebook closed.
MORGAN: Look, I have made him look so important, he makes millions doing it.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ADAMS: At day's end, Morgan drives home to the countryside north of town. She likes opera, so it's Pavarotti on the stereo, a glass of wine, and ice for her ankle.
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ADAMS: Lucy and Dick Morgan live only half the year in Tallahassee. In April, they'll escape the coming hot weather by settling into their cabin in the North Carolina mountains. They'll take the computer and she'll watch for that next story to come along.
MORGAN: Dick's 81, I'm 71. I don't know what I'm going to do. As long as it's fun, my health is good enough to do it and I'm interested in doing it, I may do it, but I don't really intend to be doddering around in my 90s doing it.
ADAMS: Noah Adams, NPR News.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. Not long ago, two obscure copyright bills nicknamed SOPA and PIPA seemed certain to win congressional approval. Then came SOPA blackout day. Several big Silicon Valley companies and Internet activists joined forces to stop the bills and Congress backed down, but NPR's Joel Rose reports that the coalition now faces a new challenge: agreeing on what to do next.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: For months, opponents of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, and its sister bill, PIPA, the Protect IP Act in the Senate, complained to anyone who would listen that the bills would chill free speech on the Internet and they were pretty much ignored until January 18th, when Wikipedia and Google joined a 24-hour online protest.
MARKHAM ERICKSON: Five thousand petitions a minute to Congress, four million Tweets on SOPA and PIPA, nine million people signing petitions to their members of Congress.
ROSE: Markham Erickson is executive director of Net Coalition, which represents web companies, including Google and eBay.
ERICKSON: We've never seen anything like that grassroots reaction to a bill passing through Congress, especially one having to do with copyright law.
ROSE: At the heart of critics' concerns were provisions in the bills that they say would have made a website like Wikipedia liable for so much as linking to a page that's suspected of copyright infringement and Congress took note. SOPA and PIPA were both shelved indefinitely to the dismay of their backers, including Michael O'Leary at the Motion Picture Association of America.
O'Leary says his group will still push for ways to protect American movies and music from so-called rogue websites that he says are currently beyond the reach of U.S. law.
MICHAEL O'LEARY: Right now, we have very little recourse against people who sit offshore and steal American products. So, I cannot tell you what form the response will come in, I can't tell you when, but there is still an understanding, a common understanding, which I think is shared by all parties to this debate that something needs to be done to address this problem.
ROSE: The MPAA and other content creators might take comfort from this line in President Obama's State of the Union Address.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: It's not right when another country lets our movies, music and software be pirated.
ROSE: In other words, SOPA and PIPA may be history, but this debate is far from over and opponents of those bills, like Josh Levy, know it.
JOSHUA LEVY: There will be more things coming down the horizon that we will have to look out for and that's why we have to get out in front of them.
ROSE: Levy is the campaign director at Free Press, one of many nonprofits that joined in the fight against the two bills. He wants to see the Internet community craft an online bill of rights or even push for a legislative alternative to SOPA.
One such alternative is the Open Act, a copyright enforcement bill sponsored by Congressman Darrell Issa of California and Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon. Levy says that bill is better than SOPA, but he isn't ready to commit to it just yet.
LEVY: The next step is to find consensus about what's the best way to unite all of these millions of supporters of the Internet. We don't have the answers necessarily right now, but we know that we have a lot of momentum on our side and we have a lot of people on our side and that's new.
ROSE: But is it enough? Without big web companies like Wikipedia and Google joining the cause, SOPA and PIPA might have gone from obscure copyright bills to obscure copyright laws and Wikipedia, at least, does not seem to be interested in rewriting the rules that govern the internet.
Jay Walsh is a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the online encyclopedia.
JAY WALSH: What Wikimedia and what the people who edit Wikipedia really want to do is edit Wikipedia. Advocacy isn't our subject area of expertise, nor is how to prevent online piracy, to be honest.
ROSE: Walsh wouldn't rule out another protest if Wikipedia's interests are threatened again, but without the web's sixth largest site on their side, Internet activists may, once again, find it hard to get Congress and the country to pay attention to the finer points of copyright law.
Joel Rose, NPR News.
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Now, the international effort to end the violence in Syria. The head of the Arab League joined Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the United Nations today. They're trying to break a deadlock. The problem is Russia. As NPR's Michele Kelemen reports, Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution last year to condemn the Syrian government's crackdown, and it doesn't like the new draft currently under consideration.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Though Russia is a major arms supplier to Syria and has close ties to Bashar al-Assad's regime, Western diplomats are hoping Moscow won't want to turn its back on its other friends in the Arab world. So today, Arab officials took the lead, spelling out their proposals for ending the conflict. Qatar's prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, called for the Security Council's help, saying, through an interpreter, that the Arab League tried for months to resolve this on its own.
PRIME MINISTER HAMAD BIN JASSIM AL-THANI: (Through Translator) Our efforts and initiatives, however, have been all useless because the Syrian government failed to make any sincere effort to cooperate with us, and unfortunately, the only solution available to it was to kill its own people. The fact of the matter is that bloodshed continued, and the killing machine is still at work.
KELEMEN: The Arab League is now proposing a political roadmap, calling on President Assad to hand power to a deputy who would then open a dialogue with the opposition, form a unity government and prepare for new elections. The Arab League's secretary general, Nabil el-Araby, urged council members to adopt a resolution endorsing that plan.
Syria's ambassador rejected outside intervention, saying his country can solve its own problems. Russia has raised objections to the Security Council resolution as well but says it's willing to negotiate. Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who did not attend today's session, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that Russia wants to avoid another Libya.
SERGEI LAVROV: We would be guided by the facts. We would also be guided by the need to avoid taking sides in a situation of internal conflict. The international community unfortunately did take sides in Libya, and we would never allow the Security Council to authorize anything similar to what happened in Libya.
KELEMEN: Western diplomats accuse Russia of throwing up straw men. The draft U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria does not endorse military action and only holds out the prospect of sanctions. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says it's time for the international community to send a clear message of support for the people of Syria.
SECRETARY HILLARY CLINTON: Now, I know that some members here may be concerned that the Security Council could be headed toward another Libya. That is a false analogy. Syria is a unique situation that requires its own approach, and that is exactly what the Arab League has proposed.
KELEMEN: And while Russia's foreign minister argues that countries should drop their, quote, "obsession with regime change and press all sides in Syria to renounce violence," Secretary Clinton blames President Assad for most of the bloodshed.
CLINTON: To date, the evidence is clear that Assad's forces are initiating nearly all of the attacks that kill civilians, but as more citizens take up arms to resist the regime's brutality, violence is increasingly likely to spiral out of control.
KELEMEN: Secretary Clinton describes the Arab League plan as the best effort of Syria's neighbors to chart a way forward and says the Security Council should give it a chance to work. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
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Both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich campaigned in Florida today, making last-minute appeals for votes in today's presidential primary. Polls close in most of the state in just two hours, and they close across the panhandle at 8:00 P.M. Eastern. NPR's Don Gonyea joins us from Orlando to talk about how the candidates spent their day. Hi there, Don.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: Hey. How are you?
CORNISH: So tell us, how did Mitt Romney spend his day?
GONYEA: Well, he had a relatively light day. He started out at his headquarters in Tampa. There were volunteers there. He kind of gave the traditional it's-Election-Day-thanks-for-all-your-hard-work speech, bumped a couple of them off the phones and made a few calls to people and, you know, had that moment. Hey, yeah, it's really me, Mitt Romney. I'd like your vote. But then that was it.
He did have a press conference, where he kind of looked back at what's been a pretty tough past week-and-a-half here, tough campaign, good week for him. It felt like kind of an easy day, kind of a frontrunner's day.
CORNISH: And we know Rick Santorum and Ron Paul more or less conceded this state and spent their time elsewhere, but what about Newt Gingrich? How did he spend his primary time?
GONYEA: It did not seem like a frontrunner's day for him. He was busy. He was running like a guy who wishes he had more time here. He was all over the place, Orlando, at a polling precinct, a county headquarter in Lakeland, over to a Southern Kitchen joint in Plant City. I caught up with him in Celebration. It's a little planned community not too far from Disneyworld.
What they do is they pull the bus up, the bus with - the red, white and blue bus with Newt Gingrich's picture on the side. They park it next to a beautiful park with trees with Spanish moss. Not coincidentally, about a hundred yards away or less, there's a polling place where people are going in to vote. He and his wife Calista step out, and they essentially form a receiving line. People line up and shake their hands and pose for pictures, and off they go.
But again, he's working it very hard. It's retail politics in a place where you don't really do retail politics, because the state's so big.
CORNISH: And, of course, you talked with voters, right? I hear you were visiting polling stations. What did you hear?
GONYEA: Well, they wanted to talk about the tone of the campaign, about the negativity of the campaign. And they would bring it up without me bringing it up. And again, you know, it was bare-knuckled. It was negative. The vibe you get from people when you talk to them is, like, come on, guys. I mean, we know this is hard fought, but isn't there anything positive that you can say at any point?
And, you know, it didn't matter if they were Romney voters or Gingrich voters or Ron Paul voters, and I talked to all of them today. They worried that the tone of the campaign could affect the general election. It's not that they're worried about giving ammunition to the Obama campaign against whoever the nominee is, but they are worried that it could kind of deflate the enthusiasm that we have seen all across the country among Republican voters.
Now, Mitt Romney did have a press conference. He was asked about the negative campaign, and he said, listen. Newt Gingrich came after us hard in South Carolina. We didn't respond like we should there. We weren't gonna let that happen in Florida. So they went after Gingrich hard. Of course, the Romney campaign went after Gingrich pretty hard back in Iowa. But anyway, the back-and-forth continues, Gingrich calling the Romney campaign dishonest, and worse, and so it goes.
CORNISH: And I'm sure we're gonna hear more of this tonight. NPR's Don Gonyea in Orlando. Thanks so much, Don.
GONYEA: Thank you.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. In today's letters, introverts speak out. That's after hearing my interview yesterday with Susan Cain, author of "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking." Cain, an introvert herself, defended her ilk against the assumptions of our extrovert-centric society.
SUSAN CAIN: Many people believe that introversion is about being antisocial and that's really a misperception because, actually, it's just that introverts are differently social. So they would prefer to have, you know, a glass of wine with a close friend as opposed to going to a loud party full of strangers.
BLOCK: Well, listener Christopher Huey(ph), a self-proclaimed proud introvert from Harwich, Massachusetts, agrees, insisting he is neither antisocial nor shy. He writes this: Quite the contrary, I am very outspoken. But at the end of the day, what recharges my batteries is being alone and at peace and in quiet.
CORNISH: Scott Dupay(ph) of Farmington, New Hampshire, also clued us in to an unexpected benefit of being an introvert. He writes, I notice that perhaps because I talk much less than the rest, my opinions carry a tremendous amount of weight. I'm not entirely sure I'd want to give up that power.
BLOCK: Finally, we aired a letter yesterday from listener Patrick Consadine(ph), who wrote in response to a story that we aired about the Chinese Oreo. It's more chocolatey, the creamy filling less sweet. It's also not necessarily black and white or round.
CORNISH: Well, Consadine wanted a taste, but alas, we could not help him.
BLOCK: So Mr. Consadine has taken matters into his own hands. He wrote again today to tell us that, in true mountain tradition, he and some of his workout pals in West Jefferson, North Carolina, will make their own Chinese Oreos using local ingredients.
CORNISH: Green pepper jelly, sorghum syrup, red pepper goat cheese.
BLOCK: Mm, goat cheese.
CORNISH: Yes. But on an Oreo? The mind boggles.
BLOCK: Yikes.
CORNISH: And Mr. Consadine tells us how they plan to construct their cookies. First, you scrape off the filling in the middle of the Oreo to get rid of those calories and create a new taste. Next, you select a new filling and spread it on that burnt chocolate wafer, put it back together. Now, you can twist, lick and dunk your way through a post-workout treat.
BLOCK: OK, Patrick. Good luck with that five minute mile and with that Chinese West Jefferson Oreo hybrid.
CORNISH: Send us your letters about anything you hear on the program. You can write us at NPR.org. Just click on Contact Us at the bottom of the page.
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And I'm Audie Cornish.
Republicans went to the polls today in Florida to cast ballots for their party's presidential nomination. It's not the only first - it's not the first big state to - it's not only the first big state to vote this year, it's also the most diverse.
Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, has taken a look at early exit polls and joins us now to talk about who turned out to vote. Hi, there, Andy.
ANDREW KOHUT: Hi.
CORNISH: So start by talking about the electorate. Who turned out today?
KOHUT: It's a very distinctive electorate, the Florida Republican base. Thirty-eight percent of them are older voters. It's an older state. Only 21 percent back in New Hampshire were 65 and older, so - and only five percent of these voters were under 30 years of age. Not many young people participated. Now, what's distinctive about this electorate as well is a high registration of Latinos and Hispanics. Fifteen percent of the voters that were polled in the first wave of exit polling describe their nationality as Latino or Hispanic.
That compares to about 12 percent four years ago, so it's not at all that different. One thing that really comes through is that it's a somewhat more conservative Republican electorate than four years ago. Sixty-six percent say they agree with the Tea Party. But the percentage of white Evangelical Protestants is lower, 46 percent, than what we saw in South Carolina and what we saw in Iowa.
CORNISH: So we know a little bit about who they are. Can you give us a sense of what the mood is out there, at least among Republicans in Florida?
KOHUT: Well, if you look at a number of the questions that I've been looking at over the past few hours, you see a very divided, disappointed electorate in some respects. When we asked, which of these candidates understands people's needs, there was no consensus about any of the candidates, a kind of an even division of opinion. When we asked how satisfied are you with the choices, only 57 percent said they were satisfied, and other 39 percent said, we wish someone else was running. Back in South Carolina, many more, 66 percent said they were satisfied with their choices.
This mirrors what we're seeing in national polls with the Republicans saying this field of candidates is not particularly exciting to them. And if you look at the issues in Florida, the top - one of the top issues, immigration - they're evenly divided. There's many people say let the illegals apply for a citizenship, that say deport them. And both front-runners are seen as running pretty negative, unfair campaigns. The mood isn't particularly good as I look at these exit polls.
CORNISH: You talked a little bit about issues there, talking about immigration. But were there other issues that Florida voters cared about?
KOHUT: Well, the top issue in Florida, 62 percent said they were voting on the economy. And that's very comparable to what we've seen in all of the other - the primaries and caucuses. The deficit was number two. Again, that's quite familiar. The personal quality that these Republicans want are they want the candidate who could best - most likely beat Obama. And again, that's - there's nothing different there.
What comes through in this - about this electorate is that while most say they're holding steady, of about 29 percent saying they're falling behind financially, as many as 50 percent say, in this land-oriented state, that foreclosures are a big problem in the communities in which they live.
CORNISH: Really brought this issue with the candidates, too, for hearing them talk about it the first time, really, in the election seriously.
KOHUT: That's right. That's right.
CORNISH: Now, how did these voters compare to who turned out in previous contests, say, Iowa or South Carolina?
KOHUT: Well, one of the things that comes through here is you had so many early voters who voted by mail or absentee ballots, about a third of the votes cast will come in that way. And it seems to have affected campaign strategy. Many fewer said that they were late deciders, just 27 percent decided in the last couple of days. And that may reflect that, yeah, they've already voted. They voted last week. That was - that number of - deciding in the last few days was as high as 55 percent in South Carolina. Relatively few said that the advertisements mattered. And Lord knows there were...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
KOHUT: â¦a lot of advertisements.
CORNISH: A lot of advertisements, and a lot of them negative. Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, thank you so much for talking with us.
KOHUT: You're quite welcome.
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What a difference 10 days can make. After being battered in South Carolina, Mitt Romney appears to have righted his campaign. He did that in part by turning in a commanding performance in each of Florida's two televised debates. NPR's Teresa Tomassoni profiles the man behind Romney's new stage presence.
TERESA TOMASSONI, BYLINE: Brett O'Donnell coached George W. Bush, John McCain and Michele Bachmann. Mitt Romney is his latest student, and it's starting to show. Just two weeks ago in South Carolina, Romney said he wasn't sure if he would release his tax returns.
MITT ROMNEY: You know, I don't know how many years I'll release. I'll take a look at what the - what our documents are.
(SOUNDBITE OF BOOING)
TOMASSONI: Before that, in Iowa, he really put his foot in his mouth when he challenged Rick Perry to a hefty bet, one only a millionaire could afford.
ROMNEY: I'll tell you what...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
ROMNEY: Ten thousand bucks?
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
ROMNEY: Ten-thousand-dollar bet?
TOMASSONI: And in Las Vegas, it seemed he might throw a tantrum.
ROMNEY: Rick, again...
RICK SANTORUM: You had the war.
ROMNEY: Rick, I'm speaking.
SANTORUM: You had your newspaper...
ROMNEY: I'm speakingâ¦
SANTORUM: The newspaper...
ROMNEY: I'm speaking. I'm speaking.
SANTORUM: It's time for you to...
TOMASSONI: But last week in Jacksonville, Romney kept his cool. He seemed well-prepared, not only to defend himself, but also to strike some jabs. Like when he smacked down Newt Gingrich's plan to colonize the moon.
ROMNEY: if I had a business executive come to me and say they want to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I'd say you're fired.
TOMASSONI: It was Romney's best performance yet, says Mark McKinnon.
MARK MCKINNON: Well, more focused, more forceful. And what's the difference? Brett O'Donnell is there.
TOMASSONI: McKinnon was a top adviser to President George W. Bush. He worked closely with O'Donnell starting in 2004 when he was brought on to help prep Bush for debates.
MCKINNON: I mean, Brett's the only guy I know in the business who actually has that kind of formal training and background.
TOMASSONI: For nearly 20 years, the Fort Belvoir, Virginia native trained the best college debate team in the country at his alma mater, Liberty University, in Lynchburg. He spent 80-hour weeks and months away from his family gearing up for debates. During his tenure, the team won more than a dozen national championships.
NOEL YATES: Here we were from Liberty, this smaller Christian school, and we were able to go out and compete against the likes of the Naval Academy. And not only were we able to compete, we were able to win.
TOMASSONI: That's Noel Yates. She started on O'Donnell's team as a freshman in the early '90s knowing nothing about debate. But she learned quickly under O'Donnell's direction.
YATES: He taught us to think clear but to think fast.
TOMASSONI: Like Romney did when Gingrich accused him of being anti-immigrant.
ROMNEY: Mr. Speaker, I'm not anti-immigrant. My father was born in Mexico. My wife's father was born in Wales. They came to this country. The idea that I'm anti-immigrant is repulsive.
TOMASSONI: Liberty University's current debate coach, Michael Hall, says O'Donnell excelled at sensing what each of his students needed.
MICHAEL HALL: Some students need someone who's going to be more passionate and kind of fire them up, and then other students need someone who's going to calm them down and kind of help them get through some of the nerves that they're going to have right at the very beginning of a debate.
TOMASSONI: Hall won't speculate on what specific style O'Donnell is using with Romney other than the basics: preparation and confidence. Both were apparent during the Jacksonville debate. This time, when asked about his finances, Romney did not shy away.
ROMNEY: I'm proud of being successful. I'm proud of being in the free enterprise system that creates jobs for other people. I'm not going to run from that. I'm proud of the taxes I pay.
TOMASSONI: Romney has been through nearly two dozen debates, just this election cycle, which means O'Donnell probably doesn't deserve all the credit. But given his personality, McKinnon says O'Donnell would be the last person to take the credit anyway. Teresa Tomassoni, NPR News.
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The bitter fight over new legislative districts in Texas played out in a federal courthouse here in Washington today. Lawyers for the Justice Department say Republicans in the State House discriminated against Latino voters and shortchanged their ability to elect more minorities to Congress. Texas says it was just playing politics, protecting incumbent lawmakers, not violating the Federal Voting Rights Act. NPR's Carrie Johnson reports.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: The special three-judge court that will decide whether Texas ran afoul of the landmark voting rights law started the day with the question on everyone's mind. Referring to news reports that the state's GOP Attorney General Greg Abbott had reached out to try to settle the case, Judge Rosemary Collyer asked: What is happening in Texas? The judge clearly did not get the answer she wanted to hear - no deal, at least not yet.
But Democratic Representative Trey Martinez Fischer, who leads the state's Mexican-American legislative caucus, says he's negotiating from a position of strength.
STATE REPRESENTATIVE TREY MARTINEZ FISCHER: We believe there's a clear case of discriminatory purpose and effect in those maps, and we will not accept a resolution that doesn't acknowledge that.
JOHNSON: To the Obama Justice Department, the issue isn't a close call. Latinos are responsible for about 90 percent of the population growth in Texas, winning the state four new seats in the U.S. House. But Justice says Texas actually went backwards when it comes to protecting Hispanic voting rights. Gerald Hebert is a lawyer working with minority groups to fight state plan.
GERALD HEBERT: Funny that that becomes a dispute, because it's such a simple matter of mathematics.
JOHNSON: And Justice says the math goes like this: Under the existing plans, minority candidates were favored to win 10 districts, but under the state's new plan, despite the population growth, they'd still be favored to win only 10, not more. To make its case, the Justice Department relied on email messages between Republican aides who helped draw the maps, messages that Hebert says were something of a smoking gun.
HEBERT: They were intent on drawing districts that sounded like they were going to maintain the Latino percentage, say, in a district. But what they were really going to do is substitute low turnout minority Latino populations for other higher turnout Latino populations.
JOHNSON: Lawyers for the state of Texas didn't want to talk on tape, but in the courtroom, they said they weren't playing with the numbers. The Justice Department's simple math, they said, failed to consider an important fact: Many Latinos in the state are not U.S. citizens and not able to vote. Texas said the Justice Department was to blame for providing confusing instructions for how to draw the maps, and they argued that Republicans in the state did not have race and ethnicity on their minds when they created the new districts.
Instead, they were motivated by politics to protect incumbents, and that's all right under federal voting rights law. But the judges didn't seem to buying it. At one point, Judge Collyer said of a witness for the State: I sort of got lost in the cul-de-sac of evasion. And Judge Beryl Howell asked Texas how it was possible that districts for minority lawmakers, but no Anglos, had been redrawn in such a way that the boundaries no longer included their former office headquarters.
A court in San Antonio hearing another element of the voting rights case has given both sides until February 6th to make a deal. That's less than a week away. Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
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And I'm Melissa Block. Today was Super Bowl Media Day in Indianapolis, and normally, that would be what you'd expect a day for media. But this year, something new occurred. For the first time, fans were allowed inside the stadium. For a modest fee, they could witness a vast horde of notebook-toting reporters descending on Giants and Patriots players and coaches. Curt Nickisch of member station WBUR was there, and he survived to send this report.
CURT NICKISCH, BYLINE: Media Day is a marvel of modern sports hype, a sea of video cameras and microphones crowds football players on the field where the Super Bowl will be played. Sports reporters are dwarfed by the players they're interviewing, and TV hosts in platform shoes pose for stand-ups.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Yeah. And then we're going to pull on out. And here, you're going to say with the Patriots.
NICKISCH: Meanwhile, the star players and coaches sit in booths for more than an hour to answer back-to-back questions. Because the game is being held in Indianapolis, where Peyton Manning and the Colts play, half the questions for New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning were about his older brother.
ELI MANNING: Peyton and I, we still - when we go home, we still sleep in bunk beds.
NICKISCH: What's different this year is the in-house audience. More than 7,000 football fans were in the stands, watching the coordinated chaos unfold.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING)
REGGIE MAGEE: Having a ball.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
NICKISCH: Reggie Magee, like everyone else in the stands, got an earpiece to wear. He could look up at the big screen to see which player was being broadcast on which channel and then could listen in on the simultaneous press conferences.
MAGEE: I've been flipping back and forth. Very interesting, I like it.
NICKISCH: He better like it. He dropped 25 bucks to get in the building to watch TV hosts swarm the players like ants and listen to players answer the same questions over and over. Well worth it to Patriots fan Brian Ragland.
BRIAN RAGLAND: This is amazing. I mean, I don't know why they didn't do it before. I don't know why they didn't sell 50,000 seats.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
RAGLAND: It's awesome.
NICKISCH: What's so awesome? To see the players without their helmets on, to see the TV personalities they know from ESPN and "Extra." Katie Daryle from HDNet didn't mind being part of the paid show.
KATIE DARYLE: I'm having a blast. I mean, come on. This is pretty much every dude in America's dream right now. So if you can't enjoy it for that, then you're just a jerk.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
NICKISCH: The whole event lasted more than three hours. The length of time, the amount of access, that's what's always made Media Day such an event. Now, the NFL has figured it's another way to bring in revenue and build excitement for the Super Bowl on Sunday, although the New England Patriots coach didn't help the cause. For more than an hour, the tight-lipped Bill Belichick deflected probing questions, answering with Zen-like brevity.
BILL BELICHICK: We have a lot of respect for the Giants.
NICKISCH: Wouldn't you pay $25 to listen to that? For NPR News, I'm Curt Nickisch in Indianapolis.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. We've traveled through Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and now to Florida. Polls are beginning to close there. And we begin this hour with our correspondents who have been following the two leading Republican presidential candidates: Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. NPR's Ari Shapiro is with Romney in Tampa. NPR's Don Gonyea is with Gingrich in Orlando. Welcome to you both.
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: Hi Audie.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: Glad to be here.
CORNISH: So Ari, let's start with you. How did Mitt Romney spend primary day in Florida?
SHAPIRO: Well, originally he was scheduled to have a rally this morning, but the campaign cancelled, perhaps because they were feeling so confident. He ended up visiting his headquarters in Tampa and placing a few calls to surprised voters, saying yes, it really is me, Mitt Romney, but remember to go to the polls today. Then he had a news conference where people asked him what the lesson of Florida was. And he said the main lesson that he takes away is if you're attacked, you cannot just sit back and take it. You have to fight back, which of course he did in a very big way here in Florida, saturating the airwaves here with attack ads. I don't know if you can hear behind me. The audience seems to be going wild about something. I can't exactly see what they're responding to right now. But at any rate, he did not mention, when talking about the attacks, that it was in Iowa that he first started going after Newt Gingrich, and only then did Gingrich jump off his plan of keep it a clean race and starting attacking Romney back, and that's how the tit-for-tat began.
CORNISH: And Don, how did Newt Gingrich spend his time?
GONYEA: Well, he was not confident, as Governor Romney seems to have been. But he was still defiant. And when I say not confident, Newt Gingrich is certainly a confident guy. Anybody's who's watched him knows that. But he spent this day taking nothing for granted. And they noise you hear now, they're testing the sound system and we're getting some kind of pop music or disco played in here in the ballroom where the party will be tonight.
But listen, Speaker Gingrich went from Orlando to Lakeland to, you know, other small towns near Tampa, to, finally to the town of Celebration, Florida. That's a planned community. It's near Disneyworld. His big bus pulled up and he basically, today, engaged in retail politics all day. They parked the bus next to a park. He and his wife, Callista, would get out and they would form a receiving line - or the people waiting to see them would form a receiving line. And they would just come by and shake hands, and ask them for their votes, and thank them for their support. Now, this is a state where we don't see a whole lot of that, but that's how he was spending his day today.
CORNISH: Now Florida, of course, is much a diverse state than those that have voted so far. So give me a sense of the issues that have been big in Florida. Ari?
SHAPIRO: Well, it is diverse. But one issue that goes across that diversity is the housing crisis. Romney often mentioned that one in four foreclosed homes in the U.S. are here in the state of Florida. And from the time he landed in the state he had a roundtable with people who had suffered from the housing crisis. He gave a speech in front of a foreclosed home.
This morning, I spoke with the Romney campaign's Florida co-chair, Tom Lee, who said to me this is something a candidate in this state has to talk about. Listen to what he said.
TOM LEE: It's at the epicenter of the problems we're facing in our economy here. If we don't get housing turned around, we're not going to get America turned around. And if a candidate's not talking about those issues right now, they're missing what's on the minds of people here in the state of Florida and around the country.
SHAPIRO: Now, what he didn't mention is that the housing issue also provided a perfect vehicle for Romney to keep attacking Newt Gingrich for work that Gingrich did for the housing giants Freddie Mac. He often repeated this line that Gingrich took $1.6 million for what Romney called influence peddling, Gingrich called consulting. One way or the other, it was a very convenient line of attack that played right into a really key issue for Florida voters.
CORNISH: And attack seems to be the operative word here, right Don? I mean, issues are one thing, but the tone in Florida really stood out.
GONYEA: And when I talked to voters today in Celebration and elsewhere, the thing every single one of them would bring up â and they would often bring it up without me broaching the subject â is how relentlessly negative the campaign has been here in Florida. There's a study out today that says 92 percent of the ads that aired in Florida during this primary campaign were negative. And anybody who's been here watching the TV and watching these candidates said that comes as no surprise, as big as that number is.
But listen, I was outside the polling place in Celebration just before the Gingrich bus rolled up, and I talked to this voter. Her name is Drusilla Amerie(ph). She is an IT specialist. She voted for Ron Paul. She says she'll vote for the GOP nominee no matter what. But listen to her take on the state of the campaign.
DRUSILLA AMERIE: I'm just not really happy about that kind of, you know, ad campaign. I just thought that was just was too destructive and they're just beating each other up and completely defeating the purpose. I don't like that kind of politics. I mean, why can't they just say, this is what I really want to do for America, instead of, this is what the other guy's doing.
GONYEA: And here's what some of the people I talked to worried about. It's not that this, you know, very, very bitter and brutal back-and-forth is going to give ammunition to the Democrats and to the Obama campaign come the fall. They're worried that it will demoralize Republican voters, who have been so enthusiastic about this election this year.
CORNISH: And guys, in the time we have left, I want to get a little bit of a preview of what's next for these candidates after Florida. Ari, what are you hearing from the Romney campaign?
SHAPIRO: Well immediately tomorrow he stops in Minnesota on the way to Nevada, which is the next state to vote on Saturday, a state where Romney has always done very well, partly because of the large Mormon population. Nevada leads the country in home foreclosures per capita, so housing is probably going to continue to be a huge issue there. A senior adviser, Eric Fehrnstrom, yesterday told me this candidate is not going to go on cruise control. You're going to see him keep attacking President Obama and keep attacking his Republican rivals as long as they stay in the race.
CORNISH: And Don, what's next for Newt Gingrich?
GONYEA: He will be working his way toward Nevada as well, hoping to do well in a place that is seen as Romney country. Mitt Romney has done well there in the past and has worked it very hard. But here's the other thing: Newt Gingrich made the point again to reporters this morning that today is the fourth primary. He's got one win under his belt. He hopes to do better than expected here today. And he said guess what. We have six months to go. Now, we'll see how things play out in the weeks ahead, but as of today, Newt Gingrich is saying that he is in this until the convention.
CORNISH: NPR's Ari Shapiro and Don Gonyea, thank you both for talking with us.
GONYEA: Thank you, Audie.
SHAPIRO: Good to talk to you, Audie.
CORNISH: That was NPR's Ari Shapiro and Don Gonyea with the Republican presidential candidates in Florida; Ari Shapiro with the Romney campaign and Gonyea with the Gingrich campaign.