AILSA CHANG, HOST:
It's New Year's Day. Have you started your resolutions yet? Maybe if you're like me, you've got some diet and exercise goals after over indulging this holiday. Well, NPR's Patti Neighmond reports on the most popular workout trends for 2018.
PATTI NEIGHMOND, BYLINE: The biggest change for this coming year is a movement - back to the basics. Physiologist Walt Thompson says fewer people will be plugging in their ear buds and zoning out on fancy, new electronic equipment.
WALT THOMPSON: Commercial clubs are moving away from the shiny new bells and whistles of yesteryear into more basic kinds of exercise programs.
NEIGHMOND: Think group classes and more simple things like bodyweight exercises, lunges, pushups, planks. Thompson's is president of the American College of Sports Medicine, which every year surveys thousands of fitness instructors to see what's in and what's out when it comes to workouts.
This year, group classes got the biggest boost jumping to No. 2 in fitness trends.
THOMPSON: The gyms love it because the equipment is minimal. So it's very advantageous to gyms to have a lot of people in a single class because it helps the bottom line.
NEIGHMOND: And class members like it because it offers what individual exercise often doesn't - connection to others, motivation and supervision from a pro. Amy Dixon directs group fitness programs at Equinox fitness clubs nationwide.
AMY DIXON: They love the feeling that they get in a group. They love the fact that they can show up and have an instructor that's done their homework, that coaches them through an experience that allows them to get a workout in without them having to think about it.
NEIGHMOND: Take for example the new Cut jump rope class, which Dixon helped develop.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: We're going to go in three, two, one.
NEIGHMOND: The class warms up and starts to jump using different ropes - one regular, one weighted - and alternating every few minutes between cardio drills and martial arts punching and kicking.
MADISON WILLIAMS: It's exhausting.
NEIGHMOND: After 30 minutes, the class is over, the first for 28-year-old Madison Williams (ph).
WILLIAMS: You think you're in good shape until you have to, like, keep jumping for 30 minutes straight.
NEIGHMOND: It's high-intensity interval training. And for the second year in a row, it's No. 1 on the American College of Sports Medicine's fitness list. And there's a good reason why high-intensity interval training stays on top. It works says, Dr. Robert Sallis, a sports medicine physician with Kaiser Permanente Medical Center.
ROBERT SALLIS: From the heart to the muscle to the metabolic system, all are pushed to the limit. And the body's response to that being pushed is to function more efficiently...
NEIGHMOND: ...And get into shape fast. Sallis points to studies showing just five to 10 minutes of high intensity exercise can deliver the same results as 45 minutes of moderate exercise. And he says it's all relative. If you're older, a bit overweight, not terrific shape, you can still gain benefit by pushing yourself to your version of high intensity.
SALLIS: You know, you don't have to go to a super high intensity in the beginning especially - you know, just a little above what is normal - you're moderate intensity - really can add benefit.
NEIGHMOND: So for example, if you jog at a moderate pace, push it up and go as fast as you can for a block or two. If high intensity intervals and group classes are in this year, what's out? Thompson says wearable technology and smartphone exercise apps won't be as popular, neither will things like Zumba, Pilates and cardio bar. One workout that hold steady year after year, he says, is yoga.
SALLIS: The yoga instructors are continually reinventing themselves so that the program doesn't become boring. It doesn't become the same exercise program every single time you walk into the gym.
NEIGHMOND: There's hot yoga, power yoga, restorative yoga and finally, rounding out the top 10, workouts for older adults. As the nation ages, Thompson says this trend will only get more and more popular. Patti Neighmond, NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
All right. We all know exercise is great for your health. But if you are looking to lose weight, you should know this. Your diet ultimately matters more than how much you work out. NPR's Maria Godoy looks at some apps that can help you keep track of what you eat.
MARIA GODOY, BYLINE: Like a lot of Americans, I've got some extra pounds to shed. So about two months ago, I started tracking everything I eat using an app called Lose It. It's one of several out there, like My Fitness Pal and My Plate. When I eat something, I can look up how many calories it contains. If it's not listed, I add it myself, like when I add creamer to my coffee.
All right. It says 35 calories per tablespoon. I use two tablespoons. So that is 70 calories.
Research shows that logging what you eat can be a powerful tool for weight loss. Basically, it's your food budget. And it's not that different from creating an actual budget.
YONI FREEDHOFF: You know, how many people out there have done this exercise from a money perspective realized, holy (expletive)? I'm spending that much at Starbucks. I think that similarly we might say that about the calories we're spending at Starbucks.
GODOY: That's Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, a weight loss expert in Ottawa. He has his patients keep food diaries. And he says patients that use apps are more likely to keep up with the logging. It makes sense. Most of us are glued to our smartphones all the time anyway. I use my app to track my exercise, too.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Three, two, one.
GODOY: I think you made this extra hard today.
Thirty minutes of cross training adds an extra 340 calories to my daily food allowance. It sounds good, but there's a limit to how much food we can actually burn off through exercise.
ABBY LANGER: Yeah. Your body does not work like that.
GODOY: That's Abby Langer, a registered dietitian.
LANGER: People who think that they can spend all day in the gym and just sort of negate all the food that they've eaten in terms of calories, that's just not how your body works.
GODOY: Because you can only burn off up to 30 percent of the calories we eat. And some people burn less. Another big concern - she says some people can become dangerously fixated on counting calories.
LANGER: There are some people who are predisposed to becoming obsessed with tracking the calories and just all the numbers and number crunching.
GODOY: She says anyone who's ever had an eating disorder should not use these apps. And they shouldn't be relied on alone. One study of young adults showed those who use weight loss apps lost the same amount of weight as those who didn't. Still, as long as you take it with a grain of salt, tracking your meals can be really helpful for some people. It has been for me. While the average American puts on about a pound during the winter holidays, I actually lost six. Maria Godoy, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARMS AND SLEEPERS' "SOME DIE YOUNG")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We begin this morning with North Korea...
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
...Where Kim Jong Un began the new year with a speech broadcast on national television.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
SUPREME LEADER KIM JONG UN: (Speaking Korean).
CHANG: In it, he made his own dark New Year's resolution to focus on the mass production of nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles.
MARTIN: Let's bring in NPR's Shanghai correspondent Rob Schmitz, who's following all of this. Good morning, and Happy New Year, Rob.
ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel. How you doing?
MARTIN: So sort of a grim message from Kim Jong Un - I suppose it plays well, though, domestically, huh?
SCHMITZ: Yeah. I mean, like many of the North's communications directed at the outside world, there's a fair amount of posturing here. And a lot of that posturing is, of course, for his audience back home. Kim warned the U.S. that its mainland is within range of a nuclear strike from the North and that the button to launch that strike is always on his desk - so obviously a message there that we as a nation have arrived on the global stage as a serious nuclear power.
He went on to say North Korea's greatest achievement of 2017 was the, quote, "historic accomplishment of completing our nuclear capabilities" and said the U.S. would no longer dare to strike North Korea. So that's another message to the home audience, that he's working hard to protect them. And then he sort of changed his tone a little and said that his country is a responsible nuclear nation that loves peace. And he said that as long as there is no aggression directed at North Korea, his country does not intend to use these newfound nuclear powers.
MARTIN: Can we extrapolate that that means he's open for diplomatic talks?
SCHMITZ: That's one way we could extrapolate it, I think. Yes.
MARTIN: I'm trying to be positive, Rob. It's a new year.
SCHMITZ: (Laughter) And, you know, I think, you know, yeah. Obviously, that's an opening, right? And I think that, you know, he - there was another part of his speech that was also an opening to his southern neighbor. You know, after taking this threatening tone toward the U.S., he sort of softened his approach to South Korea and said he wished for a peaceful resolution with the South. He wished South Korea all the best for hosting the upcoming Winter Olympics. And he made a surprise call for immediate dialogue with Seoul to discuss the North's participation in the games. If such talks happen, it would be the first time the two Koreas have had an official dialogue since South Korean president Moon Jae In took power last May.
MARTIN: Wow. Well, that at least seems significant.
So 2017, I mean, we saw this much more emboldened North Korea, right? There were all these missile tests. They were crossing more red lines - seemed like every other day there were some new red line that North Korea was was just flagrantly crossing. So what does that mean for 2018? I mean, are we likely to just see more of that on repeat?
SCHMITZ: You know, from this speech I'd say, yeah. It certainly sounds like it. Kim said in the speech that the next step for his regime is to try and mass produce warheads as you mentioned as well as intercontinental ballistic missiles that can carry those warheads. We believe from reports earlier this year based on U.S. defense intelligence that North Korea has figured out how to miniaturize a nuclear weapon into a warhead that fits on a missile. But there's a lot of questions about how close the North is to actually being able to successfully deliver that warhead with a missile. What is clear is that Kim Jong Un is tightly focused on this goal and that this message to the rest of the world this morning was that everyone needs to take him more seriously in the coming year.
MARTIN: NPR's Rob Schmitz - thanks so much for joining us, Rob.
SCHMITZ: Thanks, Rachel.
MARTIN: Now to the antigovernment protests that have been unfolding in Iran.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting in foreign language).
CHANG: Demonstrations began late last week and continued over the weekend. Some protesters have even taken an extraordinary step, calling for the removal of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yesterday, Iran's President Hassan Rouhani appealed for calm. He said Iranians have the right to protest but warned that the government will not tolerate those who damage public properties violate public order and create unrest.
MARTIN: Ali Noorani is in Tehran. He's a journalist for AFP. And he joins us on Skype. Thanks so much for being with us this morning.
ALI NOORANI: Hi, Rachel. Thanks.
MARTIN: What can you tell us are protesters out on the streets again today, and what have those looked like?
NOORANI: There's nothing coming today yet because it's just afternoon. But overnight, there were continued protests in several cities across the country. Last night, some - at least four people died in two towns. And in these four days of protests, at least 400 people have been arrested and...
MARTIN: And people have died. I mean, that death toll is escalating, no?
NOORANI: Yes. The total deaths - death toll is at six now in the whole protest, at least. That is the confirmed number. But some unverified reports say that it may increase for the past night.
MARTIN: Why are these happening, and why are they happening now?
NOORANI: The reason why this is happening is really not known to analysts and officials. But it did begin on the back of economic problems and people protesting to high prices and cost of living and poverty and unemployment in the northeast of the country - in the second city Mashhad on Thursday. But things got out of control. And the slogans suddenly changed toward the regime. And from that moment, it started to spread just to - in many other cities across the country, big or small alike and very randomly because it's spreading through social media.
MARTIN: Yeah.
NOORANI: And there is no real algorithm.
MARTIN: So this has got to be complicated for Hassan Rouhani. He brokered the Iran nuclear deal in hopes that his economy was going to improve, right? That's what he told Iranians. But you're saying that these protests are about economic instability. So people clearly are not deriving or at least feeling like they are getting a benefit from that economic opening.
NOORANI: Yeah. That is a problem for Rouhani because ordinary people on the street haven't been feeling real fruits of his nuclear deal really on the table. And yes. For him, that is a problem. But his officials and himself have indirectly said that there could be - the start of this protests could be by the conservatives - his opponents - to undermine his economic outreach to the world. But it's not clear yet who was behind it. But it is going on through social media. And it is still on.
MARTIN: We should say one of the social media sites that's being used has now been shut down in the country. Ali Noorani of AFP reporting in Tehran this morning for us - thanks so much.
NOORANI: Thank you.
MARTIN: All right. Now we're going to get the view from the White House or the winter White House rather. That's where President Donald Trump has been spending the holidays. NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson joins us now. Hi, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Rachel.
MARTIN: Happy New Year by the way.
LIASSON: Happy New Year to you.
MARTIN: So President Trump is monitoring all of this - two big international issues...
LIASSON: Two big international issues...
MARTIN: ...For him to navigate right now, right? How is he responding?
LIASSON: Yep. Two big international issues - he tweeted support for the Iranian protesters. He criticized the Iranian regime for shutting down parts of the Internet. He said the USA is watching very closely. But that got him some pushback from Republicans. Republicans aren't on the same page on either of these important foreign policy issues. On Sunday, on "Face The Nation," Senator Lindsey Graham said, you can't just tweet here. You have to lay out a plan. If I were President Trump, I'd lay out a plan as how I would engage the regime. President Trump hasn't done that.
And on North Korea, he told a New York Times reporter over the weekend just we'll see about what he's going to do about North Korea. He expressed displeasure with China for not cutting off oil shipments to North Korea. And even though in the past he has at times seemed to threaten military action to stop North Korea's nuclear program, he hasn't decided exactly what to do here. And Republican divisions are on display in both of these issues.
MARTIN: So let's switch gears sort of because there's another issue that has created all kinds of divisions within the Republican Party. This is, of course, the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. 2018 could see the end of this inquiry one way or the other, right?
LIASSON: It could. It might not. Nobody knows how long Mueller's going to take. But what's interesting about this is that there are Republican divisions about the attacks on Mueller. Over the weekend, in that New York Times interview, the president said he wasn't going to fire Mueller but that he could do anything he wanted to do with the Department of Justice. But he was holding back in the hopes of being treated fairly.
But in the same interview, he also had praise for Republicans in Congress and his supporters in the conservative media who have been attacking Mueller for being biased, corrupt, going so far to say the whole FBI is corrupt. And the strategy is to make sure that the Trump's base and maybe other voters can dismiss whatever Mueller comes up with at the end of this inquiry as a partisan witch hunt. And that is making some Republicans nervous. They're supposed to be the law and order party. And they are wondering why it's a good thing to undermine the FBI.
MARTIN: Also, big election coming up - 2018 midterm elections - Democrats are going to be able to capitalize on any of this?
LIASSON: There's certainly hope so. Expectations are very high. I think we're getting to the point where it's take the House back or bust for Democrats. But they still have a very high hurdle - 23 seats in the House fortified by redistricting is going to be tough for them to get. And they're defending a set of very difficult Senate incumbents.
MARTIN: NPR's Mara Liasson breaking down the news - we should look for the stories of 2018, only hours old at this point. Mara, thanks so much.
LIASSON: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF ERIC LAU'S "SOME TIME")
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Ailsa Chang with news of a trip back in time. A flight from Auckland, New Zealand, to Hawaii experienced a short delay getting off the ground. The 10-minute hold up meant a Hawaiian Airlines flight left on Jan. 1, 2018. And just about nine hours later, passengers arrive at the gate in Honolulu at 10:15 p.m. on Dec. 31, 2017. No need for a DeLorean like in "Back To The Future." Turns out a flight delay works just fine for time travel. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
After a year of missile launches, a nuclear test and name-calling with President Trump, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is starting 2018 with yet another threat to the U.S.
SUPREME LEADER KIM JONG UN: (Speaking Korean).
MARTIN: In his annual address today, Kim Jong Un warned the U.S. never to start a war with North Korea. And he said he keeps a nuclear launch button sitting on his desk. He also made his own dark New Year's resolution to focus on the mass production of nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles. NPR's Rob Schmitz is covering this from Shanghai. Rob, a fairly grim message from Kim Jong Un. I suppose, though, it plays well domestically for him.
ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: Yeah, I mean, like many of the North's communications directed at the outside world, there's a fair amount of posturing here. And a lot of that posturing is, of course, for his audience back home. Kim warned the U.S. that its mainland is within range of a nuclear strike from the North. And as you mentioned, he has the button to launch that strike on his desk. So obviously a message there that we, as a nation, have arrived on the global stage as a serious nuclear power.
He went on to say North Korea's greatest achievements of 2017 was the quote, "historic accomplishment of completing our nuclear capabilities." And he said the U.S. would no longer dare to strike North Korea. So that's another message to the home audience that he's working hard to protect them. He went on to say that his country is a responsible nuclear nation that loves peace. And he said that as long as there's no aggression directed at North Korea, his country does not intend to use these newfound nuclear powers.
MARTIN: Well, that sounds positive. I mean, does it - does that indicate that he could be open for some kind of diplomatic talks?
SCHMITZ: Yeah, and actually he did mention that. I mean, after taking this threatening tone against the U.S., he softened his approach to his southern neighbor, South Korea, and he said, he wished for a peaceful resolution with the South. He wished South Korea all the best for hosting the upcoming Winter Olympics, and he made a surprise call for immediate dialogue with Seoul to discuss the North's participation in the games. And if such talks would happen, it would be the first time the two Koreas have had an official dialogue since South Korean president Moon Jae-in took power last May.
MARTIN: So, Rob, we have heard, for the past year plus that the road to getting North Korea to change its behavior leads through China.
SCHMITZ: Right.
MARTIN: As we look towards 2018 - I mean, you've thought a lot about this - are we likely to see China change, toughen even, its position on North Korea in the year ahead?
SCHMITZ: Well, China claims that it has toughened up on North Korea. And it definitely, I think, will continue to make it seem, at least, like it is toughening up on North Korea. But it's sometimes hard to know whether it really is. You know, China's been caught off guard lately because of reports that Chinese ships have been selling oil to North Korean ships in violation of U.N. Security Council sanctions. President Trump tweeted that the Chinese were caught red-handed. And so China's been busy defending itself on that.
Officially, China usually tries to stand aside when it comes to tensions between U.S. and North Korea. And it often will call for peace and more dialogue. But behind that official stance, Chinese troops have been busy along China's border with North Korea, constructing refugee camps for North Koreans in case that there's a war. A few Chinese towns along that same border have also started educating their residents of what to do in the event of a nuclear blast.
So on the outside, China has been defending itself, as well as calling for a peaceful resolution to these tensions. But inside the country, they've been sort of preparing for the worst.
MARTIN: NPR's Rob Schmitz reporting this morning from Shanghai on the annual address by North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un. Hey, Rob, thanks so much.
SCHMITZ: Thanks, Rachel.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
All right. We're going to focus now on a community called Bonita Springs in Florida. It was hit hard by Hurricane Irma, which was back in September. Today, the debris piles are gone, and businesses are back up and running. Now the city is focused, though, on a long-term problem - protecting vulnerable areas from repeat flooding. Here's NPR's Greg Allen.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: On Florida's southwest coast, Bonita Springs is known for its beautiful white sand beaches and the Imperial River, which runs from the Western Everglades into the Gulf. For Isaac Rodriguez, living close to the river has become a major headache.
ISAAC RODRIGUEZ: Let's see. I got 10 inches inside and, like, 14 outside.
ALLEN: Like most people in this neighborhood, Rodriguez's home flooded badly in hurricane Irma. After the storm passed, water from the river cascaded through the streets. With the river high, he says, the flooding continued long after the storm passed.
RODRIGUEZ: Oh, it took seven days for it to recede far enough for me to get into the house.
ALLEN: Nearly four months after Irma, Rodriguez is still not back at home. With money from his flood insurance, he's been doing the repairs himself.
RODRIGUEZ: I've been coming along. I got the drywall up. Painting's done. Bathroom's done.
ALLEN: That was the second time last year that homes in the neighborhood flooded. Several weeks before Hurricane Irma, unusually heavy rains caused the Imperial River to crest, giving residents a preview of the storm's flood. Rodriguez says he can't afford to elevate his home, so as soon as the work is done, he's leaving.
RODRIGUEZ: I'm planning on putting it on the market, moving out.
ALLEN: And why are you doing it? Because of the flooding? Or...
RODRIGUEZ: Absolutely, absolutely. I'm just - you know, this has taken a long toll, I mean, being out of your place here, renting another place - yeah, money issues. It's just - it's not worth it.
ALLEN: In Bonita Springs, a few large trucks with cranes are still at work, picking up the remaining piles of debris. Lori Malone says a truck recently carted off a huge pile of waterlogged furniture and clothing from her front yard. She walks me through her home just a few blocks from the river.
LORI MALONE: You can see the water line right here.
ALLEN: Yeah, it's about two feet high, I'd guess.
L. MALONE: And the whole staircase was, like, this thick of just green mold.
ALLEN: All the drywall has been ripped out. A contractor recently sprayed the interior to eliminate mold. Malone says the electrical wiring is damaged.
L. MALONE: It's working barely, but it all needs to be ripped out and redone. The plumbing all needs to be out and redone.
ALLEN: Lori and her husband Rodney Malone had flood insurance. But after ripping out most of the drywall, their contractor is telling them renovating the home will cost $250,000. That's nearly double what they're getting from insurance.
L. MALONE: And that's what I'd love to do. But I can't sell this as it is, and I still have no - a mortgage on it, so I'm just - we're just stuck.
ALLEN: The Malones call her neighborhood the toilet bowl because water from surrounding areas flows in and settles there. The city's mayor, Peter Simmons, says, following Hurricane Irma, consensus is building to find a long-term solution to the area's flood problem.
PETER SIMMONS: We need water storage. We need water retention. We need rivers dredged so that it can handle more water. We need to retrain this water, if you will, to get it into the river and get it into the Gulf of Mexico so that it does the least amount of damage for folks and for homes.
ALLEN: The city is working with FEMA on a plan to buy out residents of a mobile home park on the river. But they have little other help to offer to nearby homeowners like Rodney and Lori Malone.
L. MALONE: I'm feeling like we don't matter. We're just insignificant. We're down here in the toilet bowl. And we'll continue to live here and try to fix our houses the best that we can.
RODNEY MALONE: So the next flood comes, and then they'll be having the same excuses.
ALLEN: For now, the Malones say they're negotiating with their insurance company and hoping the river doesn't flood again. Greg Allen, NPR News, Bonita Springs, Fla.
(SOUNDBITE OF BALMORHEA'S "DREAMT")
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
A teapot sits on the mantelpiece in a house in Urbana, Ill. And while it's charming to behold, the real power of this piece of fine china is the story it holds. It's a tale about long odds, strength in the face of adversity and the 1922 Rose Bowl. NPR's Richard Harris has this audio postcard.
RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE: In October, I paid a visit to the home of Tina Gunsalus, a professor at the University of Illinois. While her husband Michael was preparing dinner, she walked into her living room and came back with a white teapot festooned with a blue floral pattern.
TINA GUNSALUS: It's a teapot that was given as part of an entire tea set to my grandmother when she was married. And she said it had been given to her and to her husband as a wedding present from the football coach who took Washington & Jefferson College to the Rose Bowl.
HARRIS: Gunsalus's grandfather was a history professor at tiny Washington & Jefferson, which had just 450 students at the time. He also helped out the football team. And she says she didn't think much about the story until she told it to her daughters.
GUNSALUS: And we all sort of looked at each other and thought, that's really odd. Washington & Jefferson is this little college in Washington, Penn. And the Rose Bowl, as a person from the University of Illinois, I happen to know is between the Big Ten and the Pac-12. So it seemed odd. And I thought, well, you know, maybe my grandmother was old, or maybe I got it wrong. And, no, I had a note from her that said that's what it was.
HARRIS: A bit of research revealed that the story was even odder than that.
GUNSALUS: Not only did they go to the Rose Bowl. It turned out that they were the first team to take an African-American quarterback with them. And the more we looked, the better this story got and the more interesting it got.
HARRIS: Other teams had actually refused to play Washington & Jefferson because of its black quarterback, a man named Pruner West. But the coach, Greasy Neale, refused to bench West, even though it once meant forfeiting a game. The team was so cash-strapped that it could only afford to buy train tickets to Pasadena for 11 players. And during the trip, near disaster struck.
GUNSALUS: In Kansas City, one of the players takes ill, gets off the train. And they think they're going to have to play the game with only 10 players. Except it turns out one of the other players had stowed away in the baggage car. So he got off the train, got on the seat that had been occupied by the player who's now in the hospital, and they went. And I think that the same 11 players played the entire game, both offense and defense.
HARRIS: Their Rose Bowl opponent was no less a team than the University of California, Berkeley Golden Bears, who were heavily favored. But amazingly, the Washington & Jefferson Presidents finished the game in a tie at zero. In fact, it was the only scoreless Rose Bowl game ever. As she recounts this story, Tina Gunsalus glances down lovingly at the teapot and its hand-painted glaze.
GUNSALUS: It's just as pretty as it can be. And we look at it, and we think about the Rose Bowl and W&J and honorable people in the 1920s and Pruner West.
HARRIS: Do you ever use the teapot?
GUNSALUS: Well, we did. We all had tea with it. And other than that, we mostly just keep it on the mantel and look at it because the more that we found out the story was true, the more worried I got about breaking it.
HARRIS: So there it rests on an ornate, oak mantelpiece, an unlikely memento of a moment in American history. Pruner West would go on to become a physician and spend his life treating patients in Alexandria, Va. And he has just been elected into the Rose Bowl Hall of Fame. Richard Harris, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SAM SPENCE'S "WINTER ICICLES")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
And I'm Rachel Martin with some historic music firsts on this first day of the new year.
(SOUNDBITE OF ATOS TRIO'S PERFORMANCE OF BEETHOVEN'S "PIANO TRIO IN E FLAT MAJOR, OP. 1, NO. 1")
MARTIN: That's the trio for piano, violin and cello, "Op. 1 No. 1." It was the first published work by a young composer named Beethoven. Here to help us celebrate some other important musical beginnings is classical music commentator Miles Hoffman. Happy New Year, Miles.
MILES HOFFMAN, BYLINE: Thank you very much. Happy New Year to you, Rachel.
MARTIN: So just to be clear, Miles, even though it is hard to imagine anything coming before an "Op. 1, No. 1," that Beethoven trio we just heard was actually not the first piece that Beethoven composed, right?
HOFFMAN: That's right. He had written other pieces. But that trio is the first of his pieces he ever considered worthy of being published. Opus is just the Latin word for work. And opus numbers are meant to indicate the chronological order of musical pieces, although sometimes they indicate the order of publication rather than the exact order of composition. Sometimes it's actually scholars who make chronological catalogs long after the composers have died. And many composers just give their works titles or names, no numbers of any kind.
MARTIN: So who gave Beethoven his opus numbers?
HOFFMAN: Beethoven - Beethoven himself - and he was a pioneer in this respect because he was the first major composer to assign opus numbers to his own works. The trio we just heard, for example, was one of a set of trios that Beethoven had published together as his op. 1. He was an old man of 25 at the time this was published. And we can hear that he was already a brilliant and mature composer.
(SOUNDBITE OF ATOS TRIO'S PERFORMANCE OF BEETHOVEN'S "PIANO TRIO IN E FLAT MAJOR, OP. 1, NO. 1")
MARTIN: Twenty-five - that's crazy.
HOFFMAN: Well, there are composers who rolled out their op. 1's much, much earlier than that. And actually, the first one who comes to mind is the greatest child prodigy composer of them all. Take a listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF PERFORMANCE OF MENDELSSOHN'S "PIANO QUARTET IN C MINOR, OP. 1")
HOFFMAN: That was the op. 1 of Felix Mendelssohn, a piano quartet - a quartet for piano and strings. And Mendelssohn composed it when he was 13 years old.
MARTIN: He was 13 when he wrote that?
HOFFMAN: 13 years old - he wrote it. And he could have played it, too. He was a great pianist. And he probably could have played the violin part as well. And there again, Rachel, it wasn't the first piece that Mendelssohn composed. He'd been writing string symphonies since the ripe old age of 12. But I've got another op. 1 by a 13-year-old for you, Rachel. This is by another great compositional prodigy.
(SOUNDBITE OF PERFORMANCE OF KORNGOLD'S "PIANO TRIO IN C MINOR, OP. 1")
MARTIN: Wow.
HOFFMAN: Different style, huh?
MARTIN: It is different. But this whole segment is just making people feel bad about where they were at in their lives when they were 13.
HOFFMAN: (Laughter) Yeah. That's from the "Piano Trio," also C minor - "Op. 1" - composed at the age of 13 by Erich Wolfgang Korngold - considered the Mozart of Vienna in his day. He was born in Vienna. And by the age of 10, he'd already been proclaimed a genius by Mahler.
MARTIN: Come on.
HOFFMAN: Gustav Mahler - yeah, yeah. And he'd already had a big success. He'd written a ballet when he was 11. He was just amazing.
MARTIN: Wow. So Korngold, too, like Beethoven and Mendelssohn - he wrote other pieces before his op. 1, right?
HOFFMAN: Yeah, yeah. He had gotten an early start. But that piano trio was his first published composition - "Op. 1." Very often, op. 1 marks the beginning of a career, really, rather than the first attempts at writing music.
And Korngold's career actually is particularly fascinating because in the '30s - in the 1930s, he came to America. And he became one of the greatest of all Hollywood film composers. Yeah, he won a couple of Oscars. He won an Oscar for the score to "Anthony Adverse," which I confess I've never seen - and "The Adventures Of Robin Hood." And altogether, he wrote music for 16 different films. He was the first major European composer - world famous composer to write for Hollywood.
MARTIN: Do you have a favorite op. 1, Miles, especially in the category of someone who's maybe older than 13?
HOFFMAN: (Laughter) OK. How about 18?
MARTIN: Eighteen - sure, yeah.
HOFFMAN: Eighteen - we're getting up there. The op. 1 of the Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnanyi is a quintet for piano and strings that Dohnanyi wrote in 1895 when he was 18 years old. I've played this piece a number of times. And I'm madly and completely in love with it.
(SOUNDBITE OF PERFORMANCE OF VON DOHNANYI'S "PIANO QUINTET IN C MINOR, OP. 1, NO. 1")
HOFFMAN: Isn't that beautiful? That's a portion of the "Piano Quintet In C Minor." We've got a lot of C minor today - "Op. 1" by Ernst von Dohnanyi. Dohnanyi was Hungarian, Rachel. And as a young man in Budapest starting in the 1990s, he made a tremendous reputation as both a composer and a virtuoso pianist. Apparently, he was an astonishing pianist. And his grandson by the way, Christoph von Dohnanyi, was the longtime conductor and music director of the Cleveland Orchestra - so followed in grandpa's footsteps.
MARTIN: Well, I can think of no better way to ring in the new year than with a conversation about musical beginnings. Miles, thank you so much for bringing us all these pieces.
HOFFMAN: Thank you, Rachel.
MARTIN: Miles Hoffman, besides being our musical commentator, is the founder and violist of the American Chamber Players and the author of "The NPR Classical Music Companion: An Essential Guide For Enlightened Listening." Give us one more musical first to go out on here.
HOFFMAN: Well, let's stick with the Dohnanyi, Rachel. I love that piece so much. And this is another section from the piece. And you'll hear why it's just such a great work of art.
(SOUNDBITE OF PERFORMANCE OF VON DOHNANYI'S "PIANO QUINTET IN C MINOR, OP. 1, NO. 1")
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting in foreign language).
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The rare sound of political dissent in Iran. Protesters there in Tehran chanting, shame on you. They've been on the streets for five days now. Iran's president, Hassan Rouhani, issued a statement acknowledging the economic grievances that appear to be spurring these protests. But some are actually demanding political change, as well, going so far as to denounce Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. Ali Noorani joins us now. He's a reporter with AFP, and he joins us on Skype. Thanks so much for being with us this morning.
ALI NOORANI: Hi. Thank you.
MARTIN: Describe what it's like in Tehran today.
NOORANI: So far, it's calm. The protesters haven't started yet. They will start later. If they start, they will start later in the evening, as with previous days. But things are calm for now.
MARTIN: Although things have not been calm. These protests have turned deadly in the last couple of days. How is President Rouhani responding?
NOORANI: President Rouhani spoke for the first time on day four in reaction to these protests. And he did say that criticism is a right of people. But he said that there's a difference between damaging public property and criticism. And he said that Iran and the government will not tolerate disruption of public order and damaging public properties.
MARTIN: What is at the root of these protests?
NOORANI: The root cause is not really clear still. But it did start with the platform of economic problems in the northeast of the country in Mashhad Iran's second city. It started with people protesting the high prices and cost of living, unemployment, poverty. And at first, many said, including government officials - said that maybe the conservatives or Rouhani's opponents are behind this. But it turned out of control soon. And it's spread across the country.
MARTIN: I mean, President Rouhani kind of sold the Iran nuclear deal as this way to improve Iran's economy, right? But, clearly, you're suggesting that Iranians are feeling any benefit from that economic opening.
NOORANI: Yeah. Iranians on the street - yeah, they are not really feeling it on the table. But Iran's economy has improved. The inflation has been tamed from over 40 percent to single digit. And there has been some international investment. But, indeed, it hasn't been as much as expected. The expectation is very, very high for the people. And, no, yeah, the people have not felt it in their own lives.
MARTIN: So we remember the protests that happened in Iran back in 2009. This was the so-called Green Revolution. Those protests were huge, got big attention from around the world. But it didn't change much in Iran. Are these protests destined for that same fate?
NOORANI: Yes. It's probably - the protests were really a surprise, but these are much smaller compared to 2009. And they were suppressed. And, probably, these ones will be suppressed, as they have turned to political and against the regime. And there are pro-regime protests popping up around the country. So the government will probably suppress it.
MARTIN: Ali Noorani, a journalist with AFP, joined us from Tehran. Thank you.
NOORANI: Thank you.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
How is the U.S. helping shape the future of Syria? American troops and their rebel allies have nearly put an end to the Islamic State caliphate there. But that fighting has destroyed cities and raised questions about who will control big chunks of territory. And that is where American civilians come in. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters more are headed to Syria to help stabilize the country.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JIM MATTIS: When you bring in more diplomats, they're working that initial restoration of services. They bring in the contractors. There's international money that's got to be administered. That is a diplomat's job. The military would move them around, make certain they're protected.
CHANG: NPR's Pentagon correspondent, Tom Bowman, was among those questioning the defense secretary, and he's with us now, along with NPR's Beirut correspondent, Ruth Sherlock. Hello to both of you.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Good morning.
RUTH SHERLOCK, BYLINE: Good morning.
CHANG: Tom, let's start with you. Do you have any sense of how many American civilians will be heading to Syria?
BOWMAN: You know, Ailsa, we don't have a sense of that number. What we do know is there are roughly 2,000 or so U.S. troops that would help these American civilians. But this job, for State Department workers and also these contractors, will be a huge one. A lot of cities and towns have been destroyed from years of fighting. And there's no estimate how long this will all take.
But this clearly goes beyond the initial goal the U.S. had of just defeating ISIS. Now Secretary Mattis says U.S. troops will remain to prevent what he calls the return of ISIS 2.0 and also push along the diplomatic efforts to resolve the civil war. So this goes beyond the initial plan.
CHANG: Diplomatic efforts - that almost sounds like nation-building, which President Trump has pledged not to do. I mean, he said he wants to focus on fighting terrorists. But what you're describing doesn't really sound like that.
BOWMAN: No, that's absolutely right. The Pentagon, interestingly, is using the term stabilization, not even rebuilding and certainly not nation-building, which is a loaded term. But here's the thing - besides restoring services, the U.S. and the international community will also help train local police forces, rebuild schools and work with local governments. So we'll have to see how this all expands. But as we've seen elsewhere in the world, this can all lead down a slippery slope to nation-building.
CHANG: Right.
BOWMAN: Now, Ailsa, it's important to note that Syria is somewhat divided in two now. The U.S. and Russia have set up a demarcation line. Basically, everything east of the Euphrates River is being run by the U.S., its rebel allies. Everything west is being run by Russia and Syria. And - but Russia and Syrian forces are now moving east. So there could be some tensions, even skirmishes, with Syrian forces in particular. Secretary Mattis said that would be a mistake for Syrian forces to take on the U.S. forces or civilians.
CHANG: Ruth, I want to go to you now. What has been the reaction of the Syrian government and its Russian allies to Mattis' announcement?
SHERLOCK: Well, so far, it's been really quite muted. There's been little from the Assad regime itself. And Russia's foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, did talk about the decision to the Interfax news agency. That's the Russian news agency. He said it, as Tom says - you know, it went beyond the U.S. mission to fight extremists in the country. But - so he called the plan surprising.
One of the reasons this might be muted, though, is that the Syrian regime, although it clearly wants to take back its territory in the long run, may not have the military capacity to do it now. The regime has been massively weakened in the war. And so for Assad to try to take back Raqqa and these other areas whilst it's also trying to fight on other fronts and keep hold of the territory it's already gained - may just be too much for its weakened military forces to take.
CHANG: I also want to talk a bit about the particular area the U.S. plans to stabilize. How easy is it for these U.S. diplomats and contractors to work there?
SHERLOCK: Well, so even though ISIS has gone, there are still huge challenges on the ground. The U.S. is working with the Syrian Democratic Forces. That's a militia that's made up of Kurds and Arabs. But you have tensions between these ethnic groups, between these Kurds and Arabs. And these may only intensify now that the unifying kind of aim to defeat ISIS is gone.
And then if you look at Deir ez-Zor province, another part of the northeast that they're going to try to apply this plan to, you have emerging conflicts between tribes. Some of these tribes suffered hugely under ISIS. Hundreds of their members were killed. And so now they're talking about taking revenge on tribes who joined ISIS. So you have this risk that, just because ISIS has gone, it doesn't mean the area's going to be peaceful. And, you know, some people say there might be violence there for years to come. So there is a risk that, in staying, the U.S. could find itself getting dragged into these local conflicts.
CHANG: All right. That's NPR's Ruth Sherlock and NPR's Tom Bowman. Thanks to both of you.
BOWMAN: You're welcome.
SHERLOCK: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
All right. The holiday season is coming to an end. And sadly, that means Christmas trees will soon be coming down. The question is, what do you do with them?
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Well, Bill Ulfelder, the executive director of The Nature Conservancy in New York, says there is one place you do not want your Christmas tree to go, and that is the landfill.
BILL ULFELDER: In the United States, we buy about 35 million Christmas trees every year. It just takes up space.
CHANG: There are other options. In Ohio, for example, old Christmas trees are lined along riverbanks to prevent erosion. In Kentucky, Rangers sink trees in streams to help fish.
ULFELDER: It's a way to create some structural habitat. The surface starts growing algae, so fish come there to eat.
MARTIN: This isn't a new idea. Ulfelder says he saw similar uses as a kid in Massachusetts.
ULFELDER: When we would go to the beach, you could see all these old Christmas trees in the dunes, you know, preventing sand erosion and keeping the dunes intact.
MARTIN: And in New York City, Ulfelder says there's mulch fest.
ULFELDER: The parks department basically just runs all of the Christmas trees they have through chippers. Then what they're doing is laying the mulch down in the city parks.
MARTIN: But the most innovative way of getting rid of Christmas trees is probably in Colchester, Vt. The Pine Island Community Farm will take your old tree and feed it to its goats - circle of life and all.
(SOUNDBITE OF CYRUS CHESTNUT, GARY BARTZ ET AL.'S "O TANNENBAUM")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
To say living as a gay person in Pakistan is difficult is an understatement. Homosexuality is illegal there, so gay and lesbian Pakistanis live secret lives. But as NPR's Diaa Hadid reports, to be a transgender woman in Pakistan is an entirely different experience.
UNIDENTIFIED WORSHIPPERS: (Chanting in foreign language).
DIAA HADID, BYLINE: At the Shiite Muslim shrine in Lahore, men and women are segregated. But there's one group that freely crosses from one side to the other - transgender women. They have long hair and wear makeup, and they lead the chants.
UNIDENTIFIED WORSHIPPER: (Chanting in foreign language).
HADID: The faithful circle the singers, beating their chests to the rhythm. Scenes have played out like this for centuries. Here, transgender women are a fixture of the culture and society. There's thousands of them across Pakistan, but they've lived on the margins. They're known as khawaja sira, and now they're demanding their rights under the law, and they've had some notable success. This movement is led by trans activists like Ashi.
ASHI: (Through interpreter) I always stand up for the rights of my transgender community, even if it's day or night.
HADID: Ashi's own story shows just how far they've come. She was born in the '60s in rural Pakistan. She always felt like a girl in a boy's body.
ASHI: (Through interpreter) I am the creation of God. I'm grateful he created me this way.
HADID: Her parents did not see it that way. Her father caught her dancing in her sister's clothes when she was in the second grade. He threatened to kill her. Her mother begged Ashi to run away. Ashi hitched a bus to town. She had no money, no food - completely desperate. That's when she met transgender women dancing in a circus.
ASHI: (Through interpreter) I thought they were girls. I said to myself, how beautiful these girls are. They told me, you're khawaja sira. And I said, no, no, I'm not. But they recognized me and invited me to be with them.
HADID: This was Ashi's initiation into khawaja sira culture, a community that largely exists because families often cast trans women out onto the streets. An older khawaja sira took her in and became what's known as her goru (ph).
ASHI: (Through interpreter) She treated me like her own child. She protected me. She fed me on time. I missed my parents, so she would hug me and dote on me and say, girl, this is our destiny. We can't live with family. You're young. But as time passes, you will understand everything.
HADID: Ashi learned the rules of the khawaja sira community. And now, she's a guru with dozens of followers. It's morning, and Ashi's visiting deras (ph). That's apartments where khawaja siras (ph) live together. Ashi climbs up a curly staircase to a tiny rooftop flat. These women call Ashi mama. That's because she's the one they call when they're in trouble.
One trans woman, Nargis, recounts how Ashi helped her out. The police detained her after a function. That's a party where they dance for cash and do sex work. Ashi used her contacts to get her out of jail. As they chat, Nargis prepares to go begging. She bleaches her skin pale and smears on white foundation. She says people give more if you look white.
NARGIS: (Speaking Urdu).
HADID: Nargis dodges traffic and hustles motorists for cash. There's a superstition that khawaja siras have the power to bless or curse people. A one-eyed beggar eyes Nargis jealously. Nobody's giving him money. But it's a hard life. Khawaja siras may be visible. They may be accepted as part of the culture, but that doesn't mean they can get jobs or find a husband - hardly. They're often the victims of violent crime, especially rape. And that's what triggered the activism.
Around a decade ago, they began demonstrating outside police stations after cops refused to investigate murders of khawaja siras. They became involved in HIV education and treatment. International groups began funding them. Ashi's now paid to be a community organizer, but it's what she's always done.
They've had a string of victories. They can obtain a third-gender passport, an ID card. They can now be counted in the census. And one of their chief allies is a legislator from a deeply conservative Islamic party. Naeema Kishwar wears a blue hijab and a matching face veil - a niqab. In August, she presented a trans rights bill to Parliament. It would provide education and medical care. It even provides a quota for government jobs.
What drew your interest to the transgender bill? How did this start for you?
NAEEMA KISHWAR: (Through interpreter) They are not been given the rights that they are entitled to, as per the law, our religion and the constitution of our country.
HADID: Kishwar expects it to pass in the next few months, but this bill says nothing about the rights of gays and lesbians. That's strictly against the law here. Leaders like Ashi are OK with that.
ASHI: (Through interpreter) Pakistan is a Muslim country, and nobody will accept them. Gays and lesbians want to use us as an umbrella. I don't think they can join us.
HADID: Not publicly at least. Some do work quietly together. Ashi's a savvy activist. One afternoon, she mobilizes around 20 trans women to protest in a traffic circle downtown. They're here to condemn Myanmar's violent crackdown on Rohingya Muslims. A camera crew surrounds Ashi as she leads a chant of down with the Myanmar government.
ASHI: (Chanting in Urdu).
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting in Urdu).
HADID: She's not only raised an important issue. She's sent a message - khawaja siras are good Muslims and concerned citizens.
UNIDENTIFIED NEWS CORRESPONDENT: (Speaking Urdu).
HADID: But for all this, Ashi's biggest victory is personal. Decades after Ashi was thrown out of home, her mother and father begged for her forgiveness. She forgave them right away. She cared for her father until he died.
ASHI: (Through interpreter) I wanted him to recognize and accept me. My wish wasn't that he would seek my forgiveness. My biggest wish was that he would consider me as his own, accept me and extend love and affection to me, as he did to his other children.
HADID: She now cares for her elderly mother in a tiny, sunless flat.
ASHI: (Speaking Urdu).
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Speaking Urdu).
HADID: Ashi boasts that she's the perfect mix - strong like a son and caring like a daughter. While she makes breakfast for her mother, a local boy comes for his morning Quran lesson.
ASHI: (Through interpreter) I teach Quran. I have a job. I consider myself a lucky transgender.
(Speaking Urdu).
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: (Speaking Urdu).
HADID: Ashi wants this for her community - an ordinary life with faith and family. Diaa Hadid, NPR News, Lahore.
(SOUNDBITE OF USTAD AMJAD, ALI KAHN AND RAHIM ALHAJ'S "JOURNEY")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Rachel Martin. And on this day, a rare and beautiful white owl is flying free. The bird was trapped in a bunch of barbed wire near the Smithfield prison in Huntington, Penn. A state game commission officer used a crate and net to coax the owl to safety. He came out with some minor skin tears but is expected to make a full recovery. And yes, while we celebrate that fact, it is all really an excuse to play this.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FREE BIRD")
LYNYRD SKYNYRD: (Singing) I'm a free bird, yeah.
MARTIN: It's MORNING EDITION.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Safety regulations around offshore oil drilling and fracking are on the retreat. The Trump administration is considering relaxing safety requirements on offshore oil drilling. The current rules were put in place after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. And the White House is also rescinding rules that were proposed for fracking. The rule changes happening now are what the industry has lobbied for. And here to talk about all of this is Alisa Barba. She's the executive editor of Inside Energy, a group of public media reporters focused on the country's energy issues. Hey, Alisa.
ALISA BARBA: Hey, Ailsa.
CHANG: Let's start with offshore oil drilling. These were rules that were put in place after the Deepwater Horizon spill. How were they meant to prevent another huge spill like that?
BARBA: It was kind of a five-year process after Deepwater Horizon that they looked at what had happened and they looked at ways to prevent something like this. So a couple of different things they put into place - they formed this new regulatory group called the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, the BSEE, under the Department of the Interior. The BSEE was supposed to certify third-party inspectors of critical equipment offshore. Now they're going to use some industry-set recommendations - recommended practices instead of these third-party inspectors. That was really the big thing. Another rule that was relaxed is the streaming data from offshore oil facilities to onshore offices there.
CHANG: And that's - you mean they were sending data in real time about some of these...
BARBA: Exactly. What was going on offshore, real time data going onshore - all of this was expensive. This was burdensome, the industry said - and so that those are going to be relaxed. This is all part of - back in March the Trump administration issued an order that said, we need to review every single regulatory action that puts a burden on energy production. So it's under that rubric that these rules are being relaxed.
CHANG: What's the time frame for these rule changes about oil drilling?
BARBA: About offshore oil drilling?
CHANG: Yeah.
BARBA: It was published in the Federal Register on Friday. And there will be a 30-day comment period.
CHANG: Let's turn to fracking now. There were rules on the books under President Obama that would have required companies to disclose the chemicals they use in fracking. What's happening to those rules?
BARBA: It's a BLM, Bureau of Land Management, rule that was proposed back in September, I believe, of 2015. But they were immediately sued by industry groups and by four different states. And they were put on hold because of that lawsuit. So they've never gone into effect. This was for fracking on federal and tribal lands, disclosing the chemicals - the very toxic mix cocktail of chemicals that goes into fracking - setting some standards for how wells are constructed and also environmental rules for protecting the kind of produced fluid that comes up after fracking takes place. So this was all about groundwater protection.
CHANG: The argument from industry groups, though, is that a lot of these federal rules duplicated state rules. So, in essence, they created extra work, extra costs that were unnecessary. How correct are they?
BARBA: In Colorado, in Wyoming, two of the four states that sued to overturn this rule - there are rules in place that do very similar things that the federal rules did. But there are other states that do not have rules in place. So people concerned about fracking would argue that you need a federal rule oversight that would cover every single state and make some kind of uniformity to increase the safety of the fracking.
CHANG: All right. That's Alisa Barba, executive director of Inside Energy. Thank You, Alisa.
BARBA: Thank you, Ailsa.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
All right. Let's say it again. Happy 2018, everybody. If you had the TV on while you were celebrating last night, you probably saw some glitz, a few musical acts, a lot of partying maybe. Not the case in Germany. There's a favorite New Year's TV tradition there that is a whole lot tamer. It is a century-old British play. And Germans have watched this thing so many times that Guinness World Records has called it the world's most frequently repeated TV show. Here's NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson.
(SOUNDBITE OF "HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU" RENDITION)
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: "Dinner For One" is barely 11 minutes long. It's about a butler named James and Miss Sophie, the lady of the house where he works.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "DINNER FOR ONE")
MAY WARDEN: (As Miss Sophie) Everything looks very nice.
FREDDIE FRINTON: (As James) Thank you very much, Miss Sophie. Thank you.
WARDEN: (As Miss Sophie) Is everybody here?
FRINTON: (As James) They're all here waiting for you, Miss Sophie, yes.
NELSON: The two characters, played here by the late British comedians Freddie Frinton and May Warden, are at a 90th birthday dinner Miss Sophie throws for herself and four of her former beaus. But there's a catch. The beaus are not actually there.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "DINNER FOR ONE")
FRINTON: (As James) By the way, the same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?
WARDEN: (As Miss Sophie) Same procedure as every year, James.
FRINTON: (As James) Same procedure as every year, James.
NELSON: The procedure means James pretends to be all four men. He toasts Miss Sophie and drinks from each of their goblets that he fills first with sherry, then wine, then champagne and finally port.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "DINNER FOR ONE")
FRINTON: (As James, slurring speech) It's one of the nicest little women - one of the nicest little women that ever breathed.
NELSON: Not surprisingly, the butler ends up drunk and can barely carry the dishes or navigate the dining room, which has a fur rug with a tiger head he keeps tripping over.
(LAUGHTER)
NELSON: It's classic slapstick. And nowadays, the innuendo is a bit troubling - for example, the closing scene in which Miss Sophie instructs her employee to join her upstairs. But for nearly 15 million Germans, sitting down with loved ones to watch "Dinner For One" before ringing in the New Year is a time-honored tradition, says Thomas Schreiber. He's the head of entertainment at the German network NDR. He spoke to me from their studio in Hamburg.
THOMAS SCHREIBER: It's each and every generation I have to look at the engineer sitting behind the glass window. Are you watching it? Is it part of your ritual?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Yes, it is.
SCHREIBER: So - and he's, I would say, in his 20s. So you grew up with it. And the 31 of December without "Dinner For One" is not the 31 of December.
NELSON: The skit was first introduced in Germany in the early '60s, when there wasn't much in the way of programming here. The version that is most popular features Frinton and Warden. It was filmed in English before a live German audience in Hamburg in 1963. Schreiber says there have been many variations since then, some live, others satirical and even once performed in various German dialects. There's also a Swiss version and a colorized version. But none have supplanted the black-and-white original, he says.
SCHREIBER: The humor was what carried it and the assumption that this was something totally, totally British, which Germans were very fond of in those days.
NELSON: "Dinner For One" aired roughly 20 times in Germany between yesterday noon and 1 this morning. Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Berlin.
(SOUNDBITE OF HAUSCHKA'S "TAGTRAUM")
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
People who earn the minimum wage in 18 states are getting a raise today. Those raises range from just 4 cents in Alaska to a full dollar in Maine. Sounds like good news for some workers. But, actually, not everybody is convinced. Joining me now to talk about all this is NPR's Joel Rose. Hey, Joel.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: Hey, Ailsa.
CHANG: All right. First of all, which states are we talking about? We mentioned Maine and Alaska. What are some of the others?
ROSE: Yeah, they're really all over the map. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25, and it's been the same since 2009. So states and cities across the country are really taking matters into their own hands. You've already mentioned Maine. They've got the biggest jump this year. They're going up a dollar to $10 an hour. Some of the other big jumps we're going to see are in Colorado and Hawaii. There are a lot of states that are going to see smaller increases. New York and California are on that list. Both of those states are on their way up to $15 an hour over the next couple of years.
CHANG: And what's up with the four cents in Alaska? Does that even count as a raise?
ROSE: Well, technically, yes. The minimum wage is pegged to inflation in Alaska, as it is in many states. So you know, this year it's going up four cents. But I guess every little bit counts.
CHANG: OK. Well, many cities have already hiked up the minimum wage, in some cases by several dollars. What's been the effect there?
ROSE: That is really in dispute. There are a lot of studies that have shown little to no effect on hiring. But there was a really big, provocative study that came out this year about Seattle, which - the city of Seattle has gradually been raising its minimum wage all the way up to $13 an hour. And this study from the University of Washington found that wages did go up, but overall, the average low-income worker actually lost money because businesses cut payrolls. They reduced hours. Michael Saltsman is with the Employment Policies Institute, which is opposed to these big hikes in the minimum wage. And he was very eager to talk about this Seattle study.
MICHAEL SALTSMAN: Yeah, people were seeing increases in their hourly pay. But on average, they lost enough hours at work that they were earning $125 less a month. For me, that's kind of, like, the clearest picture of a scenario you want to avoid.
CHANG: Well, Saltsman's group is opposed to big hikes, as you said. So this is a really contentious issue. What do other groups say about this?
ROSE: Other economists have looked at Seattle and other cities, and they've come to very different conclusions. Michael Reich studies wages and employment at UC Berkeley. He thinks that Seattle study is flawed. He's run the numbers on minimum wage hikes in a bunch of cities - in Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Seattle, Washington, D.C. - and he's got a big paper on this that he's going to present this week. And he says that, so far, these minimum wage hikes have little to no effect on hiring.
MICHAEL REICH: If any city did find big negative employment effects, then it should be visible at the street level. That is you should see closures. You would see workers protesting and so forth.
ROSE: Reich says that all economists agree basically, at some point, raising the minimum wage will have an impact on hiring. But he says you just haven't seen that yet in Seattle or any of these other cities.
CHANG: And which employers say they will be the most affected by these wage hikes?
ROSE: The restaurant industry is one that has complained especially loudly. There was a study about restaurants in Oakland, Calif., that showed a higher minimum wage might make some restaurants more likely to go out of business. But that seemed only to apply in cases of restaurants that were sort of struggling anyway. You don't see that effect with stronger, more successful restaurants. So I think the data on that are mixed.
CHANG: NPR's Joel Rose in New York, thank you.
ROSE: You're welcome.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Sexual harassment, manipulation, threats and payoffs - these are all allegations made in recent months against a prominent Dallas-based Muslim preacher - Nouman Ali Khan. Clerics are looking into it, but the scandal highlights the challenges Muslim-Americans face when confronting misconduct by their leaders. Buzzfeed reporter Hannah Allam has been following this story, and she joined me in our studios. Welcome.
HANNAH ALLAM: Hi.
CHANG: So who is Nouman Ali Khan, and why is he such an important figure in the Muslim community?
ALLAM: Nouman Ali Khan is someone who's at the top echelon of this phenomenon that we call the celebrity preacher. It's not a new phenomenon, but it's something that, in the age of social media, has really taken off, where you can have this strong personality, a religious figure who's very charismatic, who has a YouTube channel and very active social media presence. And so he's able to reach millions and millions of followers.
CHANG: And what precisely has he been accused of?
ALLAM: I think it's important to point out that no criminal offense has been alleged. And that's part of what has made this a really complex issue because it's being framed as more an abuse of power. Some people call it spiritual abuse, which is the term that's being used now for all sorts of misconduct that's under the guise of religion. So a couple of panels of clerics and Muslim scholars have looked into the allegations against him and have found that - the words they used are he's lied and manipulated women into what they called secret sham marriages.
CHANG: And how has he allegedly lied or manipulated women into sham marriages?
ALLAM: He would tell these women, let's get married. I'm going through a divorce. It'll be quiet for now. And then if they called him on it, the exact quote from a cleric summary that I saw was, "he would apologize and attempt to buy their silence or threaten them." It's a bit complicated because the secret marriage issue is controversial even within Islam. So it's even harder to explain sort of to an outside audience.
And that's one of the problems that I think Muslim women face in deciding whether to come forward as part of this sort of #metoo movement - is that sometimes they say that the transgressions that are taboo to them - you know, if someone asked me for a photo with my hair uncovered or tries to touch my hand or something, they sort of pale in comparison with some of the very serious, violent allegations that we're hearing in other industries.
CHANG: How vigorously are these women's allegations being investigated, then?
ALLAM: I think many women's advocates - Muslim women's advocates - would say, not vigorously at first - but I think there is a movement now that actually predated the #MeToo movement, you know, where people were starting to look into these and take them more seriously. And we're seeing new nonprofits springing up, like In Chicks Clothing (ph), which is dedicated to sort of investigating these claims, finding help for women.
And then I hear that some national scholars, including some who had looked into the Nouman Ali Khan scandal - they'd like to set some standard for conduct for national leaders because as many have pointed out, there is just no mechanism in many Islamic institutions in the United States for looking into these kinds of allegations.
CHANG: Hannah Allam is a reporter for BuzzFeed News. Thank you very much.
ALLAM: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF EVOCATIV'S "CASTAWAY")
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Let's bring in a familiar voice to hear more about how President Trump is handling all of this, NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Good morning, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning. Happy New Year.
CHANG: Happy New Year to you, too. So tell us a little more about what the president is saying and doing on these two fronts on Iran and on North Korea.
LIASSON: On Iran, the president tweeted support for the protesters. He's tweeted criticism for the regime for shutting down parts of the Internet. He's tweeted that the U.S. is watching very closely. He said not good about the regime's actions. But as you can hear from Lindsey Graham, he's gotten some pushback from some Republicans who think he hasn't laid out a strategy on Iran. He hasn't decided what he wants to do about it other than tweets.
As for North Korea, he gave a interview on Thursday to The New York Times where he expressed his displeasure with China for not cutting off all the oil shipments to North Korea. But as far as what he's going to do about it, he just says we'll see. He hasn't laid out a strategy for North Korea yet either. Although, he has occasionally seemed to threaten military action threatening fire and fury to try to stop North Korea's nuclear program - so North Korea - clearly the biggest foreign policy problem on the president's plate as he starts the new year.
CHANG: But we will see. Well, let's switch gears for a moment and talk about another division in the Republican Party, the Mueller investigation. How confident are you, Mara, that 2018 will see an end to this inquiry one way or another?
LIASSON: Well, I'm not confident at all. I don't know how long Bob Mueller is going to take. Now, we know that the president's lawyers have said they believe it will be wrapping up very soon. And it will be wrapping up with an exoneration of the president. But in that New York Times interview, the president said he wasn't going to fire Bob Mueller. He went on to say he has the power to do anything he wants to with the Department of Justice but that he was holding back, staying uninvolved in the hopes of being treated fairly.
But. In that same interview, he had praise for the Republicans in Congress and his supporters in conservative media for their efforts to attack Mueller to delegitimize him. They've been saying that Mueller is corrupt and biased. The whole FBI is corrupt. So the strategy here is - on the one hand, the president's lawyers want to present a posture of cooperation with the investigation. But there's a political strategy to make sure the president's base can dismiss whatever Mueller comes up with as a partisan witch hunt. And that's making some Republicans nervous because they're supposed to be the law and order party. And they think it's not such a good thing to undermine the FBI.
CHANG: Well, speaking of the schisms, you know, we're obviously heading into an election year. Do you think Democrats will be able to capitalize on those divisions within the Republican Party when it comes to the Russia investigation?
LIASSON: I think that Democrats are not counting on the Russia investigation. But they are very confident and optimistic about their chances to make gains this election year. Usually, the opposition party does. But what's interesting to me is how high expectations have gotten now. There's so much talk about a big blue wave. It's almost take back the House or bust.
And even though there have been tremendous increases in Democratic enthusiasm and turnout in the special elections that we've seen, Democrats are still facing a pretty high hurdle. They need 23 seats to win the House back. And because of the structural advantages that Republicans have, that's going to be pretty hard. The estimates are that they would have to get 58 percent of the national vote for the House of Representatives just to get 50 percent of the seats.
CHANG: And what about their chances of retaking the Senate, the Democrats?
LIASSON: Oh, much, much less - the Democrats are defending a lot of incumbents in red states where Trump won, sometimes by really big margins. And earlier in the year when I talked to Republican senators, they said that just holding their own would be an incredible victory. Now I think they feel a little bit more confident about that.
CHANG: All right. That's NPR's Mara Liasson. Thank you, Mara.
LIASSON: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF ERIC LAU'S "SOME TIME")
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
In Iran, the last days of 2017 were marked by widespread protests against that country's government. Thousands turned out and so did the police, who are shown on video beating protesters.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We reached some protesters inside Iran. They spoke on the condition that we don't use their names. One protester is 25 years old, a college graduate and, like many of Iran's young people, is looking for a job in a battered economy. She says she joined a march on Sunday in Tehran's Enghelab square.
CHANG: Men who appear to be plainclothes police mixed with demonstrators. The protester told us she was with her friends when, quote, "the police attacked us and beat me violently." She also saw them beating other men and women.
MARTIN: An Iranian journalist, who spoke with the protester, asked her, why take the risk when Iran's security forces are so powerful? This is what she said.
UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST: She told me that I am very angry, and people are angry about the situation. And I asked her, what's your goal? You want regime change? What do you want? She said, I don't want regime change. I'm not going to ask the last king come back to Iran myself. But I need the government listen to us.
MARTIN: And throughout the protests in Iran, President Trump has tweeted support for the protesters and disparaged the Iranian government. All the while, as we just heard, North Korea continues to poke at the U.S. President Trump has been tweeting, of course, though one Senate Republican - Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina - warns that's not enough.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LINDSEY GRAHAM: It's not enough to watch. President Trump is tweeting very sympathetically to the Iranian people, but you just can't tweet here. You have to lay out a plan. And if I were President Trump, I'd lay out a plan as to how I would engage the regime.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Let's ask what's behind the deadly protests across Iran. Initially, President Hassan Rouhani seemed to be the target of the demonstrations. But then some protesters aimed even higher. They chanted death to the dictator, a reference to the ayatollah who holds supreme power in the country. We've call in longtime visitor to Iran who's watching the protests, Robin Wright of The New Yorker. Good morning.
ROBIN WRIGHT: Good morning. Happy New Year.
CHANG: Happy New Year to you, too. What are you hearing from your friends in Iran right now?
WRIGHT: Well, there are a lot of things happening that play out in a lot of different levels. This is different from the 2009 Green Movement when you saw a public uprising in challenging the election results. That, at the time, had a leadership. That was political. This at the moment began over economic issues. You have almost 30 percent unemployment among the young. And some of the staples have gone up as much as 40 percent in recent weeks. And so there was a spontaneous protest that began in a very conservative center of Iran, in Mashhad - Iran's holiest city. And it spread very quickly. And it's clear that this economic issue resonates.
Now, it has taken on a political component, challenging not only the government of President Rouhani but also the broader religious system, which is headed by Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader.
CHANG: And who is the one - of those two individuals - who are these protests ultimately aimed at? - both or is there one in particular?
WRIGHT: I think it looks at both. But there have been some striking calls challenging and calling the supreme leader a dictator. These are some of the chants that took place in 2009 as well. But it's clear that there's a kind of discontent that is sweeping Iran over broad issues. But it doesn't look like it has the kind of leadership it did in 2009 when you had defeated presidential candidates who spearheaded and endorsed and publicly got out and rallied protesters. This time, you don't see that kind of leadership emerge. And it's unclear how this is happening from town to town except through social media.
CHANG: Do you see these protests as posing a real risk to the regime ultimately?
WRIGHT: Well, certainly, it does. And the fact that you have large numbers and the fact security forces have been called out to try to put them down - it's very interesting that President Rouhani in comments to the nation yesterday talked about diligent intimacy of protests and recognition of the problems. But he also said that violence would not be tolerated. And that's where the dividing line is. If these protests become more violent then you're likely to see a real clash between Iran and its own people.
CHANG: All right. That's Robin Wright. She's a journalist and a fellow at the Wilson Center. And she joined us by Skype. Thank you very much, Robin.
WRIGHT: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
When people with simple, non-urgent medical problems go to the emergency room for treatment, it creates all kinds of problems - ERs get overcrowded, treatment is expensive, it's often inefficient. This is a big issue here in Washington, D.C., which has the highest per capita 911 call volume in the country. The District government, insurers and health providers are all trying to figure out how to bring ER visits down. One proposal is to go to Medicaid patients' homes and use telemedicine for primary care. Selena Simmons-Duffin from member station WAMU explains.
SELENA SIMMONS-DUFFIN, BYLINE: When Dennis Lebron Dolman went to a health screening fair over the summer, he found out he had crazy high blood pressure - 180 over 100 - stroke-level high. He's 41 years old and hated doctor's offices, didn't want to go. Three months later...
GRACE KELLY: So what I want you to do is listen to this while I take your blood pressure...
DENNIS LEBRON DOLMAN: OK.
KELLY: ...Because I do not want it to be high.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: As you breathe in, be aware of breathing in.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Dolman's on a cushy brown couch getting his blood pressure taken by medical assistant Grace Kelly. She's part of a new telemedicine program at Mary's Center, a community health center in D.C. They've had several of these appointments. Today, the blood pressure reading is OK.
KELLY: It's a lot better than before, but it's still high. You might have to actually take something. Hi.
GITA AGARWAL: Hi.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: That's Dr. Gita Agarwal video calling in from across town.
AGARWAL: Hi. How are you, sir?
DOLMAN: I'm fine, and yourself? How are you today?
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Dr. Agarwal checks out Dolman's vitals that Kelly has entered into her system - temperature, blood pressure and weight.
AGARWAL: Great. Let's see how your weight is. Oh, what happened with the weight?
DOLMAN: I haven't made it to the gym yet. That's the problem.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: He weighs 210 pounds, which isn't too bad for his height, but he lost weight with diet and exercise to get his blood pressure down. And now it's crept back up.
AGARWAL: What should we do? What do you think? Do you want to see a nutritionist?
DOLMAN: I mean, that would be - that would be fine.
AGARWAL: And how about an exercise program?
DOLMAN: Yes.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: This exchange, connecting patients with different health care providers and services that can help them, is the real promise of telemedicine in D.C. according to Erin Holve. She's the director of health care reform and innovation at the D.C. Department of Health Care Finance.
ERIN HOLVE: It's still early days for telemedicine, but there are lots of reasons to believe that establishing the kind of relationship between a patient and provider and having that continuity of care will ultimately reduce some of the non-emergent visits to the ER and result in better outcomes for the long run.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: The patients being targeted by this program otherwise wouldn't go to a regular doctor visit, meaning they'd miss out on preventive care. Some patients like Dennis Lebron Dolman just really don't want to go to the doctors. Others can't get there because of mobility or child care issues or because they can't get time off work. In the immediate sense, this program might have prevented an ER visit. If Dolman's blood pressure had gone unchecked, he could have had a stroke. But it's also connected him to a provider he can go to in the future for any issue with his health that might come up.
AGARWAL: Do you want a flu shot?
DOLMAN: I usually do fine without a flu shot.
AGARWAL: But how do you know you'll be fine this year?
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Dr. Gita Agarwal talks Dolman into it. Medical assistant Kelly has a flu shot with her, and he gets it on the spot there in his mom's living room.
DOLMAN: Dr. Gita's good. I like her.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Dolman walks Kelly out at the end of the visit. He's now linked with a provider he trusts who comes to him.
DOLMAN: Because it's convenient and like just good company and all of the above.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: He likes feeling like someone is keeping track of him so he doesn't slack off, someone who'll check to see if he's gone to the gym, improved his eating habits and ultimately gotten that blood pressure down. For NPR News, I'm Selena Simmons-Duffin in Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARCUS D'S "ALL AROUND THE WORLD")
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
All right. I don't know if you know this, but peak online dating season is here. Match.com says now through Valentine's Day is the busiest time of the year for dating apps and sites. So we're taking this month to find out how technology affects the way we find and think about love. Here's our co-host David Greene.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
OK. So we are calling our online dating series What Makes Us Click. Get it? We kicked it off in San Francisco. We just asked people a simple question, do you like online dating?
(SOUNDBITE OF TROLLEY BELL CLANGING)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: No. I don't like it. (Laughter).
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: I guess nobody really likes using dating apps. It's kind of like, don't look at my phone. You know? (Laughter) Like...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: I just prefer, like, meeting people face to face. You know what I mean? It's more real that way.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: It's something that's fun, and it's kind of a social experiment.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: It's way different to - say, if you see a girl at a bar and you go up and introduce yourself, whereas Tinder's much more - shallow's the word I'm looking for.
GREENE: So a lot of mixed feelings there, as you heard. But, actually, most Americans, 60 percent, say online dating is a good way to meet people. And that's actually a 15 percent increase from a decade earlier, according to the most recent numbers from the Pew Research Center. So what does all of this swiping left and right mean for our psyches, for society, for the culture of romance? Well, we sat down with two people who spend plenty of time thinking about this. Skyler Wang is a Ph.D. candidate who studies the sociology of online dating at the University of California, Berkeley. And Megan Murray works for the dating app Zoosk. And I started out by asking them, what's different about dating today?
MEGAN MURRAY: I feel like dating's always been hard and it's going to continue to be hard, but the way people meet is different, and that has to affect the relationships we form. I've found people don't approach each other as much in person when you go out to bars.
SKYLER WANG: Yeah. And I think it's so fascinating that, like, you know, friends and I would go out, and before hitting the clubs, you know, they would go on Tinder, right? And I was with friends who, you know, inside these gay bars, they would turn on Grindr and find someone to dance with.
GREENE: This has turned everything on its head because it used to be it was sort of, like, taboo and strange to go online and find someone, and now it's a little strange to meet someone in person unless you've connected with them online. I mean, is that OK?
MURRAY: I don't think it's, like, good or bad. It's just different. But I think a lot of times you see people go on these interspace dating sites, or, dating sites that focus more on interest. So I think a lot of the apps are kind of moving towards that.
GREENE: You're almost Googling, like, I want a person interested in "Star Wars" and guacamole.
MURRAY: Yeah.
WANG: So there's a really nice metaphor. It's called relationshopping. So basically people are treating dating like it's shopping. So, like, as if you're trying to look for the next dress or the next handbag or whatever, and you're browsing.
GREENE: Do you ever feel like you're a commodity when you're doing online dating, or feel objectified?
MURRAY: Yeah, kind of. And I think because I have, like, data about my own profile sometimes (laughter) so I can tell if I, like - I have a picture of myself with glasses and books in the background, but the picture of me holding a beer does better. And also, like, you're doing it too. Like, there is literally a giant red X on someone. And there is something, like, a little gross about saying, like, no, I do not want this person in my life.
GREENE: Well, I'm just so fascinated because both of you share this thing in common that you're both using online dating but also writing about it, thinking about it, which has to shape the experience personally. Didn't you have Excel spreadsheets of dates and people and...
WANG: Yeah. (Laughter).
GREENE: Not that that's a bad thing.
WANG: Yeah. So people use lists nowadays to basically get a better sense of who they're attracted to and to really put a very quantitative twist to something that did not used to be like that. I think it's just, it's, you know, why do we wear Fitbits? Like, why are we tracking how many calories that we're eating? It's really new cultural phenomenon, and I think it has basically encroached onto our dating lives, as well.
GREENE: And, Megan, just listening to that, like, if someone is thinking, wow, technology offers a lot of good things - like, a lot of opportunities to keep track of myself and, you know, find people, but I also don't want to lose the magic of romance and meeting people. Like, what is your advice on the balance?
MURRAY: Yeah, I do think the romance and the magic sneaks in there no matter what. Like, if you really care about someone and you meet them, there's going to be these indefinable moments or something that you realize, or maybe you find out you're both keeping spreadsheets. You know? Like, there's always going to be some sweet, little thing that comes through.
GREENE: It feels like there's something about dating that it's like it's become something crazy and new and data-driven and you can use all of these new toys, but that there's something central to romance and the magic that everyone wants to make sure to hold onto.
WANG: Yeah. And I think that's what a lot of companies are saying - we're not an online dating service, we're more of an introductory service. The dating doesn't happen online. The dating happens in person. So in a way, they're trying to preserve that magic, right? So they're really framing their services as more of a way to just bridge connections, and then you go out into the world and do the real dating.
(SOUNDBITE OF CARLY RAE JEPSEN'S "CALL ME MAYBE")
GREENE: That was Megan Murray, who works at the dating app Zoosk, and also Skyler Wang, who studies sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. And we should tell you Skyler gave us the title of this series, What Makes Us Click. You can find more of our stories online and on the radio all this month.
(SOUNDBITE OF CARLY RAE JEPSEN'S "CALL ME MAYBE")
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Researchers say as many as 200,000 Americans experience early-onset Alzheimer's disease. They develop dementia-like symptoms in their 40s and 50s. And that can mean struggles with jobs and money or with identity and family. Bella Doolittle is confronting all of this. She and her husband, Will, are talking publicly about her illness in a series of essays and podcasts. North Country Public Radio's Brian Mann spent some time with them.
BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: Bella Doolittle is in her kitchen filling little brown bottles.
BELLA DOOLITTLE: I just finished making my annual Christmas presents. It's homemade Kahlua. It's the best you will ever drink.
WILL DOOLITTLE: Why don't we give him a little sip?
B. DOOLITTLE: And I have my vanilla beans imported from Madagascar.
MANN: Bella is a young-looking 59 years old. She wears a T-shirt and has a bright red tangle of hair. She watches my face as I take a sip.
Oh, my God.
B. DOOLITTLE: I make it every year.
MANN: But this year is different. Bella says for a while now she's just felt off. She says her brain gets fuzzy.
B. DOOLITTLE: I got lost a couple of times in neighborhoods that I'm familiar with. It was dark, but I thought to myself, that should not have, you know, put me out there that I couldn't figure out where - how I was going to get back home.
MANN: The Doolittles live in Glens Falls, a little suburban city in upstate New York. They raised four children - two grown and gone, two still in college. She and her husband, Will, started traveling to Albany about an hour away for test after test. Last February, her neurologist said the words.
B. DOOLITTLE: Well, we figured out what's going on with you, and this is it - Alzheimer's. And I'm like, no, it's not.
W. DOOLITTLE: You asked them - you said, well, how long does this take, or how long do I have or something? And he said, on average, eight years.
B. DOOLITTLE: Yeah.
W. DOOLITTLE: That really upset you.
B. DOOLITTLE: That really pissed me off. It did, absolutely. I mean, I was pretty devastated. I'm like, eight years? I haven't even gotten wrinkly yet.
MANN: Bella says after she heard the diagnosis, she sat in the car and cried. Will Doolittle writes for the local newspaper. After the shock of the diagnosis eased, they decided that they would tell their story in his column and also in a new podcast.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "ALZHEIMER'S CHRONICLES")
W. DOOLITTLE: I'm Will Doolittle, and my wife is Bella. We're facing a lot of practical questions about finances, and wills and whether Bella will keep working or retire. And we're facing personal questions as our relationship is challenged by this. And as we react to the changes it brings, it's a journey.
MANN: That first episode of "Alzheimer's Chronicles" appeared in November. Bella says the decision to talk publicly about her illness wasn't hard.
B. DOOLITTLE: I don't feel like it's something that's, like, Some bad secret. It's not something I brought on myself, and it really isn't - I mean, it isn't something that people should be embarrassed about. But I know a lot of people who have this are afraid for other people to know.
MANN: Other doctors have told Bella that that eight-year timeline - it's not certain at all. There's a lot of variation in the way this disease progresses. But for Bella and Will, things are already moving frighteningly fast. In the first podcast, they're still debating whether she needs to leave her job at a local community college. A month later, the decision's been made, and we hear she's not happy.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "ALZHEIMER'S CHRONICLES")
B. DOOLITTLE: It's not my condition's fault that society isn't ready yet to acknowledge that just because you're not perfect, you're not as useful.
MANN: Bella says he's convinced with a little help and support, she could've kept working. But as she talks about it, she gets confused, loses the timeline.
B. DOOLITTLE: So I stayed for a couple of more years, and I recently retired.
W. DOOLITTLE: So you didn't stay for a couple more years. You stayed for, you know, ten more months.
B. DOOLITTLE: That was a couple years ago.
W. DOOLITTLE: No, it wasn't, hon. That was last spring.
B. DOOLITTLE: Was it?
MANN: So Bella, I see Will already helping you with memory. How does that feel?
B. DOOLITTLE: I appreciate it. I mean, there's nothing he can do that will make me angry.
MANN: One irony - kind of painful, kind of bittersweet - is that Bella and Will are experiencing a kind of honeymoon during this crisis, a new kind of romance. Part of that is because Bella's personality is already really different. They talk about it on the podcast.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "ALZHEIMER'S CHRONICLES")
W. DOOLITTLE: You're a little more goofy, a little more upbeat and jolly.
B. DOOLITTLE: (Laughter) That's a little oxymoron.
W. DOOLITTLE: It is? Why?
B. DOOLITTLE: Because I've been diagnosed with a disease that I have an expiration date with. So I should be, like, depressed and walking around like the world is about to end because it is.
MANN: Bella agrees. She's kind of a different person now - warmer, less of a perfectionist. Will says he misses the part of Bella that's gone, misses that bossy, Type A, sometimes fierce woman.
W. DOOLITTLE: Well, of course, I mean, you know, we fell in love. We've had a long marriage. And we had - you know, I - it's not like I wanted parts of her to fade away. You know, I didn't wish for that. I'm not saying I exactly miss (laughter) our fights, but, you know, that's a part of who we were as a couple. And that's not there now. It just really isn't.
MANN: So the Doolittles are making all kinds of adjustments as they try to figure out where this goes next. Will has taken over managing their finances. A lot of that used to be Bella's job. Early-onset Alzheimer's is a complicated condition. Bella will eventually require special care. In the meantime, now that she's not working, she's arranging to take art classes, thinking about trying to start a home business. On the podcast, she sounds committed to managing this, maintaining some control even as her mind changes.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "ALZHEIMER'S CHRONICLES")
B. DOOLITTLE: I feel like I can go with the flow. But if the flow isn't going the way I want it to go, I'm going to change that direction.
W. DOOLITTLE: So that's an optimistic way of looking at it.
B. DOOLITTLE: Yeah, it is optimistic.
MANN: Bella says she hopes to break down some of the stigma of Alzheimer's, showing she can be productive and hold on to the best parts of herself at least for a while.
B. DOOLITTLE: It doesn't stop me from doing life. The one thing that I really dislike about the disease is that I'm afraid that I'm not going to have as much time with my husband as I would like. I want us to be really old together. But if I die early, he'll be on his own, and I feel bad about that.
MANN: Bella and Will plan to continue the podcast as her Alzheimer's advances, talking candidly about this part of their marriage, about their love and about this disease, the things they're gaining and the things slipping away. Brian Mann, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF U137's "LET ME KEEP THIS MEMORY")
CHANG: You'll find a link to the Doolittles' podcast "Alzheimer's Chronicles" at our website, npr.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF U137's "LET ME KEEP THIS MEMORY")
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
There is a wintertime food that bridges the gap between rich and poor. It's a luxury food that you can also find in surprisingly unluxurious places. It's venison, a kind of meat that you can spend a lot of money on or nothing at all. NPR's Dan Charles has the story.
DAN CHARLES, BYLINE: Winter is a special time of year at Cafe Berlin on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. James Watson is one of the chefs here.
JAMES WATSON: This time of year, we run generally a wild game menu.
CHARLES: People come here this time of year for deer and wild boar and quail.
WATSON: I mean, they ask, you know, weeks in advance when does the wild game menu start? When does it start?
CHARLES: And the star of the menu is venison.
WATSON: Venison ribs and a venison loin.
CHARLES: Dishes that take you back to some old European castle eating like aristocracy. You won't see venison in ordinary supermarkets. At a specialty meat shop in Washington, those top cuts are selling for $40 a pound. This venison comes from farms that raise a species of very large deer called red deer. Meanwhile, less than two hours' drive from Washington, Daniel Crigler has a whole freezer full of venison that he got for free.
Oh, this is great. This is your stash of...
DANIEL CRIGLER: That's all venison.
CHARLES: All venison.
CRIGLER: (Laughter).
CHARLES: Crigler's home in central Virginia surrounded by woodlands that are full of white-tailed deer - venison on the hoof - and Crigler loves hunting.
CRIGLER: I love the outdoors. I love being out, but I also like to eat the meat.
CHARLES: It's pretty much the only red meat he eats.
CRIGLER: That's a whole loin right there.
CHARLES: OK.
CRIGLER: What I like to do with that is split it open, fill it full of blue cheese, wrap it up in tinfoil and put it on the grill for about an hour and a half.
CHARLES: But here's the odd thing about this meat - it's so scarce and expensive in big cities, so abundant if you're a hunter in Madison County, Va. Hunters like Crigler kill millions of deer every year in America, but the meat from those animals can't be sold. It hasn't been officially approved by meat inspectors. Also the government doesn't want hunters to make money from poaching. Hunters can give it away, though, and many do.
JILL SKELTON: We're starting to gear up. We've got bags built this morning.
CHARLES: This is the basement of a Methodist church in Culpeper, Va., and an organization called Empowering Culpeper is passing out free food to people who need it. Jill Skelton's in charge.
SKELTON: We got over 600 pounds of venison. A lot of times venison is the only protein meat source that we have available to distribute.
CHARLES: And it was all donated by hunters, including Daniel Crigler. An organization called Hunters for the Hungry pays small deer processing shops to cut and grind the meat into usable portions. There are organizations like this across the country, and Phil Ferlazzo, one of the volunteers here this morning, is offering the meat to a line of people coming through.
PHIL FERLAZZO: Now how about venison? Do you like venison?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Yeah, yeah, that's good.
CHARLES: For a lot of people here, venison is not like the meats you find in the supermarket. It's not coming from a faraway farm. It's from the woods next to their homes, and they have personal experiences with deer, which is why Alsace Lee Kwai won't eat this meat.
ALSACE LEE KWAI: 'Cause the first time I ever went hunting with my husband, he shot one, I heard one cry like a baby. No, no, thank you.
CHARLES: On the other hand, Bonita Gray grew up eating meat from deer and rabbits that her family shot, and she loves it.
BONITA GRAY: 'Cause I'll take all of it if they give it to me (laughter). And it tastes so good. You season real good, put onions in it, green peppers, make deer burgers. Oh, my God.
CHARLES: And that experience is something she'll have in common with the people spending plenty of money on the wild game specials at Cafe Berlin. Dan Charles, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE SOUL'S RELEASE'S "EVER ALONE")
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Chinese tech giant Tencent is trying to do something that's never been done before - take the biggest online mobile game in China global.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The game is called "Kings Of Glory." Tens of millions of Chinese play it every day. Now it's being released. This new version, though, isn't exactly the same, as our co-host Steve Inskeep discovered while playing it with international gamer Drew Miller.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It sounds, you know, like James Bond or something except with games.
DREW MILLER: (Laughter) Very similar to James Bond just with video games. Recently I got back from Korea. I was on Team Liquid and we played against Team SK in a showmatch for the Asia International Championship for "Arena Of Valor."
INSKEEP: What's the game in its Chinese form?
MILLER: It's called "Kings Of Glory."
INSKEEP: OK. So "Kings Of Glory." What is the concept of "Kings Of Glory?"
MILLER: It's basically a mobile version of "League Of Legends" or "Dota." And this breaks it down into, like, a 15-minute game, whereas the PC versions take up to an hour or even an hour and a half. You pick a team of five and then the other team picks a team of five, and then you fight against each other with magical spells and you try and defeat the enemy's base.
INSKEEP: As best you can tell, what is it about "Kings Of Glory" that has made it so appealing?
MILLER: Well, they basically did a bulk of their advertising through the WeChat app, and it's the No. 1 used messaging app in China.
INSKEEP: Oh, this is huge. Hundreds of millions of people are on there, so they have an opportunity to advertise to that market.
MILLER: Exactly. So through the WeChat app, it turned it from a game into more of a social aspect as it has the nearby feature within the game. So you can see who's playing around you, like...
INSKEEP: You could play some stranger who just happens to be 50 feet away from you at the time.
MILLER: Yeah. And the game is simple enough that it's the only mobile game that I would ever consider trying to play with my mom as well. So it's simple enough...
INSKEEP: (Laughter).
MILLER: It's true because most MOBAs are considered the hardest multiplayer games to play online.
INSKEEP: You just said MOBA game. What is a MOBA game?
MILLER: Multiplayer online battle arena.
INSKEEP: Well, I've got a phone here, and the app is loaded and there's a number of choices. What do I do?
MILLER: We can do the grand battle.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "ARENA OF VALOR")
INSKEEP: OK. I just pressed it. Wow. That was quite a sound effect. Your screen name is alwaysgreen (ph).
MILLER: Yes.
INSKEEP: So I'm in the game. Alwaysgreen is in the game. And now it says find a match.
MILLER: You can go ahead and hit find match now.
INSKEEP: Match found. There's a bunch of players here, I guess.
MILLER: You're going to pick which one you want to play as.
INSKEEP: OK. What about this guy here?
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "ARENA OF VALOR")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Freedom is hard fought.
INSKEEP: Freedom is hard fought says this hero. Oh, my gosh. I am now a guy in shining armor with a sword.
MILLER: That is Arthur.
INSKEEP: That's Arthur. OK, great.
MILLER: The match is about to begin.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "ARENA OF VALOR")
INSKEEP: Look at it. There's a bunch of our characters now standing around in a kind of arena.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "ARENA OF VALOR")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Get ready. Minions will be deployed in five seconds.
INSKEEP: OK. I - oh, I can move around my character using my thumb.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "ARENA OF VALOR")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Dare to engage.
MILLER: Now you've found the joystick.
INSKEEP: Yeah. And now I got to start whacking people, except I'm facing the wrong way, which is really not good.
MILLER: You can follow me.
INSKEEP: I'm following you.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "ARENA OF VALOR")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Stand your ground.
MILLER: If you swing the sword - yeah.
INSKEEP: OK.
MILLER: There you go.
INSKEEP: I just like the old sword swinging.
MILLER: They're going to kill us here.
INSKEEP: Oh. Oh, my goodness. It's like a nuclear explosion almost.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "ARENA OF VALOR")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) You have been defeated.
INSKEEP: Boo. And there I am, dead on the ground.
MILLER: Yes, that's your body.
INSKEEP: OK. Good to know. At this point, I think I'm going to retreat from the field of battle. Is that OK?
MILLER: Yeah.
INSKEEP: OK. So I'm just going to close the app.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "ARENA OF VALOR")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character) Enemy onslaught.
INSKEEP: Enemy onslaught. OK, we're getting out of there. Hey, that was fun. Thank you for guiding me through that.
MILLER: Yeah, no problem.
INSKEEP: I guess we should note that video games are designed to be addictive. What about this game would you say is addictive?
MILLER: This sort of provides a similar competitive feel as playing like a pick-up basketball game or something else of that nature.
INSKEEP: Pick-up basketball game - that's what this is. Like, it's a group of random people who get together to play maybe one time, maybe 20 times. You never know.
MILLER: Yeah.
INSKEEP: Well, Drew Miller thank you very much for taking the time to guide us through, as alwaysgreen, this American version of a Chinese game, "Arena Of Valor."
MILLER: Yeah, it's been my pleasure to talk with you.
(SOUNDBITE OF HANS ZIMMER'S "LOBBY THEME")
MARTIN: That was our own Steve Inskeep gaming his way to greatness. He was talking on skype with international gamer Drew Miller.
(SOUNDBITE OF HANS ZIMMER'S "LOBBY THEME")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It is day six of anti-government protests in Iran, and the death toll there is rising.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting in foreign language).
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Nine more people were killed overnight in clashes between police and security forces. That's according to Iran's state television, which says, so far, more than 20 people have been killed since the protests began last week.
MARTIN: Ali Noorani joins us again. He's an AFP journalist based in Tehran, and he's on Skype this morning.
Ali, thanks for being back with us.
ALI NOORANI: Hi. Thank you.
MARTIN: Things appear to be getting worse. What can you tell us?
NOORANI: Yeah, indeed, things are worse in terms of the death toll and the continuation of these protests. And last night on day four, we had nine more people dying, including one Revolutionary Guard. And earlier, we had another policeman. There was a boy killed the other day. So six of these people had raided a police station in a very small town of 35,000 - population. So I'm afraid these small towns - the protests are continuing, but not in the capital. But it is across the country in a few cities.
MARTIN: How would you characterize the response from the security forces thus far?
NOORANI: I think their response has been more or less the standard response, trying to disperse the protesters with water cannon and tear gas. But at the small towns where there were armed protesters or people - protesters trying to raid police stations or government buildings, there were shots fired. Many of them - the government said that were not fired by the police but by armed protesters. But more or less, they have been trying to practice restraint.
MARTIN: Do you see that changing? I mean, as these continue day by day, do you see the government cracking down harder?
NOORANI: I guess if this continues, yes. The security forces and the government will lose its patience. And as the disorder continues in these small towns, I think the crackdown will become harsher.
MARTIN: When we spoke to you yesterday, you said there was no cohesion to these protests, no leader, no one message. Is that still the case?
NOORANI: Yeah. That's still the case. The closest thing to leadership that we can see is by exile opposition groups on social media, on the Telegram messaging app, which has been blocked by the authorities in the past two days with people using VPNs and proxy software to use it. And that is I guess the worst kind of leadership that these protests could have because there are simply anti-regime. And the kind of response that they can get is crackdown and suppression.
MARTIN: AFP's Ali Noorani talking about the protests in Iran that are increasingly fatal, Iranian state television reporting that at least 20 people have been killed since the protests began. Ali, thanks so much for sharing your reporting this morning.
NOORANI: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: And this morning, President Trump is back in our nation's capital.
CHANG: That's right. He returned yesterday after spending the holidays at his private Palm Beach club in Florida where he predicted that 2018 was going to be very special. But the president did not specify in those comments what he was planning to focus on as he gets back to work in Washington.
MARTIN: Lucky for us, NPR political editor Domenico Montanaro has some ideas. And he joins us now.
Hey, Domenico.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Hey, there.
MARTIN: Happy New Year, by the way. I haven't talked to you.
MONTANARO: Happy New Year.
MARTIN: So from your reading of this president and this White House, what are the Trump administration's top priorities?
MONTANARO: Well, there are really kind of six areas that this White House says the president's setting his focus right now. Internationally, it's North Korea and Iran. And we just heard about Iran, and we've seen the president tweet support on Iran. And there are four key domestic policy areas - health care, welfare, immigration and infrastructure.
MARTIN: Pretty ambitious.
MONTANARO: Absolutely.
MARTIN: We suppose, though, the midterm elections are incentive to at least try and get some of these done.
MONTANARO: Yeah. But, you know, in most midterm years, actually, not much gets done, you know? And this is because a lot of the opposition forces. Democrats are unlikely to kind of get - to want to just suddenly pick up and get on board. They're going to need Republicans' 60 votes for almost anything that they decide to do this year. And infrastructure and welfare are expected to be top priorities, but they're easier said than done, especially since everything's likely going to need Democratic support. And the GOP majority, remember, is about to get smaller tomorrow with the swearing in of Doug Jones, the Democrat from Alabama. And Democrats feel like they have some leverage now on things like immigration and infrastructure. And don't expect them to jump at the chance with this - to work with this president.
MARTIN: So I want to switch back to the international stage because, as you mentioned, President Trump tweeted about what's happening in Iran. He is full-throatedly supporting the protesters. And he tweeted that it is, quote, "time for change in Iran." Where's that going to lead?
MONTANARO: Yeah. You know, the president, again, tweeting support for the protesters - Vice President Mike Pence has even brought up the difference between past administrations' postures. But it's still an open question what this White House and this president want to tangibly do or can do to affect change there. You know, in 2009, when President Obama was dealing with this, it was a very different kind of Iranian leadership. You know, remember Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - much more hard-line than the current leader, Rouhani, who's more pragmatic. So what would change actually bring even if there was a change? President Trump's stance on the uprising is more also in line with kind of an interventionist approach, which is pretty contradictory to the more isolationist America First foreign policy that he keeps touting.
MARTIN: Right. Stay out of other countries' business. Let them manage it.
MONTANARO: Right. So there is this open question now when it comes to the Trump doctrine. When does the U.S. intervene, and when does it not? What's the trigger to say, OK, this is where the U.S. gets involved?
MARTIN: Right. And we still don't know. All right, NPR's Domenico Montanaro for us this morning - Domenico, thanks so much.
MONTANARO: You're welcome.
MARTIN: All right, Iran was not the only subject of President Trump's tweets yesterday.
CHANG: That's right. His first tweet of 2018 was about Pakistan, and we'll just read it right here. Quote, "the United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than $33 billion in aid over the last 15 years. And they have given us nothing but lies and deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan with little help - no more." Well, now Pakistan is responding.
MARTIN: As you might think they would. OK, NPR's Diaa Hadid is in Islamabad following all this. She joins us this morning.
Hey, Diaa.
DIAA HADID, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: How is Pakistan taking this?
HADID: Angrily (laughter).
MARTIN: Yeah.
HADID: Oh, sorry. Last night, Pakistan summoned the U.S. ambassador to complain about the - about Trump's tweet. The defense minister fired off his own tweet accusing the U.S. of giving nothing but, quote, "invective and mistrust." This evening, senior ministers and military officials will hold a national security committee meeting to assess the relationship with the United States. Yeah. And what we modestly expect them to say is that, you know, they're seeking out other foreign allies. And we kind of expect that, they being close to China. And they've been actively courting Russia for a while.
But the thing at the heart of why people here are upset is that Trump described the relationship with Pakistan in dollar terms. And this is an old relationship. Pakistan was an ally on the U.S. war on terror. And so they feel offended by this. I spoke to Mosharraf Zaidi, his - oh, I'm sorry - not Mosharraf Zaidi. Excuse me - to Shahzad Chaudhry. He's a former military official - just to get a sense of what people were thinking.
MARTIN: Yeah.
SHAHZAD CHAUDHRY: The U.S. looks at Pakistan as a transactional nation, not an ally. The Pakistanis have a sense of anger, sense of frustration and sense of disappointment when they look at the U.S. and especially the president of the United States.
MARTIN: But President Trump has a point here. I mean, this is not a new idea. The U.S. government has long maintained that Pakistan shelters terrorist groups. I mean, Osama bin Laden was found there. So, I mean, Donald Trump calling them out for sheltering terrorists shouldn't necessarily have come as a surprise, right?
HADID: No. I mean, the timing for sure was a surprise - January 1, the first tweet of the year. But beyond that, no. We sort of were expecting something like this. But it's that the Trump administration specifically has come to see Pakistan as the reason why it's not, quote, unquote, "winning" in Afghanistan. And that's what's changed. And also the tenor has escalated. And so for that, I spoke to Mosharraf Zaidi, who I previously introduced - he runs a podcast called "How To Pakistan" - to get a sense of why there's so much anger right now in this relationship.
MOSHARRAF ZAIDI: They've used this tool of kind of rhetorical coercion to see if they can scare Pakistan into doing some of the things that the U.S. would like Pakistan to do in Afghanistan.
MARTIN: I mean, but ultimately, Diaa, this is about two allies who need each other, right? Like, they get into these diplomatic kerfuffles, and it's never going to last that long because they both have interests that align, ultimately.
HADID: I mean, this is what's becoming harder and harder to tell. So the U.S. does need Pakistan. It's the chief air and road corridor for military routes, supplies into Afghanistan. Now the question is, is there an alternative?
MARTIN: NPR's Diaa Hadid - thanks so much, Diaa.
(SOUNDBITE OF TUSKEN.'S "BANTHA")
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
And I'm Ailsa Chang with an update on one of last year's biggest stories.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: We're going to move on now for more on Harvey Weinstein.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: One of Hollywood's best-known actors Kevin Spacey, the latest high-profile star caught up in allegations.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: A new woman is coming forward this morning to say that Senator Al Franken groped her years ago. Her name is Stephanie...
CHANG: Allegations of sexual harassment and abuse have dominated headlines in recent months - from media to entertainment to politics. Now, there's a high-profile initiative that's all about fighting back.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It's called Time's Up. And the group has some ambitious goals, including setting up a $13 million legal defense fund to protect lower-income women and a push for more gender parity in Hollywood. Three hundred women have signed on - including high-profile names like Shonda Rhimes, Eva Longoria and Reese Witherspoon, who has spoken publicly about her own encounters with sexual harassment.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
REESE WITHERSPOON: I have my own experiences that have come back to me very vividly. And I found it really hard to sleep, hard to think, hard to communicate a lot of the feelings I've been having about anxiety, about being honest - the guilt for not speaking up earlier, for taking action, true disgust at the director who assaulted me when I was 16 years old.
CHANG: Time's Up is a response to a letter published last November on behalf of thousands of female farm workers. The letter came after the Me Too movement came under some criticism. Some said it didn't focus enough on less privileged women. Actress Jessica Chastain share that concern on the "Today" show last month.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "TODAY")
JESSICA CHASTAIN: But I think it would be a grave injustice to ignore other women in other industries because it's a society-wide problem.
CHANG: The letter announcing the Time's Up initiative says the mission is to have all survivors of sexual harassment everywhere to be heard, to be believed and to know that accountability is possible.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Ailsa Chang. The cold snap hitting much of North America is tough even if you're used to cold weather. Take for example a few dozen king penguins who live at the Calgary Zoo. In the wild, they live close to Antarctica. But in Calgary, the penguins aren't allowed outside when it drops below minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit. That's happened a few times in the past week. At one point, it's been 24 below. So these Canadian penguins have had to do their waddling indoors. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump's first tweet of 2018 was about Pakistan. He said that despite the U.S. giving billions in aid, Pakistan has given, quote, "nothing but lies and deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more," end quote. So how is Pakistan responding? Let's ask NPR's Diaa Hadid, who's in Islamabad. Hi, Diaa.
DIAA HADID, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: Good morning. So what has been the immediate response from Pakistan?
HADID: It's been anger. Last night, Pakistan summoned the U.S. ambassador to complain about the tweet. The defense minister fired off his own tweet that accused the United States, quote, "of giving nothing but invective and mistrust." Tonight there'll be a national security committee meeting that's going to be attended by ministers and military officials to reassess the relationship with the United States. And what we modestly expect is that they'll at least say that they are actively seeking out other allies, and they've been courting Russia for a while. And really, like, at the heart of what people are angry about is that Trump described the relationship with Pakistan in dollar terms. Pakistan's an old ally of the United States, and it was an ally in the war on terror. And so I spoke to Shahzad Chaudhry - he's a retired military official - just to get a sense of what people were thinking.
SHAHZAD CHAUDHRY: The U.S. looks at Pakistan as a transactional nation not an ally. The Pakistanis have a sense of anger, sense of frustration and sense of disappointment when they look at the U.S. and especially the president of the United States.
MARTIN: This isn't a new idea though. The U.S. government has long maintained that Pakistan shelters terrorist groups. I mean, Osama bin Laden was found there. So Donald Trump calling them out for this shouldn't have come as such a surprise, right?
HADID: Right, but the timing was definitely a surprise. It was the first tweet on January, 2018. And what seems to have changed here is the tenor. It was quite an aggressive tweet. And it also seems to reflect that the Trump administration specifically sees Pakistan as the reason why it's not, quote, unquote, "winning" in Afghanistan. It sees - it accuses Pakistan of harboring the Taliban, which is conducting cross-border attacks into Afghanistan. So I spoke to Mosharraf Zaidi - he runs a podcast called "How To Pakistan" - to understand this a bit more.
MOSHARRAF ZAIDI: They've used this tool of kind of rhetorical coercion to see if they can scare Pakistan into doing some of the things that the U.S. would like Pakistan to do in Afghanistan.
MARTIN: All right, so this relationship has hit another roadblock. But doesn't it always? I mean, the thing is both countries need each other, so any diplomatic obstacles won't last that long - will they?
HADID: It's hard to tell. I mean, this relationship has gone through ups and downs over the years for sure. And - but, you know, the U.S. needs Pakistan. So it is like the chief air corridor for U.S. troops into Afghanistan. So now it's just a matter of does the U.S. have another option, and that's what we're waiting to see.
MARTIN: All right, that's NPR's Diaa Hadid. Thank you very much, Diaa.
HADID: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
All right. College football fans, you have got one more game to look forward to, and it is the big one. It will be the Alabama Crimson Tide versus the Georgia Bulldogs with the national championship on the line. Both teams won in different styles yesterday. Alabama dominated Clemson while Georgia clawed to a double overtime win over Oklahoma. NPR's Scott Neuman has more.
SCOTT NEUMAN, BYLINE: In a hard-fought battle at the Rose Bowl, the Bulldogs finally eked out a 54-48 win against the Sooners in a second overtime, thanks in large part to impressive touchdown runs by senior running backs Sony Michel and Nick Chubb. Chubb ran for two touchdowns, including a 50 yarder. Michel's included a 75-yard run and this one that put Georgia over the top. Here's how it sounded on ESPN.
(SOUNDBITE OF ESPN RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER #1: Now it's Michel's turn, running all the way. Gets to the edge. Sony Michel will send the Dawgs home to the championship game.
(APPLAUSE)
NEUMAN: At the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, Alabama's defensive lineman Da'Ron Payne snatched an interception in the third quarter then got an unusual opportunity to re-enter the game on offense on Clemson's one-yard line.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER #2: And guess who has come into the game? The guy who just had the interception, 300-pound defensive tackle Da'Ron Payne.
UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER #3: Yeah. This is their goal line set.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER #2: Pass to him. Oh, my. Storybook it for the big man.
NEUMAN: Alabama went on to win 24-6. The Crimson Tide will face the Georgia Bulldogs in the national championship game next Monday in Atlanta. Scott Neuman, NPR News.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
So where will President Trump take U.S. foreign policy in 2018? Judging from year one, it's hard to say. From announcing he'll pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement to recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Trump has upended tradition. And in recent days, he sent tweets condemning Iran and Pakistan. So to look at what lies ahead, we turn now to Ambassador Ryan Crocker. He's a former ambassador to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Syria during both the Obama and Bush administrations. Good morning, Ambassador.
RYAN CROCKER: Good morning, Ailsa.
CHANG: So looking back on the whole last year, how might you characterize President Trump's foreign policy strategy. Are there some common through lines we can pick out?
CROCKER: There are. First, the president - President Trump got a good bounce simply by not being President Obama in the eyes of our traditional allies in the area. When he took office, our relations were suffering greatly with our traditional friends like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel. So his first trip out there was, I think, exactly the right thing to do - to say it's a new team, a new president. I'm going to engage with you. And we'll see where we go. The problem is there isn't much of a there there. I don't really see an active foreign policy taking shape. It's all pretty reactive. And the world is a big, complicated place if all you're doing is reacting.
CHANG: Well, I want first turn to Trump's tweet, his first tweet of the new year. He wrote that even though U.S. is giving billions in aid, Pakistan has given, quote, "nothing but lies and deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan with little help - no more." What do you think? I mean, is that something you would describe as reactive? And would threats like that be effective in your opinion in shaping Pakistan's behavior?
CROCKER: I'm afraid it will take Pakistan in exactly the opposite direction. You know, look, Ailsa. The Pakistanis have their own narrative about the relationship - that once the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan at the end of the 1980s, we went from being their most allied of allies to their most sanctioned of adversaries. So they tend to be very, very defensive and very worried that the U.S. will walk out on them again. And the president's comments unfortunately are simply going to feed into that.
There's a larger problem here. He has some great people in his administration like H.R. McMaster, like Jim Mattis. These are not people who understand the issue with a perspective on the whole. They know Afghanistan. They've watched their troopers get killed by insurgents who cross the border and then slip back to safe havens.
CHANG: But what do you mean they don't understand things on the whole?
CROCKER: They don't understand the Pakistani side of the equation. To put it as briefly as I can, it's - well, we're glad you're back, you Americans. We're going to take what we can get as long as you'll give it. But we know you're not going to stay the course. So if you expect us to go in full throttle turning the Taliban into an enemy and then leave us with an existential threat, you're nuts.
So the president had an opportunity with his statement on Afghanistan that we're there for - as long as it takes to get what we need to bring Pakistan in as a partner. He's pushing them in the other direction. Nothing good is going to come of that. They will simply dig in deeper and leave us without any good options.
CHANG: I also - if I can move to Iran as well - he tweeted about Iran yesterday, writing that Iran is failing at every level despite the terrible deal made with them by the Obama administration. And then he went on to say time for change. Why do you think Trump is lashing out at Iran at this particular moment?
CROCKER: Well, Iran is a huge challenge and problem for us. It was for the previous administration. It is for this administration. But once again, it's complicated out there. Generalities don't work. Be careful with your slogans. It's one thing to say we're going to get tough on Iran. It's another thing to say exactly how we're going to do that.
CHANG: Right.
CROCKER: So again, I'm - I wonder if we're seeing the same phenomenon that we saw with the Obama administration. President Obama talked very tough on Syria. Assad must go. Chemical weapons are a red line. Well, he couldn't back that up. And I'm worried that in the case of Iran, it is going to be the same thing. We don't seem to be fashioning a coherent policy, let alone a strategy. And that's what I mean by reaction.
CHANG: And if I may, turning very quickly to North Korea now, this year began with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un unexpectedly calling for direct talks with South Korea. But, you know, over here, the relationship between Trump and Kim Jong Un has been loud and very personal, full of insults in both directions. What do you think? Can President Trump's style achieve things with this regime that previous U.S. leaders have not been able to?
CROCKER: Let's see what happens now, Ailsa. It is interesting. We don't know anything really about North Korea or its leader. It may just be that the difference in tone that President Trump has existed may do something down the line there. So let's see if this goes somewhere different or better. What we have to do is stay in incredibly close contact with our allies, Japan and South Korea. And we need to be listening to the Chinese, not just lecture them.
CHANG: All right. Ryan Crocker is the former U.S. ambassador. Thank you very much.
CROCKER: Thank you.
[POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: In the version of this story that was broadcast, we say that President Trump named Jerusalem the capital of Israel. In fact, he didn’t name it as the capital, he said the U.S. would recognize it as the capital.]
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The sound of protests in Iran, which have reached a new level of intensity. Iranian state TV says groups of protesters who were reportedly armed tried to storm police stations and military bases. Nine people died last night, raising the death toll after five days to at least 20. And for the first time, a police officer is among the dead. President Trump commented on the protests, tweeting that, quote, "the people of Iran are finally acting against a brutal and corrupt Iranian regime" and that the quote - and that the U.S. is, quote, "watching." Ali Noorani is following this from Tehran. He's a journalist for AFP. And he joined us on Skype. He says Iran woke this morning to news of that rising death toll.
ALI NOORANI: Today, the protests have not yet started. But as you said, overnight, nine people were killed so far and one Revolutionary Guard and one police officer were among the dead. The rest were protesters and a teenage boy. As the night falls, then we will see if there will be more protests or no. But for now, it's been quiet.
MARTIN: The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted this morning, implying that these protests have been brought on by the, quote, "enemies of Iran." That's how he put it. So this is complicated, right? On the one hand, you've got the president of Iran, Rouhani, acknowledging that the protesters have rights to take to the streets, to demonstrate even against the government. And then you got the supreme leader saying that they're basically enemies of the state. How do you read that? How do protesters read that?
NOORANI: Actually, President Rouhani also did say - I mean, mentioned that there are - and these are the - the enemies are behind this. And officials have said that - even government - Rouhani's officials have said that Saudi Arabia and the U.S. and also some other powers are behind this. But the supreme leader also reacted to this very briefly and said that it was the enemy. He didn't explain, of course, as you said. But - that was trying to infiltrate and all of them are uniting against Iran. So that is not very much against what Rouhani said, but it doesn't have the detail. But he said that he is going to speak about this in due time.
MARTIN: It's clearly, though, a mechanism to delegitimize the protesters and their grievances, which at least some of them have been based on economic concerns. President Donald Trump is tweeting about the economic issues in Iran, saying Iran is, quote, "failing at every level." What is actually happening on the economic front?
NOORANI: On the economic front, there is a real issue. President Rouhani himself said that - I think yesterday - that unemployment is - we have no bigger problem than unemployment and that our economy needs an operation. So this is true in these small towns where protests are erupting and becoming violent, people raiding police stations. These are small towns. We have never heard their names before. I mean, I as an Iranian - I heard for - these names, for example, for the first time in my life and I believe that...
MARTIN: Which is interesting - right? - because it means that protests are not just happening in intellectual circles, in universities.
NOORANI: Yes, exactly, exactly. This is not the Tehran, highbrow, educated protests. These are coming from small towns where I believe there are unemployment and poverty problems. And they are being incited by social media hype. A lot of it, of course, is being directed from exile opposition groups, which have been very active on the messaging app Telegram, which has been blocked for the past two days. But people still use VPNs and...
MARTIN: Yeah - finding a way around...
NOORANI: ...And cheap proxy software...
MARTIN: ...Trying to find a way around those bans.
NOORANI: Yes, exactly.
MARTIN: We will be following this in the days, perhaps, weeks to come. AFP's Ali Noorani in Tehran this morning, thank you so much for being with us.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Rachel Martin. A town in the north of New Zealand bans drinking in public places during the holidays for safety reasons. But a group of friends who wanted to whoop it up on New Year's Eve were so committed to their party plans they had to build their own island. According to The New Zealand Herald, they made a big mound in the water off the shore in order to get around the drinking ban. One city official said that's creative thinking. If I had known, I probably would have joined them. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We're going to take a few moments now to remember Erica Garner. The activist died over the weekend after suffering a heart attack. She was 27 years old. Erica Garner's father Eric died at the hands of New York police in 2014. His final words, I can't breathe, became a rallying cry against police brutality, and his daughter became a leading voice in that movement. Here's Erica Garner last month appearing on the program "Like It Or Not" with Benjamin Dixon.
(SOUNDBITE OF ONLINE PROGRAM, "LIKE IT OR NOT")
ERICA GARNER: I'm in this fight forever. And no matter how long it takes - 20 years from now, I - we deserve justice. And I want to get justice for other people. And I want other families, you know, to know like it's hard, but you got to keep on. You got to keep the name out there because people will forget.
MARTIN: We're joined now by Kirsten West Savali. She wrote a piece for The Root titled "Erica Garner: I'm In This Fight Forever." Thanks so much for being with us.
KIRSTEN WEST SAVALI: Thank you so much, Rachel.
MARTIN: What struck you about Erica Garner the first time you met her?
SAVALI: Her brilliance, her resiliency - her eyes were very sad. And I recognized that grief in her because I lost my father. And that is how we bonded. That is how we connected. You know, I mention in the piece it wasn't as journalists and activists. It was as two women who were just desperately missing their fathers and wanted to make sure that their legacies endured and no one ever forgot their name. And I saw that in her.
MARTIN: No one would have blamed Erica if after her father died she just turned inside herself in order to manage her grief. And she did the exact opposite. Did it come naturally for her to become this outspoken public advocate? Or was that transition difficult?
SAVALI: You know, we didn't talk about whether or not it came naturally for her. But she has spoken about that. She has spoken about how she felt she didn't have a choice. You know, she didn't have a choice. She wanted to make sure that her father's name was not forgotten. She wanted to make sure that she walked in the tradition of people like Martin Luther King and like Malcolm X and like Ida B. Wells and like Fannie Lou Hamer - and just be that voice for people who were not only marginalized but who were actively being occupied in their own communities. And, you know, I felt - again, when I called her an intentional revolutionary, that's exactly what I meant. She did not just stumble into anything. She was very intentional and very clear-eyed about what she wanted to do. And that was justice for her father and subsequently justice for all people marginalized and targeted by the police state.
MARTIN: She took on a lot of high-profile Democrats, who would have preferred that she be on their side, frankly, when it comes to politics. She was critical of President Obama, of Mayor Bill de Blasio - Democrat in New York. She refused to support Hillary Clinton for president. Do you know what her thoughts were about how these leaders responded or did not respond to her father's death?
SAVALI: Absolutely. And I think that's something that, you know, we have seen with the Democratic Party. We saw that with President Obama. He was very tepid when it came to talking about police brutality and state violence. We saw Mayor Bill de Blasio basically refuse to release Daniel Pantaleo's disciplinary record even though he had multiple, multiple strikes against him.
MARTIN: He was the police officer involved in Eric Garner's death.
SAVALI: Yes, he was. Exactly. We saw him say that, you know, he had to follow this archaic law that said that, you know, there was a protection there. They didn't have to release his records. With Eric Holder, we saw the Justice Department - it was announced in 2014 that they were discussing or looking into bringing about federal civil rights charges against him. And that has never come to pass.
MARTIN: So she wanted a more aggressive, more forthright response.
SAVALI: A more authentic response.
MARTIN: A more authentic response.
SAVALI: Yes.
MARTIN: We will have to leave it there. Kirsten West Savali writes for the publication The Root. We've been remembering the life of Erica Garner, whose father Eric Garner was killed at the hands of police in 2014. Thanks so much for your time this morning, Kirsten.
SAVALI: Thank you.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Let's go to Russia now, a country that is crazy about ice skating. In the wintertime, ice rinks appear all over Moscow, on Red Square, in Gorky Park, even in a subway station. The city also boasts that it has the world's biggest ice rink, which NPR's Lucian Kim recently visited.
LUCIAN KIM, BYLINE: It's Friday evening in northern Moscow, and an instructor is calling skaters to a lesson in ice dancing.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Shouting in Russian).
KIM: This is the Vystavka Dostizheniy Narodnogo Khozyaystva, or Exhibition of Economic Achievements, which opened in 1939. You can picture it a bit like the Mall in Washington if it were frozen over and turned into a giant ice rink every winter.
The central avenue is lined with pavilions. Some are dedicated to former Soviet republics, others to industries, like the food processing industry or the Russian space program. Skaters - they start way down there at the Friendship Fountain and can skate for more than a quarter of a mile, ending at the Pavilion of Agriculture.
Like all of Moscow's parks, this one has suffered decades of neglect and is now undergoing a major upgrade.
YULIA DAVYDOVA: (Speaking Russian).
KIM: That's Yulia Davydova who works for the park management. She says the goal is to turn the park into one of Russia's major tourist attractions. The vast ice rink is certainly helping. Over the holidays, it attracts up to 25,000 visitors a day. I meet skaters from Israel and China and across Russia.
YEVGENIYA GEORGISYAN: (Speaking Russian).
KIM: Yevgeniya Georgisyan says she came especially from Voronezh 300 miles south of Moscow to check out the ice rink. It's also her niece's first birthday. She's all bundled up and sleeping in a baby carriage. The baby's mother, Yuliana Galits, is wearing a fur coat, helmet and kneepads.
YULIANA GALITS: (Speaking Russian).
KIM: "I want my baby to skate better than anybody else," she says. Of course, it's never too late to start. President Vladimir Putin only began skating at age 59. And now, he's shooting goals in Russia's amateur NHL, the Night Hockey League. I talk to Seva Kurkov, a Moscow lawyer who learned how to skate in his 20s.
SEVA KURKOV: (Speaking Russian).
KIM: "Our presidents should set an example for their citizens," he says.
KURKOV: (Speaking Russian).
KIM: "Does President Trump skate," he asked me, to which I can only say, I don't think so. I ask Yelena Yedinak, a 56-year-old sales manager, why Russians love to skate so much.
YELENA YEDINAK: (Speaking Russian).
KIM: She says skating produces a blast of endorphins, which is especially welcome during dark winter days. Tanya Kareva, who's skating with her 8-year-old daughter, has a simpler explanation.
TANYA KAREVA: (Speaking Russian).
KIM: "It's never cold when you're skating," she says, "and that's why it's such a positive sport." Then she asks me.
KAREVA: (Speaking Russian).
KIM: (Speaking Russian).
"Why aren't you on skates?" I don't know how, I answer. "Well, you have to learn," she says. Lucian Kim, NPR News, Moscow.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Dozens of refugee resettlement offices in the U.S. may be forced to close soon. These are places that get funding from the government to help new arrivals enroll their kids in school, arrange doctor's visits and get their immigration papers in order. The Trump administration has announced it is cutting back the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. to a historic low of 45,000. But the actual number of refugees coming in now is even lower than that.
MATTHEW SOERENS: If you look at the arrivals for the first quarter of the fiscal year, there's only been about 5,300 refugees who have been allowed to come in. If that pace continues and doesn't increase pretty drastically, we won't hit even half of that 45,000 refugee goal as a nation.
CHANG: That's Matthew Soerens at World Relief, a nonprofit that's one of the main resettlement agencies in the U.S. The State Department has reportedly said that any office expecting to handle fewer than a hundred refugees this year must close. World Relief has already closed five offices in recent months after anticipating a drop in their caseload and government funding.
SOERENS: I worry that we're actually seeing that infrastructure to resettle and to integrate refugees decimated by some of these policy decisions. We can't just turn that back on again overnight and say we're going to rehire all these people; we're going to reopen offices. That can't happen quickly.
CHANG: There are 300 resettlement offices in the U.S. in nearly every state. One of their major functions is to reunify new arrivals with family members already in the U.S. And Soerens says his agency thought about that as it pared down its operation.
SOERENS: We only closed in locations where there was at least one other resettlement agency so that there would be another agency able to do family reunification. But as more and more offices have to close with some of these new rules, it's possible we could have communities where there isn't a resettlement agency in the community anymore. And that will make family reunification much more difficult.
CHANG: World Relief, where you work, is an evangelical charity organization. And President Trump has had very strong support in the evangelical community. I'm curious. Have you found some of your evangelical supporters, your donors - have you found that they've taken a different view from the White House's refugee policies?
SOERENS: Most certainly - if you look at polling, evangelicals are quite split on their views of refugees. I think we tend to have the support of the - you know, of the significant portion of American evangelicals. Now, I wouldn't claim that we speak on behalf of all evangelical Christians in the United States. We clearly don't. But I would say right now we have more churches who want to welcome refugees than we have refugees arriving.
CHANG: The rules around refugee admissions have changed a lot the last year. We've seen executive orders. We've seen the courts come in. How has all that uncertainty affected the resettlement process?
SOERENS: Among the people who we serve - refugees who've been resettled already who are no longer refugees, who are, in some cases, now U.S. citizens - they are worried about their family members back in places where they are actively being persecuted or where they have fled persecution. They're now in a camp, and they've been in a camp for decades, in some cases. And they want to know, you know, will they still be able to come? They were in this process. They've been being vetted for years. And they were being told they were - you know, they were in line to be resettled. So you do ask, will still be able to come? We can't make the promise that that person will be allowed to be resettled. And that's incredibly difficult.
CHANG: That's Matthew Soerens of World Relief. Thank you very much.
SOERENS: Thanks so much, Ailsa.
(SOUNDBITE OF SOULAR ORDER'S "LANGUAGE")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
When a call came into Wichita police about an active shooter and kidnapping, a SWAT team was sent in with guns drawn. Andrew Finch was fatally shot by police when he opened the door. The call ended up being a hoax. Finch was a victim of swatting - made-up crimes called in to 911 that are designed to deploy SWAT teams. Representative Katherine Clark, a Democrat from Massachusetts, has introduced several pieces of legislation to combat swatting and other forms of online harassment. She joins us now.
Thanks so much for being with us.
KATHERINE CLARK: Oh, thank you, Rachel.
MARTIN: I had never heard of this term swatting until news of this case emerged last week. We've said it's hoax 911 calls. But can you explain further? What is this thing, and when did this phenomenon start?
CLARK: Yes. Many people have not heard of this. But we have estimates that there are at least 400 incidents of swatting. And swatting is a very dangerous hoax when a person calls in a false emergency, usually reporting a shooting or a hostage situation, in hopes that the SWAT team - that there will be an armed police response to a home. You can imagine how terrifying this is for a victim who doesn't understand what is happening, why there are police with guns drawn at their home, and how dangerous it is.
MARTIN: I mean, that is - that's horrific. Do you have any idea - I mean, why does this happen? Why - is it vengeance? Why are people doing this to other people?
CLARK: This came out of the online gaming world and was done so that they could watch the police response as people are watching each other play games online. And it is...
MARTIN: So they can watch it live - happen through the game that's happening live. Wow.
CLARK: Exactly. Exactly. But now it's really being used in - outside of the gaming world in a more widespread way. And it is extremely dangerous, not only to the victims, as we've seen play out so sadly in Wichita, but also for police, who are making an armed response and don't know what they are going to find. Obviously, this is a terrible situation for Andrew Finch's family and for him, but also for the officers involved to have looked like they made the best judgment they could but have shot an innocent man and killed him.
MARTIN: I understand that after you tried to push through legislation against swatting, you yourself became a victim. Do you mind sharing what happened?
CLARK: That's right. Back in January of 2016, I had introduced legislation making swatting a federal crime earlier - a few months earlier. And I was home with my family on a Sunday night, and we saw lots of police lights on a very quiet street that we live on. I eventually went out to investigate. I was afraid something might be happening at a neighbor's house and was - had that moment of terror when I stepped out of my own house where two of my children were in bed and my husband was there and saw police with long guns on our front lawn and our street blocked off with patrol cars.
MARTIN: You believe that was some kind of retaliation for pushing that legislation.
CLARK: Yeah. We'll probably never know for sure, but it seems like too much of a coincidence to be anything else.
MARTIN: So it has always been against the law to call in false 911 reports. So what is different about your bill? What does it seek to change?
CLARK: One of the issues we are trying to address with this legislation is that these calls can happen from anywhere. And, of course, one of the powers of the Internet is its ability to connect people. But when these calls come in from across state lines, sometimes even internationally, a federal law is going to help us with jurisdiction issues so that prosecutors and law enforcement have the ability to address crimes that take place in different states and, perhaps, even different countries.
And it's also trying to tailor a piece of legislation for this specific crime as we see swatting being used, unfortunately, more and more across the country and be able to really use our criminal statutes to address this particular crime that we've seen go from online abuse into real life with real consequences for people at home.
MARTIN: Representative Katherine Clark - she's a Democrat from Massachusetts. Thanks so much for taking the time this morning.
CLARK: Thank you, Rachel.
(SOUNDBITE OF TUSKEN.'S "BANTHA")
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
This week, 57,000 Hondurans living in the U.S. will find out whether they can remain here legally. The Department of Homeland Security renewed their temporary protective status, or TPS, until July. That was the latest of several renewals they were granted after being given TPS following a devastating hurricane in 1998. But it doesn't look like the Trump administration will grant any more extensions given that it has ended the program for other migrants, including Haitians and Nicaraguans. As NPR's Carrie Kahn found out in a recent trip to Honduras, relatives of the TPS recipients are anxious that their biggest source of income is about to dry up.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: Deep in the heart of coffee country about two hours west of the capital, the smell of Honduras' biggest roaster wafts through surrounding towns, like tiny La Paz where its fortunes rise and fall with international coffee prices. Here, it's not hard to find someone with relatives in the U.S.
(SOUNDBITE OF PHONE RINGING)
HAROLD CASTILLO: (Speaking Spanish).
KAHN: Nineteen-year-old Harold Castillo mans the reception desk at one of La Paz's three hotels. He says he has 15 family members in the U.S.
CASTILLO: (Speaking Spanish).
KAHN: "I've got cousins, uncles, aunts - everything," he says. Only one aunt, though, has TPS. She's been there for 22 years and has four U.S.-born children. He says she won't recognize Honduras if she has to come back home.
CASTILLO: (Speaking Spanish).
KAHN: "Honduras is too hard these days," he says. The country has been racked with high levels of gang violence, earning it one of the highest murder rates in the world. More than 40 percent of its residents live in extreme poverty, earning about a dollar a day. Nearly 20 percent of Honduras' annual GDP come from relatives sending money back home.
HUGO NOE PINO: That's the principal source of hard currency right now in the country.
KAHN: Hugo Noe Pino is an economist at UNITEC, a private university in Tegucigalpa. He says unemployment is also high, making it extremely difficult for the country to absorb tens of thousands of Hondurans sent home if the TPS program expires.
PINO: Most of them are going to be unemployed, and they will suffer in different ways.
KAHN: Noe Pino says many migrants will come back with new skills, but unfortunately, there just aren't enough new jobs being created. Foreign direct investment has dropped steadily over the past four years, and he says the recent political instability will be a further deterrent to investors.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Shouting in Spanish).
KAHN: Last November's controversial presidential elections are still being disputed with regular protests throughout the country, some of which have turned violent and left more than 20 people dead in clashes with police. International observers have called for the elections to be redone due to widespread irregularities detected in the contest. But current President Juan Orlando Hernandez, the declared winner, rejects such calls. And last month, he got a boost from the U.S., which congratulated him on his victory and certified his government is eligible for foreign aid, citing an improvement in its human rights record and corruption.
Lester Ramirez of the Association for a More Just Society, a Honduran non-governmental group, says the slight drop in the crime rate has come at a big cost in Honduras. He says President Hernandez has consolidated much power, and it appears that his strong-arm approach is more appealing to the U.S. than transparency or democracy.
LESTER RAMIREZ: Because what the United States doesn't want to have is a problem in their back door, you know, people migrating and having this humanitarian issue we had three years ago.
KAHN: In 2014, tens of thousands of unaccompanied minor children streamed over the border into the U.S., many fleeing Honduras' deadly gang violence. The numbers dropped significantly once President Trump took power, but the number of migrants from Central America has been creeping up in recent months.
CAROLINA VALESQUEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
KAHN: Back in La Paz in the town's outdoor market, Carolina Valesquez is counting a customer's change at her produce stand. Vendors say sales are way down, mostly due to the political unrest and the poor economy. Valesquez says she's also worried about her brother who lives in Florida. He's been able to work there legally because he's had TPS for nearly 15 years.
VALESQUEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
KAHN: "It's going to hit us hard if he gets sent back," she says. "He's been the lifeline for our household," she says, which altogether includes nine family members. Carrie Kahn, NPR News, La Paz, Honduras.
(SOUNDBITE OF TUSKEN.'S "BANTHA")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump is back at our nation's capital. He returned yesterday after spending the holidays at his private club in Florida where he predicted that 2018 is going to be, quote, "very special." The president has not yet specified where he's going to focus his energies as he gets back to work this week. Lucky for us, NPR political editor Domenico Montanaro has some ideas. He joins us in our studio. Good morning, Domenico.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Hey, Rachel.
MARTIN: All right. From your reading of this president and this White House, what are the Trump administration's top priorities in 2018?
MONTANARO: Well, there are really six places that they talk about, two that are foreign, four domestic, as the White House puts it. North Korea - they're looking at containment. Iran - they're really encouraging protests through Twitter support at this point. We're not sure tangibly what that will mean, you know, even further to sort of enact change. But we'll be watching that. And then the four domestic areas - immigration, which they see as tied to national security, welfare, health care and, you know, that - those are some key, big places that they want to watch for.
MARTIN: Those are big.
MONTANARO: Yeah.
MARTIN: I mean, welfare reform as they're billing this, immigration - some kind of comprehensive immigration reform. Is this likely to happen in this upcoming year?
MONTANARO: Right. And when you throw infrastructure in there, as the other big area, you know, Democrats at this point are not looking like they want to jump on board so easily. And when you look at the midterms, not much gets done traditionally in midterm years. Opposition parties have a very high bar to walk when it comes to working with the majority. Democrats will seek major concessions if they have to work with Republicans, especially in the Senate, on anything related to immigration or infrastructure.
MARTIN: So the story - one of the many stories, political stories, this past year has been about the growing rift between the president and his partners in the GOP. What do we expect to happen on that front? I mean, how do the president's priorities, as you just outlined them, how do they jibe with congressional leaders?
MONTANARO: Well, they got a big thing done when it came to taxes - the tax overhaul. Without that, there might have been an even bigger rift that was exposed. You know, President Trump and Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, seem more aligned than with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Ryan and Trump both want to attack welfare entitlements and health care. But McConnell has said that he's not quite ready to walk that plank, and Democrats certainly aren't getting ready to, you know, get to the edge of that ship anytime soon to help McConnell out.
MARTIN: Right. McConnell just came out and said I want to turn the page on health care.
MONTANARO: Right. He said he's ready to move on from health care, and he doesn't think entitlements can get done unless it's bipartisan.
MARTIN: I also want to ask you about what is unfolding in Iran. You mentioned that President Trump up until now has just refrained from doing anything more than weighing in on Twitter, which is a big deal in and of itself considering. But he tweeted again this morning, throwing in a knock on the Obama administration's Iran policy. How might that translate into policy for the Trump administration, if at all? Or is this just rhetoric?
MONTANARO: I think that's the big question because what can he do to enact change tangibly I think is the real question here. You know, when it comes to 2009, President Obama was dealing with a much more hard-line leader in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This time around, there is a more pragmatic leader in Rouhani, someone who Obama was able to strike that Iran nuclear deal with. So these are very different types of people. So if President Trump and Vice President Pence are calling for change, well, what does change look like in Iran?
MARTIN: Right. Like is Rouhani the moderate that is going to be as good as you can get from an American government perspective?
MONTANARO: Right. Because it certainly doesn't appear that people in the streets are going to be able to take down the supreme leader anytime soon.
MARTIN: Meanwhile, the threat from North Korea still looms. I mean, is there any kind of - have you been able to discern a cohesive American strategy when it comes to North Korea?
MONTANARO: Well, the president's tried to saber rattle a bit more. But if anybody thought that that saber-rattling approach was going to, you know, make Kim Jong Un a little bit more cowed, that certainly didn't seem to be the case because over the New Year's holiday, he came out and said that they've become a nuclear power and that he has a nuclear button on his desk ready to launch at any time. So, you know, China is key to containing North Korea, and yet, the president has criticized them. China is feeling emboldened, and one Chinese professor, for example, told The New Yorker that they see Trump as the biggest strategic opportunity, and clearly American leadership has declined in the last 10 months. So when President Trump says that he's been the most well-received leader ever in China's history, it might be for a different reason than President Trump thinks.
MARTIN: NPR's Domenico Montanaro. Thanks so much, Domenico.
MONTANARO: You're welcome.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Germany's economy is strong. Its manufacturing sector is really strong. But that's not so in the U.S. where manufacturing jobs have crept back up only slightly after a steady decline over the past quarter century. So how does Germany pull this off? NPR's John Ydstie visited the country recently and joined us for the first of a series of reports on this issue. Hey, John.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.
CHANG: So how much better is German manufacturing doing than American manufacturing?
YDSTIE: Well, here's a data point. Manufacturing is nearly a quarter of the German economy. That's twice the share in the U.S.
CHANG: Twice? That's huge.
YDSTIE: Twice.
CHANG: Why is there such a big difference?
YDSTIE: Well, one big difference is the strength of the small and mid-sized German companies called the Mittelstand. The U.S. has lost a lot of these kinds of companies in past decades as firms have moved overseas looking for cheap labor. When I was in Germany, I visited several of these Mittelstand firms to find out what makes them so successful. And Schmittenberg Metal Works was one of them. I got a tour of their factory in Wuppertal where their machines stamp out millions of small metal parts mostly for the auto industry.
CHRISTIAN RIEDER: On the left side, you get the coil in. And step by step, it runs through the tool and the good part on the other side.
YDSTIE: That's Christian Reider, head of sales for Schmittenberg. And here's Yvonne Schmittenberg, the boss.
YVONNE SCHMITTENBERG: They put it into a machine that softens a bit the edges.
YDSTIE: Schmittenberg is the third generation of her family to run this company.
SCHMITTENBERG: My grandfather was an engineer and toolmaker, and he had the technologic know-how, and my grandmother supplied the money. So, I mean, this was, yeah, a dream team, yeah (laughter).
YDSTIE: Schmittenberg was founded in 1932. It survived the Second World War and right afterward began supplying parts for Germany's recovering auto industry.
SCHMITTENBERG: Starting with Volkswagen, the Beetle - the first Beetle - was supplied by Schmittenberg company with the first weld nuts.
YDSTIE: Weld nuts are small but critical auto parts. They're still Schmittenberg's specialty. Yvonne Schmittenberg is a petite woman with long, blond hair - an unusual CEO in the male-dominated industry. She was working in France in the 1990s when her grandmother, who was running the family business then, called and said it would be sold if Yvonne didn't come back home and take over.
SCHMITTENBERG: I was working as an investment banker, which I liked a lot. However, blood is thicker than water, and after all, I was very much tempted by the entrepreneurial challenge, yes.
YDSTIE: This is one of the strengths of German Mittelstand companies. They're often family-owned and focus on long-term success and not maximizing short-term profits. The part Schmittenberg makes are used by most of the world's automakers. Your car likely has some. Most are about the size of a silver dollar. They're welded to a car's body and used to bolt on things like seats and seat belts, says Christian Rieder.
RIEDER: So they need to be resistant to really high-strength impacts, like a crash, for example.
YDSTIE: The parts look simple, like the kind of thing you could make more cheaply in some low-wage country, but actually, they're very highly engineered. In fact, these weld nuts, or threaded plates, no bigger than the palm of your hand, are incredibly strong, says Rieder.
RIEDER: On this threaded plate, you can hang four Mercedes S-Classes on.
YDSTIE: Think about that. You could weld this small, threaded plate to a steel girder, then hang four large cars on it - the equivalent of eight tons - and the threads would not strip, the part would not fail. That attention to engineering and quality is a hallmark of German manufacturing, and it's what makes Schmittenberg and companies like it competitive.
SCHMITTENBERG: Obviously, we are under pressure, and we have to fight for market shares every day, but we would never, ever shift to anywhere when the quality is in slightest question.
YDSTIE: So what's the takeaway for U.S. companies? Focus on quality and take a long-term view. And Yvonne Schmittenberg has one more piece of advice - pay attention to your workforce. Don't presume every kid should go to college. Get them interested in making things.
SCHMITTENBERG: I think this is so important to keep the youngsters interested in manufacturing, and this starts at the schools, to have the kids running around with open eyes, being interested in technical issues, see how things get done and really get them motivated to want to do that.
YDSTIE: Now, the U.S. has struggled to make this kind of vocational training widely available, Ailsa.
CHANG: Yeah.
YDSTIE: We'll hear more about how the Germans do it tomorrow.
CHANG: All right. So lots of examples here about what makes German manufacturing so strong, but can the U.S. embrace these same qualities and boost manufacturing here?
YDSTIE: Well, I asked that question to Martin Baily, who studied this. He's an economist at the Brookings Institution and a former White House economic adviser. Baily says he thinks it would be a good thing if the U.S. had more manufacturing jobs and could provide work for people who aren't highly educated, but he thinks it would be very difficult to achieve.
MARTIN BAILY: I would not advise U.S. companies or U.S. policymakers to try to replicate what's happened in Germany. In fact, I would look at Germany and say, you're going to have a tough time going forward. In fact, you, to some extent, already are having a tough time as some of the production shifts to Eastern Europe.
CHANG: So he's saying even Germany won't be able to hang onto these manufacturing jobs.
YDSTIE: Right. And Baily says a big reason is technology. It's advancing so fast that it will continue to replace even highly skilled manufacturing workers. And some Germans are also worried about this. Jeromin Zettelmeyer, a former economic official in the German government, now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, says Germany may soon find that it's too reliant on manufacturing.
JEROMIN ZETTELMEYER: There is a very serious worry that we might lose our manufacturing edge over the next 10, 20 years and then be much in the same position that the U.S. is now except without having grown a new growth engine like the IT sector in the meantime.
YDSTIE: So it's sort of grass looks greener situation. Even if Germany is really good at manufacturing, maybe it needs to try to emulate the U.S. and start looking beyond manufacturing to find post-industrial jobs to drive its economy. Still, this begs the question for the U.S. - how are we going to provide decent jobs for workers who once have been employed in manufacturing?
CHANG: A question that's very hard to answer. That's NPR's John Ydstie. Thank you very much.
YDSTIE: You're welcome, Ailsa.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE AMERICAN DOLLAR'S "WUDAO")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
And we start with new developments concerning how the Russia investigation began.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The founders of Fusion GPS are calling on Congress to release the firm's testimony. You may remember Fusion GPS. It's the research firm that, during the 2016 election, put together what became known as the Steele dossier - a collection of unsubstantiated information about Donald Trump's ties to Russia. Well, now the Fusion GPS founders say, in a New York Times op-ed, they want the firm's testimony to be made public.
MARTIN: All right, NPR congressional reporter Kelsey Snell joins us in our studios this morning. Hey, Kelsey.
KELSEY SNELL, BYLINE: Hey, there.
MARTIN: First, just remind us what was in the so-called Steele dossier.
SNELL: Sure. So it was compiled by a former British intelligence officer who was working for the firm, Fusion GPS. And he found alleged direct connections between members of the Trump campaign and Russian officials who were working to get him elected. So these were uncorroborated reports. And anonymous sources have - were the ones that were relied on for this. And the information was released by BuzzFeed after they obtained the information several months - maybe possibly a year - after the information was originally compiled.
MARTIN: OK. So the authors of this op-ed - these are the founders of this company Fusion GPS - they're arguing that Republicans have spun up conspiracy theories about the dossier. Like what?
SNELL: Yeah. First of all, they talk in this op-ed about refuting the claim that the Steele dossier was what started the Russia investigation.
MARTIN: The Mueller investigation...
SNELL: Right.
MARTIN: ...By the FBI.
SNELL: So they don't exactly say who it is within the Trump campaign that spoke about this. But The New York Times reported over the weekend that George Papadopoulos, a campaign official who also worked in the White House, told an Australian diplomat in London about this meeting between Russian officials and the Trump campaign, when he was at a bar.
So they wanted to refute that. And they also want to refute the idea that they were doing research for the Clinton campaign when this was released. It's a little bit of them trying to clear up their own name.
MARTIN: So just to be clear - they are arguing that it wasn't the so-called Steele dossier that triggered this whole investigation, that it was used to corroborate information that they had from another source, according to The New York Times, possibly George Papadopoulos.
SNELL: Right. And they had been hearing from the intelligence community that they had heard information about the Trump campaign having discussions with Russia. And they want to clear that up. They want to have their testimony released.
MARTIN: And by releasing that testimony, that's going to dispel all of this? I mean - so they sat for Congress - let's back up - they sat for Congress in testimony...
SNELL: Right
MARTIN: ...Recently.
SNELL: Yeah, they said that they did 21 hours of testimony from their firm in conversations with Congress. That's a lot of time to be spent. And they want that all out there, in part - and like I said - because they want to clear up their name. They pushed back, they say, only when it came to the investigations into their other clients that weren't related to the Steele dossier or to the campaign.
MARTIN: And they still stand by their research, even though it's been widely controversial because it can't be substantiated. They still stand by it.
SNELL: That's the way that they and this op-ed is they say they stand by their research. We don't know if Congress plans to release this. And we imagine that they will get a lot of questions. The Senate comes back into town this week, and the House returns to Washington next week, so I'm sure this will be an issue they discuss.
MARTIN: NPR's Kelsey Snell - thanks so much, Kelsey.
SNELL: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: All right - my button is bigger than your button. President Trump tweeted out those words last night in response to North Korea's leader.
CHANG: That's right. So Kim Jong Un gave an address in which he signaled a willingness to hold talks with South Korea. But he also jabbed President Trump, saying he has a nuclear button on his desk. President Trump tweeted, asking if someone from Kim Jong Un's regime would, quote, "please inform him that I, too, have a nuclear button. And it is a much bigger and more powerful one than his, and my button works."
Meanwhile, U.S. department (ph) spokesperson Heather Nauert says Kim's proposal to start talks could be an effort to drive a wedge between the U.S. and South Korea.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HEATHER NAUERT: That will not happen. That will not occur. We are very skeptical of Kim Jong Un's sincerity in sitting down and having talks.
CHANG: But today North Korea announced it will reopen a cross-border communication channel with South Korea.
MARTIN: All right, NPR's Shanghai correspondent Rob Schmitz is following all of this. Hey, Rob.
ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: So this seems like a big deal, opening up this cross-border communication channel between the North and the South. What is this channel? What does it do?
SCHMITZ: Yeah, this line of communication began in 1971, when the two Koreas agreed to use an uninhabited border village named Panmunjom along the Demilitarized Zone to make phone calls to each other. And here's how it works. South Korean officials sit inside a building in this village called Panmunjom - in the House of Freedom, it's called - and they work at a desk with one green phone for receiving calls and a red phone for making calls to the North. They also have a fax machine, if they want to go that route.
MARTIN: (Laughter) Oh, good.
SCHMITZ: It's not very high-tech (laughter). Around a hundred yards away is North Korea's building, where they have a similar setup. South Korea calls the North an odd dates. The North takes the even dates. Now, this was the case up until early 2016, when the North stopped answering the South's calls. And this was a retaliation measure North Korea took after the South halted operations at a joint factory complex the two sides had managed together. And they haven't spoken ever since until, that is of course, today.
MARTIN: Wow. So I mean, how are the North and the South framing this development?
SCHMITZ: Well, the South Korean officials that have come out to the press - they're calling this a breakthrough, a very significant step in restarting dialogue with the North. Tensions, as we all know, are very high in this region. And up until today, there hasn't been an official way for the two Koreas to regularly talk to each other. Now, of course, there's no guarantee that tensions between the two Koreas will suddenly disappear because of this.
And it's clear, at this stage at least, that Kim Jong Un wanted the line reopened to discuss the specific topic of allowing a North Korean team into the upcoming Winter Olympics in South Korea. In the past when the two sides have held high-level talks, they often didn't resolve very much and usually ended in stalemate.
MARTIN: So we're not supposed to expect anything much from this (laughter).
SCHMITZ: You know, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, as was mentioned earlier, played down talks between the two Koreas, saying the U.S. wouldn't take any talks seriously unless they're able to get Kim Jong Un to give up his nuclear weapons.
And for President Trump's part, after sending his my-button-is-bigger-than-your-button tweet, he responded to the news of these talks with a follow-up tweet, saying perhaps this is good news, perhaps not. We will see.
But all of this aside, this is progress. It's impossible to know how this will influence Kim Jong Un and what he does with the weapons his country has developed. But it is a regular dialogue, which is something that simply hasn't been there for the two few years between these two sides.
MARTIN: NPR's Rob Schmitz. Thanks so much, Rob.
SCHMITZ: Thanks.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: President Trump also took aim at the Palestinians yesterday.
CHANG: Yeah. So it appears President Trump is threatening to cut off U.S. aid to the Palestinians. In a tweet, the president said the U.S. pays hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the Palestinians and gets, quote, "no appreciation or respect."
Palestinians have protested Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. They've said the U.S. can no longer be a fair mediator between Palestinians and Israelis.
MARTIN: NPR's Daniel Estrin joins us now from Jerusalem. Daniel, why is the president tweeting about this in this moment?
DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: Palestinians are furious with Trump right now because he recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital. And Palestinians also want parts of Jerusalem for their capital. So they're saying they don't want to be a part of any peace talks led by the U.S. But the Palestinians rely on the U.S. for hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. And so Trump tweeted a quote - "with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?"
MARTIN: Wow. So U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, yesterday, said Trump is considering freezing funds to this U.N. agency that funds Palestinian refugees. Here's what she said.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
NIKKI HALEY: We're trying to move for a peace process. But if that doesn't happen, the president is not going to continue to fund that situation.
MARTIN: Is the Trump administration to be taken at its word on this? I mean, how are Palestinians reading it? Is it going to happen?
ESTRING: Well, the Palestinians don't know. And if you ask Israelis, I don't think Israel wants to see it happen. American aid actually helps keep the Palestinians afloat. For instance, the U.N. agency that Nikki Haley was speaking about - it gives food and services to Palestinian refugees. And the U.S. is the biggest funder of that agency. Behind the scenes, the Israeli military thinks that if that aid were to stop, there would be a massive humanitarian disaster, which Israel doesn't want.
And Israel has had a similar attitude about other funds to the Palestinians. I spoke today with President Obama's ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro. He's now at the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies. And he said - on many occasions in the past, Congress has slowed or conditioned aid to the Palestinians. But on each occasion, the Israelis have quietly asked to get Congress to eventually release those funds.
MARTIN: So you're saying Palestinians have been upset with President Trump for a while now, in particular over his decision about Israel. How are they reacting, then, to this latest tweet? Not well, I imagine.
ESTRING: One Palestinian official has called it blackmail, threatening to cut funding to the Palestinians. And actually, Rachel, Trump said something interesting in his tweet about Israelis. He said, by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital, it would have made the Israelis have to pay more in negotiations. And an Israeli Cabinet minister said Israel should be very wary about that.
MARTIN: NPR's Daniel Estrin reporting from Jerusalem. Daniel, thanks so much.
ESTRING: Pleasure.
[POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: During this conversation, we mistakenly say that The New York Times reported George Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat about a meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russian officials. In fact, the Times reported that Papadopoulos told the diplomat that Russia had collected potentially damaging information about Democratic political candidate Hillary Clinton.]
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
With tax legislation behind him, President Trump could make some major decisions this month on another economic promise - reducing the U.S. trade deficit with China. That's the figure that measures how much Chinese imports exceed American exports. And the gap grew during Trump's first year in office. Here he is on his visit to China this past fall.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I do blame past administrations for allowing this out-of-control trade deficit to take place and to grow. We have to fix this because it just doesn't work for our great American companies, and it doesn't work for our great American workers.
CHANG: Now the president is reportedly considering the hard-line move of raising tariffs on some electronics from China. And Wendy Cutler says that could be a big mistake. She was a deputy U.S. trade representative under President Obama, but she told me that she agrees with the Trump administration on this point - that the U.S. should take some action against China.
WENDY CUTLER: There's a growing frustration in the United States that China is not operating on a level playing field and that while Chinese companies have access to the U.S. market, our companies don't have fair access to China's market.
CHANG: How so? Like, what are some examples?
CUTLER: Well, the most pressing example now is the whole issue of intellectual property rights and, in particular, the Chinese practice of forcing U.S. companies to share technology as a condition for investing in China. The practice is, if you want to invest in China, we want to share in the technology, we want to learn about your technology, and we want to be in a position, I guess, ultimately, to be able to make these products at some point without you.
CHANG: The White House could also make a decision soon on certain appliances most of us rely on every day. The president is said to be considering sweeping tariffs on Chinese-manufactured washing machines, also solar panels because domestic makers of these goods say they have been hurt by Chinese imports. If these tariffs were to happen, how would American consumers and even American workers be affected?
CUTLER: Well, U.S. consumers would pay, and that is because - through higher tariffs, that means prices for these goods would go up, and perhaps a selection would go down. And so U.S. consumers will be hit.
CHANG: Would these tariffs, if they were to become reality - would they set us up for some sort of trade war with China? And what might a trade war look like?
CUTLER: Well, a trade war - no one wins in a trade war, and that's clear. And so in any trade war - let's just say the U.S. increases tariffs against imports from certain countries. U.S. consumers, let's say, would be the first to lose out then because prices would go up. But then if a country counterretaliates, they would then not welcome U.S. exports. And that would affect not only U.S. companies but also workers for those companies that produce the goods.
CHANG: Well, what is the risk to American businesses - particularly, American workers - if the White House doesn't impose new tariffs?
CUTLER: Once again, I think we have very legitimate concerns about wanting to address China's unfair trade practices, but increasing tariffs - it's very black and white. That goes against our World Trade Organization obligations.
CHANG: Wendy Cutler is a former deputy U.S. trade representative under President Obama.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
You may not know him by name, but you know his sound.
(SOUNDBITE OF WILSON PICKETT SONG, "MUSTANG SALLY")
MARTIN: Music producer and songwriter Rick Hall, the so-called father of Muscle Shoals music, has died. Hall was the founder of FAME Recording Studios, the place that made Muscle Shoals, Ala., synonymous with the Southern sound of soul and R&B.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Just listen to this, Wilson Pickett's version of "Mustang Sally."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MUSTANG SALLY")
WILSON PICKETT: (Singing) Listen. All you want to do is ride around, Sally.
UNIDENTIFIED SINGERS: (Singing) Ride, Sally, ride.
CHANG: There at his small FAME Studios, Rick Hall cut some of the biggest records, like Aretha Franklin's first hit. In an interview from 2015, Hall told NPR's Linda Wertheimer that before she came to Muscle Shoals and found her voice, Aretha Franklin's music wasn't selling.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
RICK HALL: It was a little bit too vanilla, and was too many ditties. And it was little jazz-oriented records with written arrangements. And we don't do that in Muscle Shoals. We don't use arrangers in Muscle Shoals.
LINDA WERTHEIMER, BYLINE: You don't write it down?
HALL: No, ma'am. We do it from the heart (laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I NEVER LOVED A MAN (THE WAY I LOVE YOU)")
ARETHA FRANKLIN: (Singing) I ain't never, no, no...
MARTIN: Here's what Aretha Franklin had to say in the 2013 documentary "Muscle Shoals."
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "MUSCLE SHOALS")
FRANKLIN: Coming to Muscle Shoals was the turning point. That's where I recorded "I Never Loved a Man," which became my first million-selling record. So absolutely it was a milestone and the turning point in my career.
MARTIN: Rick Hall, a white producer, worked with African-American musicians at a time when Alabama was segregated.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
HALL: During the '60s we had it tough here because we wanted to produce black music, black - with black artists singing. In doing that we were afraid of white people that didn't like the idea of us recording black singers.
MARTIN: But in Rick Hall's FAME Studio there was no color line. Hall worked with Etta James and Otis Redding.
CHANG: And that Muscle Shoals sound traveled far and wide. He eventually worked with the Rolling Stones. Here's Keith Richards from the documentary "Muscle Shoals."
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "MUSCLE SHOALS")
KEITH RICHARDS: Record making like that, it doesn't happen very often. There's usually somebody like Rick Hall who's like a total maniac (laughter) with the drive and the foresight to do it. He's a tough guy.
CHANG: Hall was inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame in 1985, and in 2014 he received a Grammy Trustees Award for his significant contribution to the field of recording.
MARTIN: In an interview on "Larry King Now," Larry King asks Rick Hall, what makes a good producer?
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LARRY KING NOW")
HALL: A good producer? A guy who knows a hit song when he hears it. It takes a tough guy. And you have to be able to take a lot of B.S.
MARTIN: Rick Hall died at his home in Muscle Shoals, Ala. He was 85 years old.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU LEFT THE WATER RUNNING")
OTIS REDDING: (Singing) You left all the water running when you left me behind. Let me tell you that you left all that water running. It's running from these eyes of mine. And there you go. You locked the door and left me outside, and then you threw the key away. Baby, one day you'll regret, baby, you'll be upset when you get your...
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Ailsa Chang. We've all mispronounced a word, but it probably didn't cost this much. On "Jeopardy!" this week, one of the clues asked for a mashup of Coolio and John Milton. A contestant buzzed in...
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "JEOPARDY!")
NICK SPICHER: What is "Gangster's Paradise Lost"?
CHANG: Alex Trebek gave it to him, but the judges said no.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "JEOPARDY!")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: You said gangster's instead of gangsta's on that song by Coolio.
CHANG: So Trebek took the contestant's $3,200 dollars and his street cred. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We turn now to the ongoing protests in Iran. State-run media there say 22 people have died in the anti-government demonstrations. They started because of longstanding economic woes in many parts of the country, problems that got worse under Western sanctions on Iran. And while Iran's government admits it should do more to fix the economy, it also blames the U.S. and other countries for fueling the unrest. NPR's Peter Kenyon has been following this story from his base in Istanbul. He joins us now. Good morning, Peter.
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: Hi, Rachel.
MARTIN: So nearly two dozen people have been killed in these protests, hundreds arrested. What's the latest that you're hearing?
KENYON: Well, one thing that's new is the return of pro-government demonstrations. We're getting reports today of marchers in a number of places condemning the violence associated with the anti-government protests. Now, the government had tried these pro-government rallies last weekend on Saturday. At that point, they didn't have much effect. Now they're back. We'll see what happens. And, meanwhile, the anti-government protests just keep going in their seventh day in numerous places, also not involving huge numbers of people. Here's a video from last night that will give you a little sense of what's happening, a little different from the usual protest scenes.
MARTIN: OK.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTORS: (Chanting in foreign language).
KENYON: Now, it almost sounds like an ordinary traffic sound, but what it is is this person focusing not on the demonstrators - they're in the background - but in the foreground, you see this motorcycle patrol of paramilitary besiege units moving over to confront them. So clearly there's a level of crackdown still going on, not overwhelming yet. And, meanwhile, the government seems to be trying out these pro-government rallies.
MARTIN: Well, that's what I was going to ask. I mean, how's the government's response? You say there are now pro-government protesters on the streets. But is the government changing or evolving its response to these demonstrations?
KENYON: Well, if so, it's pretty slow. It's essentially a dual-track approach. I mean, some officials, especially the president, Hassan Rouhani, are acknowledging the economic problems. He's saying please be patient, please don't be violent. Others more hardline, from the supreme leader on down, are blaming outside agitators including Washington. The Rouhani government is trying to point out, look, the economy is better in broad indicators. But that's not satisfying people at the street level whose wages aren't keeping up with the inflation. They're not seeing the benefits that this 2015 nuclear deal was supposed to achieve with the lifting of sanctions. So that's the problem he's facing right now.
MARTIN: Right. I mean, this is how Rouhani sold this thing, the Iran nuclear deal, to Iranians, that it was going to improve their lives. So is he in a politically difficult spot right now?
KENYON: Yes, he is. And, partly, it's institutional. It's structural. The power is very fragmented in Iran. Everyone supposedly answers and does answer to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at one level, but the elected president, Rouhani, has a very limited reach. I mean, he's not a reformer himself, but he is trying to make life better for ordinary Iranians. But the security, the intelligence, the military and even economic sectors are deeply controlled by hardliners. I mean, the Revolutionary Guard Corps for years has been deeply embedded in the economy. A lot of money goes to them, goes to proxy militias in the area, Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Iraq. There's a war going on in Yemen that Iran's involved in. So Rouhani's ability to change any of that is very limited, and the idea that these street protests are going to do it seems unlikely at the moment.
MARTIN: So how does this end?
KENYON: Well, your guess is as good as mine. We're getting reports today that Rouhani spoke with the Turkish president and said he believes that things will be calming down in a few days. We'll see if that prediction holds. You know, in 2009, the demonstrations were much, much bigger, and the model then was just to crush the dissent with a heavy-handed show of force. This time there's a slightly different nature of the protests, different people out there on the streets. A heavy-handed response now could backfire a little bit, but then that begs the question, what can they do? I mean, real job creation, the kind of things people are asking for, even if they decide to redirect money towards that, that's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take time.
MARTIN: NPR's Peter Kenyon in Istanbul, covering the protests happening in Iran. Thanks so much, Peter.
KENYON: Thanks, Rachel.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The Democratic Republic of Congo experienced its own deadly crackdown in recent days. It happened on New Year's Eve when security forces opened fire on demonstrators and churchgoers. At least five people were killed. The protesters were demanding the departure of the president, who was expected to step aside more than a year ago. NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton reports.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Weeping).
OFEIBEA QUIST-ARCTON, BYLINE: The weeping widow of a 24-year-old man shot dead Sunday by the Congolese security forces in the capital Kinshasa, says his family. Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya, the widely respected head of the Roman Catholic Church in predominantly Catholic Congo, has added his influential voice to those denouncing what he calls repression by the authorities.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LAURENT MONSENGWO PASINYA: (Foreign language spoken).
QUIST-ARCTON: Cardinal Monsengwo says the response by the security forces to peaceful protests against President Joseph Kabila was nothing short of barbaric. "We condemn the actions of supposedly valiant men in uniform," the cleric told journalists. He accused the authorities of opening fire on peaceful protesters and using tear gas against people worshipping in churches during Sunday Mass, armed with just their Bibles and rosaries.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PASINYA: (Foreign language spoken).
QUIST-ARCTON: Catholic activists, backed by civil society groups and opposition parties, organized the New Year's Eve rallies, again calling for President Kabila to step down. In power for the past 17 years, his constitutional two-term limit was up a year ago. The Catholic church brokered a 2016 peace deal that was supposed to see Kabila bow out and elections held by the end of 2017. Critics accuse the president of clinging to power and stalling the vote to elect his successor. Cardinal Monsengwo had harsh words for Congo's leadership.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PASINYA: (Foreign language spoken).
QUIST-ARCTON: The cardinal says, "it's time for mediocre people to leave office and for truth to replace systematic lies in Congo." He asks how the Congolese can have any confidence in leaders who are incapable of protecting the people or guaranteeing peace and justice.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PIERRE-ROM MWANAMPUTU: (Foreign language spoken).
QUIST-ARCTON: Police spokesman Pierre-Rom Mwanamputu acknowledges that five people were killed, but says they were criminals and not peaceful protesters or churchgoers. Cardinal Monsengwo is calling for an independent investigation into Sunday's killings in Congo. The human rights minister has said there will be an inquiry. Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, NPR News, Dakar.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The opioid crisis is causing some horrifying side effects. We're going to hear about one of them now. And a warning - this story is disturbing and may not be appropriate for younger listeners. The story is from West Virginia, where there's been a rise in sex trafficking, including crimes where the perpetrators and the victims are members of the same family. As Kara Lofton of West Virginia Public Radio reports, spotting this problem can be tough.
KARA LOFTON, BYLINE: Brian Morris says all forms of human trafficking, whether for labor or sex, are severely underreported in West Virginia. He's with the Department of Homeland Security, and he's co-chairing a state task force that's trying to figure out how common human trafficking is.
BRIAN MORRIS: Most of what I see is familial trafficking, which is where the parents tend to prostitute their children out. And the reason that they do that is we are increasingly facing a drug epidemic in this state.
LOFTON: Morris says human trafficking is defined as the use of force, fraud or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act. Other members of the task force caution it's difficult to know how prevalent human trafficking is because local law enforcement is just beginning to know how to recognize it. But Crittenton Services, a residential treatment facility for girls ages 12 to 18, knows those signs all too well. Nine of the 30 girls living here now have a history of being sexually tracked by family members. Laura Smith is a clinical therapist at Crittenton.
LAURA SMITH: We have had young women who eventually, when they are able to tell us their stories, tell us stories of being in basements and having guns held to their head while they were having sex. And they're very aware that that's not what is supposed to be happening.
LOFTON: Smith says, a lot of times, the girls are not viewing this as something their family has done to them. In some cases, the young women develop a kind of relationship with their abusers, so they view a much older man as a boyfriend or person that they love.
SMITH: And sex is just a manifestation of that love. So in those cases, they don't understand mom or dad is getting money on the side from that relationship, too. That part is kind of hidden usually when the girls feel like they're in a relationship with those individuals.
LOFTON: Smith says some young women arrive at Crittenton and not realize they've been trafficked.
SMITH: And then it becomes a question of if we tell them that that's what's happened to them, is that further damaging their trauma and damaging what they've grown up with and those safety nets that they have? Or is it going to be useful to them in the long run to move on from it?
LOFTON: At the Huntington Police Department, Bob Leslie, a deputy with the West Virginia attorney general's office is leading a training for police officers on how to spot human trafficking. He says it's likely far more common than they realize.
BOB LESLIE: We know that trafficking is the second largest criminal activity in the United States and in the world. Anybody want to hazard a guess as to what is the number one criminal activity in the United States? Somebody say heroin, or somebody say drugs.
LOFTON: Leslie said last year, the task force trained nearly 3,000 people in West Virginia on how to spot human trafficking. Agent Brian Morris says the hope is that if people know what human trafficking looks like, West Virginia's reporting numbers and federal cases will also increase.
MORRIS: This is a human life that we are referring to. And if you don't stand up to protect these children, there's nobody else that's going to stand up to protect the kids.
LOFTON: But standing up for kids can be a bit of an uphill battle. In order to build a case, prosecutors need victims to testify which is especially difficult when the perpetrator is a family member. So prevention is key. And prevention here, in part, means getting a grip on the opioid crisis. For NPR News, I'm Kara Lofton in Charleston, W.Va.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Here's a question for you - would you run a marathon? Maybe. But what about seven marathons? What about seven marathons in seven days on seven different continents? Well, that's exactly what Jonathan Terrell is planning to do this month. It's called The World Marathon Challenge. And he's running to raise money for pediatric mental health. Terrell lives in Washington, D.C. And when he stopped by our studio, our co-host David Greene asked him, why are you doing this to yourself?
JONATHAN TERRELL: I think I might be a little crazy. And that's why I took it on because it is so crazy. And if I was running a 5K, I don't think anyone would care.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Have you been a marathon runner for a long time?
TERRELL: Well, not really. I'm 55 now. And I ran my first marathon when I was 49.
GREENE: Wow. OK.
TERRELL: And I've - did the JFK 50-mile Ultra Marathon, and that was my 25th marathon. So I've been packing them in.
GREENE: And so what is the training regimen beyond what you're describing? I mean, are you on a special diet? Do you have to kind of get your head in the right place to get ready for something like this?
TERRELL: There's the actual physical training. And I train about 20 to 25 hours a week. I do triathlon training - so a lot of running but also swimming and biking and strength training. Secondly, I'm very particular about my diet. And then, as you say, the mental game is really huge. And, you know, exercises in belief and gratitude and meditation are all part of how I get myself ready for this.
GREENE: So what is your exercise? Belief - is that what you said?
TERRELL: So, you know, I start off with gratitude. Grateful to be in this physical shape. Grateful for the people in my life who are supporting me. But I also have to visualize and believe that I can achieve this. And once you start thinking that defeatist way, pretty soon you're dropping out. But I do consciously exercise a sense of belief that I will get to the finish line in each of these seven marathons.
GREENE: I keep going back to you saying you're 55 years old. I mean...
TERRELL: But I'm spry.
GREENE: A spry 55. I mean, is there something different in your experience, do you think, compared to someone who has been running marathons since they were, you know, like, 14?
TERRELL: Well, I come from a place of having health problems in my mid-40s. And I had kids late in life. And I think when you start having children in your 40s, it makes you attitudinally stay a little bit younger, perhaps, because I want to be physical and present and involved in my children's lives.
GREENE: I just want to get kind of a picture of what your week is going to be like. Where's the first marathon?
TERRELL: Well, we're going to be meeting up in Cape Town.
GREENE: OK. South Africa, right?
TERRELL: South Africa, yes. And then we'll fly down to Nuvo, Antarctica. And then two hours later, we'll run the first marathon. After that, we'll all get back to Cape Town and run the second. And then on to Perth, Australia - from there to Dubai, from there to Lisbon, Portugal, from there to Barranquilla, Colombia and finishing, finally, in Miami in Florida.
GREENE: And you're traveling with a group. Are you're also running with other people, or is this a very solitary thing for you?
TERRELL: No. It's an organized event. The first two years, there were 12 runners. There was about 30 last year. And this year, it's much bigger. It will be 60. And there's a very great camaraderie between runners when you're on these kinds of events and a lot of high-fives and encouragement and all that. So I think there will be, you know, a good energy and a good group dynamic.
GREENE: Well, congratulations for improving your health. It sounds like this is just such an important cause that you're working for. And best of luck to you in these seven marathons.
TERRELL: Thank you.
CHANG: That was runner Jonathon Terrell. He plans to run seven marathons in seven days on seven continents in January.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Showtime's newest drama "The Chi" offers a close-up look at violence in a poor neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. The show debuts this Sunday, but NPR TV critic Eric Deggans says it is a story that TV should have tackled a long time ago. And a warning - you'll hear some explicit language over the next few minutes.
ERIC DEGGANS, BYLINE: As a child in nearby Gary, Ind., I've waited years for a TV show or movie to intimately explore Chicago's poor, mostly black South Side neighborhoods like "The Wire" did for West Baltimore and "Boyz N The Hood" did for South Central LA. And I so wanted "The Chi" to be that show in this moment, but the first four episodes I saw didn't quite hit the mark. The action starts with Coogie Johnson, a fresh-faced 16-year-old with huge hair. He's childlike enough to feed a stray dog but savvy enough to barter with the owner of the local bodega for a lower price on his snack.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE CHI")
AMRO SALAMA: (As Habib) Dollar for the pop, $1.75 for the jerky.
JAHKING GUILLORY: (As Coogie) Wait. How much the pop cost?
SALAMA: (As Habib) A dollar.
GUILLORY: (As Coogie) How much it cost you - wholesale?
SALAMA: (As Habib) Seventeen cents.
GUILLORY: (As Coogie) OK, so I give you a quarter. That's like 8 cents profit, man. How you lose on that?
SALAMA: (As Habib) Everybody else pay a dollar.
GUILLORY: (As Coogie) Habib - listen, man. Check this out. I give you a quarter for the pop and I pay full price for the jerky and we good, man.
SALAMA: (As Habib) How we good?
GUILLORY: (As Coogie) 'Cause you make your money.
DEGGANS: Eventually, Coogie gets his way. This is what "The Chi" does best - humanize people in a place most of us only know from headlines and political rhetoric. Coogie was arrested because he was seen near a murder scene. This leads to a fight between Coogie's older brother, his girlfriend and Coogie's abusive mom played by "The Wire" alum Sonja Sohn.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE CHI")
SONJA SOHN: (As Laverne) Coogie in jail. I need you to give me a ride down to the police station.
TIFFANY BOONE: (As Jerrika) Wait. What happened?
SOHN: (As Laverne) Listen here, girl. Don't be getting your nose all up in my [expletive] business, all right? It's bad enough I got to come all the way up here to see my son.
JASON MITCHELL: (As Brandon) Why do you have to talk to her like that? Why is it a thing?
SOHN: (As Laverne) I'll talk to her any [expletive] way I please.
DEGGANS: Soon, there's another murder in the neighborhood. The characters are caught in a swirl of revenge, violence and regret as people avoid the police and seek justice on their own. But that's only part of the story in "The Chi," which also features elementary school kids. We mostly see a trio of boys who hang together - Papa, Jake and Kevin, who's played by Alex Hibbert from the Oscar-winning film "Moonlight." Here, the three kids explain their biggest challenge in school. Kevin speaks first.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE CHI")
ALEX HIBBERT: (As Kevin) The worst thing about school is getting there.
MICHAEL EPPS: (As Jake) You got to know who run what block, what crew is beefing with your crew. You might have to walk three or four blocks out of your way just to avoid the ops.
SHAMON BROWN JR.: (As Papa) That's why I'm glad I got the gift of the gab, so I could talk my way out of any situation.
EPPS: (As Jake) Is that what you did that time you peed on yourself after the boy jumped...
DEGGANS: "The Chi" has an impressive pedigree. Chicago native Lena Waithe, who became the first black woman to win an Emmy for comedy writing a "Master Of None" last year, created the show. Oscar-winning rapper Common, also from the Windy City, serves as an executive producer. But this is a sprawling tale which takes a long time to get where it's going.
I fear this Showtime series may be a victim of what I call Netflix syndrome, where many of today's high-profile series take way too much time to set up stories. It's also overshadowed by stories we've seen before, most notably "The Wire." HBO's series made history a decade ago depicting an all-black neighborhood crippled by poverty and crime struggling with violence from an out of control illegal drug trade.
"The Chi" needs to tell a story that stands apart from those familiar themes, and so far, I haven't quite seen it. Television is waiting for a story that turns the South Side's unique struggle into groundbreaking pop culture poetry, but "The Chi" will have to raise its game a bit more to pull that off. I'm Eric Deggans.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump is again going after North Korea on Twitter. He responded to Kim Jong Un's mention of a nuclear button by saying he too has a nuclear button and his is bigger and more powerful. This happens as North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un, has started to show more willingness to hold talks with South Korea. Yesterday, U.S. State Department spokesperson Heather Knauert said Kim's proposal could be an effort to drive a wedge between the U.S. and the South.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HEATHER NAUERT: That will not happen. That will not occur. We are very skeptical of Kim Jong Un's sincerity in sitting down and having talks.
MARTIN: Nevertheless, today, North Korea announced it will reopen a cross-border communications channel with South Korea. NPR Shanghai correspondent Rob Schmitz has been following all this. He joins us now. Hi, Rob.
ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: What do you know about this cross-border communications channel? How does it work? How long has it been around?
SCHMITZ: Yeah. You know, this line of communication was established in 1971, when the two Koreas agreed to use an uninhabited border village named Panmunjom along the demilitarized zone to make phone calls to each other. Here's how it works. South Korean officials sit inside a building in this village called the House of Freedom. And they work at a desk with one green phone for receiving calls and a red phone for making calls to the North. They also have a fax machine if they want to go that route.
MARTIN: A good faxing, yeah.
SCHMITZ: (Laughter) This is not a very high-tech setup here. Around a hundred yards away is North Korea's building, where they have a similar setup. South Korea calls the North on odd dates, the North takes the even dates. Now, this was the case up until early 2016, when the North stopped answering the South's calls. This was a retaliation measure the North took after the South halted operations in a joint factory complex the two sides had managed together. And they haven't spoken ever since - until, that is, of course, today.
MARTIN: Wow. So what does this mean now that this communications channel is open? It seems, to the layman, kind of significant.
SCHMITZ: Yeah. You know, South Korean officials are calling this breakthrough a very significant step in restarting dialogue with the North. The North said close communications were part of its effort to maintain a sincere and honest attitude with the South. Tensions, as we all know, are very high in the region. And up until today, there hasn't really been an official way for the two Koreas to regularly talk to each other.
Now, of course, there's no guarantee that tensions between the two Koreas will suddenly dissipate because of this. And it's clear at this stage, at least, that Kim Jong Un wanted the line reopened to discuss the specific topic of allowing a North Korean team into the upcoming Winter Olympics in South Korea. And in the past, when the two sides have held high-level talks, they often haven't resolved much, and they usually end it in a stalemate.
MARTIN: A stalemate, so that means we shouldn't really expect anything to come of this opening?
SCHMITZ: Well, you know, I think that's the - definitely the stance the Trump administration is taking. You know, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, played down talks between the two Koreas. She said the U.S. was not looking for a Band-Aid, nor an opportunity to smile and take pictures together. She said the U.S. wouldn't take any talks seriously unless they're able to get Kim Jong Un to give up his nuclear weapons. And for President Trump's part, after sending his infamous my-nuclear-button-is-bigger-than-yours tweet, he responded to news of these talks with a follow-up tweet calling Kim Jong Un Rocket Man again but saying also this perhaps is good news, perhaps not, we will see.
All of this aside, when you look at the political situation in the region, here you have a new president in South Korea, Moon Jae-in. He's made it clear he wants to take a softer approach to the North than previous presidents in South Korea. And since he's become president, his administration hasn't had an opportunity to really talk to the North. So for him and his administration, this is progress. It's impossible to know how this, of course, will influence Kim Jong Un in what he does with the weapons his country has developed, but it is a regular dialogue, which is something that simply hasn't been there for the past two years between the two sides.
MARTIN: Take the successes where you can get them, I suppose. NPR's Rob Schmitz. Thanks so much, Rob.
SCHMITZ: Thanks.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting in foreign language).
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
That's the sound of protesters last night in the streets of Isfahan, one of the largest cities in Iran. They're using the name of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country's supreme leader, and saying shame on you. Give up your rule. It was the sixth day of protests across Iran which have led to at least 22 deaths according to the state media. These are the biggest demonstrations since 2009. And there's a big difference between now and then.
Nine years ago, only about a million Iranians had a smartphone. Today, 48 million do. That's more than half of the population. Social media and messaging apps played a major role in sparking these protests. And as part of its crackdown against them, the government blocked several apps and in some places, cut off Internet access altogether. For more about these protests and how technology helped shape them, we're joined by Trita Parsi. He's president of the National Iranian American Council. And he's in our studio. Good morning.
TRITA PARSI: Good morning.
CHANG: So what are people doing online that is scaring the Iranian government?
PARSI: Well, they're communicating. And they're organizing. And news is spreading tremendously fast as a result of all of these mobile apps and all of these users of this technology. And they have been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the Iranian government for years now. Just a couple of days ago, they blocked Telegram which is one of the most popular apps that are used for communicating. And suddenly, I had a tremendous difficulty getting a hold of people in Iran, precisely because without that app, it just - it's much more difficult. And then...
CHANG: What makes Telegram so popular? How is it particularly equipped to maybe circumvent the...
PARSI: Well...
CHANG: ...Regime's attempts to censor or block?
PARSI: A, it's free...
CHANG: OK.
PARSI: ...Which makes it much valuable because essentially you don't have to pay the cost of calling Iran and - particularly from there, and it's much cheaper. You send small voice messages to each other that goes over very, very fast. You can also talk on the phone if they have a good reception. And it's safe because it's protected and it's encrypted. So in many ways, it's really preferrable. And then just yesterday, I started getting messages again because people had found ways to get around the block on Telegram.
CHANG: How so?
PARSI: Various other apps that they're using that is actually breaking the block. So it's a cat-and-mouse game that is very difficult for the government to truly be able to win. That's part of the reason why they actually completely cut off the Internet at one point.
CHANG: Wow. Well, the U.S. has condemned the Iranian government for limiting Internet access. Here's State Department spokesman Heather Nauert addressing that issue yesterday.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HEATHER NAUERT: When a nation clamps down on social media or websites or Google or news sites, we ask the question, what are you afraid of? We support the Iranian people, and we support their voices being heard.
CHANG: How are messages like that from the U.S. being received in Iran?
PARSI: Well, the message may actually be something that people would agree with.
CHANG: Yeah.
PARSI: The problem is that the messenger is not someone that they tend to agree with.
CHANG: Right. Right.
PARSI: Right now, the Trump administration and President Trump himself is not a popular person in Iran. For the last year, he's been pursuing policies that the Iranian people, including clearly people who have very strong negative feelings towards the Iranian government - nevertheless, they found those policies very antagonistic against Iranian people. Take for instance the Muslim ban. This is something that has made it very difficult for Iranians to be able to visit their family here in the United States or be able to come and study here. Iranian nationals have been affected more by this than any other nationality 'cause it's the biggest group amongst those countries that are affected.
CHANG: Right.
PARSI: And it's quite insulting to a lot of people because he's targeting Iran and accusing all Iranians of being potential terrorists, but he's not doing anything about Saudi Arabia.
CHANG: So the show of support right now from President Trump is not exactly galvanizing to these protesters.
PARSI: Having Donald Trump's support is not a political-plus in the Iranian political context.
CHANG: I want to talk about differences you see between the protests in Iran in 2009 and these protests going on now. Besides access to the Internet - obviously, there's a huge difference there - what are some other important differences you see?
PARSI: There's a huge amount of differences. First of all, these protests in 2009 were much larger. We're talking about more than 2 million people on the streets of Tehran a couple of days after the fraudulent elections then. Now we're talking about a couple of thousand people, but it's much more widespread. And it's primarily in the smaller cities. It has kind of reached the big cities, but it's not really taking root there. It's actually happening in places that many people haven't even heard of. And part of the reason for that is because it's a completely different demographic of people that are protesting now.
2009, it was the educated. It was the middle class. It was the reformist, the green movement. I've been talking to some of the organizers of the green movement, and they're completely taken by surprise of this. They're on the sidelines. They had no idea this was coming. They were not part of this. And to a certain extent, they've even kept a calculated distance from these protests because they're not entirely clear of what the direction is going. Moreover, this specific demographic, much poorer, much less hopeful. And - in a way that one person described it to me - they feel they have absolutely nothing to lose.
They are also people who do not seem to buy in - perhaps, they're giving up or at least at this point - they're not buying in to the idea that you can change the system from within or that you can change it through reform. That's why you have these calls for the complete overthrow of the government. That's very different from the green movement. That was a reform movement that worked within the system - was obviously very, very much opposed to what was taking place, but they were not operating outside of it.
CHANG: That's Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council. Thank you very much for coming in this morning.
PARSI: Thank you for having me.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin with a story about how every penny really does count or, in this case, the Chinese equivalent. One man in China had accumulated so many coins he used them to buy a car. The man hauled in 10 boxes of coins to the car dealership, and because money is money, the dealership closed its office for the afternoon so staff could count out the $11,000 in spare change. So next time you find a quarter in your couch, just think, you only need roughly 44,000 more to buy yourself a new ride. It's MORNING EDITION.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
In 1976, a young Senate candidate from Utah ran with this slogan - what do you call a senator who served in office for 18 years? You call him home. That candidate won. His name was Orrin Hatch, and more than 40 years later, he still holds that Senate seat. He is the longest-serving Republican senator in history, and he's just announced he plans to retire when his seventh term ends a year from now.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Over the holidays, Orrin Hatch's hometown paper, The Salt Lake Tribune, said in an editorial that Hatch should leave the Senate. It cited a, quote, "utter lack of integrity that rises from his unquenchable thirst for power" - strong words there. George Pyle is The Tribune's editorial page editor, and he joins us now. Mr. Pyle, thanks for being with us this morning.
GEORGE PYLE: Good morning.
MARTIN: Why did you and your paper call for Hatch to step away?
PYLE: Well, mainly that we thought he had promised that he would six years ago when he ran the last time. He was making it pretty clear that that would be his last term. And he basically froze a generation of Utah politicians who might have been ready to take over for him. It's very difficult to raise money or set up an organization if you think that you're - that's going to be blocked by a long-term incumbent like that. So when he started making noises in the last year or so about how he might seek yet another term that would be his eighth, we thought he was way out of line and we called him on it.
And we were also upset about the fact that some of the things he promised to do the last time, such as settle the immigration issues, particularly the DREAMers, the people who have been brought here as children, and some other things that he said he would take care of in renewing his children's health initiative, which was his and Ted Kennedy's creation. He wasn't able to accomplish either of those things in the past six years, and there didn't look like a great deal of opportunity to think that if he got an eighth term that he would be able to do it then.
MARTIN: But it's up to the voters - right? - and the voters kept picking him.
PYLE: Well, they kept picking him, but there were polls recently that said that maybe 70, 75 percent of Utahans didn't want him to run again, hoped that he would retire. Nobody wanted him to resign, to get out early, but to finish up this term and keep the promise that it would be his last.
MARTIN: How - so now he's going to step down. How will he be remembered? I mean, what is his political legacy in Utah?
PYLE: Well, the most obvious thing is just the length of it. The accomplishments are kind of hard to list, especially if the CHIP program doesn't come back. That was something that he was very much behind. I think what a lot of people will remember are the days when he was a leader in bipartisanship, when he would reach across the aisle and make deals with his friend Senator Kennedy and others. And in the last year or so, he seems to have picked up the idea that bipartisanship is something that people don't do anymore, that everybody needs to be hyperpartisan and tribal and do nothing but stick up for your own side.
MARTIN: So now Orrin Hatch is clearing the way. Many people would suggest for Mitt Romney to launch a run for that Senate seat. He's a favored son there, even though Massachusetts has been his primary residence for a long time. Would Romney be a shoo-in for this seat?
PYLE: Just about. I mean, he's very well thought of here. I mean, the Mormon legacy is part of it. More directly, he's created - the 2002 Winter Olympics, which had been mired under a great deal of scandal before he came in. We don't know for sure that he's going to run, but the symptoms point in that way.
MARTIN: George Pyle - he is the editor of The Salt Lake Tribune editorial page. Thanks so much for your time this morning.
PYLE: Thank you.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The Trump administration's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital is still having ripple effects. Palestinians say the U.S. can no longer be a fair mediator between Palestinians and Israelis. And now President Trump is responding. On Twitter yesterday, he said the Palestinians don't give the U.S. any, quote, "appreciation or respect." And he questioned whether the U.S. should cut off aid payments.
To explain all of this we have NPR's Daniel Estrin on the line from Jerusalem now. Hey, Daniel.
DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: Good morning.
CHANG: Good morning. So what prompted this tweet from President Trump, you think?
ESTRIN: President Trump is reacting to the Palestinian backlash against his recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Palestinians say it's not fair. They also have claims in Jerusalem. And so they say they won't participate in any U.S.-led peace process. But the Palestinians rely on hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. And so Trump tweeted, with the Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?
CHANG: Well, yesterday, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley, said Trump was considering freezing funds to a U.N. agency that funds Palestinian refugees. Would the president really stop that funding? How would Israelis feel about that?
ESTRIN: I'm skeptical about it. I think in many ways American aid is in American interest. It helps maintain stability in the Palestinian territories. The U.S. is, for instance, the biggest funder of the U.N. agency that helps Palestinian refugees. And behind the scenes, the Israeli military is afraid that if that aid stops there would be a humanitarian disaster.
I spoke with former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro about all of this. He's now at the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies. And he says whenever Congress in the past has held up aid to the Palestinians, the Israeli government has quietly advocated for getting Congress to eventually release those funds.
CHANG: So even Israelis are not exactly supporting cutting off funds. So what's also been the reaction from the Palestinian side to these president's threats to cut off funding?
ESTRIN: One Palestinian official called it blackmail. They're very angry at it. And actually, regarding Israel, Trump said something very interesting in his tweet. He said by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital, in return, the Israelis would have to pay more in peace negotiations with the Palestinians. And an Israeli Cabinet minister said Israel should be very wary about that statement. So looking forward I think the question now is, will Trump still try to push for what he has called the ultimate deal for peace between Israelis and Palestinians? And, you know, now can he get the Palestinians to work with him again?
CHANG: All right, that's NPR's Daniel Estrin in Jerusalem. Thank you very much for joining us.
ESTRIN: You're welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF PORTICO QUARTET'S "ENDLESS")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
For almost 30 years, Peter Martins shaped the New York City Ballet. He was the company's ballet master in chief, the main fundraiser and most influential voice until this week, when he became yet another powerful man who lost his job after allegations of sexual misconduct. Some two dozen women and some men have accused Martins of behavior including physical violence and sexual harassment.
New York Times reporter Robin Pogrebin broke this story, and she joins us now. Welcome to the program.
ROBIN POGREBIN: Thank you so much. Good to be here.
MARTIN: These stories unfortunately have become to be somewhat formulaic. Everyone starts asking the same question - how could this have happened for so long? What did you learn in your reporting that would answer that question in this case?
POGREBIN: What was particularly fascinating about this particular field is that you didn't have clear victims who were coming forward sort of calling foul. You had a real culture of sort of indoctrination under a very powerful, charismatic leader who had admittedly done some very positive things in terms of bringing this company into the 21st century, but at the same time had been able to sort of reign unchecked for a long time with a kind of behavior that many experienced as bullying and to some extent damaging to their kind of psychological experience and to their careers.
And people were loath to speak out. And only after sort of digging over a number of weeks through my reporting do these experiences come out as formative and decisive. And finally, the ballet seems to be paying attention and have taken action.
MARTIN: Peter Martins was a successful fundraiser. He brought in a whole lot of money to the ballet. Did that play into this?
POGREBIN: I think in this case and - as well as other nonprofit organizations face the same conundrum as this is a company that is largely successful. They've had some financial difficulties in the past, but right now they're kind of going strong. They've been getting good critical reviews. They are bringing in money and are sort of financially stable. And in a case like that when you have a board full of volunteers they're basically, you know, on some level happy to go to the black-tie galas and sort of enjoy the fruits of this success and not look sort of behind the scenes at perhaps the underbelly of an organization like this where some people are suffering and not sort of enjoying this in a positive way.
And this goes back years. I mean, we're talking about over 30 years of people experiencing in the company a kind of body shaming by him, a verbal and physical abuse on some level, and also a kind of a sexual favoritism that seems to kind of have skewed the meritocracy in a way that people found demoralizing.
MARTIN: What will be the repercussions of this? I mean, his departure will leave a big opening there. I mean, what are the consequences of this shift at the ballet and through the larger world of dance?
POGREBIN: It's a good question because I think in addition to finding a successor to him - and there are several candidates out there - this is prompting a real kind of re-evaluation and kind of introspection on the part of this institution and other nonprofits about, you know, whether this culture has to change, a culture that is largely defined by patriarchy, by one powerful leader at the top, and really just a kind of a soul-searching that actually could be healthy in the end.
MARTIN: Robin Pogrebin. She covers the art world for The New York Times. Thanks so much.
POGREBIN: Thank you for having me.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The Senate convenes today for the first time in this new year. And two new members will be sworn in right off the bat. Minnesota lieutenant governor Tina Smith takes Al Franken's seat. And Doug Jones will be the first Democrat sworn into an Alabama Senate seat in 25 years. They join the Senate as Congress gets ready for midterm elections this fall. We're joined in the studio by NPR's Kelsey Snell. Hey, Kelsey.
KELSEY SNELL, BYLINE: Hi.
MARTIN: Two new Democratic senators. They're going to make the Republicans' margin in the Senate that much smaller, right?
SNELL: Right. So now we are going from a 52-48 Republican majority to a 51-48 majority - or 51-49 - remembering that Tina Smith is filling the seat of another Democrat, Al Franken.
MARTIN: Yeah.
SNELL: The one person we're watching the most is going to be Doug Jones. When he was elected, there were a number of Republican officials who called on him to act like a Republican because he's representing a lot of Republicans in Alabama. We don't actually expect him to do that. But there will be a lot of talk about that once he gets started. Democrats are also hoping that his addition gives them the space to tell Republicans that they need to come to their side on things like spending and DACA, which is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration issue. And, you know, they are hoping - Democrats are hoping - there will be a lot more pressure for Republicans to wheel and deal this year than they saw last year.
MARTIN: So where's the wheeling and dealing going to happen? I mean, when you think about the Senate more generally, what are the primary items on their agenda when they get back to work?
SNELL: The big thing that we're watching first - this idea of spending caps. So the Republicans and Democrats started conversations almost as early as Thanksgiving about a way to increase spending levels for the rest of the fiscal year. That may sound like not that big of a deal, but Republicans have been resisting the idea of funding major spending programs on the domestic side, things that people rely on every day. And Democrats want to make sure that those are funded at the same level as military priorities. So the hope is that they will reach a deal sometime maybe this week or next week, so they can pass a new spending bill, since it's unfinished business left over from last year.
MARTIN: Yeah.
SNELL: (Laughter).
MARTIN: So 2018 is also going to be the last year for the Senate's longest-serving member. Republican Orrin Hatch is set to retire. How's that going to change the Senate?
SNELL: Yeah. Today is actually the 40th anniversary of the day that Hatch was sworn into office in 1977.
MARTIN: Wow.
SNELL: So it is a big departure. He has been a mainstay of a lot of, again, bipartisan negotiations. He helped write the Children's Health Insurance Program. He's done a lot of religious freedom work. And he was an architect of that big tax plan that passed at the end of the year. His departure really does make a big difference because it's an open seat. We're seeing that former governor and former vice presidential candidate Mitt Romney may be throwing his hat into the ring. He just changed his location on his Twitter page to say that he is in Utah...
MARTIN: Yeah, I saw that.
SNELL: ...Reminding people that he's in Utah.
MARTIN: Changed from Massachusetts to Utah.
SNELL: Yeah.
MARTIN: So that's an indicator.
SNELL: So reminding people he's available. But he also is one of many powerful Republican chairmen who retired, leaving open seats where Democrats hope they can make some challenges and pick up more seats, particularly in the House, where they are hoping for a wave election this year.
MARTIN: Are we really talking about midterm elections in January?
SNELL: I know. It's - what? - third day of the year.
MARTIN: Yeah.
SNELL: And we're already thinking about November.
MARTIN: Yes. Do it. That's what we do.
SNELL: There are a lot of people who have been thinking about this for some time. Democrats really do hope that this is a year they can turn over a lot of seats, particularly in the suburbs and areas in California. There are eight open seats - well, eight contested seats - in California that Democrats really think they could pick up. And we're also looking at places like New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where they're hoping that they could retake control of the House.
MARTIN: NPR's Kelsey Snell. Thanks so much, Kelsey.
SNELL: Thank you.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Now let's take a look at one area of interest to congressional panels looking into President Trump's ties to Russia back when he was campaigning for office. It's a 35-page document that's come to be known as the Steele dossier. It was commissioned by a political research firm, Fusion GPS, to prove the connection between the campaign of then-candidate Trump and officials in the Russian government.
The Steele dossier is back in the news because the founders of Fusion GPS claim they have been attacked and misrepresented by the conservative media and by President Trump himself. They've testified before Congress behind closed doors. And they claim that their testimony will set the record straight. To unpack all of this, we are joined now by journalist and author Luke Harding. He writes for The Guardian and joins us now from their offices in London. Thanks for joining us.
LUKE HARDING: Thank you.
CHANG: So can you just for a moment take us back to the origins of the Steele dossier? What is this thing, and why did it become such a big deal?
HARDING: Well, Christopher Steele is a former MI6 - that's British intelligence - spy with extensive knowledge of the Soviet Union, where he lived, and then Russia. And he went into private business intelligence in 2009 and has a pretty kind of solid track record both in London, where I am, and in Washington - pretty well-regarded. And he was hired by Glenn Simpson from Fusion GPS, really, to answer a sort of simple question in the spring of 2016, which was, what are Donald Trump's connections, business or otherwise, to Russia?
CHANG: OK. And what did the dossier find?
HARDING: Well, I mean, the dossier found, really, what Steele described as a kind of conspiracy going back a long way - at least five years - a transactional relationship where Trump was passing information - or people around him were passing information - to Moscow about Russian oligarchs living in the United States. And by way of kind of return, the Russians were sort of helping Trump's kind of nascent political career. And now, of course, we know what happened last year. We've had inquiries, but we've also had kind of hacking. And we've had U.S. intelligence saying unambiguously that they believe that Moscow and Vladimir Putin tried to kind of push Donald Trump across the line.
CHANG: And we should add that much of what appears in the dossier is still unsubstantiated and is in dispute. Can you tell us a little bit about the founders of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson and Peter Frisch. Who are they? They're journalists, correct?
HARDING: Well, they're former journalists. I mean, Glenn Simpson was a distinguished correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. He specialized in what you might call post-Soviet murk, Russian organized crime and the way that kind of Vladimir Putin's kind of country has seen a kind of merger between criminal elements in the state. And so he was someone with a kind of track record. He's a gun for hire. I mean, he's worked for kind of different clients over the years. But I think he - I mean, I can't speak for him, but I think he's been increasingly frustrated with the sort of partisan way that Republicans have gone after his firm.
And there's one very important aspect to his kind of article, which is that the FBI, he says, began investigating Trump and Russia not because of the Steele dossier but because of separate warnings from intelligence agencies in my country, the United Kingdom, but also in Europe and, indeed, Australia who are picking up meetings between Donald Trump campaign people and Russian intelligence assets. And this is what galvanized the whole inquiry.
CHANG: And just to - why is it so important to Glenn Simpson to make it clear that the Steele dossier did not trigger the Russia investigation?
HARDING: Because these attacks on Fusion and Glenn Simpson's personal credibility fall away if the dossier was the only source of reporting. And you can say - I actually personally think the dossier is broadly correct. But if you say it's all wrong, false, fake news and so on, then you have no inquiry. But more problematic for the White House is the fact that the U.S.'s very good allies who routinely share intelligence were saying as early as late 2015 and spring 2016, wake up. There are some worrying contacts going on in London and other European cities between, basically, Russian spies and Trump people. And you should know about this. Now, that's much harder to dismiss. And I think it's more problematic for President Trump.
CHANG: And why did investigators on the Hill become so interested in investigating Fusion GPS eventually? They sat for 21 hours of testimony or something like that.
HARDING: Yeah. I mean, I think this is probably one for Glenn Simpson to answer. But I think it's a kind of classic smear. And you focus on process, who paid for what and so on. And I'd make two points. First of all, when Christopher Steele began investigating all of this stuff, he didn't know who the client was. He was simply putting this query out to his sources, who, by the way, had proved reliable in other areas. So I think Steele is someone with a credible track record who was alarmed by what he discovered and alerted the FBI.
CHANG: Why do you think they want their testimony to be released? I mean, they say that it will set the record straight. What do you think the testimony will show? What do they say it will show?
HARDING: Well, they say it will show that Fusion GPS are a kind of professional outfit who were relying on or employing or subcontracting Steele, a kind of professional with a kind of good track record and that they will be kind of vindicated. And, ultimately, the most important question here is, is the Steele dossier true, and is collusion true? And I think Steele feels - and Glenn Simpson feels - that, sooner or later, they will be vindicated.
CHANG: But do you think there's any reason to believe that that testimony will actually be released?
HARDING: Well, it's not in the interests of congressional Republicans to do that.
CHANG: Right.
HARDING: So I suspect for now we'll have to wait.
CHANG: All right. That's The Guardian's Luke Harding. Thank you so much for joining us.
(SOUNDBITE OF JACOO'S "LONGING")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
As we heard yesterday, manufacturing accounts for nearly a quarter of Germany's economy. In the U.S., it's about half that. American presidents have long envied Germany's ability to generate well-paying manufacturing jobs. NPR's John Ydstie found that a key element of Germany's success is their apprenticeship training program.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: Nineteen-year-old apprentice Henrik Tillmann is sitting at a workbench at Hebmuller Aerospace.
HENRIK TILLMANN: I prepare it for you, OK?
YDSTIE: So you're going to build it from bottom up here. Oh, I see.
TILLMANN: Yes. Yes.
YDSTIE: Yeah.
Tillmann is assembling a valve that will be used in a commercial aircraft galley kitchen or lavatory.
Do you know what it - where it goes in the airplane?
TILLMANN: Yeah, it's for the galleys.
YDSTIE: Tillmann is training to be an industrial clerk. Valve assembly will not be part of his job, but he will be a better clerk, says his boss, Axel Hebmuller, because he'll know this valve inside out when he describes it for customers.
AXEL HEBMULLER: I think it's much easier for the young people to understand what they're learning when they get a little practical work with it because then they can seeing what they learn at school.
YDSTIE: As an apprentice, Tillmann spends 3 1/2 days here at work each week and 1 1/2 days at a government-funded school. Hebmuller, a co-founder of this firm, located near Dusseldorf, says small companies like his rely on apprentices. In fact, that's how he started his career.
HEBMULLER: I was an apprentice at the local bank. This was where I got my economy degrees.
YDSTIE: Hebmuller says only three of the 16 people who work for his company went to university.
HEBMULLER: Even in some of the big, big companies in Germany, in the upper management levels, you have a lot of people that only had an apprentice and don't have any university degree.
YDSTIE: Every year, about half a million young Germans enter the workforce in apprenticeship programs. They provide a steady stream of highly qualified industrial workers that help Germany maintain a reputation for producing top-quality products. Felix Rauner, a professor at the University of Bremen, is one of the world's leading authorities on apprenticeships and vocational education. He says U.S. presidents have noticed Germany's success.
FELIX RAUNER: Every president of United States in the last 30 years, after becoming elected, said, oh, we should implement the apprenticeship system.
YDSTIE: And Donald Trump is no exception. Last June at the White House, Trump signed an executive order aimed at boosting the number of U.S. apprenticeships by nearly tenfold to 5 million. But experts doubt the move will have much impact because of a lack of funding. Professor Rauner says historically, the U.S. approach to vocational education has been ineffective, partly because it's often not directly connected to specific jobs at real companies. Also, says Rauner, U.S. society has stigmatized vocational education, so most American parents see college as the only path to status and a good career for their children. But in Germany, there's still lots of prestige attached when someone trained through apprenticeship achieves master status.
RAUNER: If, for example, someone gets a master title, it would be published in the local newspaper, and there is a huge celebration. It is an important event. No one in Germany is interested if someone gets a master degree in a university.
YDSTIE: Dr. Ludger Deitmer, Rauner's colleague at the University of Bremen, suggests the failure of the U.S. to widely provide this kind of training has hurt U.S. manufacturing.
LUDGER DEITMER: Vocational training should be one of the medicines - a key medicines in how to make America great again. Why not? This is exactly what the country needs.
YDSTIE: But one hurdle is getting American companies to buy in because of the cost of training an apprentice. In Germany, a firm bears the cost of in-house training and pays the apprentice a modest wage.
DEITMER: But in the second year, they're already doing 60 percent of the workload of a fully skilled worker. So there is a return.
YDSTIE: Deitmer says that cheap apprentice labor reduces the net training cost to the company to a little over $10,000. And he says the real payoff for the companies is that after three years, they've got a highly skilled worker. U.S. firms often complain about a lack of skilled workers, but the U.S. has struggled to create widespread apprenticeship programs.
Felix Rauner says growing a viable American apprenticeship system will be difficult, partly because the U.S. has historically had a barrier between schools and business, and partly because of the fractured nature of U.S. education, with 50 states in charge.
John Ydstie, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRAMPIQUE'S "EARTH")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Imagine having one of the worst moments in your professional life play out in front of 5 million people. ABC News anchor Dan Harris doesn't have to. In 2004, he had a panic attack on live television after years of working in war zones and using drugs to cope with the stress. That moment led him to start meditating. He wrote a book called "10% Happier" about his experiences with meditation and its potential health benefits. It became a best-seller, but he still thought the impact fell short.
DAN HARRIS: In that first book, I made this naive assumption that anybody who did read it would want to meditate and actually would meditate. And it was pretty quickly after the book came out that I started to realize that that is just not true. It's just complete underestimation of how hard it is for us to create healthy habits.
MARTIN: Now, Harris is out with a new book with co-author Jeff Warren. It's called "Meditation For Fidgety Skeptics."
What was the No. 1 obstacle you heard from people when they described why they just couldn't get into it or why they haven't been able to maintain a meditation practice?
HARRIS: Time. When I wrote my first book, I was dealing with this - the No. 1 obstacle at that time was that people thought meditation was weird. I think that...
MARTIN: Yeah - some kind of stigma.
HARRIS: Yeah. I think that's still true, but I think it's going away. But so now we have this new issue, which is that people want to do meditation, especially at this time of year, the whole new year, new you thing. But they feel like it's just another thing on their to-do list that is further stressing them out, which of course defeats the whole purpose. And so for people, my answer to this fear is I've got good news and even better news.
The good news is that I think five to 10 minutes a day is a great meditation habit, and I've spent a lot of time talking to the neuroscientists who study what meditation does to the brain, and they haven't cracked the dosage question fully, but generally speaking, people, the scientists, say, yes, five to 10 minutes should be enough to derive the advertised benefits of meditation. So that's the good news. The better news is that I truly believe one minute counts and that it doesn't need to be one minute every day. You can shoot for daily-ish (ph).
MARTIN: So let's talk about this.
HARRIS: Yeah.
MARTIN: Because I read the book clearly and that stood out to me. Oh, I only have to do this one minute a day. So I sat the other day for a minute, and my mind was all over the place. And I guess that's supposed to improve. But by the end of the minute, I just felt like, well, now I just know how undisciplined my brain is.
HARRIS: Let me reframe that whole experience for you...
MARTIN: OK.
HARRIS: ...As a victory because the primary insight for beginning meditators is that it is a zoo inside of our skulls. We are having this nonstop conversation with ourselves about which most of us are unaware. But when you tune into it, you see how negative, repetitive, ceaselessly self-referential it is. And when you see that, that is a victory. Why? Because when you see how absolutely bonkers you are, you have a much better chance of not being owned by the insanity so that the voice in your head, which is in the business of giving you terrible ideas, like, oh, yeah, you should finish that sleeve of Oreos or you could say the thing that is going to ruin the next 48 hours of your marriage or whatever, that voice has less purchase over your actual action.
MARTIN: So you're saying that just by recognizing in this 60 seconds that I'm meditating if there is just one moment when I recognize that I've wandered and I've brought myself back, that is the work, that is the practice and the victory.
HARRIS: Yes, yes. That is the bicep curl for your brain. And this is what shows up on the brain scans in the areas of the brain that regulate attentions or your ability to focus but also in self-awareness, which is, in meditation speak, mindfulness. But this self-awareness, this ability to see your inner urges, impulses, desires, conversation, without being carried away by it is a game-changing skill.
MARTIN: You ended up talking with some young people who were transitioning from prison to life on the outside. This was in California. And this was interesting because you came in thinking, oh, we can help these guys learn some meditation skills that will hopefully help them make this really challenging transition. And it turned out that they were already employing a lot of these strategies in their own life. They may not have - they just weren't calling it mindfulness or meditation, right?
HARRIS: It's really useful and humbling for somebody like me who is, you know, an unabashed meditation evangelist that there are lots of ways to increase your wellbeing. And meditation is one of them but not the only one. And that really hit home for me in spending time with these kids who are part of a group called InsideOUT Writers, which is run by screenwriters in Hollywood. And they teach formerly incarcerated youth and presently incarcerated youth how to write as a way to deal with their life situation. And we spent some time with the alums of the program who regularly meet and write together. And what I saw is that they have a practice.
There are all sorts of practices that have beneficial results. And for them, the act of writing, the act of fellowship, that boosts their self-awareness muscles and their compassion muscles every bit as much as meditation does. And so it is so important when talking about well-being not to get stuck on one thing only. I think it's important to, you know, use every arrow in the quiver, and that includes sleep, nutrition, exercise, having good friends and meditation. I just think meditation needs to be in there as well.
MARTIN: You reveal in the book that you meditate for two hours a day. Come on.
HARRIS: I know. It's ridiculous.
MARTIN: How do you - where do you find - I mean, that is such a cliche question, but literally where do you find the time?
HARRIS: First of all, let me just issue this caveat. I'm reluctant always to talk about my meditation dosage because people - I'm...
MARTIN: It's a pretty high standard.
HARRIS: It is.
MARTIN: Like, no one's going to get there (laughter).
HARRIS: Right. And I know how the mind of a skeptic works, which is you're just looking for an excuse not to do the thing.
MARTIN: Right.
HARRIS: And so I don't want this to be an excuse. I don't want people to say, oh, well, that's where this thing goes and I don't have time for it - not true. One good way to think about this is like exercise. You know, most of us, if we exercise, we know that we need 30 minutes of cardio a certain amount of days per week, and we do it grudgingly. There are some people, however, get really into it and do triathlons. And so for me, I think five to 10 minutes a day is an incredible habit - or just one minute a day.
But I got really interested. I'm writing these stupid books about meditation. I'm really into this thing, so I just allow myself to do it whenever I can - in the back seat of taxis, on airplanes, in my office before or after a show. And for me, it's just - the reason I want it to go up is the mind is trainable. Happiness is a skill. And if you can become 10 percent happier, what's the ceiling? And I really am interested in deriving the benefits at an even higher level.
MARTIN: Dan Harris - his new book is called "Meditation For Fidgety Skeptics." Dan, thank you so much.
HARRIS: Thank you. I really appreciate it.
(SOUNDBITE OF TYCHO'S "A WALK")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Temperatures inside many schools hovered around 40 degrees. That's because a lot of these schools are in bad shape. They've got ceilings that are falling in, some pipes that are bursting. Mary Rose Madden from member station WYPR reports that parents, teachers and students are angry, they are confused, and they are cold.
MARY ROSE MADDEN, BYLINE: Nikki Massie's 16-year-old daughter goes to one of Maryland's crown jewels, Baltimore City College High School. Built in 1839 with Gothic architecture, it looks like a castle. And it had very little heat this week. Massie says she was at work on Tuesday and started getting texts from her daughter. The first one said it was really cold inside the school.
NIKKI MASSIE: And progressively, her texts got a little bit more desperate sounding, with the last one saying that she couldn't feel her feet at one point. And I texted her back, and I said, are you joking? And she says no.
MADDEN: Massie says her daughter has been cold at school before. It's an old, drafty building. But this - this was different.
MASSIE: She wrapped herself in a blanket as soon as she got home. And she stayed that way. And she actually sat on our sofa right next to the heating vent literally until it was time for her to go to bed at like about 10 o'clock.
MADDEN: That night, parents in the district heard from administrators for the first time. The email said they were working on the problems. The next morning, Massie's daughter felt sick. And there was a crucial question Massie needed answered - would there be heat in her daughter's school that day? She had a tough decision to make. City, as the school is known, is academically rigorous, and the workload is intense.
MASSIE: Do you keep your kids home and risk them falling behind versus sending them into an environment that - you know, I wouldn't put my worst enemy in a building that was unheated in this weather.
MADDEN: Sixty schools out of the 180 were open but without fully functioning heat this week. At Frederick Douglass High School, a burst pipe and fallen ceiling tiles destroyed numerous MacBooks and technology equipment for teaching kids to become EMTs. Dennis Morgan is a senior and says he's freezing.
DENNIS MORGAN: As of now, I have on like four shirts, two hoodies and a jacket - right? - and it's kind of hard to get comfortable when you got so many layers on. And you're not used to it, and you're still cold.
MADDEN: He says teachers are sharing their scarves with students.
MORGAN: We have teachers and our principal trying to help us. But Baltimore City Schools doesn't. They don't really listen to us.
MADDEN: Soon after we spoke, his high school was dismissed early. Yesterday, the Baltimore Teachers Union called on the district to close all the schools until the facility's crew could fully address the problems. City Schools CEO Sonja Santelises spoke to the public on Facebook Live. She said the operations teams worked through the holiday break, and they thought they were in good shape. But Monday night was another brutally cold evening, and that took its toll on the old infrastructure.
(SOUNDBITE OF FACEBOOK LIVE VIDEO)
SONJA SANTELISES: We had schools that were cold yesterday that were warmer today. The challenge was we had new schools today that were facing heating challenges.
MADDEN: The city is in the middle of building 26 new schools. But that will only help a fraction of the students, she said. The forecast looks like it's only getting colder. Santelises emphasized that, if needed, she will keep closing individual schools. Mom Nikki Massie says it makes it really hard to plan. However, she did get a robocall. It said student progress reports are in. But there was no progress report on the heat.
For NPR News, I'm Mary Rose Madden.
(SOUNDBITE OF MICHITA'S "INNER MONOLOGUE (INSTRUMENTAL)")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The winter storm hitting the East Coast today is part of a pattern of weather over a number of days. It had a prologue, and it's going to have an epilogue, too. So let's talk it all through in sequence. What comes before a bomb cyclone - the storm itself - and what comes after for much of the country? NPR's science reporter Rhitu Chatterjee has been tracking the storm. She's in our studios. Good morning.
RHITU CHATTERJEE, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: OK, so what was the preliminary to all of this?
CHATTERJEE: So the extremely cold temperatures that much of the U.S., especially eastern part of the country, has been experiencing over the past 10 days was one of the key ingredients for this storm. These cold temperatures were caused by really cold air, what scientists call jet streams, coming down from up north into most of the country. And when that air moved further south and met warm, moist air over the Atlantic, it caused a dramatic drop in air pressure, which is what scientists called a bomb cyclone.
INSKEEP: OK, so this cold air that my mom felt in Indiana, single digits, or in upstate New York or here in Washington D.C. where it was in the teens, that is one of the ingredients of this bomb cyclone.
CHATTERJEE: One of the key ingredients, yeah.
INSKEEP: Hits some warmer air coming up from the Caribbean or wherever. And what is a bomb cyclone as opposed to any other storm?
CHATTERJEE: Well, that's just a scientific term that describes this kind of cyclone that's formed by these two masses of warm and cold air. When they collide, it causes a very, very rapid drop in air pressure, and that's what they call bomb or bombogenesis. It's just a fancy term to describe this dramatic drop in air pressure in a very powerful storm that is going to intensify as it moves north on the - along the East Coast.
INSKEEP: What kind of effects could we see?
CHATTERJEE: So as we know, parts of the southern U.S. have already gotten snow - parts of the U.S. that don't usually get snow.
INSKEEP: Sure.
CHATTERJEE: But New England is really the region that's going to be really badly affected because the storm is going to intensify as it goes north. There are going to be very powerful winds, snow, 12 to 18 inches or more. There could be power outages. And people should be thinking about where they could stay warm if they lose power.
INSKEEP: So what's the epilogue, then, to this bomb cyclone?
CHATTERJEE: Well, this storm is going to subside by tomorrow. But what it's going to do is it's going to pull in more of that cold, frigid Arctic air over most of the country. So both on the East Coast, the Northeast and big chunks of the middle of the United States, the Great Lakes region, are going to see very, very frigid temperatures.
INSKEEP: Wait a minute. This super low pressure area, is it kind of like a black hole? It's going to suck air in its direction.
CHATTERJEE: Exactly, exactly.
INSKEEP: And it's going to be Canadian air, really cold air.
CHATTERJEE: Yeah, for many days to come.
INSKEEP: Meaning if I live in the Great Lakes or anywhere else, I'm going to be feeling the effects of this.
CHATTERJEE: Yes. Most of the middle of the country and east of that.
INSKEEP: Hundreds of miles from the coast. So I have to ask, as we do any time there's an extreme weather event like this or something we haven't really heard of, and I think most people hadn't heard of a bomb cyclone before, although I'm sure...
CHATTERJEE: It's pretty common actually.
INSKEEP: ...Meteorologists have. Is climate change any kind of a factor here?
CHATTERJEE: So, you know, scientists have a much better idea of climate change's connection - influence on hurricanes, but with these kinds of winter storms, they really don't know. The models aren't there quite yet, and they don't know whether there is a connection here.
INSKEEP: Well, listen, try to stay warm today, OK?
CHATTERJEE: You too, Steve, thank you.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Rhitu Chatterjee.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE CALM BLUE SEA'S "NOW THOSE ASHES ARE AT THE BOTTOM")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It was just a few months ago that President Trump spoke of his former adviser, Steve Bannon, like this.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I have a very good relationship, as you know, with Steve Bannon. Steve's been a friend of mine for a long time. I like Steve a lot.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
So that was then, and this is now. The president expressed a different view after quotes from Steve Bannon were released as excerpts from an upcoming book by journalist Michael Wolff. The former presidential adviser references the meeting that happened between a Russian lawyer and top Trump campaign officials, including Donald Trump Jr. Bannon is quoted as saying about the meeting, quote, "even if you thought that this was not treasonous or unpatriotic, and I happen to think it's all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately," end quote. According to the book, he went on to say they're going to crack Don Jr. like an egg on national TV. The president's reaction to all this - well, here's White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS: I think furious, disgusted would probably, certainly fit when you make such outrageous claims and completely false claims against the president, his administration and his family.
MARTIN: The president issued an official statement saying his one-time close confidant Steve Bannon, quote, "has nothing to do with my presidency and has lost his mind."
INSKEEP: Let's discuss that with NPR's congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, who's here. Good morning, Scott.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: Also our justice reporter Ryan Lucas - Ryan, good morning to you.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Good morning.
INSKEEP: First, the Bannon statement itself - the statements about Don Jr. in that meeting, calling it treasonous - why would he go there?
DETROW: You know, I think Steve Bannon has long denigrated Jared Kushner and basically any other top adviser in the Trump administration. He's often painted Kushner as someone who opposes Trump's populist agenda. And he just didn't seem to respect Kushner's political instincts.
INSKEEP: Oh, Kushner's involved in this meeting too you're talking about here.
DETROW: Yes.
INSKEEP: OK, so you've got that. And yet, he's using the word treasonous. It makes me wonder if you're Bannon - if you're somebody close to Trump, and you're using the word treasonous about somebody else close to Trump, are you affectively saying you're not treasonous?
DETROW: I mean, that's a good question. And Steve Bannon has not spoken publicly since this book came out. I think there's also a lot of questions about why Trump ramped it up to 11 on his response to Steve Bannon. You know, they have a complicated relationship. And Trump has long been frustrated by reports of Bannon's high influence in his orbit. But we should point out. When he says that Bannon wasn't that influential, Trump essentially made him co-chief of staff at the beginning of his administration.
INSKEEP: OK, Ryan, let's try to figure out where these Bannon statements fit into the investigation of Russian influence in the 2016 election. We're talking about a meeting during 2016. A Russian lawyer is there. Top campaign officials are there in this meeting in Trump Tower. Bannon has a label for it. He says it's unpatriotic or treasonous or something. And he used another phrase we won't repeat here. But does he say anything else?
LUCAS: He does. There - some of the excerpts reference a statement that he made saying that basically there's no way that Trump Jr. did not take the Russian delegation - if we want to call it that - that he didn't take the Russians up to the 26th floor of Trump Tower to meet with Trump himself. Now, Bannon doesn't offer any proof. He merely lays this statement out there. But it's important because Trump has said that he was not aware of any outreach - any overtures by the Russians during the 2016 campaign. So if it's true, it would fly in the face of that. And also those who were involved in the meeting itself have said that it didn't go anywhere. It was a bust. It fizzled. And we didn't do anything with it. So if Bannon's statement plays out - and, again, he didn't offer any proof - it could have an impact on how we view and understand the Russian connection.
INSKEEP: So - and we're talking about a statement from a former presidential adviser, close confidant but also, I mean, the head of Breitbart News. I mean, this is not somebody who is necessarily always known for absolute truth telling. So we can't say that we have evidence of anything here - but something that's going to be of interest to investigators?
LUCAS: Certainly something that will be of interest - I mean, Mueller's team and congressional investigators obviously want to understand anything that they can about that Trump Tower meeting that has been a subject of intense focus. And if Bannon can provide greater insight on what happened, I'm sure they will want to talk to him about that.
INSKEEP: Scott Detrow, hasn't this rupture been coming for a while?
DETROW: Certainly, I mean, Steve Bannon, once he left the White House, decided to declare war on Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and what he liked to frame as the Republican establishment - saying he was going after McConnell and that he was going to to push Republican challengers to Republican incumbents. So Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, many other congressional Republicans have long said Steve Bannon is not a political winner. He should have nothing to do with Trump's strategic decisions. They pointed at the fact that Steve Bannon played a large role in the fact that Republicans lost a Senate seat in Alabama. But, again, I go back to the fact that Steve Bannon did not make Donald Trump endorse Roy Moore and endorse Roy Moore in increasingly direct and forward ways leading up to that election. That was a choice that President Trump made as well.
INSKEEP: The president has also made a choice to send his lawyers after Steve Bannon.
DETROW: He has. There was a cease-and-desist letter issued last night from Trump's private lawyers - also a threat of a future lawsuit. But we should say. Over Trump's career, he has consistently threatened lawsuits and consistently not filed them after making those public threats.
INSKEEP: Let's talk about another lawsuit now, Ryan, because Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman - the guy who was running the campaign before Steve Bannon came on board - he's under indictment now and is now suing the Russia investigation led by Robert Mueller. What's that about?
LUCAS: Well, what Manafort alleges in the lawsuit is that the - Mueller - the special counsel Robert Mueller has basically overstepped his mandate by investigating issues that aren't related to the 2016 campaign. So if you remember, Manafort was charged with money laundering and other crimes that are related to his work in Ukraine that date back to 2005 - so not stuff that's directly tied to the question of Russian interference in the election. Now, Mueller's mandate allows him to investigate any matters that may arise in the course of the investigation. And this would include something that has arisen in the course of the investigation. So legal experts have certainly questioned the seriousness of the lawsuit. A spokesperson for the DOJ called it frivolous but also said that Manafort can file what he wants.
INSKEEP: Very briefly, another aftereffect of the 2016 election, Scott Detrow, is this voter fraud commission, which president Trump said he wanted after claiming there'd been massive fraud against him. What happened to that commission?
DETROW: Well, it is being disbanded. The White House blames states not turning over information the commission requested. This commission's work had basically ground to a halt because of that and also a lot of legal challenges that opened it up to records requests, among other things. And we should point out this all came back to a response to a Trump tweet claiming he could have won the popular vote without voter fraud. There was never any credible evidence backing that claim up.
INSKEEP: Gentlemen, it is only the fourth day of the year. Thank you for coming by - really appreciate it. That's NPR's Scott Detrow and Ryan Lucas.
DETROW: Thank you.
LUCAS: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: OK, much of the country faced brutally cold weather even before the storm called a bomb cyclone.
MARTIN: Yeah, several deaths have been blamed on cold temperatures that have gripped parts of the U.S., from Texas to New England. So what's going to happen with this storm that is now on the move up the Eastern Seaboard?
INSKEEP: NPR's Rhitu Chatterjee is going to tell us. Good morning.
RHITU CHATTERJEE, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: Thanks for coming by. What is a bomb cyclone?
CHATTERJEE: That's just the scientific term for a kind of cyclone that is formed when a big mass of cold, dry air bumps into a big mass of warm air - warm, moist air. And that collision creates a lot of energy that causes the air pressure to drop dramatically creating a very powerful cyclone like this one. And with this cyclone, what's happened is the cold that we've been experiencing for the last 10 days is one of the ingredients. That's because of cold air coming down from Canada which bumped into warm air over the Atlantic creating this storm.
INSKEEP: Oh, those of us in the eastern United States have been feeling the preliminary parts of this then.
CHATTERJEE: Exactly exactly. And as this storm moves up north, the air pressure is going to keep dropping, so it's going to get more and more powerful as it moves up north along the East Coast.
INSKEEP: What's bomb-like about it?
CHATTERJEE: It's just the drop and continuing drop of air pressure. So as it moves north, the air pressure is just going to keep dropping, drawing in more air from around it, creating that eye of the cyclone as the storm moves.
INSKEEP: OK, we heard our colleague Sarah McCammon, who was on the beach - at, I believe, Virginia Beach yesterday - describing how surf was coming up onto the beach and freezing. Like, some of the water was freezing before it would go back out. So we see some very, very early effects of this. What are some of the more severe effects that people could see up and down the East Coast?
CHATTERJEE: So as I mentioned, as it moves north, it's going to get more powerful. So New England is going to be the worst-hit region. We're going to - states like Massachusetts and Maine are going to get 12 to 18 or even more of snow. And those winds - the winds are going to get really powerful storm surges and power outages. And so people in New England should actually start thinking about if the power goes out, where can they get some shelter to shelter from the cold because the temperatures are going to continue dropping.
INSKEEP: You know as, we've gone through this cold weather and then heard about this storm, I started thinking about that movie "The Day After Tomorrow," the climate change movie which includes a massive - I mean, ridiculously massive snowstorm. But is there some connection between a storm like this - a series of events like this and climate change?
CHATTERJEE: So with - actually scientists have a much better idea with climate change and hurricanes. With winter storms like this, they actually don't really know whether there is a connection. The models just aren't that good. And so we don't know.
INSKEEP: Well, it's good to state frankly what we don't know. Thanks for coming by.
CHATTERJEE: Thank you, Steve.
INSKEEP: We'll be listening as we learn more. That's NPR's Rhitu Chatterjee this morning as we prepare for a massive storm moving up the East Coast.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRAMPIQUE'S "EARTH")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Digital spy tools are changing divorce as we know it. NPR spoke with dozens of lawyers and investigators who say more and more couples are turning to surveillance when their marriage falls apart. From something as simple as the Find My iPhone feature to insidious spyware that can be installed in a spouse's computer or phone, these tools are cheap and easy to use. NPR's Aarti Shahani has the story.
AARTI SHAHANI, BYLINE: A woman discovers she wasn't going crazy. It wasn't in her head. Her ex-husband was in fact following her every move.
(SOUNDBITE OF BEEPS)
SHAHANI: This is the recording from a police precinct where a sergeant is taking her statement.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER: Just for the record, state your first, middle and last name.
SHAHANI: We're going to call her M. NPR interviewed her, her lawyers, the sergeant, and we reviewed her court filings and those of her ex-husband. We won't disclose their names or where she is because she says she fears for her safety. All summer, M. worried her ex-husband was stalking her. As she tells the sergeant, her ex would know where she was, whom she visited, down to the time of day and street.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
M: There's not really much I can do, so I've understood that what I have to do is I have to make sure that I'm as careful as possible, I have as many safety plans as possible...
SHAHANI: M. started to change the way she drove - slowing down, driving in circles - in case a private eye was on her. But she didn't see one. Then she went online, and she learned about GPS trackers, small devices you can slip into a car to monitor where it goes 24/7. She looked for one and couldn't find any, but then at her local auto shop, the mechanic found a GPS tracker hidden near the front left tire. That's why she came to this police station.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER: How did you know they found this?
M: Chris, the service representative, showed me. She pushed the button in order to show that there was still 25-50 percent energy on it.
SHAHANI: Meaning the batteries were fresh, not old. It had been nearly a year since M. left her ex-husband, moved out. But he couldn't let go, and through technology, he didn't have to. This might sound highly invasive, though it turns out, at least in this case, it's completely legal. M.'s husband acknowledged through a lawyer's letter and in family court that he had the GPS tracker installed. The sergeant from the police station - he did a criminal investigation, but he tells NPR prosecutors would not prosecute because the car was jointly owned. If it belongs to both of them, the ex has a right to track it.
M: I'm now fully aware that all of those times that I thought I was keeping myself safe, all of those times that I was leaving town, all of those times that I was staying in different places or staying at friends' houses, I never was safe.
SHAHANI: Welcome to divorce in the 21st century, where what it means to be safe, how much privacy you're entitled to, is an open question. NPR talked with dozens of marital experts, lawyers, investigators and a leading family judge, and they tell NPR, digital spying is changing divorce as we know it. The tools are abundant, clients use it, and the laws are murky.
M. doesn't think her ex stopped at the GPS tracker. She suspects he used another more invasive tool too - spyware on her phone. Sitting in her lawyer's office, M. tells the story of how he went from love of her life to control freak. She says it started with verbal fights over the baby crying or shopping bills. Then one day - she explained this in court, too - he choked her.
M: And I wasn't scared. I was shocked. I wasn't scared at all. There was no moment in that interaction where I was scared. I was too shocked. I just couldn't believe it.
SHAHANI: And was now worried about physical safety - hers and her child's. She didn't leave right away. She stuck it out until this one night, she says, when he grabbed her and told her, you belong to me. It just clicked.
M: I can't explain it, but I knew we needed to leave, and we need to leave fast.
SHAHANI: M. took their child and fled. Then he filed for divorce. In family court, in her affidavits and oral testimony, M. laid out her fear of physical abuse and electronic surveillance. M. claimed her ex seemed to know the contents of her text messages, what friends she talked to, even after she left the house. Her ex denied all the allegations, and the judge - the judge focused on the physical stuff. That makes sense. Choking is a familiar offense where the harm is tangible. This newer, quieter intrusion - spying - is harder to grasp. M. gives NPR this one example of a creepy message her ex-husband sent.
M: I know all of the ways you've described to me to your friend. And snippets of how I described him were then forwarded to me as a text message.
SHAHANI: To this day, M. wonders if he knew this through spyware. These are apps. Like Netflix, you pay a subscription - say, 16.99 a month - and in return, you get to see everything on your target's phone, every incoming and outgoing message. M. didn't turn to the police because she figured in domestic cases, they investigate assault, not iPhones. Instead, M. went to the Apple Store, where she had to explain her situation in front of a lot of people at the Genius Bar. It was humiliating.
M: I can't be the only person who has no clue, goes into the Apple Store and starts jabbering about, I need help because I have stalking issues, which, in itself, sometimes makes people think that you are the stalker.
SHAHANI: M. said the Apple geniuses did not look for spyware on her phone. When they saw she was scared, she said, they helped her by swapping the device for a brand-new one. Unfortunately, that also meant the evidence was thrown out. This happens all the time in spyware cases, the experts tell NPR. Victims solve the immediate problem, but that hampers any future investigation. Spyware itself is not the crime. Dozens of companies sell it legally as a tool to monitor kids and employees. But using it secretly on your spouse - that typically is not legal. Back at the police station, M. spelled out for the sergeant how it feels to be watched anytime, any place.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER: Is there anything else that I need to know?
M: Yes, I'm terrified. I am absolutely terrified. I might still be functioning, but that doesn't mean that I'm not terrified.
SHAHANI: In court, M.'s ex agreed to stay away from her, and the judge ordered him to stay away from their child. He found M.'s fears for her child's safety were credible. While she has full custody now and no contact with her ex, she continues to wonder what he can and cannot see. Aarti Shahani, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF AETHER SONG, "CATHARSIS")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. If you look up the word maverick in the dictionary, the first definition is an independent-minded person. But the second definition is an unbranded calf, which is why in China the NBA's Dallas Mavericks are actually known by the rough translation the Little Cows. The team didn't so much like that so they asked their Chinese fans to come up with something else, and they did. The Mavericks will henceforth be known in China as the Lone Ranger Heroes. No offense, little cows. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort is suing the Justice Department and special counsel Robert Mueller. Manafort, of course, faces charges as part of the special counsel's Russia investigation. NPR's justice reporter Ryan Lucas has been following this, and he is in the studio with us this morning. Hey, Ryan.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: What is Manafort alleging here?
LUCAS: Well, what the lawsuit says is that Mueller has basically overstepped his mandate by investigating matters that aren't related to the 2016 campaign. Now, remember, Manafort and his former business partner, Rick Gates, have been charged with money laundering and other crimes related to work that they were doing in Ukraine for a pro-Russian Ukrainian party, and that work dates back to about 2005. The central focus of the Mueller investigation, of course, is potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.
MARTIN: Although he can broaden. Like, you can follow the investigation where it leads, right?
LUCAS: Exactly. Mueller's mandate allows him to investigate any matters that may arise in the course of the investigation. That's according to the order laid out by the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. And Rosenstein said publicly last month that Mueller has run everything by him that he's done, as the rules dictate, and that Mueller is running the investigation properly. Legal experts have certainly questioned the seriousness of Manafort's lawsuit, and a spokesperson for the Justice Department has called it frivolous but said that Manafort can file what he wants.
MARTIN: Yeah. So you say the legal ground of the suit may be tenuous at best, but it still pushes this narrative, right, that the president has been pushing, that other Republicans have been pushing, trying to delegitimize Robert Mueller in the investigation?
LUCAS: It does, and it certainly provides Trump and his allies another talking point on this front. Now, this campaign that you mention has been pretty consistent for some time now. And it's been Republicans in the House, largely, who have been questioning the legitimacy of Mueller's investigation. They've pointed to alleged political bias among members of Mueller's team. They've said that, you know, the upper ranks of the FBI are chock-full of anti-Trump folks, and this has really been a consistent kind of talking point over the past probably month or two months. Now, there was also the letter to Congress last month alleging that Mueller's people improperly obtained emails from the transition. You know, legal experts largely press that argument aside. But all of this, all of it really feeds into this broader narrative of alleged misdeeds by Mueller's team or, you know, Mueller's folks overstepping the bounds of what they should be investigating.
MARTIN: So while it may not change Manafort's destiny in any tangible way, politically it could serve to help the president himself.
LUCAS: It could, yes.
MARTIN: So I want to turn to the president's former chief strategist Steve Bannon because there's a lot of news about Mr. Bannon this morning. He's been quoted widely in this book that's expected to come out next week by journalist Michael Wolff really lambasting the president's family, in particular Don, Jr. But what is interesting about what he says as it pertains to the Russia investigation, this is ultimately something that could change the investigation in some way?
LUCAS: Well, I wouldn't say that it would change the investigation, but it certainly ties back into the investigation. It raises questions. So what we're referring to here is the excerpts from the book that basically alleged that the meeting in Trump Tower in June of 2016 that featured Donald, Jr., that featured Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and president's adviser, and Paul Manafort in the meeting that they had with a Russian lawyer. Now, the Russian lawyer, of course, was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton in this meeting, and Bannon says that this was treasonous. He suggests that this whole meeting was treasonous. But perhaps the most substantive nugget here is the suggestion that he makes that there's no way that Trump, Jr. didn't take the Russian lawyer up to meet Trump himself. Now, Bannon doesn't offer proof, but this is potentially important because it would contradict Trump's own assertions that he knew nothing about this specific outreach or any of the overtures made by Russians during the campaign.
MARTIN: And that might play into how Mueller is pursuing this investigation. We don't know, I guess.
LUCAS: We don't know, but certainly this is going to be of interest, as this meeting has been for quite some time for Mueller's folks.
MARTIN: NPR's Ryan Lucas. Thanks so much, Ryan.
LUCAS: Thank you.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
So there was a time when I was broke and living in New York City, which happens to a lot of people at some point in their lives. And there was one small pleasure that I could afford. I used to go to the Strand, a used bookstore, and search through floor after floor after floor of used books and find something cheap to read that I didn't even know I wanted when I walked in the door. So here's a tip of the hat to the owner of the Strand, Fred Bass, whose father founded the business in the 1920s. Fred Bass died Wednesday at age 89, and NPR's Lynn Neary has this tribute.
LYNN NEARY, BYLINE: If you don't know what people are talking about when they go on about how much they love the smell of books, then you probably have never visited the Strand. Its smell is matched only by its creaky wooden floors and endless random stacks of books that beg to be explored. And once you start wandering through the labyrinth of shelves, you can pretty much always find a book you didn't even know you wanted, leather-bound classics mix with musty old paperbacks of novels that were popular decades ago. And no one bothers you if you want to hang out for a while and browse through volumes of art, architecture or photographs. Back in 1996, Fred Bass told NPR he wasn't sure exactly how many books were in the store.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
FRED BASS: I haven't counted them, but we occupy four floors. And there's about eight miles of shelving, which we have figured out, give or take a quarter of a mile.
NEARY: Those miles grew to 18, a figure proudly touted by the Strand. Bass was just 13 when he started working in his father's store. During college, he arranged his schedule so he could work there every afternoon. He took a brief hiatus when he joined the Army for two years. In an interview with the radio show "From Scratch," Bass said he got hooked on books and took over the store even though his father discouraged him from doing so. And although the Strand eventually did sell some new books, his favorite part of the business always remained buying old books.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BASS: I'm a lucky man. I'm working at a job I like. I mean, I let my daughter run the operation and have her staff and everything else. I keep an eye on what things are going on, but I picked I'm going to work at that buying counter because that's the fun, that's the treasure hunt.
NEARY: Over the years, Bass found some great treasures, amassing a rare book collection along with the piles of used books that pass through the store, which he described as a hungry monster that had to be fed. It was a monster he loved dearly, as do the legions of book pilgrims who come there every day to see what treasures they can find. Fred Bass' daughter, who was already managing the store with her father, will carry on the family business. Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
When Breitbart News executive Steve Bannon left the White House this past summer, Bannon critics wondered if he would do more harm outside the tent, so to speak. His quotes in a new book suggest that might be true. Bannon is heavily quoted in journalist Michael Wolff's new book "Fire And Fury." In it, he calls a meeting that happened at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer, quote, "treasonous," and he lashes out at the president's son Donald Trump Jr. The quotes made President Trump upset, to say the least. Here's how his press secretary, Sarah Sanders, characterized his response.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS: I think furious, disgusted would probably certainly fit.
MARTIN: The president's lawyer is even threatening legal action against Steve Bannon, who led Trump's campaign then served as chief strategist in the White House. We are joined now by Scott Detrow, congressional reporter and the host of NPR's Politics Podcast. Hey, Scott.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: All right, so I want to get to these quotes, but first, just tell us more about this book and in particular how Michael Wolff got this access - the access he would've needed to write this thing.
DETROW: Yeah. He is saying that he did more than 200 interviews for this, and the way that this is being described is that he was at the White House so much last year, he was basically camping out in Steve Bannon's office and other places, as opposed to coming in for specific interviews. There's a lot of eye-popping quotes from Trump advisers in the excerpts we've seen, not just from Steve Bannon.
A lot of this is being denied by the White House and some of the people quoted, but some of the main allegations that are getting attention are things that have been coming up a lot in a lot of different reports - the idea that Trump just doesn't seem to be engaged on policy, that many of his aides and cabinet members have insulted his intelligence and that he seems to spend a good chunk of his day, according to this book and other reports, seething and watching cable news.
MARTIN: So let's get into exactly what Bannon said because this illustrates what is becoming a deeper rift between these former allies. What exactly is - has stoked the ire of the president so much?
DETROW: What seemed to really set this off were quotes that first appeared in The Guardian, going back to that June 2016 Trump Tower meeting set up of a premise of Russian intermediaries having damaging information about Hillary Clinton. This is the meeting that Donald Trump Jr. famously emailed about saying, if it's what you say it is, I love it. So Bannon is quoted calling the meeting, quote, "treasonous and unpatriotic." And he goes on to predict that investigators looking into this will, quote, "crack Don Jr. like an egg on national TV" - other quotes as well. But going directly after President Trump's family and into a territory that President Trump is so sensitive about - the Russia investigation - seems to have triggered this, this bombastic response from the White House.
MARTIN: And we heard how Sarah Huckabee Sanders characterized the president's response. But then the White House actually took an extraordinary step and issued a statement from the president on this.
DETROW: Yes. And even with the statements we've been accustomed to reading on Twitter and elsewhere, this was remarkable. It discredits Steve Bannon. It says he's always overstated his importance. This was issued from the president himself. The line that really stood out was, when he was fired, he not only lost his job; he lost his mind. In addition to that, Trump's personal lawyers have sent a cease-and-desist letter. They're threatening a lawsuit, but we should point out, throughout his career, President Trump has consistently threatened lawsuits and not actually filed those lawsuits.
MARTIN: Right. It is amazing though that the - why wouldn't he have just tweeted that? It sounds like a tweet, but they wanted to make extra sure that everyone knew this was an official statement.
DETROW: This seems to have been a long-brewing statement from President Trump. You know, he and Bannon have a complicated relationship. And Trump's claim that Bannon has long exaggerated his role is something many people have long said about Bannon, but it's clear that the articles about Steve Bannon's prominence, that he was a top adviser, an architect of the campaign, had often bothered Trump.
When Trump's spoken publicly about Bannon before, he said, you know, Steve Bannon's a friend, he's an adviser, but he came on late in the campaign, and, you know, I'm the one who was responsible for this. But this idea that Bannon is totally out of the loop on the presidency - we should say that he was a close adviser and that at the beginning of the administration, President Trump basically appointed him as almost a co-chief of staff with Reince Priebus. That was an unprecedented move.
MARTIN: Which he did on purpose to kind of create this competition to see who would rise and who would fall.
DETROW: Right, right.
MARTIN: So is any of this going to affect the 2018 midterms?
DETROW: I think one...
MARTIN: I feel like everything does in some way.
DETROW: Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, was very happy about this development, so much so that his campaign account actually tweeted out a smiling GIF of this. McConnell had been concerned that Bannon was taking on Republican incumbents and threatening Republicans' Senate majority. The Alabama race where Bannon played a big role and resulted in a Democratic win was exhibit one. So Mitch McConnell's probably pretty happy. Bannon is out of the loop with President Trump. So is Paul Ryan. So are many other establishment Republicans.
MARTIN: NPR's congressional reporter Scott Detrow. Thanks, Scott.
DETROW: Sure thing.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
So is there something more than a tweet that is wrong with U.S.-Pakistan relations? Early on New Year's Day, President Trump denounced Pakistan on Twitter. He said the United States had foolishly given billions in aid, only to receive, quote, "lies and deceit." Pakistanis responded with anger and dismay. We're going to talk about all this with Najam Sethi. He's the editor-in-chief of The Friday Times. He joins us once again. He's in Islamabad.
Welcome back to the program, sir.
NAJAM SETHI: Thank you.
INSKEEP: It's good to talk with you. I got to mention, President Trump is not the first American to say something like this, is he?
SETHI: No, he isn't. But he's really upped the ante, as it were. The new year's being greeted by a barrage of tweets from him starting with North Korea, Iran, Palestine, and of course the liberal American media. And now he's added to that list of dubiously distinguished targets - is Pakistan.
But as you said, Pakistan has been under pressure from both President Obama and earlier President Bush to do more in terms of fulfilling American objectives. But Pakistan has not really fulfilled those American objectives. And I think the cause of concern and anger in the White House now is that Pakistan needs to be rapped on the knuckles for not doing what America wants it to do.
INSKEEP: What is it that Pakistan is not doing that - in your view, even - that the United States would like it to do?
SETHI: Well, you know, the thing is that Pakistan has been India-centric. Pakistan's entire national security doctrine is based on its hostile relations with India. And to that extent, it has particular interests in Afghanistan. It does not want to see Afghanistan become an Indian proxy. And so to that extent, the American, Indian and Afghan nexus is worrying for Pakistan. So Pakistan will not do anything that would undermine its so-called assets, and some of its assets are those people who are actually undermining this axis, one of which is the Haqqani network.
Now, Haqqani Network is an integral part of the Taliban resistance. Some of its leaders are said to be holed out in safe areas in Pakistan. And the Americans have been leaning on Pakistan to let go of these so-called assets or crush them or drive them out of Afghanistan. Pakistan says that some of its Taliban - those who've been creating trouble for the Pakistanis - are holed out in Afghanistan and is expecting some sort of reciprocal arrangement, whereby if the Haqqani network is ousted from Pakistan, the Afghan government and the Americans oust the Pakistani Taliban who are holed out in the northern areas of Afghanistan and are fomenting trouble and bombings and terrorism in Pakistan.
INSKEEP: So...
SETHI: So there's this sort of situation.
INSKEEP: Well, this is really interesting because you're saying that the Haqqani network is an asset to Pakistan in some sense, as it tries to keep some influence in Afghanistan across the border.
There was a New York Times story the other day about a terror suspect who had been captured by Pakistan who was associated in some way with Haqqani network. And according to The New York Times, American officials said, let us question this man, and Pakistan said no. Now, we haven't confirmed that independently, but this is what The New York Times reports. You're saying that kind of makes sense that Pakistan would refuse because they have an asset there in the Haqqani network.
SETHI: And, you know, this is power politics. It's got nothing to do with terrorism. One side in Pakistan is fomenting trouble in Afghanistan. Another side in Afghanistan is fomenting trouble in Pakistan. It's cold politics, cruel politics. People are suffering for it. If there were a quid pro quo, if there were some reciprocal movement, my sense is that both sides could actually end up getting rid of the Taliban on both sides. But that's not happening. And this will need a reciprocal, step-by-step arrangement whereby trust is built up and palpable results are achieved on both sides.
INSKEEP: Can the United States cut Pakistan loose? Do you think the U.S. could do without your country?
SETHI: Well, it's not so easy to cut it loose, as it were. Two or three reasons - first of all, America still has a significant presence in Afghanistan, and all the supply routes are through Pakistan, so it won't be easy. There was a time when the Pakistan-American relationship nosedived. The Americans had crossed over into Pakistan's border and taken out some Pakistani military post.
INSKEEP: Yeah, real problem.
SETHI: The Pakistanis retaliated by blocking all NATO supplies to Afghanistan, and that really hurt the American effort in Afghanistan. Eventually, they papered over the cracks and got back to business again. So that's one leverage that Pakistan has on the United States.
INSKEEP: If I could...
SETHI: The other leverage of - yeah.
INSKEEP: Go. No, finish, finish. Go ahead.
SETHI: Yeah, I think the other leverage is that, you know, Pakistan is a deeply troubled state. The fundamentalists are rampaging. Any destabilization of this state could create very serious difficulties for Pakistan and then, of course, for the whole region.
INSKEEP: Najam, it's always a pleasure talking with you. Thank you very much.
SETHI: Welcome.
INSKEEP: Najam Sethi is editor of Pakistan's Friday Times and a noted broadcaster there as well.
(SOUNDBITE OF EMANCIPATOR'S "TREE HUNT")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Howard Dean thinks that, for Democrats of a certain age, it is time to step aside. The former Vermont governor and one-time Democratic National Committee chair says it's time to make room for the young talent in his party ahead of the 2020 presidential campaign season. He joins me in our studios.
Governor Dean, thanks so much for being with us.
HOWARD DEAN: Thanks for having me.
MARTIN: So the other day on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," you said something you have said, before but you said it in a stronger fashion. You said your generation needs to, quote, "get the hell out of the way." Can you expand on that? What needs to change?
DEAN: The most important age group for us is people under 35. They elected Barack Obama in 2008. But now it's time to let them take over. And they're going to have to take over on their own terms. We have tons of talent in our party. We do not need to rely on my generation anymore. And these kids think differently. They're more respectful of each other. They're willing to listen to each other's ideas and work things out. They're entrepreneurial. They're more conservative than we are economically than the left wing of the Democratic Party. They're mostly libertarian.
I just think this is the future of America. They are diverse. They value immigration. They value different kinds of people. They believe that gay rights is the civil rights issue of their time. They care deeply about the environment. We need a real change in this country and the only way to do it is for us to get out.
MARTIN: Although it was only just over a year ago you, yourself, were vying to run the Democratic National Committee - so over the past year, you have come to this new conclusion?
DEAN: No, I was a placeholder. I ended up supporting Pete Buttigieg, who didn't win or get many votes. He was - 35-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., you know, the perfect candidate for this generation - two-term mayor of a city in a red state, served two terms in Afghanistan and openly gay. I mean, that is the generation that is coming up. They're incredible kids.
MARTIN: So you're ready to step aside, too?
DEAN: I'm not stepping aside. I'm raising money for Indivisible and Run For Something and Flippable and all of these great groups that helped so much in the races in Virginia. I'm coaching. I'm trying to get them to work a little more together because their problem is mostly that they cooperate but they don't commit. They're great at mobilization, maybe not so good at long-term organization. There's a lot we can teach still, but they're going to have to do it on their terms with our coaching, not our terms.
MARTIN: This past October, Congresswoman Linda Sanchez, who's the fifth-ranking Democrat in the House, suggested that she believes it's time for Nancy Pelosi to step down as House minority leader. Let's listen to this clip.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LINDA SANCHEZ: I personally think that, you know, our leadership does a tremendous job. But I do think we have this real breadth and depth of talent within our caucus. And I do think it's time to pass the torch to a new generation of leaders.
MARTIN: Do you agree? Do you believe Nancy Pelosi should resign her leadership position?
DEAN: I don't think that would help right this moment. Nancy is probably the greatest speaker since Tip O'Neill. If she'd only had a couple more terms, her version of the health care bill was terrific as they got it through the House. She knows what she's doing.
MARTIN: But isn't she the personification of the old entrenched Democratic Party?
DEAN: Republicans have made her that way. She does need to transition out. I'm not about pushing her out given her record. But I'm just saying, we do need to change. Look, Congress is going to be the last place to change. I want to see the presidential races change. I want to see Cabinet officials in their 50s appointed. I'm not talking about, you know, these people that are taking free plane rides in the Trump administration. I'm talking about real people who are public servants.
MARTIN: But Tim Ryan challenged her for the leadership position. He got a lot of votes. Ultimately, she prevailed. And because you say that the Republicans have used her as the poster child of their ire against Democrats, I mean, for those reasons alone, shouldn't she move on?
DEAN: I'm not interested in talking about who should move on and who shouldn't. We need a movement to do this. People are going to have to make their own minds up about when they move on. And some of them are going to be moved out. And some of them are going to move themselves out, and that's up to them.
MARTIN: Democrats have been unsuccessful at the local and state level over the last decade, I think it's fair to say. Your party's lost a dozen governorships and more than 900 statehouse seats during the Obama era. Does this mean Democrats have just not done well at cultivating young talent?
DEAN: No. What it means is when you have the White House, this always happens. This is not just particularly Obama's problem. When you're in charge, the DNC becomes the re-elect for the president. And they neglect the stuff that's being done on the Republican side by outside forces. We're going to have to start doing that. We are doing that now.
All these races in Virginia - the reason we won 15 races is because of all these young people on the Internet. We did have 40 organizers down there. It was great. But a lot of the heavy-duty work and the field work was done by young people organizing informally outside the Democratic Party.
MARTIN: So how do you do that?
DEAN: Well, these kids vote with us because the Republicans are an - Donald Trump doesn't represent a single value that the younger generation in America has. He's attacked the environment, attacks gay people, transgender people. Now he's talking about pushing the button on the atomic bomb. I mean, this guy is way out of touch and so is the whole Republican Party. So they're going to vote with us.
The question is, can we integrate them into an institution? And the answer is probably not the way it's been done for the last 10,000 years. When young people come in to big institutions, they're socialized by the institutions, and they socialize the institution a little bit. This time, the young generation that's coming in is going to socialize the institution a lot more than the institution is going to socialize them. But you do need institutions, and that's the message I have for the young people. They're unattractive. These kids don't need them because they can go on the Internet and get half a million...
MARTIN: Right. It's not the time of institutions.
DEAN: It's not. It's not. But they are still valuable. They've got to change dramatically, but they're still valuable because they're the only thing that gives us continuity.
MARTIN: Who are the young up-and-coming leaders you would like to see break through?
DEAN: There are tons of them. I named four, but there are many, many others. Now, excuse me in advance for alienating those people I don't mention. The ones that I have - interested in the presidency in reverse alphabetical order because I go back and forth are Chris Murphy, senator from Connecticut; Kamala Harris, senator from California; Kirsten Gillibrand, senator from New York; and Eric Garcetti, mayor of Los Angeles.
But there are many others, really interesting people - Seth Moulton, you know, a bit of a longshot. But, you know, I think it's great for these young people to be out there. Seth Moulton has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and recruited more than a dozen veterans to run for office, and a lot of them are going to win. And that's really important.
MARTIN: Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont, one-time DNC chair, one-time presidential candidate - Governor, thanks so much for your time.
DEAN: Thanks for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF BASSTI'S "DER DRITTE")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. A passenger stuck on a plane took some air. He was on a Ryanair flight that landed in Spain and was delayed getting to the gate. The man opened the emergency exit window and climbed onto the wing. He brought his backpack, as if he planned to leave. But it's a long way down from the wing. Asked by the pilot what he was doing, he simply said he was sick of being inside. Because of this incident, the plane's arrival was delayed even more. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
President Trump's commission to investigate voter fraud did not reveal that much, and now the president is dissolving the commission. He is not dissolving his insistence that there was significant voter fraud in the presidential election that we won. System is rigged, the president said on Twitter today, must go to voter ID. NPR's Pam Fessler has been covering the commission. She joins us now. Hi, Pam.
PAM FESSLER, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: What happened?
FESSLER: Well, the president is blaming the refusal by a lot of states to turn over detailed voter information to the commission. As you recall, one of the first things that the vice chairman did - Republican secretary of state in Kansas Kris Kobach - was ask every state to turn over its detailed voter rolls, things like names, addresses, date of birth, even Social Security numbers if possible. And the states were - one of the purposes was to see if there was evidence of voter fraud, and states resisted. They were worried about privacy concerns, and they questioned just how this information was going to be used. And, you know, despite the president saying this was mostly Democratic states that were opposing, the opposition was bipartisan.
INSKEEP: Oh. In state after state across the country, there was not so much interest in cooperating with this commission.
FESSLER: Exactly. Mississippi Republican Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann in fact told the panel it could go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.
INSKEEP: You have told us many times over the years that there's very limited evidence of voter fraud in any given election.
FESSLER: Right. And it's not just me. I mean, almost every expert in the country, election officials, say that the president's claims and allegations that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally in 2016 are just completely unsubstantiated.
INSKEEP: Did this commission find anything that would suggest otherwise?
FESSLER: As far as I know, they didn't find anything that they...
INSKEEP: And then what happens to the investigation now?
FESSLER: Well, the president has said that they're going to ask the Department of Homeland Security to look at the commission's initial findings, which, as I say, is pretty curious since I don't know if there were any findings, and then decide what to do. The commission - the Department of Homeland Security, the main thing they've been doing is actually looking into these allegations of Russian hacking in the 2016 elections and trying to work with states to improve cybersecurity. That's where their focus has been.
INSKEEP: So it's taking the president's conspiracy theory about the election and grafting it onto the Russia investigation in a sense.
FESSLER: Well, we don't know if that's actually what the Department of Homeland Security will be looking at. And the other thing that the president this morning was calling for - voter ID. Now, that is something that quite frankly is up to the states. It's not up to the president or to the federal government.
INSKEEP: And a lot of states have enacted voter ID laws.
FESSLER: Exactly. There are a lot of - and that's in fact why they say there's very little fraud because they already have a lot of measures in place to protect against it.
INSKEEP: Pam Fessler, listen along with us because we're going to bring in another guest, Matthew Dunlap, the secretary of state of Maine, who is a Democrat. He was on the president's voter fraud commission, which was bipartisan, and sued the commission to find out more of what it was doing. Secretary Dunlap, good morning.
MATTHEW DUNLAP: Good morning.
INSKEEP: First, the idea that you would have to sue the commission that you were on to find out what it was doing - did I describe correctly your situation?
DUNLAP: That's very accurate, and it was not something that I went leaping into. In fact, I was greatly hesitant to go down that road. But I was asking the exact same questions that you're asking right now. What were we working on? And I thought that was a very strange question to have to ask being a member of the commission. And when we couldn't get answers, we pressed forward with a legal complaint. And we prevailed in court on the 22 of December and hadn't heard anything since then until last night when we got word that the president had dissolved the commission.
INSKEEP: So what did you learn in that process about what the commission was doing?
DUNLAP: Well, we haven't learned very much. No information was handed over pursuant to the court order. And we were actually talking yesterday about how to proceed to get the White House to conform to the order from the federal court. And, you know, I think what we don't know is what's really scary. And, you know, that's why I - all I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to know what our reference materials were, who were we talking to, how the planning was being situated, what our schedule was. I didn't have a sense of what our schedule was. And we were hearing things third-hand in the newspapers about possibly meeting in December, possibly meeting in January but nothing directly from staff or other members of the commission.
INSKEEP: You know, I want to ask about the perspective of Kris Kobach, who was the guiding force, the driving force, behind this commission in recent months. His argument, if I can try to summarize it, was essentially why not look? Why not see what is there? Why would you - why would you not at least investigate? And he spoke with NPR about this over the summer. Let's hear a little bit of what he said.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
KRIS KOBACH: If a state like Kentucky or California apparently won't provide publicly available information, one has to ask the question why not? I mean, what are they trying to hide if they don't want a presidential advisory commission to study their state's voter rolls?
INSKEEP: OK. Why wouldn't a state want its voter rolls to be studied to see if there's some problem?
DUNLAP: Well, in the course of the state of Maine, we couldn't. Under state law, we cannot provide the information to the commission because they said they were going to make it public. Maine law says it has to be kept confidential. And to that fact, even Secretary Kobach couldn't comply with his own letter. He couldn't - he couldn't supply all the information that the commission was asking for. So - and the information they were asking for, what was publicly available is so high level it'd be absolutely useless. I mean, how many Matt Dunlaps are there in the United States? You'd have to get a lot deeper information to have that information be of any use to the commission. And then...
INSKEEP: Someone is Googling Matt Dunlap right now just to see how many answers come up. Go on. I'm sorry.
DUNLAP: I want them to think about the fellow that does voiceovers and modeling in Seattle who's also named Matt Dunlap.
INSKEEP: (Laughter) Well, let's hope his voter registration is separate from yours and in a different state and everything else. But let's be serious here. There is a lot of concern about the integrity of elections at this moment, particularly because of Russian interference in 2016, which is a separate issue. But then there's this question that is raised by Republicans about voter fraud. Is there - having been on this commission, having thought about this - is there a serious unanswered question in your mind about voter fraud?
DUNLAP: I don't believe there is. I never believed that we'd find anything like what the president alleged. But what I did think we had the opportunity to do would be to answer that question and talk about the good work that we do, not only as secretaries of state and other chief election officers but local election administrators and volunteers who pursue this process with almost religious zeal to get it right. And they do such a great job that what we come across are actually mistakes in confusion not criminal wrongdoing. That's very, very rare.
INSKEEP: Matthew Dunlap, thank you very much.
DUNLAP: Thank you.
INSKEEP: He's a member of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, or he was. And he is not the voiceover guy in Seattle. NPR's Pam Fessler has been listening along with us. Pam, what did you hear there that was significant?
FESSLER: Yeah. I think the secretary makes a very good point that there are a lot of issues that do need to be addressed and that people are addressing such as cleaning up voter rolls because there are a lot of problems with that. And there has been a lot of work being done, and this commission was not doing it.
INSKEEP: Pam, thanks very much.
FESSLER: Thank you.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Pam Fessler this morning.
(SOUNDBITE OF GOGO PENGUIN'S "SMARRA")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
2018, it's a congressional election year, which we hardly need to mention to our next guest. Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado leads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, charged with keeping his party in the Senate majority if they can do it. Republicans also aspire to send legislation to President Trump's desk this year although the president remains, to say the least, unpredictable. Senator, welcome to the program.
CORY GARDNER: Hey, thanks for having me.
INSKEEP: I just have to mention. So we're into a new year. And so far this year, the president has denounced North Korea - said his nuclear button is bigger - attacked Pakistan, attacked an aide to Hillary Clinton, criticized Iran, attacked the media, talked up voter fraud, said his former aide Stephen Bannon lost his mind. And it's January 4. Is this helpful to you either in terms of electoral politics or policy?
GARDNER: Look. I think the president is going to continue doing what the president has done. That's up to him and his administration. What we will continue to do in the Senate is focus on policies that help the American people. And that's what we focused on the past year. That's why we passed a tax relief bill that's going to help millions upon millions of Americans around the country keep more of their own dollars in their own pocket. That's why you passed legislation to revitalize our STEM education programs earlier in the year. And that's why we'll continue to cut regulations, grow businesses and help people take home more money.
INSKEEP: But did anything the president has done over the last several days in public help your cause?
GARDNER: Well, look. I think it's not about the president. I think the American people know the president is going to tweet what's on his mind. I wouldn't have done what he did. But the fact is this. We've got to focus on helping the American people whether that's Colorado, whether that's Missouri, whether that's North Dakota. All 50 states, that's our focus. And we're going to continue to do our job and let people ask the president about the president's actions.
INSKEEP: Well, there's a substantive issue here that is before Congress because, of course, the Senate and the House are investigating and having to do with Russian interference in the 2016 election. And one of the disputes in which the president has weighed in, in recent days, involves that his former aide Steve Bannon described a meeting with Trump's son, his son-in-law and campaign chairman and a Russian lawyer as treasonous or unpatriotic. And, of course, this is one of the meetings at the center of the investigation of Russian interference. I'd just like to ask you, from the outside, when you think about that meeting, do you think about it in those terms?
GARDNER: When I think about anything relating to this, I think about the investigation that's taking place. And that's why it needs to be thorough. It needs to be fair. It needs to be as quick as possible. We need the results. We need the conclusions. And I'm not going to speculate about what did or didn't occur. I'm not going to speculate about what the facts can be inferred to mean. What I hope to do is to see through an investigation that's bipartisan in the Senate that continues with the Mueller investigation. Let's get this done. Let's get these results to the American people. That's what we have an obligation to do.
INSKEEP: You don't want to endorse those words like treasonous or unpatriotic.
GARDNER: Again, I think that's why we're having an investigation, to make sure we know the facts. And everything else right now, I think, is - we have to wait for the facts.
INSKEEP: As you know, Senator, Steve Bannon has wanted to play in the 2018 congressional elections and support certain candidates and support a certain point of view. Does his break with President Trump complicate your job in any way?
GARDNER: Well, I think Mr. Bannon has played in the 2018 elections, and he lost Alabama. That's a pretty amazing feat for a Republican. And so what we know we have to do, as candidates who run good races, candidates who represent their state, candidates who work hard, who go home, who show up - they're the ones who are going to be victorious. It doesn't matter who's behind them whether it's the president, whether it's Steve Bannon, whether it's the National Republican Senatorial Committee or whether it's the Democrat Senatorial Committee. What happens is candidates who are going to do the best job for their states are going to get the votes of their state.
INSKEEP: Does the break between Bannon and Trump represent any larger fissure within the Republican Party?
GARDNER: I've never been concerned about the relationship of the president with Steve Bannon in terms of campaigns or elections or what it means for candidacy's successes. What I'm focused on is making sure that our incumbents and our candidates represent the best values of the American people. That's growing the economy. That's doing what they can to make sure Americans feel like they're going to be better off tomorrow than they are today. And that's making sure that we represent those values of whatever state it is that they're seeking to represent.
INSKEEP: Let me ask about some legislation that, in some people's minds, is very urgent - having to do with DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Many people, after President Trump declared an end to that program, are waiting for a legislative fix. You're sitting there considering that as a senator and also as the head of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. Is it to the political benefit of your party to allow a DACA fix to get through Congress before the election?
GARDNER: Well, I hope people don't look at DACA through the lens of a political guise only.
INSKEEP: Well, you can hope - but, well, not only.
GARDNER: Right, right.
INSKEEP: But let's just ask about it in those terms if you don't mind.
GARDNER: You know, look. I think it's important that we do what's right and doing what's right is good politics. And good policy is good politics, as the old saying goes. And so if you look at the children who were brought to this country, through no fault of their own at very young age, we're not going to hold them responsible for the acts of their parents. And I think most Americans - a majority of Americans agree with that whether that's Republicans - Democrats. They understand that if your 3 year old crosses your neighbor's lawn - front yard, you're not going to charge them with trespass. We don't do that in this country. And so that's why I think it's important that we find a solution that can be bipartisan in this nation. And I'm excited about the opportunity to bring a bipartisan solution for so many DREAMers.
INSKEEP: Cory Gardner of Colorado, thanks for the time - always appreciate it.
GARDNER: Thanks.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is turning a blind eye to pot no more. NPR has learned that he intends to reverse the policy that opened the door for states to legalize marijuana, even though federal law still forbids it. In 2013, the Department of Justice under President Obama issued this memo saying it would not stand in the way of states that allowed pot as long as marijuana didn't cross state lines or get into the hands of children or criminals. Jeff Sessions is expected to rescind this memo today. This, of course, comes just days after recreational marijuana became legal in California. The AP's Sadie Gurman was the first to report on this policy change, and she joins me now. Hey, Sadie.
SADIE GURMAN: Hi, there.
MARTIN: Lay out, if you could, what it is specifically that the attorney general is doing here.
GURMAN: So he is basically lifting an Obama-era policy that took a sort of hands-off approach to marijuana enforcements nationwide and allowed the legal marijuana industry to flourish. So basically, in its place, he is letting U.S. attorneys across the country in pot-legal states decide whether they want to expend the limited federal resources to go after pot and that could potentially jeopardize the legal industry.
MARTIN: So Jeff Sessions has been pretty vocal about his opposition to marijuana, though, so is this necessarily a surprise?
GURMAN: This is not a surprise. I think advocates on both sides have been expecting Sessions to take some kind of an action. The pro-pot people were expecting something more dramatic, like federal raids on marijuana dispensaries and things like that. But this is a different approach that could have consequences.
MARTIN: We should remind listeners, though, Jeff Sessions is just enforcing the law - the federal law as written. And if people who support legalizing marijuana want real change, that federal law's got to be changed.
GURMAN: That's exactly right. That's what the Justice Department has always maintained. Even under the Obama administration, the Cole memo, which is the memo in question here, never, you know, said that federal law wasn't enforceable. It just laid out some parameters...
MARTIN: Guidelines for businesses in the world of pot to kind of circumvent the law.
GURMAN: Yes.
MARTIN: So what's going to happen now? I mean, how is this announcement going to affect states that have already legalized pot?
GURMAN: Well, I think that remains to be seen. And I think a lot of it will come down to where the U.S. attorneys in each of the states stand and who the Trump administration decides to put into those positions - some of which are still open.
MARTIN: Although, in a state like California, it's unlikely that state officials would overturn what their state has already decided, how to treat marijuana.
GURMAN: Right. So I think the end result will just be, you know, additional confusion that already exists about - what is legal, what isn't legal, where can you do it, where can't you?
MARTIN: At the same time, that's going to be a deterrent, I imagine, for people who are thinking about getting into the legal pot business - just raises more questions and risks.
GURMAN: Yeah. I think that's true. A lot of the anti-pot advocates say that, you know, this will sort of discourage investment in the industry that has become a million-dollar business.
MARTIN: All right, Sadie Gurman with The Associated Press. She was the first to report on this policy change this morning. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is going to overturn - rescind an Obama-era memo that paved the way for legalizing marijuana. Sadie, thanks so much for your time this morning.
GURMAN: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF BLENDED BABIES' "CHINGY MUNGY")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It is Friday, which is when we hear from StoryCorps. And we start in Cleveland in 1975, when a shopkeeper at a small grocery store was murdered. The main witness in the case was Eddie Vernon, who was 12 years old and had not actually seen anything. Vernon says police pressured him into testifying and then used his account to convict three innocent people. One was a teenager named Rickey Jackson, who served almost four decades in prison. At last, in 2014, witness Eddie Vernon, then aged 52, came forward with the truth. Rickey Jackson was released and reached out to Vernon. And they spoke for StoryCorps.
RICKEY JACKSON: I went through 39 years of incarceration because of some things that you put in motion.
EDDIE VERNON: Right.
JACKSON: Throughout the years, did you ever think about me?
VERNON: Yeah, I wanted to trade places because I said, it should be me instead of them. As I grew up, I was depressed, suicidal. It ate me up so much inside, man.
JACKSON: I used to think about you a lot - hatred, loathing. I even used to fantasize about where it is that I was going to kill you. We didn't have any physical evidence to bring back into court. It was just you.
VERNON: When I came forth, I was tired. I couldn't live no more like that, Rickey. I know that so much was taken away from y'all, so many years. Y'all deserved our freedom.
JACKSON: In court, I hadn't seen you...
VERNON: Since the trial.
JACKSON: 1975.
VERNON: Right.
JACKSON: So when you walked in that courtroom, I saw the little 12-year-old kid in you. But I also saw the strength of a man who had come there to do something. And the next thing I know, I'm a free man. It was a very courageous thing that you've done. So I talked to my lawyer and asked him if there was any chance that you and I could hook up. And when I saw you, all that stuff I used to think about you - the animosity - I could hardly remember. And it might have been my imagination, but when we embraced, it felt like you just got lighter in my arms.
VERNON: It took a whole lot off of my shoulders - the weight I've been carrying for all these years.
JACKSON: I don't know if I ever told you this, but you did your part when it counted most. You know that? You hear me talking to you, man?
VERNON: Yes.
JACKSON: You did your part when it counted most.
VERNON: OK. Thank you.
JACKSON: People still find it hard to understand that I forgive you. And I think people confuse that with forgetting. I'm not going to ever forget.
VERNON: Right.
JACKSON: But if forgiveness is my way out, I'll gladly take it.
VERNON: And I thank God for that, man. I really do, Rickey.
JACKSON: You know, after all that we've been through, to finally be sitting here face to face, talking about what happened, I'm saying one man to another, I wish you nothing but the best always.
INSKEEP: That's Rickey Jackson with Eddie Vernon for StoryCorps in Cleveland. Now, after Eddie's testimony, the two other men convicted in the case also had their sentences overturned. The murder itself remains unsolved.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now let's talk about a U.S. trade partner that's been criticized by President Trump. The president complains about German products sold in the United States much as he complains about China. Germany's exports do make almost half of the country's economic output compared with just 12 percent for the United States. So how does Germany pull that off? NPR's John Ydstie concludes a series.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: The shipping area at Beko Technologies is a busy place. Boxes filled with filters, condensate drains and monitoring devices for compressed air systems are headed all over the world.
Where is this going?
RAINER STUTZEL: Italy, Italy.
YDSTIE: Italy.
Rainer Stutzel, a marketing executive at Beko, is giving us a look around the company's main location in Neuss, Germany, across the Rhine River from Dusseldorf.
STUTZEL: Here we have the area where our compressed air filters are being produced.
YDSTIE: Stutzel says compressed air is used everywhere in the global economy from gas stations to paint shops to hospitals. In the early 1980s, Beko's founder developed a condensate drain that removed corrosive moisture from compressed air systems. The company, which now has about 500 employees, later developed filters and other products that eliminate impurities from compressed air.
STUTZEL: Actually, if you think, OK, you leave the condensate inside a compressed air system and the compressed air goes to a paint job place, like painting cars with spray guns, not only would the paint come out of the spray gun, but lots of drops of oil and water and dirt. And your car would look like hell.
YDSTIE: That's why the world wants Beko's products. And the company provides them through four factories and several marketing subsidiaries spread across the globe. The result - half of Beko's production ends up outside Germany. Thousands of small and mid-sized German companies, like Beko technologies, are big exporters. They've helped create a $280 billion annual surplus in the export of goods for Germany. Meanwhile, the U.S. has a $750 billion deficit.
Martin Baily, an economist at the Brookings Institution, says it's partly because Germany decided after World War II to rebuild its economy through manufacturing and exports. Also, says Baily, German firms are more motivated to export than U.S. firms.
MARTIN BAILY: Partly because it is a smaller economy. So their companies are much more oriented towards exporting, whereas, our companies are much more oriented towards selling in the domestic market.
YDSTIE: The big U.S. domestic market is an advantage in many ways, says Baily.
BAILY: But from a trade point of view, it means that most companies are sort of, like, oh, yeah, exports. Why would we export?
YDSTIE: German exporters have also benefited from China's rapid growth, says economist Jeromin Zettelmeyer of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
JEROMIN ZETTELMEYER: Germany is lucky that it has the type of industrial structure that produces goods that China needs.
YDSTIE: Like high-quality machines for China's factories. So, in part, German companies have simply out competed companies from other countries. But what about the Trump administration's claim that Germany is cheating at trade?
ZETTELMEYER: Yes, it's not cheating (laughter).
YDSTIE: Zettelmeyer, who is also a former economic official in the German government, says the Trump administration does have a point about one advantage Germany has.
ZETTELMEYER: You know, the only sense in which I think Germany could be accused of cheating - in quotation marks - is by being a member of the euro.
YDSTIE: The euro has been Germany's currency since 1999. But if Germany still had the deutsche mark, its products would almost certainly be more expensive and less competitive in global markets. That's because the deutsche mark would reflect the real strength of the German economy. The euro doesn't. It reflects the less robust economy of the whole euro area, and therefore, German products priced in euros are less expensive and more competitive.
There is another force that supports Germany's big trade surplus. Germany saves more than the U.S., both at the personal and government level. The German government balances its federal budget or runs a surplus, while the U.S. government runs huge budget deficits. In other words, the U.S. borrows massively instead of saving like the Germans do, says Martin Baily.
BAILY: They are very disciplined on that, so they don't run those deficits. Their saving is high so they get the conditions right under which they can have a trade surplus.
YDSTIE: The U.S. has urged Germany to spend more on its infrastructure and other programs which could draw more imports into Germany and reduce its surplus. But many Germans are proud that what they produce is in demand around the world, and they're not inclined to save less or spend more to mollify their critics. John Ydstie, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Just before the new year, many people in high-tax states scrambled to prepay their state and local taxes. The idea was to pay what they owe for the upcoming year ahead of the new tax law that limits the amount that they could deduct. Local governments were overwhelmed. And as NPR's Chris Arnold reports, there's still confusion.
CHRIS ARNOLD, BYLINE: The week after Christmas is usually a short and slow one for town officials in New Paltz, N.Y., but not this time. Daniel Torres is the deputy town supervisor.
DANIEL TORRES: When we opened town hall on Wednesday, we had almost a hundred voicemails from people inquiring about how they could prepay their taxes.
ARNOLD: And the phone kept ringing. People were showing up. Torres says the town clerk's office only has a few people working in it.
TORRES: The clerk's office was so overrun, after a certain while, we couldn't even pick up the phones anymore.
ARNOLD: And there was a lot of confusion. The governor had said that people could prepay their taxes, but the IRS issued a statement saying that would only work if your taxes had already been assessed. Torres says, in New Paltz, the assessments had been done, but they were still at the printing facility in another town, and they hadn't been mailed out. So he and another town official scrambled over to the printing company.
TORRES: It was 14 boxes that we threw in the back of a town car. It's actually an old police car, to be honest. And, you know, we drove them down. And by the time we did them, there was already hundreds of phone calls that had come in inquiring about it.
ARNOLD: The reason that people want to prepay so badly is that it will save them money on next year's taxes. The tax act caps deductions for state and local taxes at $10,000. In states with higher tax rates like New Jersey, California and New York, even many middle-class and upper-middle-class people pay more than that $10,000. And those states also happen to vote more often for Democrats. This week in his State of the State address, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said the Republican-designed tax act is robbing blue states to pay for tax cuts for red states and corporations.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
ANDREW CUOMO: It is crass. It is ugly. It is divisive. It is partisan legislating. It is an economic civil war. And make no mistake. They are aiming to hurt us.
ARNOLD: Cuomo vowed to sue the federal government, calling the tax act unconstitutional. Republicans, though, say it's not their tax act that's hurting people. It's that state and local taxes are too high in states like New York, New Jersey and California. Meanwhile, many people who tried to prepay their taxes aren't sure if the IRS will recognize the move. Amanda Carew lives in Bloomingdale, Ill. Her husband, who works on a grounds crew at a federal laboratory, went down to the assessor's office last week to prepay their property taxes.
AMANDA CAREW: He bundled up my son. They drove down there. They got there. And there was about 700 people in line.
ARNOLD: But Carew says since the town only had a preliminary tax assessment, she's not sure whether the IRS will be OK with them prepaying. The family actually just moved into a smaller house to live in a town with a better school district. They're paying more taxes there. But because they can't deduct all of them, Carew estimates that she and her husband will be paying about $750 more in taxes under the new rules.
CAREW: And knowing that we're going to be punished, to an extent, for picking a good school district - it feels incredibly unfair.
ARNOLD: Just how many Americans end up thinking the tax bill is unfair will undoubtedly play a big role in the midterm elections. Chris Arnold, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF AND SO I WATCH YOU FROM AFAR'S "THE VOICELESS")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Tomorrow is Three Kings Day. It's an occasion celebrated by many Christians and especially among Latinos.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Aside from the religious symbolism, there's food. Many Latinos enjoy a hot drink and a traditional cake called rosca de reyes. Bakers in Los Angeles today unveil what's reportedly the city's biggest rosca ever.
INSKEEP: But you don't need to go to LA. You can find the cakes in just about any metro area. And NPR's Ashley Westerman found one in hers.
ASHLEY WESTERMAN, BYLINE: In the back of La Mexicana Bakery and Taqueria in Alexandria, Va., the giant oven is roaring.
CARLOS BENITEZ: Let me show you - in the oven already.
WESTERMAN: And when bakery owner Carlos Benitez opens it...
BENITEZ: OK.
WESTERMAN: Wow.
Dozens of huge roscas de reyes, or Three Kings Day cakes, can be seen going round and round on the oven carousel. Uncooked, the roscas are pale-yellow, doughy ovals. But the more they bake, the more they shine - literally. The cake is decorated with green and red candied cherries, figs, plums and glittery bands made of sugary, colorful paste.
BENITEZ: OK. These are the medial ones.
WESTERMAN: This is one of the busiest times of the year for Benitez. He's been making roscas since he opened in 2002.
BENITEZ: So we're going to make it all this week.
WESTERMAN: Baked inside are little, plastic figurines representing the baby Jesus.
BENITEZ: The person who got the piece, got the little Jesus inside - they're supposed to throw a party at the 2 of February, a tamales party.
WESTERMAN: Benitez walks me through how he makes the dough. First, he combines the yeast and flour. Then he adds lots of margarine, sugar, salt orange peel, orange juice, anise extract for aroma and eggs.
BENITEZ: It's ready. So start mixing.
WESTERMAN: The ingredients are mixed until the dough is no longer wet or sticky. Then it's unloaded onto a table and kneaded, then rolled into the shape of an oval to represent a crown. After proofing for a couple hours, it's decorated. These are the jewels of the crown. And then it's baked.
Pati Jinich is a chef and the host of the PBS show "Pati's Mexican Table."
PATI JINICH: Everybody in Mexico eats roscas growing up. It's a huge deal.
WESTERMAN: She says the love of roscas goes well beyond Mexico.
JINICH: All of the Latin American countries that were conquered by the Old World inherited this tradition.
WESTERMAN: And over the years, she's seen the tradition grow here in the U.S. along with the Latino population.
TONY SALAZAR: We see about 20 percent increase year to year for the last five years consistently.
WESTERMAN: Tony Salazar is chef at Porto's, one of the most famous bakeries in the Los Angeles area. They're one of the bakeries behind the 24-by-2-and-a-half-foot rosca de reyes being unveiled today in LA. Salazar says the first time they sold roscas in the 1970s, they only sold 10. This year, they're planning to sell over 5,000. He says other bakeries around the LA area are experiencing the same thing.
SALAZAR: We really are so happy that the popularity is growing. The people who don't celebrate Three Kings Day will come and buy it. It's so good, and they enjoy it.
WESTERMAN: Back at La Mexicana Bakery and Taqueria outside Washington, D.C., Carlos Benitez says he's expecting to sell almost 300 roscas de reyes this year. And it's not just families placing orders. He says more companies and schools are ordering them, too. Benitez says this means the tradition is reaching people outside the Latino community.
BENITEZ: I feel so happy that people don't lose their traditions. I think that diversity of the cultures make this country great.
WESTERMAN: Ashley Westerman, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MEXICAN INSTITUTE OF SOUND'S "JALALE")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Leaders of the U.S. and North Korea are talking - in their way. Kim Jong Un said in a speech that he has a nuclear button on his desk. Donald Trump replied he had a bigger button. Next week, however, North Korea begins a more intimate kind of dialogue. Diplomats meet with their counterparts from South Korea - high-level talks, we're told. NPR's Elise Hu is watching all this from Seoul. Hi, Elise.
ELISE HU, BYLINE: Hi there.
INSKEEP: What's it look like when these two sides meet?
HU: Well, they haven't met in two years, so that's what is significant about all of this. But it's likely to happen right on the border in what's known as the Peace Village in a conference center. It's a three-or-four-story building. It's pretty airy. And it was built specifically for inter-Korean talks, so it sits empty a lot. But inside the room itself, diplomats sit at a long table facing each other, two or three diplomats on each side.
INSKEEP: And they talk in a diplomatic way, not about nuclear buttons and so forth?
HU: They are not expected to talk about security issues but instead focus on North Korea sending a team or a delegation to the upcoming Winter Olympics, which South Korea is hosting.
INSKEEP: Well, how did they suddenly agree to have a discussion about anything amid this nuclear confrontation?
HU: Kim Jong Un made an overture on New Year's Day. He said he wished for a successful Olympics. And he extended an olive branch in that speech to restart dialogue. South Korea jumped right on it. And now they're going to do some real diplomacy.
INSKEEP: Oh, this is interesting because we primarily noticed that speech on New Year's Day for the remark about the nuclear button. But you're saying there was some peaceful language in there.
HU: Yeah. A lot of attention was focused on the nuclear button remark. But what was really important was actually this offer to restart dialogue. That was the meat. That was the change in the previously frozen ties. And that led to the place that we're at now.
INSKEEP: So President Trump, I know, took credit for these talks because he said he was talking tough. Is there anything to that?
HU: Well, talking tough - and then, also, there's a policy of sanctions, right? So this raises the question of whether the sanctions that are being placed on North Korea are effective. I asked David Kang, who heads the Korean Studies Institute at the University of Southern California, to weigh in on how to read this opening that we're at now.
DAVID KANG: I think the reality is that these moves by North Korea aren't aimed at all at ending the sanctions. They're aimed at lowering the tensions between both sides. And if they can do that, I think everybody is better off.
HU: So a lot of us are going to be watching to see what happens at the border on Tuesday, Steve.
INSKEEP: OK, Elise. Thanks very much.
HU: You bet.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Elise Hu.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The political strategist who once meant to do damage to the political establishment seems to have done damage to himself.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A billionaire patron of Steve Bannon says she doesn't back him anymore. That's what Rebekah Mercer said after the publication of incendiary quotes from the one-time presidential adviser that came out in a new book. Among many other things, Steve Bannon said Trump aides and family members took part in a meeting he called, quote, "treasonous." He later tried to make good with the president.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
STEVE BANNON: You know, I support him day in and day out whether going through the country giving the Trump miracle speech or on the show or on the websites. I don't think you have to worry about that.
MARTIN: Which drew a response from Trump.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I don't know. He called me a great man last night. So, you know, he obviously changed his tune pretty quick.
MARTIN: The president's lawyer tried to block publication of the book by the journalist Michael Wolff. Instead, publication has been moved up to today.
INSKEEP: OK, we've got NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley with us once again. Scott, good morning.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: Why would the White House effectively promote - publicize this book by denouncing it so ferociously?
HORSLEY: Well, I'm not sure that was their goal, but that has certainly been the effect. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders has described this book as a complete fantasy. And to be clear, the author Michael Wolff's reporting has been challenged in the past. Some of those who are quoted in the book have come out to say they didn't say the things they are reported to have said. And as you note, the president's attorney Charles Harder sent a cease-and-desist letter yesterday to the publisher of the book, Henry Holt. Charles Harder, the attorney, also asked for his own copy of the book. But all of that has not dampened sales at all. It's - the book has vaulted to number one on Amazon's best-seller list on the basis of advance orders. And the controversy has just helped to generate publicity, including the fact that we're talking about it right now.
INSKEEP: OK, so don't publish the book, but send me one. I want to read it. There's the question about some of the quotes although there's also reports, I believe, that Michael Wolff may have recorded some of his interviews. In any event, Rebekah Mercer, as Rachel mentioned, seems to have heard enough.
HORSLEY: That's right. And this is important because Mercer has been one of the dark money financiers of Steve Bannon in his effort to recruit anti-establishment candidates all around the country. She also sits on the board of the Breitbart website that Bannon heads up. Now, The Washington Post says that Mercer is no longer willing to bankroll Bannon's political efforts. And that may have more to do with his failed effort to install Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race than the Michael Wolff book. Either way though, this is certainly a setback for Bannon and some of his more outrageous candidates. And it is a relief for folks like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the establishment wing of the Republican Party.
INSKEEP: So there's this political fight going on but also some substantive news having to do with the Russia investigation - or who was trying to influence the Russia investigation.
HORSLEY: That's right. The New York Times is reporting on efforts by the president to prevent Attorney General Jeff Sessions from recusing himself from the Russia probe, as Sessions did back in March. We know that this has been a source of friction between the president and the attorney general - that Trump was angry when Sessions did recuse himself. The president continues to regard the attorney general as sort of his personal protector rather than the nation's top law enforcement official. Now, The Times also says that before he fired the FBI Director James Comey, some of the Justice Department were trying to dig up dirt on Comey to discredit him. The Justice Department disputes that account. But this is one of the threads that The Times says special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating.
INSKEEP: Scott, thanks as always.
HORSLEY: You're welcome.
INSKEEP: NPR's Scott Horsley.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: The presidents of the United States and North Korea have been debating the size of their nuclear buttons, yet diplomats from North and South Korea say they want to sit down and talk.
MARTIN: The two countries are reviving direct talks for the first time in more than two years. Diplomats from the North and the South are set to meet at a border village on Tuesday.
INSKEEP: NPR's Elise Hu has been watching all of this for us. She joins us from Seoul. Hi, Elise.
ELISE HU, BYLINE: Hi there.
INSKEEP: Why did they make the announcement now?
HU: Well, South Korea's president, Moon Jae-in, is actually a big supporter of dialogue and has been for a long time. So all last year, he'd been setting up the upcoming Olympics in February as this great opportunity for both Koreas to come together and make a show of unity. And then there was Kim Jong Un's overture, earlier this week, on New Year's Day in which he wished for a successful Olympics. And in that speech, he extended an olive branch to restart dialogue. South Korea then jumped right on it. And now they're doing some real diplomacy.
INSKEEP: Oh, wished for a successful Olympics because it's happening where you are. It's happening in South Korea. So that's why you would say something about that if you're Kim Jong Un.
HU: That's right.
INSKEEP: And I'm just thinking, you know, the old Theodore Roosevelt statement that he picked up - to speak softly and carry a big stick.
HU: Yeah.
INSKEEP: I guess Kim Jong Un is - be willing to talk at the border and carry a large nuclear button. Is that his approach here?
HU: (Laughter) A lot of attention is focused on the nuclear button remark. But substantively, there actually wasn't any new information in that particular turn of phrase. He added its visual image - right? - by saying button. But the nuclear capability is what it is. Trump then amplified it when he tweeted about having even stronger nuclear weapons. But really the significant part of the New Year's Day speech from Kim Jong Un that singled some change here was the overture to the South Koreans and adds a lot to this opportunity.
INSKEEP: Let me just ask about the U.S. perspective on this. The Trump administration has been saying, fine, you guys talk - whatever. But there's really nothing to discuss except whether North Korea is going to dismantle its nuclear program. I doubt that...
HU: Right, the U.S....
INSKEEP: ...North and South Korea are going to discuss that, are they?
HU: Well, we don't know. I mean, South Korea is saying that they want to discuss a wide range of topics - really aimed at improving the inter-Korean relationship. It's unclear what will be brought up besides the Olympics right now. But this is really an opening - you know, an opening to talk more. And so the South Korean administration is very pleased that it's happening.
INSKEEP: Elise, always a pleasure talking with you. Thank you very much.
HU: Of course, you bet.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Elise Hu in Seoul.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: Now let's go to Pakistan, where the United States has suspended almost all of its security assistance.
MARTIN: State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said that the suspension includes military equipment and funds related to counterterrorism operations.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HEATHER NAUERT: Until the Pakistani government takes decisive action against groups, including the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network, we consider them to be destabilizing the region.
MARTIN: The question now - how might Islamabad respond?
INSKEEP: NPR's Diaa Hadid is on the scene to answer that question for us or give us the best shot that she can. Hi, Diaa.
DIAA HADID, BYLINE: Good morning.
INSKEEP: OK, so first, what is being frozen here? It's military aid - right? - not civilian assistance of various kinds that goes to Pakistan.
HADID: It's military aid. So it's the money that goes straight into Pakistan's military and also coalition support funds. That's reimbursements that Pakistan receives for participating in the war on terror.
INSKEEP: OK, so I'm just thinking. If you're Pakistan, you're being paid to support the United States in the war on terror. And the United States is going to stop paying that. What is Pakistan going to do about that?
HADID: Well, I mean, Pakistan - I spoke to the foreign ministry spokesperson today, and he says that they're trying to meet with Americans and find common ground and a way forward. So obviously, there's damage control being done here. But it's unclear what more they can do. They could - you know, in the most dramatic step, they could punish America by shutting off the land and air corridor to Afghanistan. That's used to ferry - yeah, it's used to ferry military troops and supplies into Afghanistan. Without that, the war there would become a lot more expensive, but that's a very dramatic move.
INSKEEP: What is it that specifically that the United States is demanding of Pakistan? And is it anything that the Pakistanis think they can deliver?
HADID: So they are demanding that they crack down on the Haqqani network in particular, which is an affiliate of the Afghan Taliban. Now, Pakistan, on one hand, denies that it harbors this network. And on the other hand, it says it's already fighting them. And it says that it can do no more. But at the base of this is a certain anger. Analysts here believe that while Pakistan is harboring these people, and it is a card - a strategic card that it carries so that it will have some influence in the future of Afghanistan. And Pakistan, as far as I can tell speaking to analysts, doesn't really want to give that up.
INSKEEP: So I'm trying to think through this problem and how closely linked the two countries are in the fight on terror in that area and the fight in Afghanistan. One question that occurs to me is can the United States punish Pakistan without punishing itself. And the other question that occurs to me is can Pakistan retaliate against the United States without retaliating against itself.
HADID: This is - yeah, no, everybody hurts. This is a game where everybody bleeds. Pakistan can retaliate - I mean, beyond shutting down the land corridor and the air corridor. It can restrict visas to U.S. diplomats. It already restricts them. It can do that even more. It can step up its restrictions on the movements of U.S. diplomats. It could potentially shut down American aid organizations in the country. All of these things will also hurt Pakistan, but they'll also hurt the United States.
But here's kind of like the weak point for Pakistan. This country's in economic trouble right now. In the next few months, it's expected it will be appealing to international financial institutions for help. And for that, it needs American support even though it's diversifying its allies. It's close to China. It's reaching out to Iran. It's reaching out to Russia. All those allies put together, analysts say, doesn't equal the relationship that Pakistan has with the United States.
INSKEEP: Diaa, always a pleasure. Thank you very much.
HADID: Thank you.
INSKEEP: NPR's Diaa Hadid in Islamabad, Pakistan.
(SOUNDBITE OF ANIMALS' "ANIMALS")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's dig more deeply into a trend in love - or rather, its end. We reported yesterday on a woman whose ex-husband used a digital spying tool to track her moves. Divorce lawyers say electronic spying factors in many of their cases. So let's ask how this spying works and whether it's legal. NPR's Aarti Shahani and Lauren Silverman of our member station KERA have been covering this story, and they're both with us. Hi, guys.
AARTI SHAHANI, BYLINE: Hi.
LAUREN SILVERMAN, BYLINE: Hey, Steve.
INSKEEP: Aarti, you first, what got you thinking that this might be a trend?
SHAHANI: Well, you know, as a matter of fact, I have friends who are going through divorces - ugly divorces. And they've absolutely thought about spying tools - I mean, whether they're concerned their ex is using it or, frankly, they've thought about using it. This stuff hits very close to home. People talk on Facebook groups about it.
You can find them pretty easily on Google. And that basically got us thinking, could this be a real trend? So we started calling family lawyers - people who presumably would have their finger on the pulse. And they said, yep (ph), this is happening enough so that it's actually changing their practice.
INSKEEP: Changing their practice, Lauren Silverman?
SILVERMAN: Well, what's different is the evidence that they have to work with. We talked with more than two dozen lawyers and digital forensics investigators. And they said clients are often talking about wanting to spy or worry that they've been spied on. But the bulk of the spying is pretty subtle - maybe a husband who uses that Find My iPhone feature to see if his wife is actually at the gym, where she says she is. We talked to a lawyer in Dallas, Rick Robertson, and he says clients are using digital tools they already have.
RICK ROBERTSON: I've had clients who came in and say, I left my iPad in my husband's car and I found out all this stuff. So technically, they're using tracking technology. It's just not necessarily something illegal.
SILVERMAN: And when you think about it, Steve, a lot of parents are using apps to monitor their kids to try and keep them safe online. If you stop trusting your romantic partner, you can use those same tools on him or her.
INSKEEP: Well, Aarti, at what point does this become illegal?
SHAHANI: OK. So we're not going to give legal advice. But, in general, there are two things you have to ask. One, are you intercepting communication illegally? That means eavesdropping or wiretapping. And then, separately, whose property are you monitoring? Is it yours or someone else's? What courts have found is when a couple jointly owns a car, either person can have a GPS tracker in it and arguably that's legal. But with smartphones, it's different. Even if you paid for the phone, it's considered such an intimate device it belongs to the person who's using it.
INSKEEP: OK. So putting spyware on somebody else's phone - anybody else's phone, even your spouse, that's going across the line?
SILVERMAN: Probably. But you can use digital tracking technology legitimately to monitor kids or employees. And that's exactly how spyware makers market the technology. What becomes dicey territory is, as you said, when you use it on an intimate partner. For example, in the case of one person I interviewed, he found spyware on his home computer which his ex-wife admitted to putting there. And he's angry at the people who make spyware. He says, hey, you say it's for monitoring kids and employees, but, in reality, exes are using it in breakups.
SHAHANI: And I do want to note, NPR reached out to spyware makers who say exactly as Lauren mentioned, it's for kids and employees and using it on partners is illegal. But, you know, they're still creating a product that's completely hidden by design. There's not some little red icon letting the person know, hey, this thing is on, and you're being watched.
INSKEEP: Well, if it's illegal to use this product in a certain way, could you actually get prosecuted for doing it?
SILVERMAN: What we learned is that it's really unlikely that local police are going to go so far as to actually run a spyware detection program for that. You generally have to pay a digital investigator, and that can cost thousands of dollars. So it's just cheaper to throw out your device or to wipe it, even though by doing that you get rid of the evidence that could be used in court, which is exactly what the people Aarti and I interviewed did.
INSKEEP: Wait a minute. In order to protect themselves going forward, they destroyed anything they could use to get justice for the past?
SILVERMAN: Yes.
SHAHANI: Exactly. And, you know, just the other thing to note is that even when there is evidence, judges and prosecutors have a hard time figuring out how to deal with it, OK? So they know what burglary looks like but hacking - not so much. So, Steve, this trend of surveillance and divorce - it becomes yet another visceral example of the law can't keep up with technology.
INSKEEP: NPR's Aarti Shahani and KERA'S Lauren Silverman. Thanks, guys.
SILVERMAN: Thank you.
SHAHANI: Thanks.
INSKEEP: And you can visit npr.org/alltech to check out their series and read up on how to get help if you think you may be a victim.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Fewer people are smoking these days, and now a huge tobacco company says it's trying to give up cigarettes itself. Phillip Morris International, the maker of Marlboros, announced this in newspaper ads in the United Kingdom. The company says it will stake its future, instead, on electronic alternatives, which it claims are healthier. But as NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports, antismoking advocates were quick to question the company's motives.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Phillip Morris says, this year, it will focus on providing more information to British smokers about how to quit, including a new website and inserts included in cigarette packs. And it says it will invest more heavily in smoke-free products. Robin Koval is president and CEO of the Truth Initiative, a public health group devoted to smoking cessation. She scoffed when she saw copies of the full-page ads in the British newspapers.
ROBIN KOVAL: When I saw this New Year's resolution, I thought what a great publicity stunt, perhaps, a little bit more of an April Fool's joke than a New Year's resolution.
NOGUCHI: Koval says the first obvious problem with a company's resolution was that it set no goals.
KOVAL: The first thing we tell smokers when they want to give up smoking is to set a definite quit date. I didn't see that any place in this ad.
NOGUCHI: In its ads, Phillip Morris touts its IQOS product, which heats tobacco instead of burning it, calling it healthier than cigarettes. But regulators have yet to endorse that view. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reviewing whether the company can market those claims. Koval notes the company has always had an icy relationship with regulators.
KOVAL: Phillip Morris has sued governments to thwart their anti-tobacco programs, to prevent increases in taxes, to prevent graphic warning labels. And they have certainly done nothing to stop promoting Marlboro.
NOGUCHI: She also notes, the company has less to lose in the U.K., where it is a relatively small player in the traditional cigarette market. Koval says she sees the announcement as more of a marketing move than anything else.
KOVAL: It's the new year, and smokers are thinking about quitting. Maybe it would be more beneficial for Phillip Morris if they switched to IQOS and became new users of that brand.
NOGUCHI: Yuki Noguchi, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF ROB CROSS' "WE LEARN")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. How does that old song go, I'm just a fool whose intentions are good? Authorities say a man robbed a bank in Ohio and used most of the money to buy an engagement ring. Police say 36-year-old Dustin Pedersen spent $4,500 on a ring less than an hour after the robbery and gave it to his fiancee the next day. Pedersen denies the robbery but admitted the surveillance photos sure look like him. I guess he was in a hurry to lock in that for-better-or-for-worse thing. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The White House has suspended almost all of its security assistance to Pakistan. This follows days of tensions that began with a tweet by President Trump accusing Pakistan of deceit for taking billions in U.S. aid while harboring militants that are fighting U.S. forces across the border in Afghanistan. For more, we're joined by NPR's Diaa Hadid in Islamabad. Good morning, Diaa.
DIAA HADID, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: So the White House says it's freezing hundreds of millions of dollars here. How is Pakistan reacting to this?
HADID: So Pakistani officials seem to have been taken by surprise by the initial New Years tweet by Trump and the subsequent public humiliation they say they've experienced. But they weren't really that surprised that there would be some sort of announcement in a cut in military aid. This relationship has been rocky for years, and it took a nosedive in August, when President Trump announced his new strategy for Afghanistan. And that's the first time he publicly accused Pakistan of harboring militants. That's really set the tenor for what's happened.
MARTIN: Which they do, by the way. I mean, the Obama administration also castigated Pakistan.
HADID: Certainly, these are not new accusations. It's just - it's the tenor and the sense that this is a public browbeating that has really poisoned relations as far as I can tell from Islamabad. But there are efforts to salvage it. This morning, I ran down to the Foreign Ministry to speak to the spokesperson, Mohammad Faisal, and he said this.
MOHAMMAD FAISAL: This was anticipated that the difference of opinion on Afghanistan would be complex. The efforts are still underway to find common ground and identify steps that can be taken jointly to move forward.
MARTIN: So that sounds optimistic, but this cut in military aid, I mean, is it likely to generate any kind of change? I mean, that's presumably what the Trump administration is hoping, that it's going to change Pakistan's behavior. Is that likely?
HADID: That's optimistic. Pakistanis say that they're trying to find common ground. They're not saying that they're going to change their policies. And certainly, analysts here say that this public browbeating might make Pakistanis more defiant.
I was speaking to Ammara Durrani (ph). She's a sociologist and writer on current affairs. She really reflected something that many Pakistanis here say is that there's a certain anger that Pakistanis feel here about that - they feel like they're being singled out for supporting the Taliban. That's the accusation. But, you know, Russia and Iran are also believed to be supporting the Taliban. Qatar, a U.S. ally, has an office for them. So in their narrative, they feel like they're being unfairly singled out. Here, you can have a listen.
AMMARA DURRANI: To say that Pakistan should not be talking to the Taliban, that may sound absurd and weird if all the actors in the region and beyond the region are already engaging the Taliban for a possible negotiation.
HADID: And so she says out of all these countries, Pakistan has the biggest stake, which is why they have - they believe to have some sort of engagement.
MARTIN: Right. So now, America is punishing Pakistan. Does Pakistan have any leverage to punish America?
HADID: It can pinch. It can shut down the air route and the land route that America uses to ferry troops and supplies into Afghanistan. Without that, the war in Afghanistan would be a lot more expensive. But that's a very dramatic move. I don't get a sense here that anyone wants to go that far yet.
MARTIN: NPR's Diaa Hadid reporting from Islamabad this morning. Thanks so much, Diaa.
HADID: You're welcome.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
If you catch any of the Golden Globes Sunday, take a closer look. Many actresses will be dressed in black, and they'll be wearing little pins with the words Time's Up, which is the name of the campaign aimed at fighting sexual harassment and abuse across not just Hollywood but all industries. I recently spoke with Kim Masters. She is editor-at-large of The Hollywood Reporter and host of KCRW's The Business. And we talked about how Hollywood is going to handle this award season as allegations continue to surface.
KIM MASTERS, BYLINE: There are still stories we honestly can't get to because our sources are too frightened to come forward. You know, we know they're there but we can't...
MARTIN: Even now you've got sources who don't want to talk?
MASTERS: Even now, yeah. If somebody's powerful and still in the chair, you know, it's hard to take them on. You know, certain people who are, you know, Harvey Weinstein - I've said often - was not at the peak of his powers when this finally happened to him after years and years of people kind of knowing that he had this alleged behavior. But if you're still in the chair, yes, people are still scared.
MARTIN: So there was this period of time not that long ago when it did feel like every single day someone was being outed for sexual misconduct.
MASTERS: Well, that's today.
MARTIN: Is it still such, even though it's not in the news?
MASTERS: Yeah, oh, yeah. I mean, it is going to be in the news. It's going to come out in pieces. I mean, just last night, I was at my house at night and I got - somebody reached out to ask me to look into a story and said he had people who would confirm what he was telling me. I'll note that some of my key sources in this have been men who have seen the behavior and are not approving it. So I think that's something that we can be encouraged about.
Also, let me just say, you know, there are two big initiatives going forward. One is a group of powerful women in the industry, actresses - Shonda Rhimes, that sort of thing. The other is spearheaded by Kathy Kennedy, who is the head of Lucasfilm. She is a formidable force in this industry. You know, she was Steven Spielberg's producer going back to "E.T." and just a woman who can get things done. And so I think I have a lot of confidence? They've got Anita Hill running that.
And they're going to come across with a bunch of recommendations. And they're raising a lot of money. And they are saying this is not going to just be about women in this industry. They're trying to reach out across multiple industries. They want a legal defense fund that can help women who are not rich and famous or even the actresses who are - you know, aspiring people who are not in this industry. They're going to try to enact some kind of significant change.
MARTIN: So as we look to awards season, I mean, the Academy has had to take a hard look because of the Oscars So White uproar of the last couple of years, and it affects the nominations. I mean, the political moment and the social moment can affect the nominations. How do you expect the story of sexual harassment and assault to figure into nominations this year?
MASTERS: Well, I'm going to take it back to Donald Trump. You know, I think a lot of the fuel for this movement is the fact that he has been accused of misconduct and he's still sitting there in the White House. And I think that's fueled some of the rage that you see over longstanding practices in this culture. So I think there are certain ways. This is a mostly liberal community, as you undoubtedly know. And if you look at the potential nominees, a lot of them are ways to sort of poke at the culture that Trump is promoting - "Get Out," for example, Jordan Peel's movie, which, you know, is about racial relations underneath it all, a movie like "Call Me By Your Name," you know, which is about a gay love affair.
You know, there are ways to say, we don't like this. "The Post" would be another example, which you see Katharine Graham standing up to Richard Nixon and Ben Bradlee too, of course. So those are movies that are in the mix and might get a little extra push because the industry wants to say, you know, we don't like this. And that's a way of expressing a political point.
MARTIN: Kim Masters is editor-at-large at The Hollywood Reporter and she hosts KCRW's The Business. Hey, Kim, thanks so much for talking with us.
MASTERS: Thank you.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
This weekend, Cleveland throws a perfect season parade. But in this case, perfect means perfectly awful. The Browns lost all 16 games this season, just the second team ever to do that. The parade is a joke but also meant to send a message. Here's Matt Richmond of WCPN ideastream.
MATT RICHMOND, BYLINE: The Browns joined the NFL 68 years ago, and for decades, were one of the most-successful teams. But in 1996, owner Art Modell moved the franchise to Baltimore. It became the Ravens. Cleveland waited three years to get the franchise they have today. And since then, the team hasn't had much success - 10 years without a winning season. The owner promises to bring back embattled head coach Hue Jackson next year even though he's now posted a 1-31 record over the past two seasons. And that brings us to tomorrow's parade. Jay Demagall's at a parade float steering committee meeting at a local bar. He and a few friends are putting together a float.
JAY DEMAGALL: So that's a plan. Milton's got candles made. Now, I was going to dress up a Santa Claus and drive. Ron, as part of your hazing, you're going to be the brownie elf.
RICHMOND: The idea for the parade got started on Twitter a year ago, when the Browns looked to be on the way to an 0-16 season. It was shelved when the team won a game. But then, the unimaginable happened. It got worse. Jay Demagall sees the parade as a warning shot across the bow of ownership for fielding a lousy team year after year.
DEMAGALL: Somebody's still making money off of it, and they're making money off of us.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: A lot of money.
DEMAGALL: A lot of money. And the players, I know they're doing their best with whatever they can do, but it's just not fair to the city.
RICHMOND: I'm standing outside FirstEnergy Stadium. A few years ago, a local comedian dubbed it The Factory of Sadness. Temperatures are expected to hover around 4 degrees tomorrow. The route is a counterclockwise circle around the stadium representing a zero. Not everyone is on board with this parade.
LIONEL SMITH: I will not be attending a perfect season parade.
RICHMOND: Clevelander Lionel Smith isn't buying the parade organizers' arguments that it will affect billionaire owner Jimmy Haslam.
SMITH: He's already embarrassed. There's not too many 0-for teams ever in the league. He's the laughingstock of the league. We don't need to parade this.
RICHMOND: But Chris McNeil, who hatched this idea last year, disagrees. He says, since then, feelings on both sides have hardened.
CHRIS MCNEIL: Around Thanksgiving, I was saying there's three things that you don't want to bring up at Thanksgiving dinner - politics, religion and the Browns Perfect Season Parade.
RICHMOND: It's expected that thousands will attend. Only two years ago, about a million Cleveland Cavaliers fans flooded downtown streets for the city's first championship parade in more than a half-century. Tomorrow will mark something very different. For NPR News, I'm Matt Richmond in Cleveland.
(SOUNDBITE OF MY DAD VS. YOURS' "TANZ MIT UNS")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The schism between President Trump and Steve Bannon is getting deeper, and it's getting a whole lot of attention here inside Washington. It started with a book called "Fire And Fury" that quotes Bannon extensively taking swipes at the president and his family. Trump responded with a scathing statement, saying Bannon, quote, "has lost his mind" when he left the White House.
So what effect, if any, does this have outside Washington for voters and for conservatives and, in particular, for Trump supporters? We're joined now by Chris Buskirk. He's a conservative talk show host from Phoenix. He is on the line with us again. Chris, thanks so much for being back.
CHRIS BUSKIRK: Oh, it's my pleasure, Rachel. Thanks.
MARTIN: What are your listeners saying? What are they saying about this Trump-Bannon split? Do they care?
BUSKIRK: Well, the funny thing is how little they're saying. That's what's really interesting. I mean, for those of us who work in or around politics on a day-in-and-day-out basis, this has been one of these stories that people can't get enough of. When it comes to sort of your man on the street, woman on the street, your average voter, then they have surprisingly little to say.
It just doesn't seem to be of that much interest, which I guess is not that surprising because when it comes down to it, people are interested in the policies - the agenda that they think are going to make their lives better and kind of look past the gossip and say, well, what's going on with North Korea, or what's going on with an infrastructure bill or the tax bill? And these people inside the Beltway - OK, they're going to have their spats. And people are going to try their powerplays. And there's going to be gossipy books that come out. But that doesn't really impact me on a day-to-day basis. So what's going to happen in Congress when they come back in session?
MARTIN: Right. But Steve Bannon was exceptional. I mean, Steve Bannon was the president's chief political adviser, the architect of the Trump movement. He was seen as this renegade rule breaker, whereas, someone like a Reince Priebus was on the establishment side of the Trump administration in the beginning. It was Steve Bannon who really spoke for the base. Is that not resonating, in some way, that now he's on the out?
BUSKIRK: Yeah. I think there's something there, sure. But you said something interesting. And this is really, I think, where the rubber meets the road - is that Bannon was the architect of Trump-ism or of the Trump agenda. That's something the president disputes. I think it's something that most listeners disagree with it, too.
Is he important? Of course. I think people respect the work that Bannon did on the campaign, at Breitbart, what he has done since then. But, really, when it comes right down to it, it's the person who sits behind the Resolute Desk - the person who's in the Oval Office. And nobody is bigger than the president - no aid, no adviser, no strategist. Nobody is bigger than the person they work for.
MARTIN: So now I'm going to ask you to put on your political analyst hat because...
BUSKIRK: OK.
MARTIN: ...Steve Bannon is in hot water, it seems. I mean, Roger Stone, longtime Trump confidant, has called his participation in this book by Michael Wolff a, quote, "stunning act of betrayal." Rebekah Mercer, one of Donald Trump's main financial backers and a shareholder in Breitbart, is now cutting ties with Bannon. And there's talk that he may be out of Breitbart altogether. Do you think he's done, Steve Bannon?
BUSKIRK: Well, yeah, I don't know what done means. I don't think that he is done...
MARTIN: Will he still be a voice in national politics? Will he still be able to galvanize Trump's base?
BUSKIRK: I think that to the extent that Steve Bannon stays true to the ideas that are really embedded into the Trump agenda, sure. And he's built up goodwill with the base. And, yes, that's true. But, you know, really where - the power relies in the political branch. It relies - it lies with the president, with Congress.
And so does Steve Bannon have the sort of influence that he might have had a week or a month or two months ago? I don't think so.
MARTIN: Do you think any of this has to do with the loss in Alabama that - Steve Bannon supporting Roy Moore in that race, losing that race?
BUSKIRK: Yeah. I think - does it play into it? Sure. I think that's part of it. But I think this really has a lot more to do with the book - with the Michael Wolff book and some of the things that are purported to have been said by Bannon while he was in the West Wing. That is something that any president would be very upset with. You cannot talk about your boss from the West Wing in that way. If, in fact, those quotes are accurate, you can't do that and expect to have no consequences.
MARTIN: The GOP establishment's real happy about this. They would have preferred that Steve Bannon be on the outside, on the outs of all conservative politics for a long time. So what does that mean for you as someone who was championing the anti-establishment wing of the GOP?
BUSKIRK: Yeah. I think the ideas still remain the same. The ideas that are - that resonated with the Trump base that are in Donald Trump's agenda - they continue to go forward. And when you look at the primaries next year - oh, sorry, gosh, it's this year now. But whether you're talking about somebody like a Josh Hawley in Missouri or Josh Mandel in Ohio or here, in Arizona, Kelli Ward - these are ideas that have lots of voices. And you're going to hear from them up and down the line during the primaries. And I say, you know, let's have a good strong primary debate.
MARTIN: Chris Buskirk, conservative talk show host, publisher of the website American Greatness. Thanks so much, Chris.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep with a chance to expand your vocabulary. Wayne State University is promoting expressive words that could be used more. For example, there's couth.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
OK, I've heard of uncouth, but...
INSKEEP: Well, couth is the opposite - cultured, well-mannered. Frangible means fragile. Nugatory is worthless.
MARTIN: Yep.
INSKEEP: And then there's eucatastrophe.
MARTIN: Eucatastrophe?
INSKEEP: Yeah. Catastrophe is where the story goes wrong. Eucatastrophe is where everything turns out all right. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump soon faces a deadline. He's got to decide whether to reinstate sanctions against Iran, sanctions that were lifted as part of the Iran nuclear deal. And the president has to make this decision against this backdrop of a deadly crackdown on protests inside Iran. We're going to talk about all this with NPR national security correspondent Greg Myre, who's in the studio this morning. Good morning, Greg.
GREG MYRE, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: First off, just explain exactly what decision the president has to make here.
MYRE: Well, the sanctions were lifted - some of the U.S. sanctions were lifted in 2015 with the nuclear deal. But every four months, the president - first Obama, now Trump - has to decide whether he wants to keep these sanctions suspended or reinstate them. And this four-month deadline is coming up around the middle of the month here. And Trump has twice gone ahead and continued the suspension, waived the sanctions.
But now with the protest, it's sort of raising the issue of whether he wants to take a hardline action here. But this would have a significant impact because the Iranians would immediately be upset, claim that the terms of the nuclear deal have been violated and would potentially risk unraveling the whole nuclear deal.
MARTIN: Can you explain the connection, if any, between the nuclear deal and what is happening with the protests in Iran?
MYRE: Sure. In Iran, there was the notion that the sanctions were the cause of their economic problems. So when they were lifted, there was this expectation that the economy would get much better. And it just really hasn't for ordinary Iranians. Also, we saw something just in the last month - details of the government budget came out in a much more public way than they have previously. And we saw how much money was being spent on religious institutions and security institutions. So this has provoked a lot of anger and a lot of criticism that so much money is being spent on this part of the - in this area, rather than on the needs of individuals.
MARTIN: Yeah. So are these protests - is there any way to know if these protests are changing the way that the Trump administration thinks about the dynamics playing out in Iran?
MYRE: You know, it certainly does challenge this notion that Iran has been ascendant and is becoming more and more powerful throughout the region without any cost to itself. We've seen the protesters in numerous places chanting things like, leave Syria alone. Get out of Lebanon, out of Gaza. And these are places where Iran is heavily invested and has made a big push and has publicized this. But it shows that - you know, that there's been a big cost there. And the Iranian government also is very fearful that this turmoil in the region could come to Iran. And I spoke with Abbas Milani, who teaches Iranian studies at Stanford University. Here's how he put it.
ABBAS MILANI: The regime has made it very clear. In the past, they have made almost direct threats - that if we are challenged at home, we will do to Iran what we have done or what we have helped do in Syria.
MYRE: Iran really is surrounded by all these conflicts, and that plays a very significant role in their thinking here.
MARTIN: Right. So whenever there's some kind of political unrest in Iran, it often sparks talk outside of Iran about the fall of the government. Is that at all realistic?
MYRE: Not really, no. Two conflicting ideas to keep in mind about Iran - the mullahs have been in power for almost 40 years now, and they have not delivered. And this has left people very frustrated. But they still hold the levers of power. And they've been able to put down uprisings in the past - and no evidence that they are in imminent danger right now.
MARTIN: NPR's Greg Myre. Thanks so much, Greg.
MYRE: Thank you.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Louisiana's coast is washing away into the Gulf of Mexico. For a decade, officials tried to rebuild the coast, but now they admit they can't protect everyone who lives there. In collaboration with Reveal, the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, here's Tegan Wendland of member station WWNO in New Orleans.
TEGAN WENDLAND, BYLINE: Ollie Williams’ double-wide trailer home is 13 feet in the air, on stilts, with a tall set of wooden stairs to reach the front door. Every time it rains, she gets the boats ready.
OLLIE WILLIAMS: We've got our canoe here, keep that out here at all times just in case we get a little tropical storm or whatever.
WENDLAND: She lives in a rural neighborhood about 30 miles northeast of New Orleans. And it wasn't like this when she was a kid. But lately, every time there's a storm, the yard floods and the canoe floats up the steps.
O. WILLIAMS: All depending on how bad the storm gets. During Isaac, we got all the way up to the second step.
WENDLAND: Wow.
O. WILLIAMS: So - and that's when we will have our aluminum boat with the motor.
WENDLAND: Two boats to escape when they need to. It's a routine. Ollie and her husband Daniel move the cars to higher ground. Inside, they grab their go bags out of the closet full of family photos and documents. The kids missed school, nearly a month of it last year. They're fed up.
O. WILLIAMS: This is where we wanted to be forever. We wanted to build our home with our family, have memories.
DANIEL WILLIAMS: Our families have been living out here since the '70s. We never got water this bad, you know.
WENDLAND: Life is tough enough without the flooding. Daniel's partially paralyzed, and they live off of his disability check. This past year, Louisiana made plans to buy out 2,400 homeowners and move people to higher ground. But without money, it's not happening yet and officials don't know if it ever will. Even if it did, the Williams wouldn't qualify. The projected flooding where they are just isn't quite bad enough. But many of Ollie's neighbors have already left. Her longtime friend, Debbie Kappes, moved after Hurricane Katrina to a single-story brick home with a big backyard 10 miles inland.
DEBBIE KAPPES: I totally wanted to be away from the water. And after that, I didn't want to be anywhere around it. I still love the beach, but I don't want to be anywhere around water where I live.
WENDLAND: Debbie and her husband were able to leave because they had money. They were retired and got big settlements from their insurance companies and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Ollie and Daniel didn't qualify for that help since they didn't own their house. But they owned land, so they bought a cheap trailer home and stayed. Now, Debbie worries about them.
KAPPES: If Ollie could afford it, I know Ollie would be out of there in a heartbeat.
WENDLAND: She's kind of just waiting for the next big storm.
KAPPES: I don't even want to think about it. That poor child needs to get out of there.
WENDLAND: Researchers see this pattern all over Louisiana's coast.
ALLISON PLYER: What we've seen is not terribly unexpected.
WENDLAND: Allison Plyer's a demographer with the New Orleans Data Center.
PLYER: The residents in the coastal parishes have been slowly retreating. We found that the people who remain in the most-vulnerable areas are disproportionately elderly and poor.
WENDLAND: People like Ollie and Daniel, who can't afford to leave. And for those left behind, life gets more difficult. Plyer says, after Katrina, nearly 40 percent of the people in some places moved away and never came back. That leaves fewer services like grocery stores, schools and post offices.
PLYER: It's a very big problem for those folks, right? They don't have the neighbors that can help them if they have a severe event of any sort. Probably their way of life has significantly changed as the land is lost and people leave.
O. WILLIAMS: This used to be nothing but houses, mobile homes.
WENDLAND: Ollie drives through her neighborhood pointing to marshy woods. Old driveways lead to nowhere, just dense underbrush and trees covered in vines.
O. WILLIAMS: It's horrible. No friends back here anymore. It's so quiet. Everybody's lots are overgrown.
WENDLAND: Ollie believes it's only a matter of time before her house gets hit by a big storm. That scares her, but it also gives her a weird sense of hope that she and Daniel might get enough federal disaster money to finally move someplace safer. For NPR News, I'm Tegan Wendland in Slidell, La.
(SOUNDBITE OF PHONTAINE'S "FIN")
MARTIN: And you'll hear more on this story on the next episode of Reveal.
(SOUNDBITE OF PHONTAINE'S "FIN")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
If you own an iPhone or a Mac or pretty much any smartphone or computer, chances are you have a security problem, a problem with the chips that power those devices. Researchers discovered they are vulnerable to hackers and have been for years. The names given to these defects are not exactly comforting - Meltdown, Spectre. Matt Tait's going to discuss this with us. He's a cybersecurity fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. Good morning, sir.
MATT TAIT: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
INSKEEP: OK. So I'm holding a smartphone. Is this defect essentially a door that's left open to my supposedly secure device?
TAIT: Basically, yes. What's happened is there's two of these vulnerabilities, which affect basically all computer processes which exist in your phone, in your laptop, in cloud computing environments, as well. And the problem is that this defect affects the hardware itself, which means that, unlike software, where we can just ship an ordinary software update to fix these defects, we can't just ship it.
INSKEEP: And the defect means that a hacker could get into that phone, get into that computer, get the information out?
TAIT: So what the defect allows is for malware to steal the computer memory of a different process that's running. And that's particularly dangerous in the context of cloud computing, where, of course, lots of different people are using the same computers. And you don't want some people to steal the memory from other customers' devices.
INSKEEP: Do you have any sense of how much this defect has been exploited?
TAIT: So we can't tell whether or not it's been exploited. It's completely invisible. But what we have been able to see is that, although we can't fix the hardware itself, we've been able to invent new bits of computer science in order to make operating systems safe in order to protect against this particular defect from being exploited.
INSKEEP: How so?
TAIT: So in the event that you install your software updates - and, you know, Microsoft and Linux and Apple have all issued software updates that will protect the operating system against this defect being exploited - then hackers can't use this vulnerability in order to attack other processes and steal their computer.
INSKEEP: So your argument is that it's - well, their argument is that it's OK now, so long as you've taken whatever updates you've been offered.
TAIT: So for people at home, yes. The takeaway is that you need to install your security updates. And then you'll be able to protect yourself against a lot of these defects. And, really, the interesting thing about this vulnerability is the sheer amount of work that's had to be put in by operating system developers, people that make web browsers, by people that work in cloud computing companies in order to find completely novel ways of protecting against this vulnerability from being exploited.
INSKEEP: You know, I got to ask - sometimes, when there's a disaster in the physical world - you know, the dam breaks, the bridge collapses - there's somebody who warned that there was a problem that was overlooked. Is there any evidence that chip makers and computer companies had some kind of warning that there was a problem here and went ahead and sold millions and millions of devices?
TAIT: So we don't know whether or not they knew that this was going to be a defect in advance. But what we do know is that this vulnerability has been worked on for months and months and months by a very large amount of people in the U.S. technology community because it's such a weird vulnerability that required completely new parts of computer science to be invented in order to find ways to protect against it.
INSKEEP: And they were doing this in secret, in effect, to avoid word of the vulnerability spreading too far?
TAIT: Yes. So this was completely secret. We started to get word that this vulnerability might exist. And people were able to reverse engineer what that vulnerability was in the final days of the embargo. But, yes, this was all being done in secret by lots of very big computer technology companies.
INSKEEP: OK. Matt Tait, thanks very much. Really appreciate it.
TAIT: Thanks so much for having me.
INSKEEP: He's senior cybersecurity fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump heads to Camp David today to meet with congressional Republican leaders. They're expected to start planning their next move after the GOP notched a win by passing its big tax legislation. But a new book out today by journalist Michael Wolff is overshadowing those talks. It's called "Fire And Fury," and it includes statements from former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon that set off this feud with President Trump and called into question Bannon's role as a populist kingmaker going forward. On Breitbart radio, Bannon's said he still supports the president.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
STEVE BANNON: The president of the United States is a great man. You know I support him day in and day out, going through the country, giving the Trump miracle speech or on the show or on the website. So I don't think you have to worry about that.
MARTIN: The president, though, hasn't seemed so convinced. He lashed out at the book on Twitter. And his lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to prevent it from being published. Here's what President Trump told reporters yesterday.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I don't know. He called me a great man last night. So, you know, he obviously changed his tune pretty quick.
MARTIN: Referring there to Steve Bannon. For more on this, we're joined by NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley. Good morning, Scott.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: So the book is coming out today - this morning, in fact - despite efforts by the president's legal team to stop it.
HORSLEY: Yeah. We have already seen some advance excerpts of the book, and they paint an unflattering portrait of Donald Trump as someone who never really expected to be elected president, someone who was and is ill-prepared for the job. It's based, in part, on interviews with Steve Bannon but also other White House advisers.
The White House itself is pushing back hard against this. The press secretary has called it a complete fantasy. And as you mentioned, the president's personal attorney, Charles Harder, sent a cease-and-desist letter to the publisher trying to block publication. But a defiant publisher instead moved up the release date to this morning. It was supposed to come out on Tuesday. And it's already vaulted to No. 1 on Amazon's bestseller list.
MARTIN: So there are political implications because of this book. I mean, it is - it has driven this wedge between Steve Bannon and the president and the White House. Now Bannon allies are severing ties with him. That's got to make Mitch McConnell kind of happy though, right?
HORSLEY: Absolutely. Now, you know, there was already some skepticism of Steve Bannon after his disastrous effort to install Roy Moore as the senator from Alabama, a move that backfired and put a Democrat in that seat for the first time in a long time. Now you have Rebekah Mercer, who has been one of the dark money financiers of Bannon and his political operation, saying she's not going to bankroll him and his political efforts anymore. Whether that's a reaction to the Alabama race or these latest comments in this new book from Michael Wolff, it certainly is a blow to his effort to put, you know, counter-insurgent candidates in office. And it's a relief for the establishment wing of the GOP, including GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell.
MARTIN: Yeah. So also in Michael Wolf's book - threaded throughout the book are these revelations, suggestions that Donald Trump is not fit for office, these suggestions that Michael Wolff culls from, he says, hundreds of interviews with Trump supporters. That's going to make the meeting today with congressional leaders sort of awkward, no?
HORSLEY: (Laughter) Possibly. Now, we should say, some of the people who were quoted in the book have disputed the accounts. And Michael Wolff does have sort of a checkered history. His accuracy has been challenged in the past. But you're right, now the president is heading to Camp David. He's going to be meeting with congressional leaders - Republican congressional leaders - Mitch McConnell from the Senate, Paul Ryan from the House. They're going to try to get on the same page. You know, they've had some different agendas. How do we build on the GOP success that they had with the tax bill last year?
Paul Ryan, the House speaker, has wanted to go after entitlements now, popular programs like Social Security and Medicare. Mitch McConnell, who has a much narrower GOP majority in the Senate, is wary of that. And he said any effort to do something on entitlements has to be bipartisan. For the White House, you know, President Trump campaigned saying he would protect Social Security and Medicare, but they are looking at what the president calls welfare reform. That means tougher work requirements for programs like food stamps and Medicaid.
MARTIN: Before I let you go, we also got this reporting from The New York Times and The Post about efforts the Trump administration made, and the president in particular, to stop Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, from recusing himself from the Russia investigation. What can you tell us?
HORSLEY: That's right. We've known that Donald Trump was very unhappy that his attorney general recused himself from the Russia investigation. He has wanted Jeff Sessions to sort of act as his protector in that probe which has been a cloud over his administration. And it's clear that Trump views the role of the attorney general as to be sort of his personal attorney rather than the nation's top law enforcement official.
MARTIN: All right. NPR's Scott Horsley. Thanks so much, Scott.
HORSLEY: Good be with you, Rachel.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Many state officials are not happy with a move by the Trump administration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave new guidance to federal law enforcement. The statement appears to make it easier to enforce the federal ban on marijuana, even in states that legalized it. The Obama administration had backed off.
Maryland changed its law in 2014, making the possession of small amounts of pot a civil - not a criminal - offense. The state also has a medical marijuana program. And we'll discuss that with Brian Frosh, Maryland's attorney general, who's on the line. Good morning, sir.
BRIAN FROSH: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: What does the Justice Department change mean in practical terms in Maryland?
FROSH: Well, it's extremely disruptive, and it's inhumane. It's inhumane because we have patients with cancer, with extreme pain, AIDS and neurological problems that are helped by medical marijuana. And this puts that help at risk.
INSKEEP: I guess we should mention it's just been in recent weeks - right? - that your state has begun opening medical marijuana dispensaries.
FROSH: That's exactly right.
INSKEEP: I've got a list of them here. There's one in Baltimore, one in Rockville, Ellicott City, Cumberland, Md. - cities that people will have heard of across the country. But when you say it's inhumane, are you expecting that the FBI or federal prosecutors are going to show up at these dispensaries, arresting people?
FROSH: Well, the interesting thing about this new policy is that they don't say what they're going to do. They just tore up President Obama's policy. And that policy essentially said that the Justice Department is going to prioritize its marijuana enforcement. They were going to go after folks who were selling marijuana to minors. They were going to go after criminal enterprises that were using it or using it for money laundering. They were going to stop it from going across borders into states where it's not legal.
And this new policy just gives us a big question mark. It opens the door to across-the-board enforcement against patients, against people who have small amounts of marijuana, as well as against the other criminal enterprises or disruptive activities that the Obama Justice Department focused on.
INSKEEP: Is it your presumption, Attorney General, then, that your local U.S. attorney or your local FBI station chief still isn't going to be able to prosecute everybody who's ever possessed marijuana in Maryland, but they're going to make their own decision about whether they want to shut down a dispensary or not?
FROSH: Yeah. That's exactly right, Steve. I mean, they don't have enough Drug Enforcement Administration agents or FBI agents to stand on every corner and stamp it all out. So it's going to be more haphazard. It's going to depend in part upon what the U.S. attorney decides in each jurisdiction. And, by the way, Maryland has an acting U.S. attorney. We have a new one who's been nominated but not confirmed. So we have no idea what the policy in Maryland is going to be.
INSKEEP: So what is your advice to the dispensary in Ellicott City or the private pot smoker in Baltimore?
FROSH: Well, I hope they will be careful, they'll abide by the Maryland law. And we will hope that the Trump Justice Department takes a reasonable approach to its enforcement of the federal marijuana laws. And our state will do what it can to help and protect them. But in large part, it's beyond our control.
INSKEEP: You acknowledge, then, that the federal government, because of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, has the right to do this, right?
FROSH: Yeah, that's exactly right.
INSKEEP: Is there anything that you could or would try to do in court to push back on the Trump administration?
FROSH: I think it's going to be very difficult to push back in court. I think the best avenue, the best approach is for Congress to take action. The marijuana laws on the federal books are old and outdated. And while it's a controversial subject, it's something on which Congress needs to take action.
INSKEEP: Do you believe there might be enough political support across the country to change marijuana laws on the federal level?
FROSH: Yeah, I do. I mean, look. There are 28 states that allow the sale of marijuana either for medical purposes or recreational. And members of both parties have expressed outrage at this change in policy of the Justice Department.
INSKEEP: When do you think you'll know the way the Trump administration is really going to be going?
FROSH: I think it's going to be something that rolls out over the next couple of years. You're going to have differences from state to state. And people are going to have to feel their way through it. It's going to be very difficult to see a definitive position by the Justice Department. They haven't taken one.
INSKEEP: Attorney General, thanks very much.
FROSH: Thank you, Steve.
INSKEEP: Brian Frosh is the attorney general of Maryland.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
(SOUNDBITE OF LO MOON SONG, "LOVELESS")
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Lo Moon is an indie pop trio that sings songs that capture specific stages in a romantic relationship. They're one of three artists selected for Slingshot, a new emerging artist project by public radio stations and NPR Music. The band's first single, "Loveless," is a plea to restart a couple's love and trust. Lo Moon's members learn to trust each other as the song evolved.
(SOUNDBITE OF LO MOON SONG, "LOVELESS")
MATT LOWELL: I'm Matt - Matt Lowell - songwriter, guitar player of Lo Moon.
(SOUNDBITE OF LO MOON SONG, "LOVELESS")
LOWELL: I had moved back from Boston to New York. I was living at my sister's place. I was working at this studio in Brooklyn that I helped build. And I started writing in a basement a bunch of songs with a friend of mine. And then one of those songs became "Loveless."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVELESS")
LOWELL: (Singing) Crosses in the distance. Bells ring fast.
CRISANTA BAKER: I'm Crisanta Baker. I play keyboards, bass.
(SOUNDBITE OF LO MOON SONG, "LOVELESS")
BAKER: Yeah. It was incredible the first time I heard it, I was, like, screaming. And everyone in the other room was, like, what is going on in there? Because it was, like, the big fills came in. I was just excited because it sounded like Phil Collins.
(SOUNDBITE OF LO MOON SONG, "LOVELESS")
SAM STEWART: I am Sam Stewart. And I play guitar. And, yeah, I remember when I heard the demo - immediately was attracted to the groove because it reminded me a bit of a Radiohead song...
SIMON: Which one?
STEWART: ...Called "All I Need," which...
SIMON: Yeah. Yeah.
STEWART: ...Is one of my favorite songs.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALL I NEED")
THOM YORKE: (Singing) You are all I need.
STEWART: So I was just immediately, like, this is great.
LOWELL: That was the inspiration for the beat...
STEWART: Except...
LOWELL: ...Except...
STEWART: ...It got moved.
LOWELL: ...It got moved. So when we were trying to kind of mimic the beat, it got shifted. And then we were like, oh, that's really cool. Let's just leave that.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVELESS")
LOWELL: (Singing) Loveless is your answer. Time will pass.
In my backyard, I have a shed that we converted into kind of the band's living room, I would say. It's like, there's gear everywhere and synthesizers and guitars. And that's where we learned how to feed off each other. I mean, we would get in there at 11 a.m. and not say a word to each other until 5 p.m. I think by the time we got into the studio to work on the album, we were comfortable enough by that time to just let it happen. I think because of the time we spent at my place, we were really used to that feeling. This sounds like the band.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVELESS")
LOWELL: (Singing) Understand. No relief in silhouettes.
And the beautiful thing about that was when we were making the record, we hadn't put anything out. And so we didn't really know where we sat. We had blinders on, and we just trusted each other. And so when Santa said, Matt, I really like that, or Sam said, I really like that, or I said, that sounds like us. That has the feeling of everybody's emotional state - then we just kind of went with it because we didn't have any other basis to go besides, this sounds like us.
(SOUNDBITE OF LO MOON SONG, "LOVELESS")
LOWELL: When we did finally get Loveless to a place where all of us were inside it - I remember the first time we listened back. We came down really late to listen. And I'll never forget. It came through the speaker, and I was, like, this song's probably 3 and a half, 4 years old, and I've just never heard it like this. I cried. I was just like, this is unbelievable. I can't believe we made this.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVELESS")
LOWELL: (Singing) What I was isn't what I want now.
SIMON: That was Matt Lowell, Crisanta Baker and Sam Stewart talking about their song "Loveless." Their band, Lo Moon, is part of Slingshot, a collaboration between NPR Music and public radio stations to highlight emerging artists. This Tuesday, NPR Music will announce 20 new Slingshot artists to watch in 2018. You can learn more at npr.org/slingshot.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Benya Golden is a Jewish Cossack. This is not a Mel Brooks movie but a new novel. Benya Golden is a political prisoner in the gulag who is pressed into a kind of dirty dozen battalion of horse riding Cossacks and convicts who detest Stalin but revile the Nazis even more. During 10 eventful, violent and wrenching days, the passionate lover of freedom also finds time to passionately romance a beautiful Italian nurse, while Papa Joe Stalin and the Kremlin frets over the invasion of Mother Russia, the siege of the city that bears his name and the romantic entanglements of his beloved daughter Svetlana. The novel - "Red Sky At Noon." And Simon Sebag Montefiore the historian and best-selling author joins us from London. Thanks so much for being with us.
SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: Lovely to be with you.
SIMON: What does Benya Golden say, my name is nothing, my surname is nobody?
MONTEFIORE: That was almost the mantra of prisoners in the gulag camps because in the camps, you know, the politicals - as they were called, and Benya Golden was one of those - the less of a pulse they had, the less people could destroy them.
SIMON: I was surprised and, if I might put it this way, charmed that in the course of the novel, this Jewish man Benya Golden loves becoming a Cossack.
MONTEFIORE: Well, the Cossacks, of course, were the horsemen of the frontiers of czarist Russia who were often escaped serfs or peasants. And they became the enforcers of the czarist regime - the Romanovs. But after the Bolsheviks came to power, the Cossacks, who had been the most anti-Semitic and brutal supporters of the Romanovs - some of them fought for the Bolsheviks. And they were known as the Red Cossacks.
SIMON: I was flabbergasted to read, I guess, in the - when you bring us up to the history in your novel - a lot of us think of horse-mounted cavalry in World War II as the desperate French battalions hurdle in themselves against German tanks. But apparently, there was a vast mounted-cavalry war between the Russians and Germans on the steppes of Russia.
MONTEFIORE: Well, this novel is really set in that cavalry war - you're absolute right. In 1942, the Germans were running out of fuel. They were advancing so fast across the grasslands, the hot grasslands of South Russia. And the Russians were running out of tanks. And so both of them turned to cavalry. And, of course, when I read about this - I'm an enormous fan of American literature and specially, you know, the great novels of Larry McMurtry - "Lonesome Dove."
SIMON: (Laughter).
MONTEFIORE: Cormac McCarthy. And suddenly, it occurred to me when I was reading - studying about this war in the grasslands of Russia - how similar it was. And in some ways, this is a western on the Eastern Front.
SIMON: Among the romances in this book, I must be said - is Benya Golden with his horse?
MONTEFIORE: Benya Golden and his horse Silver Socks. Silver Socks is the one person he can trust. He's in a penal battalion. And this is the story of these punishment battalions that Stalin set up. And they were full of criminals. They're murderers. They're cutthroats. And, you know, the only person he can trust, really, is his beautiful horse.
SIMON: How do we reconcile the monstrous Stalin from real life and history, responsible for killing so many millions, including some of those closest to him, with the almost comically doting father he is to Svetlana?
MONTEFIORE: Well, the interesting thing about writing about dictators, whether it's Stalin or probably Kim Jong Un or whoever it is, is that if we turn them into absolute Frankenstein-like monsters, we learn nothing and understand nothing about how they come to power and how they operate. So yes, Stalin was an absolutely brutal dictator, especially in World War II. I mean, these poor punishment battalions were often used to clear minefields. And they just had to run across the minefield, for example.
But at the same time, he was a doting father who adored Svetlana, who was a pretty, freckled, redhead girl who looked very like Stalin's mother. And he adored her until she stood up to him at a moment in World War II that I recount in the novel. So this is a story, in a way, of two love affairs. And at the very height of Soviet society, you have the dictator's daughter. And down among in the depths of the punishment battalions, you have Benya Golden, who meets this Italian nurse. And, of course, the Italians were a huge presence in the Russian war. Again...
SIMON: Which I also didn't know.
MONTEFIORE: Yes.
SIMON: Apparently, tens of thousands of Italians lost their lives.
MONTEFIORE: Something like 100,000 to the more - even 150,000 did not come back. And, of course, none of them wanted to be there. They had no business being there. Mussolini sent them. And the bizarre thing is they were so Italian. Even in the middle of this brutal Russian war, they were constantly talking about pasta. All their code words were operas or wines or girls they were in love with. They remained unashamedly and charmingly Italian.
SIMON: Let me put to you, Mr. Montefiore, a question that somebody poses to Benya Golden when he determines to fight for the Red Army, Stalin's army against the Nazis. He's asked, why do you want to fight for the bastard?
MONTEFIORE: Yes. That's one of the sort of questions that many people in the Soviet Union asked themselves. And the answer was that Hitler was worse. I mean, first of all, he was a fascist. He was killing the Jews. And they were gradually learning about the Holocaust. And, also, he'd invaded the Russian motherland. So as a Russian and a Jew, Benya Golden was desperate to fight Hitler. And this is his story. I mean, it's also about, you know, human nature, courage and the redemptive nature of love itself.
SIMON: Simon Sebag Montefiore's novel - "Red Sky At Noon." Thanks so much for being with us.
MONTEFIORE: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF RAUJIKA'S "CITY OF TWILIGHT")
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
It is too warm in rural Alaska. In the state's southwestern region, high temperatures of 10 to 20 degrees above average are affecting everything from recreation to survival. From member station KYUK in Bethel, Anna Rose MacArthur reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOGS BARKING)
ANNA ROSE MACARTHUR, BYLINE: Last weekend, Maurice Andrews won the Kuskokwim River’s first sled dog race of the season.
MAURICE ANDREWS: It felt awesome, man. Finally. Finally good to be out.
MACARTHUR: The race had been scheduled to happen two weeks before, but warm weather just above freezing made the trails unsafe. The entire race usually runs 35 miles up the frozen river, but this time it had to run over land. That's because, in some areas, the river ice is only inches thick, where in past years, it was feet. In other places, there's open water. This is a problem in a region with no roads connecting one village to another and where locals refer to the river as an ice highway. Mark Leary has measured the river ice for decades as a volunteer in the village and submits the data to the National Weather Service. He's seeing more open holes and bigger open holes than ever before.
MARK LEARY: We're way behind. We're way behind on winter. I don't know if we've ever seen anything like this.
MACARTHUR: Sixty miles away in the village of Quinhagak, hunting, trapping and fishing grounds lay to the north across the river, but only inches of ice have formed on it. For Ferdinand Cleveland Jr., that means his family can't drive their snowmobile across the river to set their blackfish trap.
FERDINAND CLEVELAND JR.: They usually pick up their trap, like, two or three times a week.
MACARTHUR: Cleveland also can't hunt wolves and wolverines right now to sell their pelts like he normally would. Less hunting and trapping means less money and more expensive trips to the grocery store. In the worst cases, the river's open water is fatal. Two people died last month when their snowmobiles fell through open holes. Volunteers are working to mark the open holes by putting small trees next to them with blue reflectors. People are hoping it gets colder before winter is over. For NPR News, I'm Anna Rose MacArthur in Bethel, Alaska.
(SOUNDBITE OF TVARVAGEN'S "RUNNING OUT OF TIME")
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
This week in the midst of the explosion of "Fire And Fury" and stories about President Trump grousing to billionaires while gobbling cheeseburgers in front of three TV screens and boasting about the size of his nuclear button, the president also found a minute to shut down his own Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The president appointed the group last May after he claimed widespread vote fraud was why Hillary Clinton had won about 3 million more votes than he did, even as Trump won the election without dispute in the Electoral College.
The president suggested that millions of people who aren't citizens must have voted. No evidence of this has been found. The commission, chaired by Vice President Pence, met just twice. They asked states to send them their voter registration lists, which include home addresses, Social Security numbers and other personal information. Their response - rare in these divided times - was bipartisan opposition. No state fully complied with that request. And Delbert Hosemann, the Republican secretary of state of Mississippi, where Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by almost 18 percentage points, told the president's commission, quote, "go jump in the Gulf of Mexico." The commission declined his invitation.
The administration says the Department of Homeland Security will now pursue the investigation. But in an age of mass shootings and terrorism, they also have a good many more urgent things to do than try to dig up 3 million ghost voters, even in the cemeteries of Chicago. It could be a relief to see the end of the commission established to solve a problem that mostly doesn't exist. But you may wonder if American citizens, especially immigrants and minorities, were discouraged from exercising their constitutional right to vote by extra regulations and extraneous checks. And when the president says in a tweet - many people are voting illegally. System is rigged - he makes a charge against a political system that is so open and unpredictable, it elected him.
(SOUNDBITE OF MATTHEW SALTZ AND RYAN HELSING'S "CASCADE")
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
"Fire And Fury" is the title of the new White House tell-all that appeared this week. It also describes how President Trump reacted to the release of the book which details sharp criticism of him from his former chief strategist Steve Bannon. It also features stories that question the president's mental fitness. We're joined now from St. Louis by Ed Martin. He's a conservative commentator and former chairman of the Missouri Republican Party.
Mr. Martin, thanks so much for being with us.
ED MARTIN: Great to be with you, Scott. Thank you.
SIMON: And you have another book out, "Can't Trump This 2017" selling slightly less, I gather...
MARTIN: (Laughter) Yes.
SIMON: ...At least for the moment. But you're on our show now. We'll see what happens.
MARTIN: Right.
SIMON: Steve Bannon wrote the foreword. So I have to ask you an old question from organized labor - which side are you on?
MARTIN: Well, I'm on both sides, I'm on all the sides - I don't know. I'm a little bit confused by it, to be honest. I will tell you - when I asked Steve to write the foreword to the book, I was spending much of December. And as you mentioned, the title is "Can't Trump This 2017." It's really a compilation of what I saw as the top Trump wins, the successes of the year. Steve really was pleased to do it. He wrote a nice foreword. He was, you know, I'd say excited about all the Trump successes. Obviously, I support many, many of the policies of the president.
So a lot of this fight right now is a surprise to me because I didn't see it coming. And I don't quite know - I have such respect for the president especially fighting back when somebody seems to say something about his kids. I have a bunch of kids, and I thought that was something. But I don't know - I'm trying not to be on a side - it's like Mom and Dad had a little bit of a disagreement. I prefer to think that it's going to settle down and they're all in the family here, you know.
SIMON: But disagreement - Steve Bannon is quoted as saying - and to my knowledge this statement has not been challenged - saying the president has lost it. Now, are you supporting a president who is incapable of being entrusted with, you know, the awesome responsibilities, including his finger on what we're told this week is not actually a nuclear button but obviously has the power to send nuclear weapons.
MARTIN: Well - one thing I haven't heard yet is Steve Bannon interviewed or, as you say, you know, walk that back or take it back. Your point is taken. But I think everything I see about the president makes me think that that kind of characterization - you know, the one thing about the author, he's - I haven't read the book. I think that most people haven't seen the full book. But one thing I have seen, the quote in the prologue.
You know, in St. Louis we had a columnist here named Jerry Berger who was sort of similar to Mike Wolff. He was a pretty charming guy and wheedled his way into conversations as well as events and then would write about it. And you'd shake your head sometimes and think, I was there. Jerry Berger seemed to write something different. Well, Mike Wolff actually admits in the prologue he thinks he's got what he knows as true as best as he can but he can't confirm it all. So look, I think the president of the United States has shown he's very, very capable, very, very talented. I think the rest of it I leave to a sort of tabloid discussion.
SIMON: Should he be taunting a dictator with nuclear weapons about the size of his nuclear button?
MARTIN: (Laughter) Well, I - you know, I look at that. And I - the president has a record on Twitter. My next book, by the way, will be about his tweets, and it's coming in May. But I look at, and I think that he is - it's a sort of a form that he's used. I don't think anybody thinks that he tweets with his final pronouncements. I think he makes points.
I'm reminded, by the way, of one tweet that he had about the Chinese from Mar-a-Lago last spring where he said, I'm going to let them take the first crack at getting North Korea in line. And they didn't. So I don't think that's all of Trump. It's sort of his Twitter way. But I'm comfortable again that he's a smart guy and he's in his right mind and he's doing a great job from where I sit for the country.
SIMON: Quickly, he says he's a genius. Do you agree?
MARTIN: I - a hundred percent. Nobody - Hillary Clinton was a genius. Donald Trump was a genius. These people at that level are the all-star big league ballplayers of American politics.
SIMON: Ed Martin, thanks very much for being with us.
MARTIN: Thank you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Motel 6 is being sued by Washington state. Several of its motels were accused of voluntarily and routinely providing guest lists to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents. Motel 6 admits that several of its locations shared information about its customers with ICE. It is the second time the hotel chain has been accused of doing that. Last September, a reporter in Arizona uncovered similar practices in the Phoenix area. Bob Ferguson, the attorney general of Washington state joins us now.
Thanks very much for being with us, Mr. Ferguson.
BOB FERGUSON: Thanks for having me on, Scott. Really appreciate it.
SIMON: What was ICE doing with that information it got from Motel 6s?
FERGUSON: Well, it was fairly shocking. I mean, the hotel turned over the guest list of everybody staying at the hotel. So thousands of individuals had their names turned over to ICE. And according to our interviews with employees at Motel 6, ICE agents would circle the names that looked Latino sounding and ran those names through a database and then would detain individuals based on those random checks.
SIMON: So actual detentions were a result?
FERGUSON: We know of at least a minimum of six in Washington state. And I want to emphasize the numbers that I'll be referring to today are, we think, just the tip of the iceberg. We do not have complete information for Motel 6. But undoubtedly, the number of individuals impacted will go up as our investigation continues.
SIMON: What would you say to those people who might say - look, if people are in this country illegally it's the job of ICE to detain them?
FERGUSON: Well, there's a couple of things. Number one, ICE does have that responsibility. But motels have a responsibility, too. And that responsibility is that you have to live, number one, by your privacy promises. Motel 6 has a privacy statement. It says we're going to guard your private information. They did not do that here. You cannot do that under our consumer protection laws. And so, that's number one.
Number two, they turned over everybody who was staying at the motel. People stay at motels for all sorts of very private reasons. You could be the victim of domestic abuse fleeing your abuser. Do you want your information turned over to anybody who just happens to walk into that hotel? It's not right. Frankly, it pisses me off, and I'm not going to put up with it.
SIMON: We of course contacted Motel 6, and they said that in September of last year, they issued a nationwide directive that made it clear that their motels should not voluntarily provide guest lists to ICE. What do you say?
FERGUSON: Well, we don't know whether they did after that date or not. Our investigation essentially went up to the date in which that news broke. What I will say is that when the statement first came out from Motel 6, they did not even apologize for what they did. When folks were outraged by their statement, they then apologized. But they allowed people throughout the country to believe this was isolated to these two Motel 6s in Arizona and senior management knew nothing about it. I was skeptical of that. I asked my team to investigate. And we now know what they said - Motel 6 said back in September - was not true. It's far more widespread than they allowed the public to believe.
SIMON: Mr. Attorney General, while we have you, this week I feel I have to ask you a marijuana question.
FERGUSON: Sure. Everybody else is, so go right ahead.
SIMON: Recreational marijuana...
FERGUSON: Yeah.
SIMON: ...Is legal in Washington state. The attorney general of the United States has said that the Obama-era policy of looking the other way when states legalize recreational use of marijuana is over. Citizens who use recreational marijuana in Washington state, are they going to be vulnerable to arrest?
FERGUSON: Well, I'm concerned. I don't want to alarm folks unnecessarily, but the views of Attorney General Sessions on marijuana legalization are well known, and his memo the other day is not helpful. I'm particularly troubled because I've tried repeatedly to have a meeting with Attorney General Sessions. He refuses that.
He has sent a letter to me and our governor with incorrect information about Washington state's legalization framework. That is troubling to me. We're trying to address serious issues here. He won't meet. He doesn't have his facts right, and that does lend an additional air of uncertainty over legalization of marijuana. That said, my job is to defend the will of the voters in my state, and we'll do everything in our power to make sure we protect businesses operating under the law here in Washington state.
SIMON: So no businesses are being closed up because of what the Attorney General Sessions said?
FERGUSON: Absolutely not. In fact, the people of my state should know we are doing everything in our power to defend them. If it comes to a legal fight with the Trump administration, we're prepared to have it. I've had some experience with taking on the Trump administration litigation. We have yet to lose a case yet, and I don't plan on starting with this issue.
SIMON: Attorney General Bob Ferguson of Washington state, thanks so much.
FERGUSON: Oh, thank you, Scott. Have a great day.
SIMON: And we contacted the Department of Justice for comment on Mr. Ferguson's remarks about Attorney General Sessions. We have yet to receive a response.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
A very busy week in the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. NPR justice reporter Ryan Lucas has been following the story and joins us in our studios. Ryan, thanks so much for being with us.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: My pleasure.
SIMON: A lot to catch up on. And a lot's revolved around the attorney general himself.
LUCAS: That's right. And the bottom line right now is basically this - the attorney general is in hot water. His latest troubles stem from a New York Times report that came out on Friday. And that article provides a deeper look into how concerned the White House has been about the Russia investigation. And it also gets into how the administration has tried to keep control of it.
Now, one aspect of this was the top White House lawyer, Don McGahn, lobbying Sessions to try to get him not to recuse himself from Russia matters. Sessions told McGahn that he'd consulted career Justice officials, and they had advised that he needed to recuse himself and that he was doing so. Now, that really angered the president. President Trump has been angry about that ever since both behind the scenes and in public. The latest indication of that - in that Sessions is not in favor is from this weekend. And that's the fact that Sessions is not attending a retreat at Camp David with top administration officials. And the Justice Department says Sessions was not invited.
SIMON: Let me get you to go on, too, about what was in that New York Times article because there were other details.
LUCAS: There were. And one big thing related to Sessions that's in there is that he allegedly enlisted an aide to get dirt on then-FBI Director James Comey. He wanted the aide to get it from a congressional staffer. Sessions also reportedly said that he wanted one negative article a day in the press about Comey. The DOJ denies this, but if it's true, this is highly, highly unusual for an attorney general to try to smear the FBI director, who really works for him.
SIMON: Yeah.
LUCAS: It raises a lot of questions about Sessions and his ability to continue to lead the Justice Department and its various agencies, including the FBI. So all of this just really creates a heap of questions about whether he'll be able to hold on to his job.
SIMON: Finally, there's a book out called "Fire And Fury." Have you heard about that?
LUCAS: I have, yes (laughter).
SIMON: All right. Not just on NPR, I'm sure. Michael Wolf's book, of course. And stuff has spilled out that pertains to the Russian investigation, right?
LUCAS: That's right. There are a few things in particular that stood out in the early excerpts. I haven't had the chance to get my hands on the book yet. But a couple of things in particular. One is that Bannon talks about that infamous Trump Tower meeting in June of 2016 that featured Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and the meeting that they had with the Russian lawyer, who was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. Bannon describes the meeting as treasonous, as unpatriotic. And he says that those three should've called the FBI immediately. A second thing is that he also says that there's no way - there's no way that Trump Jr. didn't walk the Russians up one floor to the 26th floor of Trump Tower and introduce them to Trump himself.
SIMON: We should explain that's his - he doesn't know that happened, but he just finds it inconceivable it didn't.
LUCAS: He doesn't offer any proof. He wasn't in the campaign at the time. But this would be important if true because Trump has denied any knowledge of the Russian overtures, any knowledge of Russian outreach. And it would - this would obviously contradict that. The last thing is that Bannon says that the investigation is going to focus on money laundering. There are indications that Mueller's team may indeed be looking at that. So a lot to digest there.
SIMON: NPR's Ryan Lucas, thanks so much.
LUCAS: Thank you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The United Nations World Food Programme has to cut back on the food that it gives out to some of the most imperiled people in the world. In Ethiopia, for example, it's had to lower the daily calorie intake for hundreds of thousands of refugees that it feeds in the camps there. Now, this is partly due to funding shortfalls, but there is also a growing need for food aid as the globe's conflicts continue. Peter Smerdon joins us now from Nairobi. He's the spokesperson for the World Food Programme in East Africa. Mr. Smerdon, thanks for being with us.
PETER SMERDON: My pleasure.
SIMON: What kind of hard decisions do to the folks in your program have to make?
SMERDON: Basically, when we haven't got enough money, we have to decide who's not going to get food. And most of the people we serve are dependent on the United Nations World Food Programme for their food needs - in many cases, 100 percent because either they fled countries in conflict, and they have absolutely no money, no jobs and no assets left or because they're refugees, and they are confined to camps. They are not allowed to work. And they have no money, either.
So when we are forced to cut, we have to decide which is the best way to do it. We can do a shallow cut, like 10 percent 20 percent of the full ration. Or we can do a deep cut if we think the contributions will not be coming in anytime soon. The difficulty with doing a deep cut is that over the longer period, of course, people will become malnourished. Their immune systems will be suppressed. And if the cuts continue, or they're getting absolutely no food from WFP, inevitably, over time, they will fall sick. And, ultimately, many people will perish.
SIMON: So - I mean, forgive me. It's one thing to make appealing ads that people are in danger of starving to death. What you're saying now is, because there's a crunch for aid, people are in danger of dying slowly.
SMERDON: That's what, in the end, will happen to the most vulnerable. It's the women and the children who will go first. The difficulty about the situation confronting us in 2018, however, is that it comes on the heels of 2017, when the world really pulled itself together, and our donors and donors for other organizations stepped up and provided a lot of funding because we were facing what was said to be the greatest humanitarian needs...
SIMON: Yeah.
SMERDON: ...Globally for assistance since the Second World War. But it's whether they can keep - governments can keep giving at the huge levels they are already giving. And when the situation - and many of them are conflict situations - are only continuing. None of the situations are being solved. It's just getting worse.
SIMON: And, Mr. Smerdon, to those people who say - wait. I just gave - what do you say?
SMERDON: We say, thank you so much. But we would like you to give again because the needs are still there, and you will still be saving lives. You know, essentially, in conflict situations, we are simply a Band-Aid. We are keeping people alive. And in many cases, we are keeping people alive - the same people year in year out. So we are not changing the problem. We are not getting to the root cause of these people suffering. What we need is some kind of solution, particularly to protracted conflicts, to stop this from going on year in, year out.
SIMON: Peter Smerdon with the World Food Programme in East Africa, thanks so much for being with us.
SMERDON: Thank you very much.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
To help offset the cost of tax cuts, the new federal tax overhaul puts some big politically left-leaning states, like New York and California, on the hook for a greater share of federal revenue. They don't want to pay. Capital Public Radio's Ben Bradford reports.
BEN BRADFORD, BYLINE: The new law no longer allows taxpayers to write off more than $10,000 of state and local income and property taxes from their federal returns or, as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo put it in his annual State of the State address Wednesday...
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
ANDREW CUOMO: As Washington has shot an arrow aimed at New York state's economic heart, the best plan is to get out of the way before it hits.
BRADFORD: New York along with California, Massachusetts and other large blue states have some of the highest taxes in property prices, so they'll feel the brunt of the loss of state and local tax deductions, also called SALT deductions. Democrats like Cuomo and California Assembly Budget Chairman Phil Ting say Republicans in Washington targeted their states.
PHIL TING: They went out of their way to really penalize our taxpayers. So we're really looking at ways as how we can mitigate that for our tax base, and we're looking at a variety of proposals.
BRADFORD: Some that might sound pretty zany - Cuomo says New York is looking to shift from income taxes to a new payroll tax, which businesses could still deduct but would probably require employees to take lower pre-tax salaries. In California, state Senate leader Kevin de Leon has a proposal for taxpayers to give to a new state-run charitable fund in exchange for a refund on state income taxes. New Jersey Governor-elect Phil Murphy tweeted yesterday that several towns will adopt a similar approach for their local taxes. California Republican Senate leader Patricia Bates says Democrats are looking for any reason to clash with the Trump administration.
PATRICIA BATES: That has certainly been the M.O. for the last year that we've been up here - since President Trump was elected. It's not the best way to go.
BRADFORD: Now, some of the rhetoric on this issue might have you thinking the loss of SALT deductions would hit every man, woman and child right in the tax return. But only about a third of filers claim SALT deductions. They're largely higher-income households, and the new tax law benefits them in other ways. Frank Sammartino of the non-partisan Tax Policy Center says most of those people will still pay less overall next year.
FRANK SAMMARTINO: It's just that relative to someone in a low-tax state, their tax cut might be smaller.
BRADFORD: And that's the real fear for leaders of high-cost states. With the loss of the SALT deduction, a state like California is now even more costly for higher-income taxpayers in comparison to a bordering state, like Nevada, which has no income tax. Some California Republicans are weighing whether they would support Democratic proposals to avoid the hit. State Senator John Moorlach doesn't rule it out.
JOHN MOORLACH: So we're going to benefit those that we really need to keep here because if we lose any of our top 1 percent, we lose a portion of about 50 percent of our personal income taxes.
BRADFORD: Moorlach's a former accountant. And his main concern is that the California bill is too cute.
MOORLACH: I just wonder if it's really something that should be pursued because it will be squashed.
BRADFORD: States are considering one other tactic to fight the loss of the SALT deduction, one that brought New York Governor Cuomo a long ovation in his State of the State speech - sue it as double taxation.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
CUOMO: We believe it is illegal, and we will challenge it in court as unconstitutional.
(APPLAUSE)
BRADFORD: New Jersey has also threatened a lawsuit, while California's attorney general says he's reviewing legal options.
For NPR News, I'm Ben Bradford in Sacramento.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The winter storm gripping the eastern United States has forced millions of people to scramble for heat and shelter. But people who work outside for a living often have no choice but to just endure. North Country Public Radio's Brian Mann reports.
BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: I've been to the Arctic before. And it feels a lot like this - howling wind, snow scouring your face and temperatures so cold that your hands start to freeze up immediately. But the thing is I'm not in the Arctic. I'm in upstate New York in a parking lot outside a Dunkin' Donuts.
(SOUNDBITE OF SNOW PLOW DRIVING)
MANN: A plow pushes drifts of snow. The guy behind the wheel, Zach Nason, is bundled up like the Michelin Man.
ZACH NASON: When it's colder, and when it's windier, that's when it's the worst. You have to dress up even extra bundled, you know? It's a hassle to work with.
MANN: For guys like Zach, the colder it gets, the more work there is. That means they spend even more time outside.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRUCK STARTING)
MANN: Across town in Saranac Lake, N.Y., Dan Farrell fires up his tow truck. It's so cold that road salt doesn't work very well, which means slippery highways and a ton of accidents.
DAN FARRELL: It's a tractor trailer stuck off the road.
MANN: That's his next job, the thing he has to do before lunch. Imagine wrestling a semi back onto an icy country road when it's double digits below zero. Dan says he plans for the worst.
FARRELL: More layers, warmer gloves. You always pack extra stuff just to be safe in case you get stranded or something.
MANN: This kind of work can be dangerous. New York state has issued a frostbite advisory. It's so ridiculously cold that as I walk to the office of an oil and heating company, the snow squeaks under my boots. I meet a repairman named Greg Trombley. He's warming up on his lunch break.
GREG TROMBLEY: Long johns on, Under Armour, two jackets, hat, mittens, gloves, heavy boots - they're a must.
MANN: He's been working overtime, fixing furnaces stressed by the cold. If he doesn't get there fast, houses just freeze up. This sounds like a young person's game, but Greg is 66 years old. He tells me about one recent job, a heating unit up on a roof.
TROMBLEY: Twenty below, and with the wind chill up there, it's like 70 below. It's really cold.
MANN: He says you learn to cope. But in weather like this, things just go wrong. Engines stop working. Tools break. Your fingers shut down.
Mid-morning, Manuel Zelaya is delivering furniture. He works in Manhattan and says, despite the frigid weather, he has 12 stops to make before he can knock off for the day.
MANUEL ZELAYA: We're starting late because it was so cold in the morning, our truck wasn't starting. So we had to go get a rental and everything. It's been a pretty rough morning, man.
MANN: Manuel is wearing pretty much the same uniform I see on all the people out earning a paycheck in this storm - lots and lots of layers.
ZELAYA: Warm pads and gloves and hat and three sweaters and two shirts, four pairs of socks and three pants under. That's it.
MANN: The last guy I try to talk to is a bus driver whose bus had broken down. But he waves me off. He's too cold, he says. His teeth are chattering so hard, I can see his chin quiver. Brian Mann, NPR News, New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF D.P. KAUFMAN'S "THE POEM YOUR GRANDFATHER TOLD")
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Let's move now to the world of figure skating. The United States has just named its team of women skaters who will go to the Winter Games in South Korea next month and try to win an individual medal for the first time since 2006. NPR's Tom Goldman is in San Jose, Calif. - where I think it's so early, it's probably still December - covering the U.S. Figure Skating Championships. Tom, thanks very much for being with us.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: It's always a pleasure, especially today, Scott.
SIMON: Who's on the team?
GOLDMAN: Well, the women who finished one, two, three in the U.S. championships last night in San Jose. Bradie Tennell, 19 years old - she finished first in both the short and long programs in San Jose. And in last night's long program, if you saw it, she was nearly flawless. She landed all 11 jumps cleanly. She looked very polished.
Then there's Mirai Nagasu, 24, the old-timer of the group. She finished second last night. She's also going to the Olympics. She's a fan favorite, a powerful jumper and a beautiful, artistic skater, as well. She's one of only two American women ever to complete the difficult triple axel jump in international competition. And I know you know the other one, Scott - right?
SIMON: Yes. Although the last time she did it - Tonya Harding, we're talking about, you know...
GOLDMAN: Right.
SIMON: ...Whose biopic is out now. The last time she did it, she did the triple axel and then hit Nancy Kerrigan on the knee with a wrench or something, right? Isn't that what happened?
GOLDMAN: With another axel, exactly.
SIMON: Right.
GOLDMAN: So yeah. So there you go. And then - well, it wasn't Tonya. It was a friend of hers.
SIMON: It was a friend of hers. Yeah.
GOLDMAN: But anyway, 18-year-old Karen Chen is the third. She won last year's U.S. National. She was sick as a dog the day before last night's long program. She says she consulted her sports psychologist, her acupuncturist, other doctors. And she just toughed it out and skated a really nice program, good enough for a third place finish last night. And now she's on the Olympic team, too.
SIMON: You mentioned Mirai Nagasu. She was passed over four years ago. Do we see this as redemption?
GOLDMAN: I think it is a redemption. You know, it's this kind of quirky, if you will, selection process. We think that it should be the top three from the U.S. championships going - filling the three Olympic spots. But in fact, a selection committee decides on the skaters. And it looks at their body of work. It looks at how they've done over the past year in other major competitions.
And because of this process, the top three at the Nationals don't always make it. And as you mentioned, Mirai Nagasu in 2014 was passed over. She finished third at the U.S. Nationals but was passed over for Ashley Wagner, who finished fourth. The selection committee thought Wagner had the better resume.
Now, Nagasu - it is a bit of redemption. Her coach says even non-skating fans knew of Mirai as the poor skater who didn't make the Olympic team in 2014. But in last night's press conference after the competition, Nagasu, you know, admitted she was the one responsible for her failure in 2014. Here she is.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
MIRAI NAGASU: I was a little bit careless over the season and didn't put out the body of work that I needed. And so I didn't want to feel that same way this year, and so I took on the full responsibility of becoming a stronger competitor and person.
GOLDMAN: And, Scott, it'll be really interesting to see how she does in South Korea. Right now she's the highest-ranked American woman in the world at No. 6. Even though she missed those 2014 Games, she has Olympic experience. She finished fourth at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, and she'll be a contender in South Korea, especially if she can get that triple axel cranked up.
SIMON: NPR's Tom Goldman, thanks so much for being with us.
GOLDMAN: You're welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF MACK DAVID, AL HOFFMAN, JERRY LIVINGSTON'S "A DREAM IS A WISH YOUR HEART MAKES (INSTRUMENTAL VERSION)")
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
This week's announcement by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to rescind the Obama-era regulations on prosecuting marijuana has done little to deter those who favor legalization. And that includes some supporters in conservative Appalachian coal country who are trying to pivot from coal to marijuana to help bring back prosperity. Susan Tebben of member station WOUB reports.
SUSAN TEBBEN, BYLINE: Pomeroy, Ohio, is a small town in Meigs County. Its main road sits right on the shore of the Ohio River. As the barges pass by, you can see West Virginia on the other shore. Donald Trump got 73 percent of the vote here, largely on hopes that he would restore coal and bring back desperately needed jobs. That hasn't happened. But in 2016, Ohio passed legislation legalizing cannabis for medicinal use, bringing an unexpected job opportunity to the area with a long history of illegal marijuana.
For decades, a particular strain called Meigs County gold was grown around here. Local legend says it was the drug preferred by the band the Grateful Dead. But here, Meigs County gold is more of a stigma than a brand. For years, locals pushed back on the image that the county was home to stoner legend. But Meigs County Commissioner Randy Smith says after the legislation passed, leaders here changed their tune.
RANDY SMITH: If you're somebody who can't see the promise in something like this for job creation only, even if that's the only positive you can see out of it, why would you continue to bring up this legacy of Meigs County gold and tie it to that?
TEBBEN: Last November, Meigs County was chosen by the state to house a medical marijuana growing operation. Smith, a former police officer, and all the county commissioners lobbied for it.
SMITH: This job, unfortunately, does not allow for personal opinion. It's got to be the 25,000 people that we represent. And these people want to go to work.
TEBBEN: That begrudging support for marijuana is shared by many here. Justin Strekal is with the marijuana advocacy group NORML. He says a 2017 Gallup poll showed increasing diversity of voters approving overall marijuana legislation.
JUSTIN STREKAL: That includes majority - outright majorities of Democrats, independents and, for the first time, Republicans.
TEBBEN: Joe Brumfield is a card-carrying member of NORML. He lives with muscular dystrophy and hates the idea of putting marijuana under state control.
JOE BRUMFIELD: I think it's going to be expensive. I think it's going to be hard for people to get access. There's a lot of people who really did the heavy lifting that are just getting stepped over.
TEBBEN: But for Smith and his fellow commissioners, the chance to capitalize on growing marijuana is just too enticing.
SMITH: Somebody at some point in time has got to put the brakes on the way things are and change them. I've got four kids. I'd love to see them have opportunities to stay around here or come back here after college.
TEBBEN: And with coal jobs dwindling throughout Appalachia, many here are eager for the jobs that will come with the marijuana growing operation now under construction. For NPR News, I'm Susan Tebben.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The first adult heart transplant in the United States took place 50 years ago today at Stanford Hospital. Chief surgeon Norman Shumway replaced the diseased heart of retired steelworker Mike Kasperak. Mr. Kasperak lived for only another 15 days. But today heart replacement surgery has become practically commonplace. Dr. Sharon Hunt was a second-year medical student at Stanford in 1968. She didn't participate in the historic surgery, but she went on to work with Dr. Shumway after she graduated in 1977. She's now medical director of the post-heart transplant program at Stanford and joins us now.
Thanks so much for being with us.
SHARON HUNT: My pleasure.
SIMON: What was that day like on campus?
HUNT: Well, it was a media frenzy here. I remember that very much, even though I was a mere student. There were media people and reporters absolutely everywhere. Several very aggressive reporters actually crawled up the outside walls with cameras to get to the second floor intensive care unit to photograph the - Mr. Kasperak. It was pretty exciting. And yeah, we did feel like we were on the brink of something pretty major.
SIMON: I was interested to learn that prosecutors in the early days of transplant surgery charged some doctors with murder following heart transplant cases because, although the person donating the heart was brain dead, that wasn't considered legally dead in the 1960s.
HUNT: No, it wasn't. There had been no particular call for a definition - a legal definition of brain death - prior to that. And both Dr. Shumway and his colleague Dr. Lauer, at some point, tried to be prosecuted for murder because they actually removed a heart from the brain-dead individual. Both were thrown out of court, but they did lead to the perception that there was a need to define this condition.
SIMON: How did medical science eventually overcome the problem of rejection in transplant surgeries?
HUNT: Well, medical science has overcome it in good part but really, even in 2018, not completely. Probably, the biggest contribution we made during the early years was to perfect - or at least introduce - a method to diagnose rejection accurately. And that was the performance of heart biopsies. That sounds like something really dreadful. We all know what biopsies are. And you would think you probably have to open...
SIMON: Yeah.
HUNT: ...The chest. But in fact, there is an instrument called a bioptome that you can insert into a person's internal jugular vein and advance into the heart from the inside and snip off little pieces of heart muscle - retrieve them to the outside and then look at them under the microscope to diagnose rejection. We do that, currently, on a fairly routine basis and have since around 1973 when we first introduced that.
SIMON: There are several thousand, I gather, successful heart transplant surgeries in the United States every year.
HUNT: Yes, somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500.
SIMON: What procedures might be in the offing for us in the near future?
HUNT: Well, a couple of things - many people are working on the concept of genetically modifying non-human animals to be immunologically acceptable as transplant organ donors. The most likely animal seems, at this point, to be the pig. The other thing that's subject of a lot of current scientific work is the use of what we call regenerative medicine, where stem cells are somehow used to rebuild damaged cells and damaged organs - not ready for prime time yet but might be soon.
SIMON: Dr. Sharon Hunt of Stanford, thanks so much for being with us.
HUNT: You're most welcome.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
There are about 200,000 Buddhist monks in Thailand. None are women. Thai Buddhism's governing body says women cannot be ordained. But as Michael Sullivan reports, a growing number of women are hacking the system and gaining popularity.
MICHAEL SULLIVAN, BYLINE: It's a beautiful morning just after daybreak in a small village outside the northern city of Chiang Mai.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOGS BARKING)
SULLIVAN: A few dogs bark at the stranger, following a line of ocher-robed monks barefoot in the bitter cold. Villagers kneel before the monks, filling their bowls with rice, fruit and sweets, and receive a blessing in return. It's a scene repeated all over Thailand every day. But this one sounds different.
UNIDENTIFIED MONKS: (Chanting in Thai).
SULLIVAN: The monks are women known as bhikkhunis. Rejected by Thailand's top Buddhist authority, they are welcomed by many villagers.
NISHAPA THONGPITHAK: (Speaking Thai).
SULLIVAN: "They follow the rules much more than the male monks," shopkeeper Nishapa Thongpithak says. "When they do their rounds, they're very strict. They won't even touch money like the men do. So I have more respect for them," she says.
And they're spreading.
DHAMMANANDA: In the whole country. We have 170 bhikkhunis and 100 novices. So together, it is 270 in all the regions - north, northeast, central and south.
SULLIVAN: Dhammananda Bhikkhuni, a longtime university professor, was the first Thai woman to be ordained back in 2003 by traveling to Sri Lanka, the only Theravada Buddhist country which allows ordination.
So why not Thailand?
SULAK SIVARASKA: The monks here are very narrow-minded and of course, partly, for their own self-interest because the bhikkhuni order would clearly be the challenge to the monkhood.
SULLIVAN: A challenge, Buddhist scholar Sulak Sivaraksa says, because the bhikkhuni behave - the men, not so much.
SIVARASKA: Much sex scandal, financial scandal - the Sangha order in this country is now worshipping capitalism, consumerism.
SULLIVAN: But the Supreme Sangha Council, Thai Buddhism's ruling body, says this is the way it's been for the past 700 years and sees no reason to change. Bhikkhuni Dhammananda says they should maybe learn to read Buddhist texts more carefully.
DHAMMANANDA: They seem to think that they know the text. But when it deals with ordained women part, they kind of skip through, you know. So they have not really read what the Buddha meant.
SULLIVAN: Both Dhammananda and Sulak Sivaraksa note that the Buddha himself ordained the first bhikkhuni. NPR reached out to the Sangha Council with no response.
But even some activist monks say it's time for a change.
PHRAMAHA BOONCHUAY DOOJAI: To me, I think I am in support of having a bhikkhuni Sangha in Thailand.
SULLIVAN: Phramaha Boonchuay Doojai, an activist monk at Chiang Mai Buddhist College.
PHRAMAHA BOONCHUAY DOOJAI: It is really very good. And the Buddha himself declared this very clear - I think it is the way to make a complete Buddhist society.
UNIDENTIFIED MONKS: (Chanting in Thai).
SULLIVAN: Near the northern city of Chiang Mai, Bhikkhuni Nanadyani leads about a dozen robed women in prayer before their morning meal. She oversees two monasteries here in the north, home to more than 50 bhikkhuni and novices. I ask her about her outlaw status, how it feels to be labeled a rebel by the authorities.
NANADYANI: (Laughter) I don't want to fight anyone because I feel compassion to everyone. Stay calmly, peacefully.
SULLIVAN: But aren't you a little annoyed the male monks get state funding, I press, while you have to rely on donations? Isn't that unfair?
NANADYANI: I never mind because now we don't - I'm not depend on anyone. I depend on only Buddha, dhamma and bhikkhu Sanga, bhikkhuni Sanga.
SULLIVAN: Back at her monastery near Bangkok, I ask Bhikkhuni Dhammananda the same question - and get the same answer. She doesn't care about equal treatment. In fact...
DHAMMANANDA: Michael, we are much better than men already. Trust me.
SULLIVAN: That sounds a little arrogant for a priest.
DHAMMANANDA: Once in a while, you know, to be arrogant is nice. Once in a while, you should be - when you are definitely sure.
(LAUGHTER)
SULLIVAN: For NPR News, I'm Michael Sullivan in Nakhon Pathom, Thailand.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
People were lined up in the bookstores of Washington, D.C. at midnight this week - not for a new Harry Potter, but the White House tell-all "Fire And Fury." The book is filled with rich anecdotes that document dysfunction in the Trump White House and of the president himself. Michael Wolff, the author, finds his reports at the center of the news cycle and a storm. His reporting methods have also come under scrutiny from defenders of the administration as well as other journalists.
NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik joins us from New York. David, thanks so much for being with us.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Of course
SIMON: After a few days of a fire and fury of reporting, what have you seen that is truly new in this book?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, I think some of the things that it was striking to see were the statements by Steve Bannon, former campaign chairman for the president, former chief strategist - that he felt that the contacts with the Russians during the campaign of Donald Trump, Jr. and others close to the president were possibly treasonous, possibly criminal. That Mark Corallo, who had been a Justice Department senior official and spokesman under George W. Bush and had served as a spokesman and aide to the Trumps, quit in part because he feared that there had been obstruction of justice committed by the president and those around him. That was pretty big.
I also think the fundamental question of those in the president's seeming inner circle and senior positions at the White House of his fitness in office...
SIMON: Yeah.
FOLKENFLIK: ...You know, that may be voiced by people outside the White House. But to hear that put in the mouths and the minds of those serving the president - that was striking indeed.
SIMON: Let me ask you about Michael Wolff. He's not one of the warm and fuzzy ones. Let me put it that way. And he's known for writing books about people with power and influence. How did he seem to approach this? And I'm amazed that Michael Wolff, of all people, was let close into the Trump circle.
FOLKENFLIK: Well, a couple things. Michael Wolff claims to be amazed as well. He is fascinated by people of power, influence and money. He's drawn to those things, and he's very solicitous of people in those roles. You know, he wrote a biography of Rupert Murdoch, and it was in part because Murdoch was flattered by his attentions and by his expressions of admiration for all Murdoch had accomplished.
Wolff has been a fixture here in New York in media circles for many years - New York Magazine, Vanity Fair. And he knew Trump from that world. It's a tabloid media world that the president emerged from up here in New York. So Wolff was a somewhat familiar figure. He had interviewed the president for one of his perches over at the Hollywood Reporter prior to the election - and favorably so, and admiringly so. And one of the things Wolff had done was castigate the press for treating him as an aberrant figure - divisive, hateful and somehow beyond the pale - in a way that drew confidence from the president and some of his admirers, including Steve Bannon.
So once invited in, you know, the way Wolff describes it, nobody had a central authority to dismiss him and say you can't be here. He said he stood on as many - or he sat on as many couches for as long as he could at the White House day after day, week after week, as he could. And he - you know, he seems to have gotten a lot of people to talk to him.
SIMON: Let me ask you about some of the objections and reservations about the book because we must note they're not coming just from the president's supporters. They're coming from journalists, too.
FOLKENFLIK: Well, journalists, I think rightly, point to the fact that other objections have been lodged to Wolff's books by some of the people who he quoted in them. And, in fact, by the sloppiness that - you know, Wolff's care is not with a pointillist precision with which he renders facts. He gives you a larger narrative, and he does at times get access to major people. I think it's notable that Steve Bannon, who has taken pains this week for all of the caustic things he said about the president in the book, to praise Donald Trump on his radio show, on the Breitbart radio show. You know, Steve Bannon does not disassociate himself, to my knowledge, a single adjective that appeared in "Fire And Fury."
Sam Nunberg, a close aide to the president for a time before quitting and recirculating there, you know, had said at one point, well, you know, it seems like there's poetic license, but what he really has said is some of that stuff was supposed to be off the record. Not that he didn't say it. I think you'll find - and Wolff claims that he has hours of tapes on this stuff - I think you'll find that this stuff will probably stand up in terms of what was said to him. I think some care will have to be given and scrutiny given to the facts as he presents them.
SIMON: NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik - thanks so much for being with us.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
President Trump must soon decide once again whether to waive sanctions against Iran as part of the nuclear deal negotiated under the Obama administration. During the recent antigovernment demonstrations in Iran, the president hinted he might want to take some action. But a prominent conservative thinks action might be exactly the wrong reaction. Matt Purple, managing editor of The American Conservative, recently authored a piece - "A Light Touch On Iran." Mr. Purple joins us in the studio. Thanks so much for being with us.
MATT PURPLE: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
SIMON: What would be the right light touch, if you please?
PURPLE: I think we just need to be careful. I think President Trump has actually taken a fairly good approach so far. He ought to come out vocally and in support of the protesters, which he has. He ought to put the Iranian regime, which has been arresting some of these protesters unjustly, on notice. He's done that as well.
But what we absolutely don't want to do is slam down in a way that could empower the hardliners in the regime itself - really, the entire regime, which has subsisted so far throughout its existence by pointing at the United States and saying, see? All of our problems here in Iran - it's America's fault. It's Israel's fault, Saudi Arabia's fault and America's fault.
And already, we're seeing this line out of Tehran. We don't want to validate that narrative in any way. And I think, you know, if we were to slap down any more of the sanctions, I think it would only hurt the Iranian people. You know, it would starve them even further while, you know, allowing that narrative some oxygen. And I just think we really need to be careful here.
Our message ought to be to the Iranian people, if you want more self-determination, if you want more liberty from your government, then we stand with you. But we need to know that that's playing chess, not checkers. We need to be careful.
SIMON: Do you - let me follow up on what you said. Because do sanctions hurt the regime or many of the people who were out there demonstrating or who would be demonstrating?
PURPLE: Well, sanctions are a very popular tool in the foreign policy kit here in D.C. because it's essentially point and click, right? You put them on a country. There's no blood or no treasure costs mostly here in the United States. And you kind of forget about them. The problem with sanctions is that, according to experts, they probably fail about 85 to 90 percent of the time. Cuba is the best example of that, of course.
But in Iran, they did work in that when Obama slapped down very hard sanctions, they brought the Iranians to the table and got a dialogue going about the nuclear program. The question we have to ask is would they do any good if we slapped them back on now? And I think all they would do is show that the United States doesn't live up to its word on this nuclear deal, which Iran has been compliant with so far, according to the IAEA.
And it would just - you know, again empower the hardliners who want to say, see? America cannot be trusted. We need a so-called resistance economy, as they call it - an isolated economy there in Iran that doesn't deal with the outside world like the president Hassan Rouhani wants to. And I think it would just tarnish our image with the average Iranian, who is looking for something a little bit more than what the regime is offering right now.
SIMON: You seem to like the nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration.
PURPLE: I do - very conservative. That's not a very popular position. I think it's one of the few good things that President Obama did. And I think probably before the George W. Bush administration, if the Iranians had signaled a willingness to deal over their nuclear program, you know, before it became this partisan football, most presidents would have jumped at that opportunity, Republican or Democrat. It's in our national interest that Iran not have a nuclear program. We want them to - you know, to stop enriching uranium in that way. So I don't think it was necessarily a partisan thing. I think it was just good policy.
And we have now in Iran the toughest inspections regime that's ever been in place in any country. It seems to be working so far. I see no reason why we should abort it just because some people in the United States are playing politics.
SIMON: You also see some similarity between some of the people demonstrating in Iran and supporters of President Trump in this country.
PURPLE: Yes. So, you know, in 2009, when the Green Revolution happened, it was largely - you know, middle-class, upper-class people in Tehran, young people who were very disturbed about the election that I think we can probably say with some certainty Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole.
This time, Iran analysts are flummoxed. They have no idea where this came from. They didn't see it coming. Where was it? It's because these are not the usual people in the hip Tehran neighborhoods they were talking to. These are people who are often from more conservative areas who are economically straddled, who don't have a lot of political power - comparable, I think a little bit, to the deplorables here in the United States who elected Donald Trump.
SIMON: Matt Purple, managing editor of The American Conservative, thanks so much for being with us.
PURPLE: Thank you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Is Donald Trump temperamentally fit to be president of the United States, to exercise the staggering powers of the most powerful office in the world? The president himself tweeted just this morning, quote, "Throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart."
The question of temperament has become unavoidable, raised not just in anecdotes and Michael Wolff's book "Fire And Fury" but many of the president's own public actions, including taunting the leader of North Korea about the size of his nuclear button. Presidential historians have often considered the importance of temperament in a chief executive.
We turn now to Doris Kearns Goodwin. The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian has written bestsellers about Lyndon Johnson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln. Thanks very much for being with us, Doris.
DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Oh, I'm so glad to be with you.
SIMON: Oliver Wendell Holmes, I guess notably, said of Roosevelt, second-class intellect, but first-rate temperament. What kind of temperament do you see in President Trump?
GOODWIN: Well, I think temperament, number one, is the most important thing to understand about a leader. In fact, I think it should have been the keystone for what we looked for in our candidates in 2016. Way back in 2008, Tim Russert and I talked about the possibility of having journalists focus on a series of leadership temperamental qualities and stacking up the candidates against them rather than how much money they raised, how much zingers they gave in a debate or how they appeared or what they promised.
I mean, for example, all the guys that I know about had a quality for self-reflection, learning from mistakes, turning failure into success, humility. And what does Trump say this morning? That he is the most stable genius there is. There was one time when he said that Pope Francis was a very humble man, very much like him. And that's why he liked him so much. So that lack of humility is a problem with temperament.
The ability to control impulses and emotions is a really important part of temperament of any leader, not just a president. And you see Abraham Lincoln writing hot letters when he got mad at somebody instead of expressing the anger and immediately putting them aside, hoping he'd cooled down psychologically and not need to then send them. You see, on the contrary, Trump having no control over his impulses time and again, knowing these tweets get him into trouble. And yet, despite everyone saying stop, he cannot stop.
You see, the idea that, somehow, most of our best presidents had resilience, the ability to get through troubling times. When they're attacked, they don't take it as personally. Maybe they will for a few moments, but after a while, they put it in perspective because they've been through difficulty. He said, I have the best temperament of anyone who has ever, ever run for president because I have a winning temperament. I've always, always won.
All of those things we saw during the campaign. And I think now what we're seeing with the new book is the question that's being asked - is what was it like to work for President Trump in this past year? We could have known that if we'd asked that question of all the people who'd worked with him throughout his career and maybe would've had a better sense of him before he became president.
SIMON: You obviously, as we mentioned, worked for Lyndon Johnson, which didn't deter you when you were a White House Fellow from writing an article called "How To Dump Lyndon Johnson" over his conduct of the war in Vietnam. And then later, you helped him with his memoirs. A lot of questions were raised about his temperament, weren't they?
GOODWIN: There's no question about that. I mean, he had a certain kind of temperament when he was dealing with domestic politics, when he understood the people that he was bargaining with, when he had convictions about what he wanted to do with civil rights and voting rights.
When he got into a separate terrain, the War in Vietnam, didn't understand the people, thought that Ho Chi Minh could be bargained with, didn't understand the balance of power between the North and the South. The war went badly, and then all the possibilities of flaws that had been in his temperament all those years - but minor chords then became major chords. So it became a problem in '67 and '68, but it wasn't the whole of him.
I think that's the difference here - that it's hard to see that other side of Trump that - as Lyndon Johnson, who really believed in civil rights and voting rights and had convictions, had visions and also had flaws. What we're seeing in this case is I don't see where the order of battle is, where his agenda is, where his vision is. All we see is a temperament that seems, I think as these - new book seemed to suggest, that it's not the temperament that you can trust as a leader.
SIMON: I realize this is leaving a big question for just 30 seconds left, but what do you think about calls that the president, any president, should undergo some kind of mental examination to certify his or her lucidity?
GOODWIN: You know, I think if he really is a stable genius or, as Lyndon Johnson told his aides when they were thinking he, too, should probably see a psychiatrist - if he started to defend himself against the aides, the aides said he'd probably beat us in a thousand ways, so we'd be the ones committed to a loony bin.
I think it's a complicated call, but I think it's just as important as physical illness and physical strength to understand temperament and leadership qualities - is the key. And we have to start thinking about it more and more and more - not just the gossip that's in this book but the really important parts, that so many people feel that he's unfit. If the people who work close to him feel that way, we'd better understand why.
SIMON: Doris Kearns Goodwin, thanks so much for being with us.
GOODWIN: You are most welcome.
SIMON: Take care.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The Trump Administration announced this week it would open nearly 90 percent of the U.S. coast to offshore drilling. That would include areas of Alaska, the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and the Gulf of Mexico to explore for oil and gas.
Energy companies applauded the measure. Environmentalists and some elected officials say it's overreach. That includes Republican Representative Mark Sanford of South Carolina. He joins us now from Beau-fort (ph). Did I pronounce that correctly, Mr. Sanford?
MARK SANFORD: Well, it's Beaufort, N.C., and it's Buford (ph), S.C.
SIMON: Beaufort, S.C.
SANFORD: So it was close.
SIMON: All right. I beg your pardon, sir. Wouldn't this be good for the economy in South Carolina?
SANFORD: I don't believe so. More importantly, it doesn't matter what I believe. It matters what the people that I represent believe. And en masse, every single municipality along the coast of South Carolina has written up a formal resolution opposing offshore drilling and testing all through the waters of South Carolina.
SIMON: It wouldn't create jobs?
SANFORD: They believe - and I agree with them - that the tradeoffs are not worth it. So what we're talking about is four months' worth of energy independence, if we were to hit a find out there, in exchange for jeopardizing a robust tourism industry that's strong on the coast of South Carolina. A lot of people come here to visit our beaches. It's $13 billion a year of economic impact.
And the scale of what might happen with energy exploration is minuscule relative to that tourism impact. So I think there are big tradeoffs in terms of jobs that people don't feel comfortable with, as well as the environmental questions and liabilities that would come with that sort of offshore, you know, exploration.
SIMON: Do you feel the administration took your views into account?
SANFORD: Well, no. They came out the other side. I mean, I had interesting conversations with the secretary, who's a friend, and a great fellow. I said, wait a minute. I mean, Republicans supposedly believe in home rule. And if we believe in home rule, the government that is most local generally know - is what generally governs best.
And we believe in not making all decisions in Washington, D.C. We believe in handing authority out of Washington to, again, local hands. And so I think it's a decision that is at odds with this concept of federalism that I think used to be important to the Republican Party.
SIMON: Mr. Sanford, I'm going to turn now to Congress. The president's meeting with congressional leaders and others at Camp David this weekend to talk about his legislative agenda. Lots of competing priorities - what do you put at the top?
SANFORD: What I put at the top is this budget deal coming down the end of January. I mean, it's going to be, I mean, a grab bag, if you will, of different interests. If you look at what might happen with regard to DACA, if you look at what might happen with regard to spending debt level - I mean, it is a, I mean, full buffet, if you will, of congressional issues that are going to be dealt with come the end of January.
SIMON: What do you put - I mean, welfare spending, infrastructure, immigration. What's up there?
SANFORD: All of it. They're all in the grab bag. Ultimately, the most important thing is, how do we decide our spending going forward? Because if not, there'd be the specter of another government shutdown. I don't think there will be a government shutdown. I think that, you know, the lubricant in these sorts of things is more money. And I think, you know, if you look at the history of past budget deals, more money has solved the equation.
But again, we're at a tipping point from a taxpayer standpoint on how much more money is there out there, particularly given the fact that as Republicans, we've said, let's hold the line on the amount of money that goes to government. That was in essence the core of the tax bill.
And the question now is, OK, if spending continues to go up, these numbers don't work. And so I think there will be a real - I mean, a day of reckoning, if you will. We've signed the line on what we want to have come into government. Now we need decide how much goes out.
SIMON: Representative Mark Sanford of South Carolina, thanks so much for being with us from beautiful Beaufort, S.C. Thanks very much.
SANFORD: Yes, sir. Thanks.
(SOUNDBITE OF CULTS SONG, "WALK AT NIGHT")
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Venezuela and Russia have announced plans to launch their own cryptocurrencies, trying to imitate the recent success of bitcoin. Venezuela has dubbed its version the petro. Analysts say cryptocurrencies may be a way for both Venezuela and Russia to sidestep financial sanctions. We're joined in the studio now by Monica de Bolle. She's senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Thanks so much for being with us.
MONICA DE BOLLE: Thanks for having me.
SIMON: What would give these cryptocurrencies any value?
DE BOLLE: So the cryptocurrencies, as we call them - they don't have any intrinsic value. Their value is basically attached to trust and to, you know, the ability of being able to use them for online transactions. So this is the rationale for bitcoin, for Ethereum and for a host of other so-called cryptocurrencies out there.
SIMON: And what would be the interest of the Russian and Venezuelan governments in doing this now?
DE BOLLE: So the reason why they're interested in doing this is that cryptocurrencies - they basically operate outside the traditional payment system, as it were. So in the traditional payment system, if you want to follow the money, you know, whenever a transaction takes place, it's going to have some kind of reflection in the banking system. When you're in a cryptocurrency environment, things are totally different because all transactions are encrypted in such a way - and this is why they're called cryptocurrencies - you can no longer identify exactly the parties to a transaction, at least not by any, you know, sort of usual tracking ability.
And, additionally, these are completely decentralized transactions. So they're extremely hard to track. So for countries like Venezuela and Russia that have had sanctions imposed on them, it's interesting to contemplate, you know, the hypothesis of operating in a cryptocurrency environment because then the kinds of transactions that they would conduct would not be able to be seen or followed in the typical way.
SIMON: So in theory, if there's a company that wants to do business with Venezuela or Russia but can't because of sanctions, conceivably, they could if they did it in one of these cryptocurrencies.
DE BOLLE: Yes, exactly.
SIMON: Isn't that a risk for the companies involved?
DE BOLLE: Well, it's certainly a risk. And then we have an additional level of questions. What Venezuela has actually announced in terms of its plans is that it would issue its own so-called cryptocurrency, the petro, and it would back this virtual currency by barrels of oil.
SIMON: And they have a lot of that.
DE BOLLE: And they have a lot of that. The problem from the point of view of a company or an investor that actually wants to buy, you know, or invest in this virtual currency - how do you actually ensure that the value of that currency is what it is because, again, you need trust in order for that to happen. And how can you trust, you know, a government such as the Maduro government?
SIMON: Is Venezuela hoping to be able to do business but not be compelled to pay off the huge foreign debt they owe?
DE BOLLE: It may be a bit of that, but it's also sort of trying to tap into the cryptocurrency craze. And so the Venezuelan government is basically trying, in a way, to capitalize on that by launching its own so-called cryptocurrency and therefore saying to investors, here. We also have a cryptocurrency for you to invest in. So in that way, they would be able to get the financing that they desperately need in order to keep, you know, the country going.
SIMON: Does this strike you as practical?
DE BOLLE: No.
SIMON: For both countries? No?
DE BOLLE: No. And the main reason - again, it goes back to trust because as a country, you can have whatever intent you wish. But you need somebody at the other end of this transaction to actually want to finance you. So you're back to the age-old question of, who's going to finance Venezuela, and who's going to finance Russia?
SIMON: Monica de Bolle is senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Thanks so much for being with us.
DE BOLLE: Thanks for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRISTEZA'S "BROMAS")
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
There are lots of names for the generation that follows millennials - ReGen, Plurals, iGen, Gen Z. Their oldest members are just starting college. They have lots of buying power in the billions. As Youth Radio's Natalie Bettendorf reports, this generation's habits are different, especially when it comes to transportation and the age of ride-sharing.
NATALIE BETTENDORF, BYLINE: Sheryl Connelly has a crazy job. She's in charge of looking into the future for Ford Motor Company. They're trying to predict how people my age - from Generation Z - will use cars.
SHERYL CONNELLY: I have two Gen Zers at home.
BETTENDORF: She's in Detroit.
CONNELLY: My 16-year-old daughter is thrilled, actually. Her car is ready to go.
BETTENDORF: Yeah, that's definitely not me.
CONNELLY: Well, I think it's context. It depends on where you live.
BETTENDORF: A couple of decades ago, you would not have heard someone from Ford saying that owning a car is about context. Things are definitely changing. I'm 18, and I don't want a car. I'm from the Bay Area. I take buses. And when I need a car, I use Lyft. Ford's Connelly says Gen Z is a game changer.
CONNELLY: They don't really care about ownership. They don't necessarily see that their vehicle is going to be a status symbol. In fact, they're really savvy customers and quite - can be quite frugal.
BETTENDORF: Does this scare you at Ford - that we're frugal?
CONNELLY: No, I don't think so at all. We're ready for you. If you want to buy a car, we got it for you. If you don't want to buy a car, we can still help you there.
BETTENDORF: The top three automakers in the United States are Ford, Fiat Chrysler and General Motors. They say they are no longer just automakers. Every major car company is trying to make a move - whether it's car-sharing or ride-hailing or self-driving. Even General Motors has a new app for car sharing that it's betting billions on. It's called Maven, and Peter Kosak is the executive director of Urban Mobility.
PETER KOSAK: We needed to create a new brand because this is really about access and not necessarily ownership.
BETTENDORF: Ownership? Well, whatever. Me and people my age are redefining what it means to travel by car. Susan Shaheen is at UC Berkeley and has been studying ride sharing since the '90s before it was a real thing. She says this isn't all bad news for car companies.
SUSAN SHAHEEN: They're going to know you. If you are using their mobility services, chances are they're going to have a lot of data about your preferences. They're going to know a lot about where you travel and how you travel. They're going to be in a very good position to market to you.
BETTENDORF: Even if you haven't thought about owning a car, car companies have already kind of got you. Car-sharing apps essentially place you on the road to ownership. And using these services is essentially test driving, which is the first step in purchasing a car. I recently came to Los Angeles for college. Before I moved, I told people that I wouldn't have a car. And they'd say, oh, good luck. But I didn't need luck because I got here, and there's Lyft, and there's Uber. And right now, for people who are selling cars, I'm a problem. So is the rest of my generation. That is what is sending car companies into their own identity crisis.
For NPR News, I'm Natalie Bettendorf.
(SOUNDBITE OF LETTUCE'S "PHYLLIS")
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Talk about fire and fury. It's time for sports.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIMON: Much of the country is huddled inside against the cold, but the NFL playoffs are just heating up. Howard Bryant of ESPN joins us. Howard, thanks so much for being with us.
HOWARD BRYANT: Good morning, Scott. How are you doing?
SIMON: I'm fine. Thank you, my friend. Most of the NFL talk we've had this this year has been about demonstrations of conscience on the field, been about the dropping ratings of the games. There are four big games this weekend. You've got the Tennessee Titans playing the Kansas City Chiefs and the Panthers against the New Orleans Saints. Where'd you like to start?
BRYANT: Well, actually, I'd like to start with Buffalo - and Buffalo and Jacksonville. You've got two teams that haven't made the playoffs in forever. Jacksonville hadn't made the playoffs since 2007. And they were a laughingstock for years. And the Buffalo Bills, the once proud Buffalo Bills, hadn't made the playoffs since 1999. They play each other this weekend.
And you're right, Scott. This has been a very difficult year, whether you're talking about CTE and concussions, and we're talking about the ratings and protests for and against Colin Kaepernick and against police brutality. And so this is the period now where the league needs this, where I think football fans are going to try to settle in and salvage this season. It's go time for the players in terms of trying to win a championship.
And then, also, of course, you're looking at the Atlanta Falcons. You've got a team there that had a 28-3 lead in the Super Bowl against the Patriots a year ago. And now they're in the playoffs again one more time. And a team that lost the Super Bowl hasn't gone back to the Super Bowl since 1993, when Buffalo did it. So maybe...
SIMON: And this was a team that was two minutes away from - or four minutes away from winning the Super Bowl.
BRYANT: From winning the Super Bowl. It goes back to what John Madden always said - I love that - that the greatest gap in sports is between the winner and loser of the Super Bowl. And it really is true.
SIMON: Yeah. Teams that had a rough regular season - can they put that all behind them when it gets to the playoffs? Do you wipe the slate clean?
BRYANT: Well, I think you have to. And I think that one of the teams that you're really concerned about in that regard is the Kansas City Chiefs. There's a team that - they went out on opening day, and they demolished the defending champion Patriots in Foxborough. You looked at them, and you said, here's a team that's really going to put it together.
And they've got Andy Reid back there, who'd been to the Super Bowl with the Philadelphia Eagles. And then, of course, they had their troubles during the season. And then they turned it around, and so now they're in the playoffs. And so, this is one of the - they're going to be one of those teams that is definitely saying, look. We're in the tournament now, so everything that happened in the past isn't going to matter. Let's see if we can turn this around.
And, of course, the team that everyone's looking out - there are two teams that everyone's looking out for. One in the NFC is the Philadelphia Eagles - great team, 13 win team. But they lost their quarterback, Carson Wentz. So now you're looking at the Eagles to see, can they win the Super Bowl with Nick Foles, with a backup? And then, of course, the defending champion Patriots, who are always there. And can 40-year-old Tom Brady do what no one's ever done before, which is to win the Super Bowl at that age?
SIMON: Yeah. You didn't ask. But I'll say, yeah. I think he can.
BRYANT: (Laughter) I think he can too.
SIMON: And let me ask about the Australian Open because it is such a testament to the eminence of Serena Williams that she can dominate a news cycle about the Australian Open by making a personal decision - let me put it that way.
BRYANT: No question. Well, Serena Williams hasn't played a professional match since she beat her sister in the Australian Open last year. She was eight weeks pregnant at the time and then announced that she was pregnant. And then she had her baby. And yet, for much of that time, she had told people that she was going to come back and make the Open, announced that she didn't reach her goal and that she's not going to play in the Open.
Serena Williams is the greatest athlete we've got going in the country right now. She does not, however, have an S on her chest. It was a great ask. But because it was Serena, everybody assumed that, hey, you're not going to bet against her. But she said she's not quite there yet. Kind of a shame but not really a surprise. You're asking a lot even of the great Serena Williams to not play a match in a year and then come back and compete for a championship.
SIMON: Yeah. Well...
BRYANT: But she'll be back.
SIMON: ...Let me just say, no male champion's ever come back after giving birth, has he?
BRYANT: (Laughter) Asking a lot, even of Serena.
SIMON: Howard Bryant, thanks so much for being with us.
BRYANT: Thank you.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
A parade in Cleveland today for the Cleveland Browns to celebrate what they call their perfect season, 0-16 - 16 losses and 0 wins. The Browns had an almost perfect season last year but managed to win one game toward the end. It did not begin a tradition. A fan named Chris McNeil has organized the parade to march around the team's oval-shaped stadium, which observers note is the shape of a zero. He told The Guardian, we are not having a celebration of losing. We are having a protest of losing. We want to let the Browns ownership and front office know we're holding them accountable for having such a bad team. And maybe we'll have some fun while doing it.
Marching outdoors in 10-degree weather doesn't sound like much fun. Fans will drive hearses and ambulances in the parade and display tombstones etched with the names of the 28 quarterbacks who've started for the Browns since 1999. Since then, the team has won just 88 games and lost 216. Money will be raised for a local food bank, so there is a win for all.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
You can forget what you thought you knew about taxidermy. Oregon artist Christopher Marley transforms poisonous snakes, tropical fish and exotic insects into works of art. Now 400 of his creatures are on display in a major exhibition outside Miami. Aaron Scott of Oregon Public Broadcasting takes us into Marley's studio.
AARON SCOTT, BYLINE: Christopher Marley is packing up the last few creatures for his big exhibition...
CHRISTOPHER MARLEY: I think we're good.
SCOTT: ...When he realizes that he forgot to frame a foot-long isopod that's still in the freezer.
MARLEY: It's like a giant pill bug or potato bug or roly-poly, depending on where you're from.
SCOTT: Calling it a giant pill bug is a gross understatement. It looks right out of "Starship Troopers" or some other movie starring monster bugs that eat people.
MARLEY: Exactly. Yeah, they do. And they are able to do some damage. There have been fish caught that were, you know, living. And they've found giant isopods in their throats or in their guts, eating them from the inside out. So they're the stuff of nightmares. That's for sure.
SCOTT: In Marley's hands, they are also the stuff of beauty. He preserves all sorts of beasts, and poses them in frames against white backgrounds. Chromatic beetles cluster like mandalas. Snakes coil like intricate pendant necklaces. Macaws spread their rainbow wings. And octopuses twist and curl so voluptuous, they seem to be alive.
KENNETH FILCHAK: I don't see anybody doing those sorts of things.
SCOTT: Kenneth Filchak is a biology professor at Notre Dame. And he uses Marley's work to inspire students.
FILCHAK: He might just be sort of the Michelangelo of this sort of presentation and preservation.
SCOTT: Marley grew up wanting to be an artist. But gifted with a square jaw and biceps like boa constrictors, he became a model. As he hopscotched the globe for photo shoots, he collected insects and arranged them into iridescent kaleidoscopes. When Marley's fiance convinced him to show them to several stores in LA, the orders came flying in. So he quit modeling and started backtracking through the countries he'd visited, sourcing sustainable insect collectors. But his interest goes much deeper than that.
MARLEY: Throughout my whole life, we'd always had dead birds in our freezers all the time.
SCOTT: Marley's dad just so happens to be a breeder of rare color mutations of Australian parrots.
MARLEY: My dad just could not bear to throw these beautiful birds away. That's when I realized, you know, if my dad does this with birds, I'll bet you (laughter) that most people that deal with any type of organism that they're in love with - that they probably do the same thing.
SCOTT: So Marley built a network of breeders, zoos, aquariums and importers that sent him their dead. He's very clear that he only uses reclaimed specimens that have died from natural causes or been caught as fishing bycatch. He doesn't buy from hunters.
MARLEY: This is a green mamba.
SCOTT: The specimens end up crowded in freezers in his warehouse in Salem, Ore., in various stages of decay.
MARLEY: This is all pythons and venomous reptiles and baby alligators, apparently.
SCOTT: To preserve them, Marley has pioneered a way to freeze-dry animals that scientists generally keep in liquid, which is how they seem so alive in the frames. He sells the creations in high-end stores and has shown them in natural history and art museums alike. His work has also appeared on the covers of biology textbooks and in Marley's own best-selling art books.
MARK PARKER: "Pheromone" and Chris's next book, "Biophilia," are both tremendous references for design.
SCOTT: Mark Parker is the CEO of Nike and a collector of Marley's art.
PARKER: Chris's subject matter and imagery have inspired Nike's design work on color and texture, on high-performance track spikes for Olympic athletes and even new interpretations of classic styles like the Nike Air Max.
SCOTT: That's right. U.S. athletes at the 2016 Summer Olympics wore shoes inspired by Marley's image of a Sagra buqueti beetle. By isolating these organisms from their natural environments, Marley hopes you'll see them anew.
MARLEY: I think that kind of the greatest power of the work itself is helping people to open their eyes to the varieties that exist in the natural world. Kind of once you get this sense of, oh, my gosh, there's so much more I didn't know about - I've never been able to experience in this fashion - it just feeds this desire to see more and more and more.
SCOTT: As for Christopher Marley's next project, he's heading deep into a Malaysian jungle to hunt for a never-before-preserved species of corpse flower. For NPR News, I'm Aaron Scott.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
President Trump has spent the morning with Republican congressional leaders at Camp David. And they have just appeared together before reporters - Mr. Trump taking questions on a wide range of matters that range from how he sees his achievements of the past year to his own mental health. NPR's Tamara Keith joins us now. Tam, thanks very much for being with us.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Glad to be with you.
SIMON: The president had a lot to say today, on Twitter and in person, about his mental health. And this all comes from the Wolff book, doesn't it?
KEITH: It does. So that book, "Fire and Fury," calls into question the president's mental health or mental stability. And there was actually a Fox News segment about that that roughly coincides, time-wise, with a series of tweets from the president, where he says, actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.
He ends this sort of long tweet series by saying, I think that would qualify as not smart but genius - and a very stable genius, at that. So at this press conference, he was asked, why were you tweeting about your mental state this morning when, you know, you're doing this retreat, and you're talking about policy? Why tweet about your mental state? Here was his response.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I went to the best colleges for college. I went to a - I had a situation where I was a very excellent student, came out and made billions and billions of dollars, became one of the top business people, went to television and, for 10 years, was a tremendous success, as you probably have heard, ran for president one time and won.
KEITH: So this would not be the first time the president has talked about going to the best college. He has a very high regard for his intelligence and actually talks about it and tweets about it on a not-infrequent basis.
SIMON: Yeah. A lot of people have pointed out, I don't believe Bill Clinton ever once said, and, by the way, I was a Rhodes Scholar, right?
KEITH: (Laughter) I don't - I can't 100 percent fact check that, though we do all know that he was a Rhodes Scholar.
SIMON: Yeah. Mr. Trump also addressed the latest developments in the Russia investigation, specifically reports in The New York Times that his staff was pushing hard to get Attorney General Sessions to not recuse himself with that investigation. What did the president say?
KEITH: Well, he didn't totally deny everything. He did say that there were some things that were wrong in the New York Times story. And then he also said, everything I've done is 100 percent proper. That is what I do - is I do things proper. And he also said, as he has repeatedly, that there has been no collusion and has been no crime and that his team is cooperating with the Mueller investigation.
SIMON: Let me ask on policy because the president was meeting with congressional leaders to try and settle on some kind of policy roadmap for the year ahead. Any news on that front?
KEITH: Yeah. I think there was. The president had been, in the later part of last year, frequently saying, once we get done with taxes, we're moving on to welfare reform. It was never 100 percent clear what that was, but I think the idea was to try to make it tougher for people to get means-tested aid programs like food stamps or welfare - Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
He is now backing away from that and saying, well, whatever we do, it's going to have to be bipartisan this year. It seems as though he's probably been talking, as we know, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has said, just given the sheer numbers of Republicans in the Senate, anything that Congress does this year will have to be bipartisan.
SIMON: And any indication that the president gave on what his involvement will be in the 2018 elections?
KEITH: Yes. So he says that he plans to be very involved, that he wants to campaign for candidates. But the big question was whether he was going to campaign for challengers to Republicans or only for incumbents. And he made it pretty clear in this press conference that he is going to back Republican incumbents. That is a rebuke of his former aide Steve Bannon in a week when he has been rebuking him left and right, calling him sloppy Steve.
SIMON: NPR's Tamara Keith, thanks so much.
KEITH: You're welcome.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
A week into January, some of us have already given up on our New Year's resolutions. But if your plan is to give your brain a good workout, this is one resolution that cannot fail because it's time for The Puzzle.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Joining me is Will Shortz. He's puzzle editor of The New York Times and WEEKEND EDITION's puzzlemaster. Will, good morning.
WILL SHORTZ, BYLINE: Good morning, Lulu. Welcome back.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Thank you. Any New Year's resolutions for you?
SHORTZ: No, I don't make resolutions. I try to improve myself year long.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: There you go. All right, remind us of last week's challenge.
SHORTZ: Yes. It came from listener Patrick Berry of Jasper, Ala. I said name a famous singer - three letters in the first name, five letters in the last. Drop the middle letter of the last name and rearrange the result to name a variety of singing group. What is it? And the singer is Bob Dylan. You do that, and you get boy band.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: We received almost a thousand correct responses. And our randomly selected winner is James Wilhoit of Renton, Wash. Congratulations.
JAMES WILHOIT: Thank you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Are you a boy band or Bob Dylan fan?
WILHOIT: Not either one particularly.
(LAUGHTER)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I hear you've been active in local theater?
WILHOIT: I have. I was in a production of "Mary Poppins," the stage musical in 2016.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Nice. And who did you play?
WILHOIT: I played the admiral and the bank chairman.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) OK. I just showed that film for the first time to my daughter, and she loved it. Do you have a question for Will?
WILHOIT: I guess my main question is, how do you keep coming up with puzzles?
SHORTZ: Well, sometimes, I don't know. It's been 31 years. That is a lot of puzzles. I heard once that if you ever get tired of writing, you're tired of life. And I feel the same way about puzzles. If you're ever tired of puzzles, you're tired of life. And I'm not tired.
WILHOIT: I agree.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Words to live by. James, are you ready to play The Puzzle?
WILHOIT: Yes.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right, Will, take it away.
SHORTZ: All right, James, I'm going to give you three five-letter words. You give me a fourth five-letter word that can precede each of mine to complete a compound word or a familiar two-word phrase. For example, if I said slide, tower and melon, you would say water as in waterslide, water tower and watermelon.
WILHOIT: OK, got it.
SHORTZ: Got it. Number one is - alley, trust, faith.
WILHOIT: Blind.
SHORTZ: Blind alley, blind trust, blind faith. Good job. Whale, noise, pages.
WILHOIT: Whale, W-H-A-L-E?
SHORTZ: That's right. That might be a harder one.
WILHOIT: (Unintelligible).
SHORTZ: And noise. What goes...
WILHOIT: Pages. White?
SHORTZ: What goes - white. Yeah, white whale, white noise and white pages. Good. Alarm, teeth, front.
WILHOIT: False.
SHORTZ: False. Good job. Speed, opera, touch.
WILHOIT: What was the first one?
SHORTZ: Speed - S-P-E-E-D.
WILHOIT: Light.
SHORTZ: Light speed. Good. Light opera and light touch. Child, piano, total.
WILHOIT: Child, piano and total.
SHORTZ: Total, yeah.
WILHOIT: Let's see. I can't - that's something from way back, I guess.
SHORTZ: I'll give you a hint. First of all, do you have any children?
WILHOIT: I have a daughter, yes.
SHORTZ: And does your daughter have any children?
WILHOIT: Oh, a grandchild and a grand piano and a grand total, OK.
SHORTZ: That's it. Good job. How about charm, guess, stiff?
WILHOIT: Lucky.
SHORTZ: There you go. Story, order, bread.
WILHOIT: Bread is the last one?
SHORTZ: Right. That might be a harder one to get from. What kind of story has five letters?
WILHOIT: Short story, short bread - yeah, OK.
SHORTZ: And short order, good. How about robin, dance, table.
WILHOIT: Round.
SHORTZ: Good job.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You did great. How was it?
WILHOIT: Well, I appreciate that. It was - that was fun.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Good. For playing our puzzle today, you'll get a WEEKEND EDITION lapel pin as well as puzzle books and games. You can read all about it at npr.org/puzzle. James, what member station do you listen to?
WILHOIT: It's KUOW, 94.9. It's the University of Washington station in Seattle.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Wonderful. James Wilhoit of Renton, Wash. Thank you for playing The Puzzle.
WILHOIT: Thank you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right, Will, what's next week's challenge?
SHORTZ: Yes. It comes from listener Neville Fogarty of Newport News, Va. Take the first and last names of a journalist well-known to NPR listeners. Remove the first letter of the last name, and the remaining letters can be rearranged to spell two modes of transport. And here's a hint - the modes of transport have the same number of wheels. Who is the journalist, and what are the modes of transport?
So again, first and last names of a journalist well-known to NPR listeners. Remove the first letter of the last name. The remaining letters can be rearranged to spell two modes of transport, which have the same number of wheels. Who's the journalist? And what are the modes of transport?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: When you have the answer, go to our website npr.org/puzzle and click on the submit-your-answer link. Just one entry per person, please. Our deadline for entries is Thursday, January 11 at 3 p.m., Eastern. Include a phone number where we can reach you at about that time. And if you're the winner, we'll give you a call and you'll get to play on the air with the puzzle editor of The New York Times and WEEKEND EDITION's puzzlemaster, Will Shortz. Thanks so much, Will.
SHORTZ: Thank you, Lulu.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
American museums, their boards, their staffs, the people who visit them are far more white than the American population as a whole. It's a problem that can affect museum's bottom lines, of course. But it also seems to be in direct contradiction with many of these institution's missions to spread knowledge and wonder far and wide.
The High Museum of Art in Atlanta is emerging as an exception.
One example in recent years, the proportion of nonwhite visitors has tripled to 45 percent, which is pretty close to the percentage of people of color in the Atlanta area. Rand Suffolk is the director of the High, and he joins me now from Atlanta to talk about how the museum is changing. Welcome to the program.
RAND SUFFOLK: Thank you. Good morning.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So tell us about the High Museum for those who may not have been.
SUFFOLK: Well, the High Museum is I think one of the finest art museums in the Southeastern United States. It's been around for over 75 years, and it's an extraordinary general fine arts museum.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: When did you realize that the low numbers of minorities visiting your museum was a problem?
SUFFOLK: Well, I think we realized early on that there was a challenge there. You know, Atlanta is an incredibly diverse city, and what we understood was that our audience did not reflect, or our numbers did not reflect the audience that we served. And there's both a missionary and a mercenary component to this. And the missionary part of it was that we really needed to figure out a way how to do a better job connecting with that audience.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So when you started to do different kinds of outreach, you know, how were you reaching these people that might not have been reached by you before?
SUFFOLK: Our staff got together, and they did a remarkable job of saying, you know, what should our voice be as an institution. And they came back and said, you know, we're a Southern institution. We're very proud of that. There should be more Southern hospitality in terms of the way we engage with people.
There should perhaps be more humility about the way we're talking about ourselves and with individuals that are out there. And ultimately, we came up with a tagline called Here For You that we just want to put it out there that everything that we do is really intended to be audience-focused.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Talk to me a little bit about the things that you're now, that are part of your exhibitions that might not have been before.
SUFFOLK: I think what's changed for us is that we've strived to raise the bar when it comes to the diversity of content that we have. And so over the course of the past calendar year alone, of the 15 major exhibitions that we've done, more than half, in fact, nine have highlighted important work by artists of color, women artists and gay artists.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I understand that the docents, the people who take people around and are the day-to-day public face of the museum have also been diversified. Is that right?
SUFFOLK: That's true.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But the board and the people who run the museum are still less diverse.
SUFFOLK: They are. But I think, in all fairness, they're working on it. And the High is an ideal situation to try and ultimately become at least one version of a national model of community engagement for the simple fact among others that Atlanta as a city has I think an uncommon history.
First of all, it's an incredibly diverse city, but it also has an uncommon history of people working together to create something extraordinary. And the board at the High Museum of Art I think is fully behind these efforts and excited and affirmed by our progress.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What do you think the takeaway is for other institutions? What can they learn?
SUFFOLK: Well, I think every institution has to look at how best they can dovetail their strengths with their community's needs. And I think that defining diversity based on your community is also important, you know. Where we are is very different than Portland, Ore., in terms of how we identify diversity and so forth.
And beyond just the demographics by ethnicity, you know, at the High, we're striving to figure out how do we just make inclusivity as I said a part of who we are. And so for example, we decided last year to stop doing audio guides. And instead, we took those dollars, and we've invested them to make sure that every single public program we do has an ASL interpreter there.
I think art museums in general have to embrace the fact that we have an incredible opportunity to make a positive immediate impact within our communities.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Rand Suffolk, director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Thank you so much.
SUFFOLK: Thank you.
[EDITOR'S NOTE ON JAN. 18: This story should have noted that artnet News was the first to report that the High Museum’s proportion of nonwhite visitors has grown to 45 percent and now is close to the percentage of people of color who live in the Atlanta metropolitan area. That news site’s report about the museum’s “valuable case study” concerning how to diversify audiences is online here.]
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
President Trump spent part of a press conference yesterday boasting about his intelligence, his stability and even his performance at college. The hashtag #StableGenius has been trending after Trump tweeted he was one. It's his response to the new book "Fire And Fury," in which the author, Michael Wolff, claims that the president is unstable. Trump was flanked by members of his cabinet and top Republican lawmakers who joined him at Camp David. They've been trying to craft a legislative agenda in the midst of a Page Six-style storm.
Michael Warren has been watching it all play out. He's a senior writer at the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine. And he joins us. Good morning.
MICHAEL WARREN: Good morning, Lulu.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. A lot to discuss, I think. What do you make of the president's reaction to this book, from the press conference to Twitter to a cease-and-desist order to the book's publisher?
WARREN: Well, I'll say it's classic Trump in that it is probably self-destructive - certainly not in the president and the White House's best interest to do so - but also entirely predictable. This is a man who has sort of built his entire public career around being involved in media spats like this. I think it was a - it was certainly a mistake initially for the president to issue a statement, as he did on Wednesday when these excerpts first started coming out.
Now the White House is trying to say - basically, since that very moment - saying that the book is tabloid trash, that there are a lot of problems. And I agree. There are a lot of problems with the credibility of the book. But that initial reaction and the engagement with the book has, I think, made this story even bigger than it already would have been.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And the book a best-seller. I mean, you know...
WARREN: That's right.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I mean, there are people lining up the block to buy it. It is filled with details about the president's mental state. And that's been a source of cable news fodder for days now. How have those charges been received among Republican officials?
WARREN: Look. I think that this has been a constant for the Trump administration and, actually, since before the election, which is that Republicans just try to look at what they like about the president or what they like about being in power and ignore everything else that's inconvenient. I think it's certainly inappropriate for - I think - for it to be making psychological judgments about the president from afar, as some of us in the media are being tempted to do. But I think that what you're seeing from Republicans on Capitol Hill, you saw at this Camp David summit is just saying, well, what we can do is try to achieve part of our 2018 agenda.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So pretend it's not happening. Ignore it.
WARREN: And pretend it's not happening and focus on what they can control. And that may be the best thing that they can do. But it's also a problem because you can't separate from the president all of these questions about - and the things that he's tweeting himself about his own genius.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The White House appears to have been caught off guard by the book. There seemed to have been no unified strategy in some ways. I mean, they sort of just let the president take the ball and run with it.
WARREN: Yeah. Well, look. This book - this is a question that I have - and I've been unable to get an answer from the White House since Wednesday - which is, how many people in the White House cooperated with this book? How many comms staff were in interviews - these interviews that Mike Wolff supposedly had - walking into the White House, roaming around, in his words?
They say he never met with the president in the Oval Office. Michael Wolff says he does. There's a lot of confusion about how much access and how much participation the White House had with this book. So they shouldn't be caught off guard, I think, based on the level of access that Wolff appears to have. And they haven't been quite forthright about what level that is.
I talked to somebody who was interviewed who said there was a comms person, somebody in the West Wing in the White House - there was a comms person in that interview with him. How many other interviews were like that? And I think that that - we should keep that in mind when we hear sort of these calls that this is this is tabloid trash, that nobody in the White House knew what was happening or that this was all Steve Bannon.
Perhaps it really was all Steve Bannon inviting Michael Wolff into the White House, giving him unfettered access. But the White House is - and the West Wing is a small place. And it's hard to ignore. I certainly saw Michael Wolff when I was covering - when I've been covering the White House for the last year. It's kind of hard to ignore the guy.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. And just briefly, I'm just curious about this idea that somehow, you know, this may not really damage the president. I mean, how much of a blow do you think this will be? Or is this just another one of these scandals that seems to erupt and then be forgotten when the next one comes in?
WARREN: I think it has a small, marginal, cumulative effect, right? I mean everybody sort of has baked in that that the president is not normal, is not - certainly not a normal president, doesn't operate in the normal way. I think what will change - say, that 36, 38 percent approval to something a lot worse - is if something happens catastrophic, if there's a drop a severe drop in the stock market or, God forbid, some kind of national security disaster, something bad for the Mueller investigation. This is only hurting his ability to weather a big storm like that. It's giving nobody who's on the fence, trying to figure out if they can still support him any reason to do so.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's Michael Warren, a senior writer at the Weekly Standard. Thanks for coming in.
WARREN: Thanks.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
It was announced this past week that a coal mine - the 4 West Mine - in southwestern Pennsylvania will close. It's another blow to the coal industry, which President Trump has promised to revive. Mepco, the company that owns 4 West, said it would be shutting down the Greene County mine because it had become less productive and more costly to operate. About 400 workers will lose their jobs. We're joined now by Blair Zimmerman. He's chairman of the Greene County Board of Commissioners, whose residents will be affected. Welcome.
BLAIR ZIMMERMAN: Thank you. Thank you very much.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So are there retraining programs for the people who will be out of work?
ZIMMERMAN: Actually, it's funny you asked that because I worked in the coal industry for over 40 years. And a lot of coal miners historically have thought, well, I'm going to get back in the industry.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right, because it's like...
ZIMMERMAN: ...Well, those days are gone.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: For mining families - right? - it's not just a livelihood, but it's also a culture. It's part of their identity.
ZIMMERMAN: Yeah, in this area, you know, generation after generation worked in the industry. And President Trump said he's bringing back coal, but there's not been any change in regulations, really, to make a significant difference. And I don't know that would anyway. We need help. My community and economic development department are constantly calling companies, corporations, manufacturers across this country, trying to get them to relocate to Greene County. We have a great interstate system. We've got river transportation, rail - and trying to get them to come to Greene County to replace the mines as they close.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: When you say, we need help, what has been the response?
ZIMMERMAN: Well (laughter), I was on Capitol Hill. I was actually at the White House. And President Trump didn't meet with us. He was out of the country. But, you know, honestly, I think it was campaign rhetoric. I'm not asking for a handout. I'm just asking for a helping hand - not only Pennsylvania, but West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama. There's a lot of mines prior to this mine closing that have closed, and you just don't bring coal back. So we need to look outside of the coal industry in the future.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Your region supported Trump this past election. Am I right?
ZIMMERMAN: That's correct. You know what? He said the right things. He said, I'm bringing back coal and talked about the Second Amendment, not taking away guns. And that's the big part of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, this corner. And he said the right stuff.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What are people thinking about the president these days?
ZIMMERMAN: You know, people aren't boasting as much as they did during the election. You know, he's going to bring coal back, and he's going to do this. Well, he hasn't. And at least in some of the meetings I've been in, it was - he was just saying what people wanted to hear to get elected. And I sincerely believe that.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: President Trump said that he's trying to roll back regulations. We have seen an uptick in coal exports, which has allowed for more production of coal. Do you see that having a long-term effect in your community?
ZIMMERMAN: I just really don't see a major change in the industry because of what he's done.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Sir, after this news, can you tell me the mood in your community right now?
ZIMMERMAN: Well, to tell you the truth, it really hasn't hit home yet, to be honest with you. It's been a little bit of talk, but not a lot. But I'm sure in the next days - next few days, we'll hear more about it. But like I was saying, a lot of coal miners hang out - hold on to the fact that they think they will get called back to the industry. And some of them will, but a majority of them won't. And they need to look beyond coal.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Blair Zimmerman, in Waynesburg, Pa., thank you so much for speaking with us.
ZIMMERMAN: Oh, you're welcome. Have a great day.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
This past week, John Pace found the largest prime number known to humankind.
JOHN PACE: Four, six, seven, three, three, three, one, eight, three, three, five, nine, two...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And that number goes on to more than 23 million digits.
PACE: It's longer than anybody really wants to sit down and hear.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: If you're not great at math, here's a primer. Prime numbers can only be divided by 1 and themselves. But Pace is not a mathematician. He's actually a FedEx employee from Germantown, Tenn., and he found his prime as part of an online collective called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search or GIMPS. Pace and thousands of volunteers ran software on their personal computers, crunching numbers day in and day out. Now, anyone can participate. You just need a computer, an Internet connection and a lot of patience. Pace began his prime hunt 14 years ago.
PACE: There was a $100,000 prize attached to finding the first prime that had a 10 million digit result. And I was like, well, you know, I've got as much a chance as anybody else.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: John Pace's prime number currently holds the title for the largest. But there are other bigger ones out there, and they're important, especially when it comes to cryptography, Internet security and the future of computing.
PACE: When they ultimately get to, you know, quantum computers - however long that takes - they'll be able to crack current encryption in milliseconds. So there's going to be a need for extremely large prime numbers. And I'd like to at least have left some legacy that, you know, I've helped contribute something to society.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So get hunting. There are still lots of prime numbers to be found.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE REDNECK MANIFESTO'S "DRUM DRUM")
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
President Trump has threatened to cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Palestinians if they don't come back to the negotiating table. This after Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and declared his intention to move the U.S. embassy there. Joining us on the line to talk about it all is Diana Buttu. She was legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team. Welcome.
DIANA BUTTU: Thank you, Lu. Thanks for having me.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'd like to look at the reaction to the Trump administration's move, first, inside the Palestinian territories and in the region more broadly. What's going on in your view?
BUTTU: Well, we've seen that there have been a number of protests happening both within Palestine and around the neighboring countries and in the Islamic world as a whole. As a result of these protests, Israeli forces have now killed 15 Palestinians simply for demonstrating their discontent against the U.S. decision to declare Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
The protests haven't been as widespread as people have expected. But nonetheless, these protests are continuing. And it's a show and a sign that the world is not standing by Trump and his declaration and his pronouncements and certainly not his positions.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well - and yet the Saudi crown prince is reported to have urged Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, to accept a very limited state noncontiguous with most settlements remaining. And we've also heard sort of similar backroom discussions from Egypt and other countries in the region.
BUTTU: Yes. You're absolutely right. There hasn't been a time in - since 1967 where Saudi Arabia has been on the right side when it comes to Palestinian rights. The real question is whether Mahmoud Abbas is going to sign something like that. And as much as he's somebody I criticize and I'm not a fan of, this is not an agreement that I see him signing onto because it doesn't even ensure that Palestinian rights are being protected.
Instead, it legitimates the settlements that are illegal. It removes Jerusalem - Palestinian Jerusalem. And it is effectively doing away with the Palestinian right of return. So this is not something that any Palestinian leader, including Mahmoud Abbas, is going to sign onto.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You've complained that the U.S. through both Republican and Democratic administrations has ceded to Israel on most issues and, therefore, has never really been a fair and impartial third party. Has Trump, in effect, made what you consider to be unstated U.S. policy simply more explicit?
BUTTU: He certainly has. One of the things that Trump has done is that he's brought to the forefront and brought to the - brought - made very apparent that the United States has never been an honest broker - not under Clinton, not under Bush and certainly not under Obama.
Obama was a president who gave Israel the largest aid package that Israel has ever seen. And it had also turned a blind eye to Israeli settlement activity. What Trump has now done is he's put it very much in your face and made it clear that the United States has never been and will never be an honest broker.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Trump, in one of his tweets, did say that Israelis would have to pay more, though, for the recognition of their capital, suggesting Israel will have to make significant concessions to Palestinians. Does that encourage you at all?
BUTTU: No. I'm not at all encouraged. I've seen both Trump's history, as well as the people that he's surrounded himself by. And it doesn't at all leave me with any signs of encouragement that his path is going to change. In fact, I think it's actually going to get much worse.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Is there a worry among Palestinians, though, about the threat of cutting off funding? Because, obviously, the United States does give a significant amount of money to the Palestinian Authority.
BUTTU: I'm not so worried about that. And I'm not so worried about that for two reasons - first, because the Israelis understand that the survival of the Palestinian Authority is also in their interest, which is why they have been lobbying for money to go to the Palestinian Authority. And secondly, Palestinians are not for sale. And we will not be blackmailed by anybody and certainly not by the likes of President Trump.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Diana Buttu is a lawyer and former adviser to Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas. Thank you so much.
BUTTU: Thank you.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Mexico is the site of frequent earthquakes. It's also one of the few countries equipped with a seismic early warning system. People in some cities have gotten as much as a minute of warning before the shaking starts. But there was no alert when a 7.1-magnitude quake struck near Mexico City last year, toppling buildings and killing hundreds of people. Reporter James Fredrick went to figure out why.
JAMES FREDRICK, BYLINE: When the ground started shaking in Mexico City on September 19, Maria de Lourdes Garcia, a caretaker at this primary school, knew she had to sound some kind of alarm.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
MARIA DE LOURDES GARCIA: (Speaking Spanish).
FREDRICK: Garcia says she rang this bell because the official alarm she expected didn't go off until after shaking started. Even though her school held strong and all the students evacuated safely, Mexico City residents are supposed to hear this before earthquakes.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALARM)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Speaking Spanish).
FREDRICK: This sounds screams from tens of thousands of loudspeakers on street corners around the city - plus public buildings, schools, radio stations and TV networks. It's now heard in six Mexican cities. So why was it late for the big quake?
JUAN MANUEL ESPINOSA ARANDA: (Speaking Spanish).
FREDRICK: Juan Manuel Espinosa Aranda runs the group in charge of the government's earthquake alert, CIRES. The system relies on nearly 100 sensors close to the major geological fault lines on Mexico's Pacific coast, hundreds of miles from the capital. When seismic waves rise above a certain threshold, they set off the alarm...
(SOUNDBITE OF ALARM)
FREDRICK: ...Giving the Mexican capital as much as 90 seconds warning for these distant quakes. When the system was launched in the late 1980s, it was the first earthquake alarm in the world. Espinosa shows me how it works. In a video recreation, circles ripple out from the epicenter...
(SOUNDBITE OF BEEPING)
FREDRICK: ...Beeping each time they hit one of the sensors. The problem on September 19 was that the quake came from a quiet, small fault near Mexico City.
ESPINOSA: (Speaking Spanish).
FREDRICK: Espinosa says it's so close that the effects of the earthquake are felt before the alarm can be triggered. Espinosa says they've already made adjustments to catch any future earthquakes that strike this close to the city.
ESPINOSA: (Speaking Spanish).
FREDRICK: "With the changes we've made, we've gained roughly 10 seconds," he says, which means Mexico City could have gotten the last warning on time. He's also pushing Mexico's Congress to invest in infrastructure, adding 60 more sensors and expanding the alarm to dozens more Mexican cities.
Although the system has been in place for nearly three decades, September was really the first test with a deadly quake.
ESPINOSA: (Speaking Spanish).
FREDRICK: "There's a sense of satisfaction because we see the alarm works for the most part," he says, "but we also regret that we could have done more."
While the system isn't perfect, they are at least trying to warn people.
RICHARD ALLEN: I think that one of the key things that we took away from Mexico is it's better to push the system out sooner rather than later.
FREDRICK: That's Dr. Richard Allen, the head of UC Berkeley's seismology lab and one of the people behind ShakeAlert, this early earthquake warning being piloted in California, Oregon and Washington.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: This is a test.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALARM)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Earthquake, earthquake.
FREDRICK: He came to Mexico soon after the quakes to speak to experts and everyday citizens about the delayed alert.
ALLEN: The really key thing to take away from this is that people recognize that there are these technical limitations, and they still want the system very much.
FREDRICK: This is an important lesson for Allen. Like the deadly quake in Mexico City, the dangerous fault lines in California are close to cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. Earthquake warning would be on a razor's edge. Allen sees an amazing tool in Mexico and is eager to launch ShakeAlert on the West Coast soon.
ALLEN: The earthquake could happen at any moment. And if that happens and we generate an alert and it just goes out to a few test users rather than going out a larger group, that will be a real shame.
FREDRICK: For NPR News, I'm James Frederick in Mexico City.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
If you hear the word millennial and immediately think - an entitled 20-something scrolling through Instagram and munching on avocado toast, Michael Hobbes wants to have a word with you.
MICHAEL HOBBES: There's really very little evidence that millennials are any more spoiled or any more entitled than any generation of young people that came before. But there is a mountain of evidence that things are objectively harder for us.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Hobbes wrote about the challenges his generation faces in a December article for Highline, which is put out by the Huffington Post. Its headline, "Millennials Are Screwed," caught our attention this week. And we asked Hobbes to explain his pessimistic prediction.
HOBBES: Healthcare, housing and education are more than five times more expensive than they were for our parents. There are fewer steady jobs. Wages have stagnated since the 1970s. I mean, I can go on and on and on. And so its weird that we're constantly talking about how millennials should do this differently, and millennials should do that differently. But we dont talk that much about - hey, the country around us can do some things differently, too.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So you obviously believe that the baby boomers messed up your life? How did they do that?
HOBBES: Well, I've gotten a lot of emails since the article came out from boomers that are saying, we've fallen off the ladder, too. And if you're 55 years old, there's a lot of discrimination for getting back into the workforce. But what we're seeing is that those impacts are concentrated on the young. So I think there's really three paradigm shifts. The first one is work has become much lower quality, basically - that there's fewer decent jobs now. Many of the jobs that are available are contingent work or sort of have been farmed out to contractors. Many fewer jobs provide things like pension, benefits or health care these days.
The second big paradigm shift was this whole idea of personal responsibility - that to get any help from the government, you really have to earn it. And so starting in the 1980s, we started looking really, really, really closely at, what are welfare beneficiaries doing to earn their benefits? Meanwhile, of course, the boomer generation protected, very fiercely, their own benefits, right? So people over 65 have socialized medicine, and they get free money every month. Meanwhile, anybody under 65, there's almost no benefits available anymore. And the only benefits that are available are only available to people that have full-time work - things like unemployment benefits or the Earned Income Tax Credit.
The third paradigm shift is around housing. If you want a high-skilled, high-paying job, you really have to move to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Boston - one of these areas. But housing costs have gotten so high in those cities, that it really swallows up any higher wages that you earn when you get there.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But let's look at another set of numbers. And I know this is not about everyone. But millennials control $2 trillion in liquid assets, and they can still look forward to a massive wealth transfer from their parents who are boomers.
HOBBES: I think there are millennials that are doing fine. I think that when you talk about wealth transfer, what's really interesting is Americans over 62 are 80 percent white. And so when you look at these wealth transfers, white millennials are five times more likely to receive an inheritance than millennials of color. Forty-five percent of millennials are non-white. That's going to exacerbate inequality within the millennial generation. And so we're already seeing this where cities are becoming concentrations of wealth. Cities have better social services, better hospitals, better schools. And it's only the kids whose white parents can get them into those engines of opportunity, that are able to access those better services.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What do you think the responsibility of the boomer generation is at this moment?
HOBBES: I think, really, to think about the ways that their kids have it harder than them. Right now, the growth is going to people primarily who own land, who own homes, who own stock. Those are all people that are disproportionately old. And we need to find ways, systematically, to share those gains with people that are younger.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And I hesitate to ask this, but what is the responsibility of the millennial generation?
HOBBES: Well, I think there's a lot of anger from a lot of these people, especially who graduated during the recession. And so what we really need to do is channel that anger into systemic improvements to our situation.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Give me an example.
HOBBES: Well, like, you think about welfare, for example. I mean, we talk a little bit about something like universal benefits or these kind of new forms of welfare. And we need to put these things in place. It's not impossible. Most other countries have this. A lot of it comes down to voting, but millennial turnout is very variable depending on the state. So in some places, it's as low as 30 percent, and in some places, it's as high as 70 percent. So what that really means is that there's procedures that keep us from voting, and we need to reform those and make it a lot easier for young people to vote. There's tons and tons and tons of systemic things that we can start doing and kind of unraveling everything that's happened in the last five decades.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Michael Hobbes is a contributing writer for Highline magazine from the Huffington Post. Thanks so much.
HOBBES: Thanks.
(SOUNDBITE OF WINE AND DINE'S "MEMORY OF LOVE")
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
North Korea's Olympic committee representative said yesterday that it's likely that two of their figure skaters will go to the Olympics in South Korea beginning February 9, which is a big deal. Joining us to talk about it is Jere Longman, sports reporter for The New York Times. He's at the U.S. Figure Skating Championship in San Jose, Calif., which is the noise I think we can hear behind you. Welcome to the program.
JERE LONGMAN: Thanks for having me, Lulu - appreciate it.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. So tell us a little bit about these North Korean skaters. What kind of skaters are there? What are their names?
LONGMAN: So it's a pairs team that finished 15th at the 2017 World Championships. So they're, you know, elite, quality skaters. The woman in the pair is Ryom Tae Ok, who's - will turn 19 shortly before the Olympics. And her partner is Kim Ju Sik, who is 25. And they're both listed as students. They have a kind of dynamism that's reflective of Chinese skaters and a kind of precision that's often seen in the Russian skaters. And they skate to the Beatles in their short program - instrumental version of "Day In The Life" as performed by Jeff Beck.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) Good choice, good choice - I like it. So let me ask you this. Why is it significant that they might be competing in the Olympics in South Korea?
LONGMAN: So North Korea is not a Winter Olympic power. It has only won two medals in the Winter Olympics - both in speedskating - and none since 1992. But given that the Olympics are taking place in...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Their great rival.
LONGMAN: ...In the divided North Korean peninsula at a time of great geopolitical tension, the International Olympic Committee and the president of South Korea are really desperately hoping they - and have been saying for months that they want North Korea to participate in hopes that, you know, it could bring some sort of immediate reduction of tensions on the peninsula and perhaps lead to some longer-term thaw in the relations between the two countries.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So sports bringing these two countries together is the Olympic hope and, I suppose, just the Olympic dream writ large for all sports.
LONGMAN: Yes - so they're being labeled and have been for months as the Peace Games. The Olympics have been corrupted in many ways by, you know, scandal and money and other things. But at its ideal is the notion that athletes from countries who don't get along with each other can, for a short period of time, come together through friendship and competition - show the, you know, sort of the better angels of mankind.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: If the North Korean pair actually compete in South Korea, how closely scrutinized will their performance be, do you think, and what will their reception be in South Korea?
LONGMAN: I think in the larger Olympic world and the larger political world, their presence would mean far more than how they actually skate. And, you know, it's much more important, at least in the eyes of the Olympics, that they be there and less important by exactly what place they finish.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Jere Longman, sports reporter for The New York Times - thank you very much.
LONGMAN: Thank you.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
There are times when we can connect surprisingly deeply with a stranger and then never see them again, a missed connection. A while ago, we asked you to call in with your missed connection stories and let us help you find that person. Greta Pane called in about an encounter she had through the wall of a piano practice room almost 20 years ago.
Greta is a postdoctoral fellow in English literature at Boston University now. But back then, she was an undergrad student at the University of Pennsylvania. She played piano intensely during high school. And when she got to college, she would play in one of the practice rooms in the basement of the music department. Sometimes, she would be there alone for hours at a time.
GRETA PANE: And one day, I was playing Rachmaninoff's "Prelude In G Minor." And when I stopped, the person in the practice room next to me started to play it and then stopped. And I realized that this person was playfully imitating me.
(SOUNDBITE OF RENDITION OF RACHMANINOFF'S "PRELUDE IN G MINOR")
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So Greta started testing the mystery pianist behind the wall.
PANE: They know Rachmaninoff's Prelude. But do they know Chopin's "Fantaisie-Impromptu"?
(SOUNDBITE OF RENDITION OF CHOPIN'S "FANTAISIE-IMPROMPTU")
PANE: So I started to play the first few bars of that and stopped. Then, this person took it up and played it back to me very, very well. I thought, OK, this person can play the "Fantaisie-Impromptu." But can they play the third movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata?" And this person immediately started to play it and then stopped.
(SOUNDBITE OF RENDITION OF BEETHOVEN'S "MOONLIGHT SONATA")
PANE: And so we went back and forth like this for a while. And I went through my entire repertoire, and this person could play every single piece.
(SOUNDBITE OF RENDITION OF BEETHOVEN'S "MOONLIGHT SONATA")
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Greta didn't want to disturb the mystery pianist. But on her way out, she checked the practice room log for the name of the person in the other room. There was a name there, but she couldn't read it. The handwriting was too bad.
PANE: When you learn a piece like this, it becomes part of you. It becomes part of your body's memory, and the feelings that you give it are your own. So to hear someone else also playing these same pieces - it's like the auditory equivalent of seeing your double.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Greta thought about this missed connection for a long time - 17 years, actually. Other than their repertoire, what else would they have had in common? Would they have been friends? She regretted not knocking on the practice room door. So when Greta Pane called in with her story, we wanted to help. It took weeks. We reached out to UPenn. The director of performance there directed us to a longtime teacher who said there was only one student that could have done this, so we called him up.
NOAH FARBER: My name is Noah Farber. I'm a pianist in the Philadelphia area. I specialize in dance accompaniment. I also do a little choral accompaniment. And I'm a bit of a composer, although I don't really earn money doing that.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Greta, meet Noah. Noah, meet Greta (laughter).
FARBER: Hi, Greta.
PANE: Hi. Hi, Noah.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Noah thinks he remembers playing those romantic period pieces back and forth with Greta 17 years ago. In fact...
FARBER: Well, I did actually do it with a few other people, I'm ashamed to admit.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Noah, why were you playing with other people, even though you couldn't see them?
FARBER: Yeah, well, because, I guess, for fun. I guess there was a bit of a musical connection there. I mean...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's kind of what you felt, Greta, right?
PANE: Yeah, exactly. It is kind of unusual when you have the opportunity to transform these moments when you're in the cell of the practice room by yourself into a moment actually of communication or connection.
FARBER: Yes.
PANE: That's what I think I felt Noah was doing.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Music is Noah's job. But even though that moment meant so much to Greta, music is not such a big part of her life anymore. We wanted to leave Greta with a little musical gift. So we asked Noah to play one of the pieces from their missed connection.
FARBER: Sure. It's Chopin's "Fantaisie-Impromptu In C Sharp Minor." (Playing piano).
Does it sound familiar?
PANE: (Laughter) Very.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was Greta Pane of Boston and Noah Farber of Philadelphia. Thank you both so very much.
FARBER: You're welcome. Thank you.
PANE: Thank you.
FARBER: (Playing piano).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And if you want to help with your missed connection, email us a voice memo with your story. The address is weekend@npr.org. This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News, connecting you to the world. I'm Lulu Garcia-Navarro.
FARBER: (Playing piano).
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Since becoming president, Donald Trump has frequently been at odds with the Republican leadership. But this weekend, all seemed to be forgiven as the president and GOP lawmakers met at Camp David to discuss their 2018 agenda. They also squeezed in a screening of a new movie, "The Greatest Showman." There was a bonding, the president said at yesterday's press conference. It's not clear how tight that bond will remain, though, as Congress takes up legislation on immigration, infrastructure and the budget. The president's struck an optimistic note with hopes for bipartisanship.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I really think we'll have a lot of Democrat support. I hope so.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: We're joined now by Republican Congressman Tom Cole of Oklahoma to talk about the prospects. Welcome to the program, sir.
TOM COLE: Great to be with you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So the president has spoken about bipartisanship and getting Democrats on board, specifically when it comes to immigration. Does that seem likely to you?
COLE: Well, certainly possible. Look. There's an obvious deal here. DACA - legal status for people that obviously are not responsible for breaking the law. They were brought here as children.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals...
COLE: Exactly.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...The so-called DREAMers.
COLE: And exchange for enhanced border security. So the devil's always in the details on these things, but I think the outline for a deal is there. And the real challenge will be it's an election year. And that makes everything exponentially more difficult.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, let's talk about the DREAMers for a moment. The president says there won't be a deal unless he gets funding for the border wall and other immigration changes. That's a nonstarter for Democrats who say spending $18 billion to extend the wall is unnecessary and wildly expensive.
COLE: Well, I disagree with them, frankly. I think, you know, what we're talking about if you actually look at the components for about 600 additional miles of a border wall and fencing, that was originally envisioned, by the way, back in 2006. The Democrats stopped working on it when they got power in 2007. So it's not a new idea. And the changes the president is proposing, which is getting rid of the lottery system, which is dangerous, quite frankly - you don't know who you're going to get - and dealing with the chain migration, I think a reasonable proposal. So we'll see where we go. Look. Each side's going to stake out a position that seems to be at odds. But at the end of the day, again, there's a deal to be had here if both sides will approach it rationally.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The lottery system - of course, everyone is vetted before they come to the United States. But what he's proposing is hardly comprehensive immigration reform. And America doesn't only need highly skilled workers, right? It needs all kinds of people doing all kinds of jobs. Should only the rich and educated be able to live the American dream?
COLE: No, you're actually right. Look. Work ethic is probably what brought Italians, Poles, Irish people here in the 19th century. There's always - for people who are willing to get up and do hard work, there's always a market. So I agree with you on that. But in terms of, you know, whether or not, you know, we can have a deal, look. I think the president's put pretty reasonable proposal on the table. Democrats are free to react or not. We've got a timeline we're working on. But, again, I would hope at the end of the day we could find this because over 80 percent of the American public believe in enhanced border security. Over 80 percent also believe that the young people that are in this deferred action program ought to be allowed to stay. So if you can't find a way to thread that needle, then you're either being deliberately obstructionist, or you're incredibly incompetent.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: This is, as you mentioned, an election year with your party led by a president who is extremely unpopular. The Democrats feel good about their chances. How do you think you'll fare?
COLE: Look. Nobody's had a good off-year election since 2002. The environment, the energy right now is on their side. But I think we did a lot to position ourselves in December by getting that tax reform. Our candidates are very good. The districts in the House are - generally favor us. And the off year - the composition of the off-year electorate usually works to the advantage of Republicans. So I look at this as sort of an even struggle, but it will be a struggle. And if you're a Republican, you need to recognize that and get ready.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Just briefly, sir, I'd like to ask your reaction to the anecdotes in the book "Fire And Fury." Michael Wolff paints a picture of a very dysfunctional White House and a president that is ignorant, unstable. Does that concern you?
COLE: Michael Wolff is not exactly what I would consider a reputable reporter. He's pretty flamboyant, and there's been a lot of questions raised about him. But it doesn't surprise me that a first-year White House is chaotic. I remember back to the wonderful Bob Woodward book - very different journalist, I might say - the agenda in the Clinton years, which painted what looked to be a very chaotic, dysfunctional White House. I think they all tend to look that way the first year. And yet the Clinton presidency ended up pretty good, and it was a successful two terms. So, again, I wouldn't judge too quickly on the basis of this one book.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Republican Congressman Tom Cole of Oklahoma, thanks so much.
COLE: Thank you.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Time now for The Call-In.
(SOUNDBITE OF CORDUROI'S "MY DEAR")
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Digital privacy in relationships - sharing passwords or devices with your significant other can be a convenience but at what cost? Last week, we asked listeners to tell us how much of their digital lives they share with their spouse or partner. We heard from many of you. This email from Abby Power in Minneapolis, Minn., sums up many of your experiences. No secret passwords in our house, she said. Myself, my husband and my two teenage boys all share passwords with each other. And we don't violate each other's privacy - fingers crossed that everyone is doing the right thing.
But sometimes, having the keys to your boyfriend's digital kingdom can be a temptation. Becky McDougal of Malden, Mass., had complete access to her fiance of four and a half years' phone until one day when she got a little too curious about something she was really hoping would happen.
BECKY MCDOUGAL: We had just moved into a condo that he bought. And we've had engagement conversations. And I felt like I just want to know. I'm a little bit curious. Are there clues? When is this going to happen?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: When was he going to pop the question? You were trying to figure out when that was going to happen.
MCDOUGAL: Right, right. Has anything been been done as far as buying a ring or anything like that? So I, one night, abused my thumbprint access and got into his phone. And I didn't really know what I was looking for. But I found emails that looked like plans for a weekend getaway. And I felt like that was going to be engagement weekend. And so I was getting really excited about it. And it came to the time where I thought we would be leaving and realized it's not happening when I'm asking about - not so subtly - what are our plans? What do we want to do tomorrow? And he - it was very clear nothing was really happening. And so I was a little bit disappointed. But in a turn of events, it did end up being engagement weekend. It was just in our house.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So he didn't take you anywhere, but he did pop the question.
MCDOUGAL: He did. So I at least figured out the date. But I did fess up afterwards and...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So you confessed?
MCDOUGAL: I did. I confessed. I felt like it was the right thing to do because having that digital access, that thumbprint, is a big trust. And I did know that I broke that. And I could've really ruined something big for him.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So how did he react when you told him that you had been snooping through the phone?
MCDOUGAL: When he - his reaction - I don't think he was mad. But certainly, we both talked about it and agreed. I did not want that access again. I'm a really nosy person, clearly. And I don't want to spoil another big surprise like that ever again. So - and he felt like, I don't really want to give you that access again. There's nothing that you really need in there. So it did change things in our relationship there. But we certainly both trust each other. And there's nothing I would hide from him anyways.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So let me understand. So now you don't have access to his phone anymore.
MCDOUGAL: Correct, yes.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: How do you feel about this now when you look back on what happened?
MCDOUGAL: I feel like it was all fun and games until it wasn't, you know, and I feel like I'm not proud of what I did. And I think that's important to be honest about that. And it still is a breach of trust to go and snoop around and dig for that when I should've just trusted it's coming, and it's going to happen in a beautiful way no matter what.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Becky and her fiance are getting married, despite the digital transgressions, this June.
NANCY BAYM: You know, I taught interpersonal communication for about 25 years. And I heard that line - we share everything. We have no secrets - so often. And you know what? It's not true. It's never true. There's all kinds of things that we don't tell our partners just because we love them, and we want to be kind to them.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's Nancy Baym of Microsoft Research. She's author of the book "Personal Connections In The Digital Age." She says how digital access is negotiated between partners depends on their expectations. And those can change overtime.
BAYM: I don't think that it's necessarily something where on one day you can say, OK, here's our rules. And you never ever have to revisit it again because you might find that down the road, something you thought would bother you didn't, or something that you thought would not bother you actually bothered you a lot.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And if you screw up and maybe get a little too snoopy...
BAYM: Probably, the best strategy is not to be blaming the technology and not necessarily to be blaming the other person but to be looking for - what is the underlying reason that this person wanted to do that in the first place? And what kinds of relational concerns or issues is that pointing out?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: There are broader issues, though, when you are navigating digital privacy and relationships.
WOODROW HARTZOG: Often, the only threat that we think about is, would this person want to log in and snoop through all my things? But that's not the only thing that can go wrong when you share your username or password with someone.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Woodrow Hartzog is a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University.
HARTZOG: The person that you trust might be totally trustworthy but just make a mistake by clicking on the wrong link that downloads a virus or getting hacked somehow and compromising your username and password without even meaning to.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And he says, don't feel bad if your spouse or partner doesn't give you total access.
HARTZOG: Just because you don't share anything doesn't mean you're trying to hide anything. And I think the notion that privacy is about hiding things is really outdated in the modern world. And we've got a lot of other things to worry about.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was Woodrow Hartzog, professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University.
(SOUNDBITE OF CORDUROI'S "MY DEAR")
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Next week on The Call-In, there's a massive nursing shortage across the country. Depending on where you live, nurses can be in short supply. We want to hear from people in the field. Are you a nurse who's seeing your industry change? Are you at the end of your career? We're just getting started. We want to hear the challenges you're facing. Call in at 202-216-9217. Be sure to include your full name, where you're from and your phone number, and we may use it on the air. That's 202-216-9217.
(SOUNDBITE OF CORDUROI'S "MY DEAR")
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
This past week, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley wrote a letter to the Justice Department along with his colleague Lindsey Graham. In it, they recommended that the author of the notorious dossier alleging coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia be investigated for possible criminal charges. Christopher Steele, a former British spy, wrote the report. Their letter suggests that he lied to the FBI.
It's another attack from conservatives who are challenging the integrity of the FBI's Russia investigation. Steele's allegations prompted the investigation back in the summer of 2016. And joining me now to talk about it is Adam Entous. He covers national security for The New Yorker magazine. Good morning.
ADAM ENTOUS: Great to be here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Adam, what are Senators Grassley and Graham actually alleging here?
ENTOUS: What they've done is they've recommended that the FBI and the Justice Department investigate whether or not Steele - this is the former British spy - lied. They're making claims. But they're not really spelling them out because the information is allegedly classified - that he engaged with reporters and media organizations in ways that somehow suggest that he had lied to the FBI.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So they're actually going after him for talking to reporters.
ENTOUS: It appears that that's the case. Again, it's not clear what the FBI will do and the Justice Department will do with this referral. Steele did meet with reporters a few weeks before the election along with people from - officials from Fusion GPS, which was a company that was hired by - we later learned - by a lawyer representing Hillary Clinton's campaign.
And clearly, Grassley, the chairman of the committee, and Republicans on the panel are interested in trying to find out as much as they can about Steele and about the dossier and its origins, potentially, as a way to cast doubt on the nonpartisanship of the underlying information in the dossier, potentially, to discredit anything that Mueller finds out later.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: It sounds like a potentially risky strategy, politically at least. And also, you know, Steele is seen as a whistleblower by many.
ENTOUS: Yeah. I mean, it's certainly part of a pattern that we've seen going back to the very beginning of this investigation. Initially, we saw some Republicans seizing on what they referred to as unmasking. This would be the process by which national security officials will - in intelligence - see the identities of U.S. persons as they're known. That was an early accusation that was being made to suggest that this investigation by the FBI was somehow driven by political considerations during the - at the end of the Obama administration. We've seen that issue sort of fade away.
But there's a new focus, or there has been, for several months - many months on Fusion GPS by the Republicans. This is the company that was hired. It's made up of former journalists from - mainly from the Wall Street Journal who have been - who were hired, initially, by a Republican and then later by Democrats to investigate Trump. And they operate much like - in some ways, like an investigative branch of a news organization.
They hired Steele to do some of this investigation. And Steele, being an expert on Russia, having done some of his most important work there as a spy for the British and very well-connected in Russia, was able to find these details. And he was - at least, you know, the way people close to him word it - he was so concerned about what he saw that he really wanted to make sure it got proper attention.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right. And it was given to an aide of Senator John McCain. And then John McCain took it to the FBI and James Comey.
ENTOUS: Right.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'd like to understand something here, though. There has been some pushback. I mean, Grassley is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. This is a recommendation that he's made. It does not necessarily mean that he's actually - that this investigation will go forward.
ENTOUS: Right, yeah. Certainly, the top Democrat on the committee has pushed back and suggested that this is an effort to just distract from the core of the investigations that are underway by three committees on the Hill, including the judiciary committee. You also have the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is probably doing the most bipartisan investigation of the three, and the House Intelligence Committee, which is led by, you know, Devin Nunes, who is pushing, also, for the committee to investigate the dossier and other things that are not core to trying to figure out whether there was any coordination between Trump and Russia.
So, you know, the accusation here of the Democrats is this is another effort to try to deflect attention from the substance that's contained in the dossier. Now, many of the things in the dossier are not as - have not been confirmed.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's Adam Entous of The New Yorker magazine. Thank you.
ENTOUS: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
President Trump is meeting with congressional leaders at Camp David this weekend, and immigration is at the top of the agenda. Trump has a long list of demands, among them - eliminating the nation's, quote, "horrible system" of so-called chain migration, a byproduct of the family visa system. Through September of last year, family visas made up roughly 37 percent of all immigration visas to the United States. To better understand just what chain migration means, we turn now to NPR's John Burnett in Austin. John, hey.
JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: Hi, Lulu.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Chain migration - talk us through it. Is this part of the nation's legal immigration system?
BURNETT: Right. It's the visa program through which immigrants already residing here can bring their family members over. Some call it family reunification. The way it works is visas are granted according to the family tree. Green card holders or legal residents can petition the Immigration Service to bring over their spouses and their minor children. And once the petitioner gets citizenship, they can apply to bring over parents, married children and adult siblings.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So if I've just become a citizen, I could petition for my sister who's living in another country who's not a citizen to get a visa and come to the United States. But what do critics say?
BURNETT: Well, they say it's a system stuck on autopilot - that these extended immigrant families, like your sister coming over, can grow and grow with no regard to who's actually coming. President Trump joins a long line of immigration restrictionists. For years, they sought to reduce the number of family-based visas, and their ultimate goal is to slash the overall numbers of immigrants who come to America.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So proponents, though, say we're a nation of immigrants. You know, what are they worried about?
BURNETT: Well, the president claims that chain migration takes jobs from Americans and threatens national security. Remember the Bangladeshi man who tried to set off a pipe bomb in the New York subway last month? Trump points out that he entered the country through extended-family chain migration.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So if Trump and his supporters don't want chain migration, what is the model that they want?
BURNETT: Well, what they want - it's called a merit-based scheme. It's similar to what Canada has. It gives preference to job training and English proficiency and education. Trump and his supporters in Congress want to cut the number of green cards from about a million annually - that's the current level - to half of that over a decade.
Defenders of the status quo claim it's fear mongering to say that family-based visa system lets in terrorists. They say all immigrants admitted to the U.S. undergo rigorous security screening and that that Bangladeshi subway bomber was radicalized after he got here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So where does the business community come down in the debate over this type of migration? Obviously, there's a lot of interest and concern about restricting immigration in a country right now where there is very low unemployment and many businesses say they need migrants.
BURNETT: Exactly. And the pro-business types say we need more immigrants, not less, especially in those tech fields that depend so heavily on them. And they worry that if we reduce immigration, there won't be enough workers for a healthy economy and we'll keep out the people who've given America its genius for innovation. The model they want is to let the market, not the government, decide how many immigrants get to come here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So I've been seeing these TV ads that have been showing - by NumbersUSA, which is an anti-immigration group, and the White House also says this - that a single illegal immigrant can result in hundreds of family members coming in. Is that accurate?
BURNETT: Well, the current system does not set limits on how many spouses and minor children of parents a legal immigrant can bring in. It does set caps on married children and adult siblings. And there are also caps just on the total immigrants who can come from each country. For instance, if your sister was coming from Mexico or India or the Philippines, they could wait 10 to 20 years or more to immigrate to the U.S.
I should add that a survey published last week by Reuters shows the number of immigrants approved for family-based visas, which is what we're talking about, dropped in 2017 to the lowest level in more than a decade. So even without new laws, the government has already begun to narrow the gate.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's NPR's John Burnett. Thank you so much.
BURNETT: You bet, Lulu.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
The Golden Globe Awards will be given out tonight in Los Angeles. The ceremony has traditionally been a time to celebrate great performances, gawk at stunning gowns and watch A-list celebrities make their way down the red carpet. But Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein is where the #MeToo movement got a second incarnation, and the movement will likely take center stage tonight. Rebecca Keegan covers Hollywood for Vanity Fair, and she joins us now from Los Angeles. Welcome to the program.
REBECCA KEEGAN: Hi there.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So it's a big night. But will the outcry over sexual harassment and assault be top of the mind for actresses and actors there tonight?
KEEGAN: I think it's going to be the No. 1 issue both visually and in terms of what people are talking about. Visually, the actors and actresses are wearing black to show solidarity with victims of sexual misconduct. They're wearing pins that say, time's up, which is the name of an initiative launched by women in the entertainment business to fight sexual misconduct.
And then, in terms of the speeches, I'm expecting people to really engage on this issue, which is something that they haven't done in the three months since The New York Times broke the Harvey Weinstein story. There have been some other nontelevised awards shows. And for the most part, people haven't been talking about it.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Why not?
KEEGAN: Well, that's been the million-dollar question. You know, I was interested because last year's awards season was really dominated by talk of Donald Trump and some of his policies. Really, it's easier in Hollywood, which is predominantly liberal, to take aim at a Republican president than it is to take aim at, say, your own agency or an executive who might give you a job or a producer who might hire you. But the Golden Globes seems to be the place where, particularly, the women in Hollywood have just sort of locked arms and said, OK, guys, let's jump.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So when you mention that this is going to be a big issue tonight, do you have any inside info on how this is going to be tackled and approached?
KEEGAN: Well, one of the people I think who probably has a tricky job is the host, Seth Meyers, who is sort of so aware of the limitations of being a white, straight male in an awakened era that he has a segment on his late night show called Jokes Seth Can't Tell. So the tricky thing is, how do you engage in this issue with comedy in a way that keeps the mood light but also takes notice of what everybody in the room is talking about and thinking about?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What about the audience watching at home? As you mention, people tune in because they want the glamour, because they want the laughs and maybe less so to see soul searching and sermonizing.
KEEGAN: I mean, this is the dilemma. I think it was a dilemma last year, as well, when politics so dominated award season. The previous year, the topic of Oscars So White came up a lot. People at home, many times, are watching to get a break from the world. They love to look at beautiful gowns and maybe hear a funny monologue. And do they really want to engage with this stuff?
I think another sort of group of people who have a really tricky job on Sunday night are the producers of shows like E! "Live From The Red Carpet," who are programming for a group of people who have the expectation of this sort of levity and fun, but they're going to be looking at their favorite actors dressed in black and wanting to talk about something that's really quite serious.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Is this then a bad night for designers? Because they do use this to sort of showcase their designs. And if everyone's wearing black, or they might be wearing gowns that they had previously, this might not be such a big night for the fashion world.
KEEGAN: Yeah, I think the fashion world is sort of confronting a dilemma with this. I mean, even in a logistical sense, a lot of people already had their gowns picked out. In fact, if you looked at the Palm Springs Film Festival Gala pictures, which happened just after the first of the year, there were some fabulous dresses. And some of them were dresses - very colorful, beautiful dresses people had planned to wear for the Golden Globes before the wear-black plan came into view. So folks have had to scramble stylists, tailors, designers to quickly pull together looks that somehow say both I'm toppling the patriarchy, and I'm glamorous, which is a hard, you know, needle to thread.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: It's a hard needle to thread, indeed. All right. That's Rebecca Keegan, Hollywood reporter for Vanity Fair. Thanks so much.
KEEGAN: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF JON BRION'S "TITLE CREDITS")
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
One year ago, Levar Stoney was sworn in as mayor of Richmond, Va. At the time, his election was one of the bright spots for the Democratic Party after the Republican sweep in 2016. Stoney's also a 36-year-old millennial and African-American. Over his first year in office, we've checked in with him as he's learned how to run the city and try to navigate its challenges - underfunded public schools, a rising homicide rate and a bitter debate over Confederate monuments. Mayor Stoney joins me now in the studio to talk about his first year in office. Good morning.
LEVAR STONEY: Good morning, Lulu.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So give me an assessment of your first year. And I know you are a politician, so try to keep it real.
(LAUGHTER)
STONEY: You know, I really do believe it was a great year. It was the fastest year of my life, but I enjoyed every minute of it. I wanted to hit the ground running and started to visit everyone's neighborhoods and visited every school, saw all the children in each one of our 44 schools, held nine town halls around the city. Public engagement, I think, matters.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But let's talk about a troubling statistic for your city. In 2017, there were 67 homicides in Richmond. That's the highest it's been since 2006. We saw homicides, though, go down in many cities across America last year, including New York, Washington, Houston, but not Richmond. What's happening?
STONEY: You know, 67 homicides are 67 deaths too many. And for Richmond, I think we have been somewhat victimized by the lax gun laws that you see in the commonwealth of Virginia. Every time an individual is able to purchase a gun freely, it also creates an illegal weapon that can be sold on the black market. There were people laughing at Richmond and Virginia - the ability to purchase as many guns as you want and then take it up 95 or down 95 or stay right in our communities.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'd like to ask about one of the most contentious parts of your first year in office, and that, of course, is the debate over Richmond's Monument Avenue. Other cities and other mayors have moved much more quickly to take down their Confederate monuments. There's been a robust debate in Richmond. Can you tell me where things stand at the moment?
STONEY: We're in our second phase of our public feedback process. And by May, there will be a report provided to me and the city council - a recommendation on what we - how we move forward. I firmly believe that the monuments should be removed. That's my personal opinion.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But there are people who have very different views on this issue, and they're very entrenched views. How do you come to a resolution that will satisfy everybody?
STONEY: Well, we're never going to satisfy everyone. There are some people in our city, whether they're black or white, who believe that those monuments should stay. But I do believe that they are relics of a segregated past that no longer, I think, represents Richmond. Now, we also need the Commonwealth of Virginia to give us the sort of authority to remove these moments. And right now, that's still up in the air.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Speaking of the Commonwealth of Virginia, Virginia is now seen as a sort of political bellwether for 2018. The Democrats won the governorship, almost won the state's House of Delegates. It was decided by some, I have to say, unorthodox means for many of us watching. Where do you see the Democrats positioned right now?
STONEY: I think if Democrats are able to speak truth to power and to articulate a message of opportunity for everyone, I think we have a good shot at winning. It just can't be about a personality. It can't be about Donald Trump. I wouldn't say that the Donald Trump stuff is a one-trick pony, but we got to do a whole lot more than just that.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's Richmond Virginia Mayor Levar Stoney. Thank you so much.
STONEY: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF BONOBO'S "KERALA")
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
January - the month of lofty self-improvement goals. You might consider doing dry January, where you stop drinking alcohol for the month. I'll confess; I'm doing it. And so I was wondering, could just one month really improve your health? Professor Rajiv Jalan has actually gathered data about the benefits of dry January, besides bragging rights. And he joins us now to explain.
RAJIV JALAN: Yes. Hi. Hi, Lulu.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Hello. All right, give me the good news. Is dry January worth it?
JALAN: Absolutely. I think, you know, there is now controlled data showing that it's beneficial.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Why?
JALAN: You know, alcohol is toxic. If it was invented in 2018, it would not pass the FDA to be on the market. So it's toxic. But, of course, it is an essential evil.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I like that, an essential evil. That's exactly right.
(LAUGHTER)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But you studied this. So I'd like to know a little bit about the data. What did you find when you looked at people who actually did a dry January?
JALAN: So the study that we did was - take some hospital volunteers. There were a group of 80 people that gave up drinking for January. And there were 40 that continued to drink. And what we observed was improvement in multiple domains. We did some tests of liver function, which improved. The skin condition and the appearance improved. They almost all lost weight.
We observed - this is really remarkable - that - so there are certain cancer-related blood tests. And these individuals also came down. They reported better sleep. Their blood glucose was lower, better concentration and better sexual function. But what was incredible - and this is really important; we don't quite understand why. The individuals that stopped drinking for a month - they reported significantly lower drinking during the following six months.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So wait. Abstaining for a month doesn't make you desperate to have a drink and then rush off to the nearest pub when it's all over?
JALAN: It actually does exactly the opposite. I think that one feels so much better that they, perhaps, reduce the amount of drinking. We don't understand what this is about as to whether there is deconditioning or reduced requirement. Or it may just be self-preservation and feeling better at the end of that month.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: It sounds miraculous.
JALAN: It is. You know, it is too good to be true. But, of course, you know, you have to recognize that the sample size that we studied is relatively small. There were only 80 individuals. The second weakness is that, you know, these were self-selected individuals. There is a clear potential for bias. But the improvements were so remarkable, that I think it obviates any of these problems.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So I guess it's a great thing to do. And you would recommend it for people to do it?
JALAN: Yes, I'm doing it, too. I'm doing it.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Do you do that? Every January, you do a dry January?
JALAN: Well, I don't last the month. So I have one or two slip ups. But I recommend it, and I think it is, perhaps, a good thing to do.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, there you go. That is Rajiv Jalan. He is a professor of hepatology and head of the liver failure group at the UCL Medical School in London. And he joined us from London. Thank you so much.
JALAN: Thank you.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Three Kings Day, the Christian holiday also known as the Epiphany, is an important tradition in Puerto Rico. But this year, the holiday has a special meaning on the mainland for families who have left the island after Hurricane Maria. Ryan Caron King from member station WNPR reports from Hartford, Conn., where Puerto Ricans are adapting the island's celebration to the frigid New England winter.
RYAN CARON KING, BYLINE: Xiomara Vega moved here from Puerto Rico with her 3-year-old daughter after Hurricane Maria knocked out the electricity in her home. She's trying to make a new life here. But she doesn't want to forget her old one and celebrating the arrival of the three kings is a big part of that. Her mom, Lourdes Rodriguez, translates for her and explains a bit more.
LOURDES RODRIGUEZ: Since she was a baby, it's a tradition for her. So every year, she knows they should be coming, like after Santa Claus. She wants to keep that tradition for her, even though she's out here. She doesn't want her to lose that feeling from Puerto Rico.
KING: Part of that tradition is for children to cut grass or hay to put in a box under their beds for the three kings' camels to eat the night before the holiday. In the morning, they'll wake up to presents. It's a celebration of the Bible story - the three kings who brought gifts to the baby Jesus. And in Puerto Rico, it's a more important tradition than Santa Claus, and it's warm there.
In Hartford, where temperatures yesterday dipped below zero with the wind chill, this day was different. It was so cold that the annual parade was canceled. Camels apparently can't take below zero temperatures, and the grass is covered in snow.
RODRIGUEZ: There's no grass to cut. It's cold, and the kids are not used to the cold on Three Kings Day.
KING: But inside a city recreation center, a 20-year tradition of giving out donated gifts to local children continued. Dozens of families lined up to receive unwrapped presents stored in black trash bags so they'd stay a surprise for the kids. Joel Cruz helped organize the event. He says more people than usual registered to receive gifts. And he thinks that's because of the new families who moved here post-Maria.
JOEL CRUZ: You know, they come to the U.S. And we don't mind celebrating having Santa Claus. But we don't want to lose the tradition that we have of having the three kings because, really, this - January 6 is a day that we truly celebrate as a day to give.
KING: Later in the day, there was a smaller gathering at a hurricane relief center across town - this one specifically for families who relocated after the storm. Cruz Cruz was there with his fiance whose grandchildren moved here with their mom from the island after the hurricane.
CRUZ CRUZ: This is their first time they were in the United States. And they didn't know anything about the snow. And they, you know, they have some concern about how the three kings are going to get here. And, you know, we have to explain, but they're having a good time.
KING: Cruz says they celebrated the holiday with the kids to make them feel like they were back in a familiar place. And they had to do a bit of improvising. Remember the grass they weren't able to cut and put under the beds? No problem. Cruz says they used lettuce instead. For NPR News, I'm Ryan Caron King in Hartford.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
The world is getting brighter, which is not necessarily a good thing. Scientists say artificial light from cities and other human settlements across the world may have a negative impact on humans and animals. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports that researchers are now able to measure exactly how much brighter the globe gets each year.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: Light pollution can keep people from seeing the stars. It might affect wildlife, like migrating birds. And Christopher Kyba says it just keeps increasing.
CHRISTOPHER KYBA: My mom, for example, grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan in a time before they had electrification. So she grew up with an amazing, starry sky. And now she lives within one lifetime under a very light-polluted sky.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Kyba studies nighttime light at the German Research Center for Geosciences. He and some colleagues knew that a satellite launched in 2011 had a new instrument, one that gives scientists a more reliable way to measure how much brighter the world is getting. The research team looked at five years of data.
KYBA: And we saw an increase of an average of 2.2 percent per year, which is pretty close to 10 percent over the study period. That's globally.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The night glow only decreased in war-torn countries like Syria, according to a report in the journal Science Advances. And the light increased the most quickly in developing countries.
KYBA: So a lot of places in South America, Africa and Asia are brightening really, really rapidly up to 10 percent or more per year even in some cases.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The United States didn't show much change, but Kyba says lots of places in this country are switching to LEDs for light. And this satellite cannot detect all the kinds of light that LEDs put out.
KYBA: And that means that, actually, the United States is almost certainly getting brighter in terms of how people see the world with their human eyes.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Kyba says what he'd like to see is more well-designed lighting that lets people on the ground feel comfortable and safe without needlessly lighting up the night sky. Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
One hot summer in New York, four siblings venture out to meet a psychic who has one particular power. She can predict the exact date of your death. What they are told transforms them. Chloe Benjamin's new book is called "The Immortalists." And she joins us now from Madison, Wis. Welcome to the program.
CHLOE BENJAMIN: Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So take it from there. What happens next? What are they told?
BENJAMIN: Well, these siblings are told the day and month and year that they will supposedly die. And from there, the novel follows each of the siblings over about 50 years as they reckon with their prophecies. And some of them fight against it. Others claim they don't believe in it. Some use it to push them to pursue their wildest dreams. And others are surprisingly limited by it even if their date of death is quite far out.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Before we get to their stories, I want to ask you, what gave you the idea for the story about the role of fate and free will?
BENJAMIN: Well, I always wished that I had a good fortune teller story of my own. But it really came out of my own neuroses. I am somebody who has always struggled with uncertainty. And, of course, uncertainty is so core to life. I seek out knowledge to help me deal with that. But I'm also aware that knowledge can be really a double-edged sword. So in writing this book, I wanted to look at knowledge as a way to cope with questions of fate and destiny and randomness and see whether it is freeing or limiting.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You never went to a psychic?
BENJAMIN: No. I was way too superstitious.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Oh, OK.
BENJAMIN: (Laughter).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: As someone who's been to many, I have to say I was curious (laughter).
BENJAMIN: Do you feel like you've heard things that are true?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I feel like they could have been true. You know, that's, I think, the central question that you get at at your - in your book. You know, what is the truth? Is it something that someone plants in your mind, or is it something else? I mean, you know, those are the essential mysteries that I think these four siblings are grappling with. Their names are Simon, Varya, Daniel and Klara - two girls, two boys. And the date they're told of their death changes them in fundamental ways. Can you talk about their trajectories?
BENJAMIN: Yes. So they're all very different in terms of their profession, as well as the way that they think about the prophecy. Simon is a gay man who moves to San Francisco in the 1980s and faces the dawn of the AIDS epidemic. Klara is a female magician. And I was really fascinated by the idea of women and magic and how they have been and remain pretty maligned in that field. Daniel, as an Army doctor during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, is coping with his sense of ethics within those wars as well as the sense of ethics that he feels about his family and what's happened to them. And Varya is researching longevity. She's trying to extend the human lifespan. And that also brings up some interesting moral questions, as well as some practical ones.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. I'd like to talk about Simon because he decides to take risks because he's told he is going to die young.
BENJAMIN: That's right. And I think in watching his section unfold myself, I like to question, did he make certain decisions because of the prophecy or because he would have done that anyway? I think it's undeniable that hearing this kind of prophecy would impact somebody of that age in a really powerful way. And for him, it's a...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...A catalyst.
BENJAMIN: Yeah, exactly. It's a catalyst. And I think in some ways, even though he may not live the longest, he lives a very full life. And that's another question that the book explores.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. You mentioned he ends up in San Francisco at the beginning of the AIDS crisis. Why did you want to highlight that period?
BENJAMIN: Well, I grew up in San Francisco. And I grew up with gay parents. And so the gay community and gay rights have always been incredibly important to me, as has the history of that city. So even though I wasn't really conscious during the AIDS crisis itself, it was really important to me to do justice to that time period and to the people who lived through such a horrific loss.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: There's so many set pieces in this book. Did you do the same amount of research for all of the different sections?
BENJAMIN: I did. They all tapped into something that was really foreign to me, whether it was the world of magic, which I just really - I found arresting.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And as you mentioned, the magician in this book is a woman. And she faces a lot of obstacles. Did you always know she was going to be a woman?
BENJAMIN: I did. Yes. She and Simon were very clear to me from the start. The older two siblings took a little longer for me to get to know. But I always knew about Simon. And I always knew that she would be a kind of nomadic person and a magician. And the research was really interesting when it came to gender. Magic is still a very white-male-dominated field. And for so long, women have just been...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...Props.
BENJAMIN: Props - yup - exactly - bodies, assistants. They, you know, are the sexy woman in peril, you know, surrounded by fire. And so I really wanted to have Klara push against that and work to carve a place for herself in that field.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: There is a question whether what happens to the characters is a self-fulfilling prophecy or indeed pre-determined. What do you think?
BENJAMIN: Well, I don't know myself (laughter). And I know that sounds funny since I wrote the book. But I don't think I could have written it with a curiosity and an openness to many different paths if I had settled that for myself. So I really love to hear what other people think and to debate it in my own mind. I certainly think that a huge factor and one of the central themes of the book is the power of the mind and the power of thoughts and that even if we start out with certain stories that we tell ourselves, when they become incorporated into the way that we see the world and act in the world, they might cease to become stories.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Do you want to know the date of your death?
BENJAMIN: Well, I always say I would but only if it was good news. So that's sort of the problem. Would you?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What's good news?
BENJAMIN: Good news is, like, post-80. I don't even need to know the method. If it's post-80, I'm good. I'm more of a total years worrier than a method worrier. What about you?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I don't think I do.
BENJAMIN: Understandable.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Chloe Benjamin's new book is called "The Immortalists." Thank you so very much.
BENJAMIN: Thank you, Lulu.
(SOUNDBITE OF NITSUA'S "MORNING HORIZON")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
President Trump spent part of the weekend touting mental stability as one of his greatest assets, along with being, quote, "like, really smart." His tweets came after last week's publication of "Fire And Fury," an inside look at the Trump administration by journalist Michael Wolff, who characterized White House staffers as questioning the president's stability. Administration officials fought back over the weekend. This is CIA Director Mike Pompeo on "Fox News Sunday" talking about the president's fitness to lead.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FOX NEWS SUNDAY")
MIKE POMPEO: It's such just a ludicrous question. All right? These are from people who just have not yet accepted the fact that President Trump is the United States president. And I'm sorry for them.
GREENE: But discussing mental health as a measure of presidential competency can actually be pretty complicated, and NPR science correspondent Jon Hamilton is here to talk about it. Hey, Jon.
JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: Hey.
GREENE: So you've been reporting on this, and, I mean, there's certainly been all these armchair diagnoses of President Trump. And you have psychologists and psychiatrists telling you that that's not such a good thing.
HAMILTON: Well, what they told me is it's pretty hard to diagnose somebody from reading their tweets, which I guess should not be a revelation, right? You really have to do a pretty thorough examination of somebody.
GREENE: Tweets are a limited body of data.
HAMILTON: A limited body of data would be safe to say. And, also, it is considered unethical by both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association. And the reason goes back to something, it's known as the Goldwater rule. When Barry Goldwater was running for president in the 1960s, a magazine actually polled psychiatrists about whether he was psychologically unfit to be president. Some said he was not fit to be president, and the magazine was sued and lost. And so ever since then those associations, those groups have decided that it's not good to opine about somebody you've not examined in person. However, I should say, there is a small group of mental health professionals who have decided that their - what they would say their duty to warn is more important than those rules.
GREENE: Can we learn anything from the cases of former presidents on this topic?
HAMILTON: You can learn that mental illness, mental problems are pretty common. Which again should not be a revelation.
GREENE: Common among U.S. presidents?
HAMILTON: Yes. Yes, in fact, there was a study a few years ago that found that nearly half of the presidents before 1974 had some diagnosable conditions. And you've also had lots of armchair diagnoses of people even more recently. You know, you hear people saying Bill Clinton was a narcissist, Richard Nixon was paranoid. Although, actually, there's better evidence that he had alcohol problems that were pretty severe late in his term before he left. Lyndon Johnson was emotionally unstable, John F. Kennedy had psychopathic trades. And of course the most famous is Abraham Lincoln, who was suicidally depressed during periods of his life.
GREENE: Well, if that's the case, if past presidents have had mental health struggles, I mean, it feels like there's a much more vocal response when it comes to Donald Trump. But why is that, and what are we seeing here?
HAMILTON: Well, you know, Trump is unquestionably a polarizing figure, and that may be part of it. He is clearly redefining the presidency and what presidents do. But I think more than that what you're seeing is that his public exposure is so much. I mean, we're getting inside the guy's head in real time when he tweets. You know, we're hearing what he thinks, and we have a 24-hour news cycle. And also we have a White House where people seem very open to speaking about every little thing that happens, every action of the president. And that simply was not happening in previous administrations.
GREENE: The cable news era was not there in previous administrations...
HAMILTON: Not so much.
GREENE: ...Going back very far. NPR science correspondent Jon Hamilton, thanks for your reporting. We appreciate it.
HAMILTON: Thank you.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Some of us know from personal experience it is now possible to go days, weeks, even months without ever paying for anything in cash. More and more people pay for everything with a card or an app on their phones. In Philadelphia, that trend has led some restaurants to stop taking cash at all. Aaron Moselle reports from our member station WHYY.
AARON MOSELLE, BYLINE: It's a sleepy morning at Bluestone Lane cafe in downtown Philly. A few customers are sitting. But most of them are in line to grab a latte and light snack before work.
SAM FOOTE: I got the banana toast. It's really good.
MOSELLE: Sam Foote is a Bluestone regular. He's a social worker in the same office building. So it's convenient. He also likes knowing it's cash free because he almost never has cash.
FOOTE: I can't remember the last time I took out cash - probably, like, a few weeks ago, a month ago maybe, something like that. And it was, like, to give money to my father, I think, who, like, doesn't have Venmo.
MOSELLE: Venmo is a popular mobile app that links to your bank account. General Manager Erica Ritchie says not having to handle cash is easier for her, too.
ERICA RITCHIE: At the end of the day, not having to count out a drawer, worry about change. Someone runs out of quarters, you're running to the bank.
MOSELLE: Bluestone went cashless last fall. A big reason, nearly 90 percent of customers were like Sam Foote, they never paid in cash. Bluestone's founder and CEO Nick Stone also says lines move faster when employees don't have to make change.
NICK STONE: We're talking about someone ordering and paying roughly in 40 seconds, versus with cash, which is around a minute.
MOSELLE: Stone says shaving that kind of time doesn't make him more money. His bottom line has actually increased because he's paying more debit and credit card fees. He does think it's better customer service. Ben Fileccia is president of Philadelphia's chapter of the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association. He says people are also using cash less often at more expensive restaurants.
BEN FILECCIA: Going back 20 years, I would say 30 percent of your revenue would come in through cash, 70 percent would come in through credit cards. In my past few years, I would say that number has dropped to 5 to 10 percent.
MOSELLE: Still, Fileccia says cash will never completely disappear from the food scene.
FILECCIA: You know, we see a lot of guests that will pay for a meal with a credit card but will always leave a cash tip. And I think people like doing that. People like palming a bartender a 20 or palming their server a 10 or palming the busboy a couple of bucks.
MOSELLE: Fileccia says there are also people who use cash to keep their meal off the books, say, if they're having an affair. A 2017 report from Cardtronics, billed as the world's largest ATM owner, finds that while people are paying with cards more, the paper stuff is still the most popular, especially when something costs less than $20 dollars. Cash, the study concludes, has carved a durable, enduring bond with consumers.
For NPR News, I'm Aaron Moselle in Philadelphia.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The number of Americans who are drinking - drinking to a point that's harmful or dangerous - is on the rise. That's according to federal survey data in recent years. The increase is notable among older adults and especially notable among women. There are many treatment options to help people quit or cut back. And the National Institutes of Health has just offered an answer to a really basic problem that stops many people from seeking help. NPR's Allison Aubrey joins us now to talk about this. Hi, Allison.
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: Hey there, Steve.
INSKEEP: Why is it hard to get help?
AUBREY: You know, I think a lot of people don't know where to go for help. And part of the problem is that our thinking about problem drinking in general is really outdated. It's not this yes-no, black-white, you have it or you don't. What the research now shows is that alcohol misuse falls along a spectrum. So some people have a mild problem. Some people have a moderate problem. Some people have a severe problem.
INSKEEP: Oh, which means that different people might need different kinds of treatment.
AUBREY: That's exactly right. It's not a one-size-fits-all approach. I mean, a person with a severe problem might need a 28-day detox, but a person with a mild or moderate problem might start out with, say, going to a doctor, getting medication to help cut back on drinking and some counseling and therapy. There's this whole range of options, but as I say, people tend not to know anything about them. That was the case for a woman that I met. Her name is Sarah Landry (ph). And the way that she describes her drinking may sound familiar to a lot of drinkers.
SARAH LANDRY: I mean, it started as one glass of wine a night and then, you know, slowly that one glass became two or three, and I was needing that relief and almost an entitlement that I had earned it and I needed to have the wine at the end of the day to relax.
AUBREY: Now, at first this did not seem like a problem to her. She was holding down a job. She had two young children she was raising. But over time, she realized that she was really losing control.
LANDRY: I recognized that I had a problem when I started hiding alcohol from my husband and, you know, trying to deny the amount of drinking I was doing, but I knew I needed some help. I just didn't know where to go.
AUBREY: So like a lot of people, you know, she'd heard about Alcoholics Anonymous, but she had really preconceived notions about who goes to AA. She just didn't see herself there.
LANDRY: I just remember looking in the mirror one night and feeling like I didn't recognize the person looking back at myself. It was very scary. So I really didn't know if there were any options available to me.
AUBREY: And the sort of sad thing here is, Steve, that this is a very typical situation, and it's a huge problem, according to George Koob. He's the head of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. That's part of the NIH. Here he is.
GEORGE KOOB: Ninety percent of individuals in the United States with an alcohol use disorder don't get any treatment whatsoever. That's a problem.
AUBREY: Especially when, by some indicators, more than 30 million adults in the U.S. drink at levels that can be dangerous.
INSKEEP: OK. So you've come here to tell us about a way that people can get out of this dead end.
AUBREY: That's exactly right. So Koob and his collaborators at the NIH have just launched this online tool. They call it a treatment navigator, and it's basically a website. I've got it up here on my laptop.
INSKEEP: OK.
AUBREY: But it's a lot more than that. It brings all the resources that you need to know - what questions to ask, how to find treatment, what's the range of treatment, how to find actual providers in your community. It brings them all right here into one spot. There's tons of evidence-based options here. Now, the first thing you do that you get onto this site I think's kind of interesting. It's kind of a reality check on your drinking. There's a survey here. It asks you 10 questions. So it says in the last year, have you ended up drinking more or longer than you intended? Another question is, have you wanted to cut down or stop but you couldn't? So there's about 10 questions. The more a person answers yes to, the more urgent the need for help or change.
INSKEEP: We're figuring out this spectrum you were talking about before.
AUBREY: That's exactly right. So say you take this survey and it affirms, yes, you do have a problem, which, if you're on the site, you probably know you do. But you say, hey, I've got a job. I've got a family. I can't just go off to some kind of residential detox program. I can't afford that. So here you go on this search engine - I got it up here - you search for outpatient options or counseling options. It brings up a whole list of providers in your neighborhood. Now, there are providers that can prescribe medications to people to help you drink less. There's behavioral options that involve working with a therapist or a counselor. There's group therapy, family therapy, individual therapy. One popular treatment is cognitive behavioral therapy, and that's what Sarah Landry ended up getting.
INSKEEP: Cognitive behavior therapy - what does that mean?
AUBREY: Well, the goal of cognitive behavioral therapy is to identify and then change the kind of feelings and situations that lead or prompt you to drink. So for Sarah, she had to change her whole thought process. She realized she had a lot of distorted thinking about how she was going to kind of muscle her way or fight her way through her day or her problem.
LANDRY: I really tried to control everything in my life. And that way of operating is very, very exhausting.
AUBREY: It ended up kind of feeding the stress that led to her drinking, but now she's got a lot of new coping mechanisms.
LANDRY: Learning other skills and tools for relieving stress outside of drinking was very important in my recovery.
AUBREY: So for some people, that's going to be exercise or playing music or finding new hobbies that just don't revolve around drinking. Sarah says that her life is a lot better now. She's been in recovery for more than a decade.
INSKEEP: Well, let me circle back to what we said at the beginning, that more people are drinking and there's more problem drinking. Any idea why now?
AUBREY: There's a lot of theories about this. There's a lot of marketing of alcohol equating alcohol with the good life. There's been a liberalization of a lot of the Prohibition-era laws. For instance, I think two summers ago the state of New York passed what they called the brunch bill. It made it legal for restaurants to start selling alcohol on Sunday mornings so people could have boozy brunches. There's a very high social acceptance of alcohol right now. It's woven in to so much of our leisure time. I mean, people go on vacation, and they go on tours of vineyards and craft breweries and craft distilleries. And I think at a time when the social acceptance of alcohol is quite high, people forget that it can be problematic. I mean, the CDC points to the fact that 88,000 people die every year due to excessive alcohol use. And with so many people struggling, I think knowing about these options and knowing that there are ways to get help could really be transformative.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Allison Aubrey. Allison, thanks very much.
AUBREY: Thanks very much, Steve.
(SOUNDBITE OF TWISTED PSYKIE'S "IT COULD HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
There is a potentially massive landslide that's looming over one of the main interstates in Washington state. The Northwest News Network's Anna King reports from a place called Rattlesnake Ridge.
ANNA KING: Nearly 70 people live on this sliver of land in central Washington state. Mobile homes are wedged in a depression below the ridge, flanked by Interstate 82.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOG BARKING)
KING: I trail two firefighters who go door to door, trying to get the residents here to leave. Farmworker Janeth Solorio says it's difficult.
JANETH SOLORIO: We have to move, and we don't have enough money.
KING: There's an offer of five paid weeks for a hotel. Most have taken it, but they keep returning to the precarious spot for belongings and to tend to animals. At the base of the ridge is a quarry for material to make asphalt. Many people wonder if removing part of the ridge destabilized it. Geologists hired by Anderson Quarry say the slide will be slow-moving and that it isn't likely to reach the Yakima River or the interstate. They say it will slide in a different direction - toward the quarry. But an independent geologist disagrees. Right now, he wouldn't drive that section of interstate.
BRUCE BJORNSTAD: I think I would find an alternate route.
KING: That's Bruce Bjornstad. He has studied landslides in the area for years, including decades with the federal government. He says the cracks showing now, moving more than a foot every week, are likely just the beginning.
BJORNSTAD: There's evidence elsewhere in the area that suggests that there have been other landslides on other ridges that have released, apparently, very quickly.
KING: Bjornstad and some other geologists say it could come down in a similar way. But so far, Washington State Department of Natural Resources says it has looked at its own data and the quarries, and that the interstate and the river are not likely threatened. Washington Governor Jay Inslee told the press Sunday that at this point, the state's job is to monitor risk.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JAY INSLEE: This is 4 million cubic yards of material that is moving. And there is no force that we have on Earth that's - that can totally control this.
KING: Federal river managers are scrambling to figure out how to mitigate flooding if 4 million cubic yards dam up the Yakima River. They met over the weekend with the state, tribes and counties to plan for the worst. Anderson Quarry has suspended operations for now. The money to move people nearby to hotels came from the quarry's parent company. For NPR News, I'm Anna King outside of Union Gap, Wash.
(SOUNDBITE OF SLOW DANCING SOCIETY'S "AS NIGHT TAKES THE DAY")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Steve, I want to talk to you about Camp David, which is designed to be a presidential retreat, and retreat means, you know, a chance to get away, maybe slow things down a little bit.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Although before taking office, President Trump found it a bit too slow, telling reporters at one point it was rustic and, quote, "you'd like it for about 30 minutes." He's since insisted he likes it better, and over the weekend, the president met with Republican leaders there. The plan was to talk over the president's second year in office, although the national conversation is dominated by a book about his first. Michael Wolff wrote that book, which included explosive quotes from former adviser Steve Bannon, which caused the president of the United States to give Bannon a nickname.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I guess sloppy Steve brought him into the White House quite a bit, and it was one of those things. That's why sloppy Steve is now looking for a job.
INSKEEP: Writer Michael Wolff also said the White House staff universally finds President Trump is not up to his job. In response, the president tweeted over the weekend he is, quote, "like really smart," and, quote, "a very stable genius."
GREENE: All right. NPR congressional correspondent Susan Davis is in our studios this morning. Hi, Sue.
SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: Good morning.
GREENE: All right. So many things to ask you about here with this book and Steve Bannon, but one thing that strikes me - Bannon has actually now given a statement to the news site Axios saying he has felt some regret over some of the quotes in this book. What is Bannon regretting here?
DAVIS: He expressed regret that he didn't respond sooner to reporting in Michael Wolff's book that he had made critical comments about the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., specifically that that 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Russian officials that the president's son helped set up was in the words of the book treasonous. Bannon said in his statement he intended to be more critical of the campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, not Donald Trump Jr., who he praised as, in his words, as a patriot and a good man. It clearly seems like an effort to make amends with a White House that has tried to bury Steve Bannon in recent days. It doesn't sound like the president is in a very forgiving mood.
INSKEEP: Bannon was also quoted, though, saying that Don Jr. was going to be cracked like an egg on national TV - we should just mention that - the original quote before he cleaned it up.
GREENE: Yeah. The book was full of quotes like that, and this book is clearly on the mind of the president at a moment when he's meeting with top Republicans over the weekend at Camp David, and they're actually talking about an agenda for 2018. So what is - what's on it, Sue?
DAVIS: One of the things that was most notable coming out of this weekend is what is not on the agenda, and that is the Republican push among some to try and overhaul social welfare programs. That has been a priority of Speaker Paul Ryan. He said he wanted to focus 2018 on doing that. He didn't get much backup from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell after - before the holidays. And President Trump seemed to side with Mitch McConnell, saying if they were going to do anything on that end, it would be - have to be bipartisan. I don't think it's an understatement to say Democrats have very little interest in working with Republicans to overhaul social welfare programs in an election year.
GREENE: Although there is a bipartisan mood in the air in Washington when it comes to immigration, right? Is that an area where we could see some working together?
DAVIS: It is. The president's expected to host a group of Republicans and Democrats at the White House early this week. They know what this bill needs to do. For Democrats, a compromise needs to include some kind of legal certainty for certain people living here illegally, the so-called DREAMers. To win enough Republicans, you have to have more border enforcement, and the White House wants tougher restrictions on legal immigration. They probably have the votes. What's not clear yet is if they have the political will to do it.
GREENE: And we know you'll be covering all of it. NPR congressional correspondent Susan Davis. Sue, thanks.
DAVIS: You're welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GREENE: All right. So if you live in a city like Houston, Texas, or if you live in Los Angeles where I spend most of my time or Washington, D.C., Steve, where you live, I mean, we are living with tens of thousands of immigrants from El Salvador who are part of our communities.
INSKEEP: Yeah. And today, almost 200,000 Salvadorans across this country face a big day. They are in the country with Temporary Protected Status, which means the United States let them in while their country was in crisis; in El Salvador's case, a civil war. Their status is set to expire unless the Trump administration extends the protection. The White House has already ended TPS designations for Sudanese, Nicaraguans and Haitians. So will this be any different?
GREENE: All right. NPR's Carrie Kahn is on the line. Hi, Carrie.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: Hi, good morning.
GREENE: Just remind us, if you can, why Salvadorans left their country and came to the United States in the first place.
KAHN: Sure. Well, TPS was granted to Salvadorans in 2001, and their grant - the designation came because of two major earthquakes that hit the Central American country that year. And it was actually George Bush who granted the TPS status that year. So Salvadorans that were already in the country, they got protection from deportation, and the vast majority of Salvadorans in the country illegally at that time were the tens of thousands who fled the - in the 1980s and 1990s during decades of the U.S.-backed civil war and unrest there. And TPS has been extended to Salvadorans every 18 months by subsequent presidents since then - both Republicans and Democrats.
GREENE: So what exactly happens if the Trump administration decides not to extend this status practically? I mean, they'll be living in the country illegally all of a sudden. They won't be able to work.
KAHN: Well, with TPS, you're granted a work permit, and that's renewed every time the TPS is extended. So they paid for that fee - they pay a fee for the permit, but they would no longer have a work permit, and they would be required to leave the country at that time once it's no longer extended.
GREENE: Will this have an impact on El Salvador?
KAHN: Oh, it'll be great. It'll be great. First of all, El Salvador is still one of the poorest and most violent in the hemisphere, and they would also have a very hard time absorbing so many returnees at once. Unemployment is still very high in El Salvador. Economic opportunity is not good, and it's crippled by one of the highest murder rates in the world, and that's due to the organized crime and violent local gangs. And additionally, most people in El Salvador are extremely worried about what will happen when these immigrants are no longer in a position to send money back home to El Salvador. These remittances, the dollars coming back home from relatives abroad, now account for a fifth of El Salvador's GDP. That's a huge loss.
GREENE: A fifth of the country's GDP - this the money the people in the U.S. are sending.
KAHN: It's about 17 percent, yeah.
GREENE: That's incredible.
KAHN: It is.
GREENE: Well, when TPS ended for Haitians, thousands of Haitians moved to Canada. If this happens and it ends for El Salvador, where - will there be a surge of newcomers to other countries as well or mostly back to El Salvador?
KAHN: Well, you're seeing a lot of Salvadorans going south into Costa Rica and also moving north and staying in Mexico as the U.S. seems farther out of reach for many since the Trump era.
INSKEEP: You can feel the contradiction just in the name - Temporary Protected Status. It's supposed to be temporary. And yet it's clear when you hear the stories that many people who got that status have tried to make permanent lives here, which raises the dilemma of today.
GREENE: And relied on it as something much more than temporary. NPR's Carrie Kahn. Carrie, thanks, we appreciate it.
KAHN: You're welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GREENE: All right. The Golden Globe Awards last night - you know, they were about the awards, of course, but it felt like they last night were about something bigger.
INSKEEP: Because this was the first awards show since the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Since then, dozens of other powerful men have faced allegations of sexual misconduct or abuse.
(SOUNDBITE OF 75TH GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS CEREMONY)
SETH MYERS: For the male nominees in the room tonight, this is the first time in three months it won't be terrifying to hear your name read out loud.
(LAUGHTER)
GREENE: The host there, Seth Meyers, bringing up that topic. All right. The Golden Globes - this all came up as a big showcase for Time's Up, which is a new initiative to fight harassment across all industries and not just Hollywood. NPR's Mandalit del Barco was covering this last night. Hey, Mandalit.
MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: Hey there.
GREENE: So how different did this feel from all the award shows that you've covered in the past?
DEL BARCO: Well, first of all, not only did all the - almost every actress I saw wear black, but some of them also brought along established activists as their guests. That included the founder of the #MeToo movement, Tarana Burke. And there was a lot of solidarity between the women that I saw everywhere, from actresses locking arms on the red carpet to a stolen moment backstage I saw where actress Frances McDormand and Saoirse Ronan embraced after they each won awards. I've covered a lot of these shows, and I haven't seen such camaraderie before. And of course, the real question is whether this translates into more jobs and better pay for women in Hollywood and really all industries. You know, Natalie Portman even pointed to this when she introduced the nominees for best director and she said, and here are all the - all male nominees.
GREENE: Oh, wow, she was sending a message there. Well, I - it almost feels like an afterthought because of a lot of the power of last night, but there were actually awards given as they are every year. Did any stand out?
DEL BARCO: Well, you know, "Coco," a Pixar film about the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration, it won for best animated feature, and Guillermo del Toro, who is from Mexico, he took home the best director award for "The Shape Of Water." And there were some Golden Globes history made last night. Actor Sterling K. Brown won for his role on the TV show "This Is Us." He became the first African-American man to win for acting in a TV drama.
GREENE: It feels like this morning all people are writing about, though, is Oprah Winfrey. To what extent did she really steal the show last night?
DEL BARCO: She did, and, you know, she also made history. She became the first African-American woman to win the Cecil B. DeMille Award. And that's an honor that's given by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and this year in her acceptance speech, she talked about empowering women. It was really the big moment of the night.
(SOUNDBITE OF 75TH GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS CEREMONY)
OPRAH WINFREY: So I want all the girls watching here and now to know that a new day is on the horizon.
(APPLAUSE)
DEL BARCO: And, of course, all of that immediately started a swirl of speculation online and at the awards show about whether or not Oprah Winfrey, the media mogul, might run for president.
GREENE: And she has been mentioned before. So, I mean, there were probably some people who were looking for a moment when she would be on a stage saying something that would feed that speculation I guess.
DEL BARCO: Right. Oprah for 2020, that's what they were all saying.
GREENE: NPR's Mandalit del Barco covering the Golden Globes last night - sounds like a really powerful evening. Mandalit, thanks a lot. We appreciate it.
DEL BARCO: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF THRUPENCE'S "FOREST ON THE SUN")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. Yes, the slogan says postal carriers will not be stopped by rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night. It says nothing about wild turkeys. A neighborhood outside Cleveland is overrun with wild turkeys pecking at postal carriers. About two dozen residents now have to pick up their mail at the post office. The mayor of Rocky River is on it but says the law does not allow for a wild turkey hunt, so she's asking people to stop putting out bird feed. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
About 200,000 residents of the United States - enough people to form a decent-sized city - learned just this hour they will no longer be allowed to stay here legally. They are Salvadorans living in the United States under what's called Temporary Protected Status. And the Department of Homeland Security says the law calls for the United States to terminate that status, which will be done. NPR's Carrie Kahn has been following this story. She's on the line. Hi, Carrie.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: Hi, good morning.
INSKEEP: Why make this move?
KAHN: The - we just heard from DHS officials - Department Homeland Security officials - senior officials in the administration - that the conditions that happened when in the country, in El Salvador, when TPS was granted in 2001, that they no longer are there. And so - that they are revoking this protective - protection that they had.
INSKEEP: So wait a minute. Let's remember here in 2001 what was going wrong in El Salvador that suggested to the United States that people in the U.S. should be given protected status and not be forced to go home.
KAHN: There were two major earthquakes that hit the Central American country that year, and it was George Bush who granted the Temporary Protected Status then. And what DHS officials have said today is that those conditions are no longer there. The - what happened after the earthquake has been repaired - schools, hospitals. It is much better when you look at the earthquake - compared to 2001, and it is time for Salvadorans to go home.
INSKEEP: What does this mean immediately for 200,000 people?
KAHN: Well, what was - one thing that was interesting, that they gave the final number. It's 262,500 people. So that's a little bit larger than we had thought. But what does it mean is that they have 18 months where - they said they have given them a reprieve of 18 months so that they can collect their belongings, make for an orderly return and also help the Salvadoran government process all the amount of people that they say will go home after this.
INSKEEP: Eighteen months, which sounds like a nice, good transition period, but aren't we talking about people who have been in the United States long enough that they've gotten jobs, they've bought houses, they've had children in many cases?
KAHN: Yes. These people have been here before 2001. I think the average they said is 21 years. Over - nearly 200,000 U.S.-born children from the TPS recipients live now in the United States. Ninety-five percent or a high 90 percent of them have jobs. Many have their own businesses. They have established roots in the United States. It's going to be incredibly difficult for many of these people to go home.
INSKEEP: Wait a minute. You just said nearly 200,000 U.S.-born children. So these are United States citizens now whose parents are being told get out of the country pretty soon. And I guess some of those children may be adults now, but some of them may be forced to leave the country with their parents.
KAHN: Yes. And on this call with senior Trump administration officials, they were asked what do you suggest for these nearly 200,000 U.S.-born children? And they said, that is not our concern nor it is - is a personal, private decision that needs to be made.
INSKEEP: Is this different than you might have heard with TPS decisions from previous administrations?
KAHN: It's clear that this - that there was no leeway in this decision-making. They took a strict interpretation - the DHS secretary took a strict interpretation of the law that said if the situation is better from the original reason why they were given the TPS, which were these earthquakes, then - that it's time to terminate that. That is a different interpretation - no leeway or any sort of movement. There's a different sheriff in town for sure.
INSKEEP: NPR's Carrie Kahn, thanks.
KAHN: You're welcome.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
The Trump administration is trying to give prosecutors more leeway to enforce federal marijuana laws, and that's drawing a lot of criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, especially in the growing number of states that are moving to legalize pot. But as NPR's Nathan Rott reports, there are still constraints that could hold prosecutors back.
NATHAN ROTT, BYLINE: On New Year's Day, there was a long line here on Santa Monica Boulevard as Californians queued up for their first opportunity to legally buy recreational marijuana in the state. Days later and just hours after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced his department's new approach, saying, quote, "marijuana activity is a serious crime," that line still stretches down the block. Tim Fister is near the front and says that's just Sessions rattling his saber. He is not concerned at all.
TIM FISTER: There's a billion dollars at stake in taxes in California. They're going to stop that? Money talks.
ROTT: And money...
UNIDENTIFIED CASHIER: Fifteen, 16, seven cents.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED CASHIER: You're all set. Take care.
ROTT: ...Is certainly pouring in. Colorado alone has brought in more than half a billion dollars in taxes and fees since legalization. And Daniel Yi, a spokesperson for MedMen, the storefront here in California, says that tax money is one of the reasons he's not terribly worried about the Fed's new direction. Don't get him wrong - the news isn't great, he says.
DANIEL YI: It creates a certain amount of uncertainty, I guess, from a business perspective.
ROTT: And Yi says that has made some investors more skittish, but he doesn't think it's going to slow down the fast-growing, multibillion-dollar cannabis industry.
YI: Until you get one of those 93 U.S. attorneys, prosecutors, say this is what my office stance is going to be and this is how that's going to impact whatever district in Arkansas, or whatever district in Florida or in California, it's just speculation.
ROTT: And we've already got a bit of a sense of how those U.S. attorneys are interpreting the change. Nearly a dozen U.S. attorneys have said they won't change their strategies or that they'll continue to use long established principles to choose which cases to pursue. John Walsh, a former U.S. attorney for the district of Colorado, says prosecutors will likely target the same criminal behavior as before - a business with gang or cartel connections that sells to youth or across state lines.
JOHN WALSH: What this sends, though, is a message from the department in D.C. that being more aggressive is something that they're going to back if you choose to do it.
ROTT: Even then though, Walsh says, there are limitations.
WALSH: There are limits on the resources you have available.
ROTT: In terms of time, money and federal agents, when there are other priorities like the country's opioid crisis. There's the possibility that local or state law enforcement might not be all that willing to help out in a bust. And then there's the challenge of finding a jury that would convict a state-licensed cannabis business. In Colorado, 56 percent of voters chose to legalize recreational use.
WALSH: So statistically, approximately, you'd have to assume that in any criminal prosecution you brought in federal court on a marijuana case that maybe seven or 12 jurors also had voted to legalize marijuana.
ROTT: And it's the same nationally. The majority of Americans support legalization, according to Gallup, and that includes a majority of Republicans. Which brings us to the political challenge of prosecuting a state-licensed business. This is the rare issue that doesn't entirely fall on political lines. Let's take Nevada, a purple state. Tick Segerblom, a Democratic state lawmaker and marijuana advocate, says, yes, it would be hugely disruptive if the Feds came after a business in, say, Vegas.
TICK SEGERBLOM: But, I mean, I don't think that they would want to do that because a lot of these guys are Republicans. The owners are big-time Republicans.
ROTT: That doesn't mean it won't happen. Segerblom and others say it's hard to know what to expect, but that's always been the case with the marijuana industry. Nathan Rott, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep, with the story of a very big dream.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TITANIC")
LEONARDO DICAPRIO: (As Jack Dawson) I'm the king of the world.
INSKEEP: That, of course, is Leo DiCaprio in the movie "Titanic." And this is the story of an exact replica of the Titanic. A developer is building the ship in rural southwest China, far from any ocean, far from any iceberg. NPR's Rob Schmitz reports.
ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE: There are a lot of questions that spring to mind upon arriving to the construction site for the Chinese replica of the Titanic. Like, why is this being built here, in the remote countryside a thousand miles from the sea? Or, why is this being built? Or simply, why?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SCHMITZ: The self-congratulatory infomercial the developer shows me upon arrival, complete with a computer-generated Titanic rising out of the sea, doesn't help much.
(SOUNDBITE OF INFOMERCIAL)
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As narrator) The incredible Titanic? The Chinese are amazing.
SCHMITZ: But there is a promise of a delivery date.
(SOUNDBITE OF INFOMERCIAL)
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As narrator) August 30, 2017, the unsinkable Titanic to be delivered.
SCHMITZ: But that date has passed, and work on the ship is far from finished.
SHAOJUN SU: (Through interpreter) I didn't expect the ship would be this big. The movie didn't mention how big it was.
SCHMITZ: That's Su Shaojun, president of Seven Star Energy Investment Group. Building an exact replica of the Titanic here in the Sichuanese countryside was his idea.
SU: (Through interpreter) I wanted to build a resort, but I didn't want to copy others and make just another theme park. I wanted to build one that has cultural depth to it. I came up with the idea at 3 in the morning.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MY HEART WILL GO ON")
CELINE DION: (Singing) Once more, you've opened the door and you're here in my heart, and my heart will go on and on.
SCHMITZ: Twenty years ago, Su saw the James Cameron film "Titanic." The movie had taken China by storm at a time when China's economy was emerging from dormancy and opportunities were everywhere. The film moved Su so much that when he became a big developer he proposed building a resort and theme park with an exact replica of the ship. He secured a loan of nearly $200 million and worked out a property deal with the local government of Daying, a town in Sichuan province.
SU: (Through interpreter) Why am I so confident of its success? First, people from all over know the Titanic. Second, Daying is in between two cities with 20 million people each. The person who designed China's Disneyland came here and said we'd have more visitors than them.
SCHMITZ: Economist Christopher Balding's not so sure. He's seen many other Chinese cities champion big projects like the Titanic. Most of them sink.
CHRISTOPHER BALDING: There is a lot of pressure in government to deliver results. One of the easiest ways to do that is to go out, build something really big and say look at what we've done for you. The further we go down this road, and especially the more debt-constrained China becomes, that's not a winning formula.
SCHMITZ: Back at the Titanic, work is years behind schedule. A dam has been built to flood a valley for the resort, but the hotel complex, including what the developer bills as the world's largest indoor beach, isn't close to being finished. As for the ship, crews have built the thousand-foot long hull, but two thirds of the Titanic remain, and the thousands of tons of steel needed to complete it is suddenly twice as expensive as last year. Workers have left. The cranes dotting the site are frozen in time.
ZHOU: (Through interpreter) People have lost confidence in it. Only a few people are working on the ship. They don't have the money to pay their salaries.
SCHMITZ: A farmer who only gives his surname, Zhou, for fear of trouble with local authorities, has watched the Titanic falter for years from across the river. If it's ever finished, they'll flood his village of a thousand people.
ZHOU: (Through interpreter) We haven't heard when they'll demolish our village. I'm concerned, but as long as they give us a reasonable amount of money for our land, I'll be happy.
SCHMITZ: A night at the resort, he quips, will cost twice his current monthly wages. Across the river, I asked developer Su whether recreating a ship that ended up sinking to the bottom of the ocean is a good idea.
SU: (Through interpreter) We Chinese can turn a bad thing into a good thing. We want to let people learn from history.
SCHMITZ: They certainly will, whether he finishes building the Titanic or not. Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Daying, Sichuan Province, China.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Fifty years ago today, one of the most performed songs of the 20th century was released. And did you know it almost never saw the light of day?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "(SITTIN' ON) THE DOCK OF THE BAY")
OTIS REDDING: (Singing) Sittin' in the mornin' sun. I'll be sittin' when the evenin' comes.
GREENE: "(Sitting On) The Dock Of The Bay" - it was a departure for the R&B superstar Otis Redding, sort of an experiment. This is biographer Mark Ribowsky.
MARK RIBOWSKY: Otis had had a throat operation in the fall that year, and he was very worried about whether he would be able to sing again and sing like Otis. He needed to sort of make it quieter, make it more poetic. And he came up with this song.
GREENE: A song that wasn't really R&B. It wasn't rock. It wasn't folk. An executive at Redding's label, Stax, he just didn't get it.
RIBOWSKY: Al Bell heard it being recorded that day and said, I don't know if we could ever release this song.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "(SITTIN' ON) THE DOCK OF THE BAY")
REDDING: (Singing) Cause I've had nothing to live for and look like nothing's gonna come my way.
GREENE: That winter, they left the recording incomplete. And then there was a tragedy. Otis Redding died in a plane crash on December 10, 1967. The music world was in mourning. His recording label had a different reaction.
RIBOWSKY: You know, let's face it - when a rock 'n' roller dies, you need a song to come out immediately to cash in on this. That's just the way the business is. Steve Cropper, who wrote it with him and produced it - great guitar player - said, let's do this song.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
STEVE CROPPER: I mean, I got this call on a Monday. And of course, Otis' plane went down on Sunday morning.
GREENE: NPR spoke to Steve Cropper back in 2000.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
CROPPER: I don't think they found Otis' body until Friday. And they said, get that thing finished and get it to us. So I went to work on it. And probably the music is the only thing that kept me going.
GREENE: Cropper sent them a completed version within one week. Again, here's biographer Mark Ribowsky.
RIBOWSKY: Jerry Wexler up in New York at Atlantic - the overlords of Stax - said, no, we can't release it. His vocal is too recessed. It needs to be remixed. Cropper said, OK, I'll change it. I'll overdub it. I'll do this. I'll do that - didn't change it whatsoever. Sent it back to Wexler who said, oh, yeah, this sounds a lot better now.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "(SITTIN' ON) THE DOCK OF THE BAY")
REDDING: (Singing) I can't do what 10 people tell me to do, so I guess I'll remain the same, yes.
GREENE: Well, we're all thankful they saved that song. "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay" was released 50 years ago today, less than a month after Otis Redding died at the age of 26. It became his biggest hit.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "(SITTING ON) THE DOCK OF THE BAY")
REDDING: (Singing) Sittin' on the dock of the bay wastin' time.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Two facts make this presidential moment distinct. One is the unprecedented questioning of President Trump's mental fitness for office.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The other is President Trump's feeling that he must respond. Over the weekend, the president wrote on Twitter that he is, quote, "like, really smart" and also, quote, "a very stable genius." No president has ever publicly spoken of himself in precisely that way. The president was responding to a book by the writer Michael Wolff who says he believes that every White House staffer he encountered has come to think the president is not up to his job. The president laid the blame for Wolff's access in the White House on his former senior strategist, Steve Bannon.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I don't know this man. I guess sloppy Steve brought him into the White House quite a bit, and it was one of those things. That's why sloppy Steve is now looking for a job.
INSKEEP: The president applying one of his nicknames as he does to people he regards as political enemies. NPR congressional correspondent Susan Davis is covering this story and much more. She's in our studios. Good morning, Sue.
SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: Is this what the rest of the president's party wants to be talking about?
DAVIS: No. And I think we know that because one of the consistent criticisms of President Trump from his own party is that, one, they wish he would tweet less. And also when other members of his party have gotten into disagreements or engaged with Steve Bannon in the past, people like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, they have chosen a different path. They have dismissed him. They have not responded. And when asked persistently to engage, they have just said, I don't have anything to say about him. The president has chosen a very different path.
INSKEEP: And this happened on a weekend when the president was at Camp David, the presidential retreat, with Republican leaders. And they didn't want to rehash 2017, which Wolff's book is about. They wanted to talk about 2018.
DAVIS: They do. And this is a broader point here - is that the Republican Party is still trying to figure out what 2018 should be about. It's a midterm election year. The majorities are at stake in Congress. And they need an agenda.
Two of the items coming up that we think we're going to hear a lot about this year are immigration and infrastructure. One of the notable things that the president seemed to be walking away from at Camp David this weekend was Speaker Ryan's insistence that they spend the year focused on overhauling social welfare programs. Mitch McConnell has been hesitant to do something like that in an election year. The president likewise said he didn't see a path forward unless they could get Democrats onboard. Getting Democrats onboard to do something like Paul Ryan would like to do to entitlement programs seems pretty unlikely in 2013.
INSKEEP: OK. You mentioned, though, immigration and infrastructure, two areas where hypothetically, in theory, there is bipartisan agreement. But is there really when you get down to the details?
DAVIS: We're going to know soon enough on immigration. There's a bipartisan meeting at the White House this week between Republicans and Democrats. I think we know what a compromise looks like. The problem with compromise is that usually means the base in both of your parties are going to be probably pretty angry by the end result.
Democrats want some level of legal certainty for certain people living in the country illegally, the so-called DREAMers. Republicans want tougher border enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border. And the president himself wants tougher crackdowns on legal immigration, which is maybe a bit further than other presidents have called for. In order to get there, it needs to have some combination of those things. They probably have the votes to do it if there's willingness to get there. It's just not clear the political will is there yet.
INSKEEP: Hasn't the president repeatedly taken off the table and then put back on the table his request for billions of dollars for his border wall as well?
DAVIS: He has. And part of - one of the things going into the talks this week is there's a feeling among Democrats that every time they get close to maybe a deal, the president moves the marker. He's - his most current ask from the White House is $18 billion towards the construction of a physical barrier along the border. Democrats like Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin say that they - that that's too much, that that's not fair.
So this is why I think that they - the end goal is one that Republicans and Democrats can agree on, which is a compromise immigration legislation. The details of how you get there are still very much in doubt.
INSKEEP: And I feel obliged to underline the president said Mexico would pay for the wall. We're talking about $18 billion from American taxpayers here.
DAVIS: That is correct.
INSKEEP: OK. And then there's that other thing you mentioned - infrastructure. Is that real?
DAVIS: Infrastructure is the bipartisan bill of the future and may always be in this administration. Again, the end goal is one that Republicans and Democrats agree on, which is why I think it's always pointed to as this thing that could be this great bipartisan achievement of Washington. But how you get there - Republicans and Democrats have very different views of that. Democrats want to spend a lot more money and maybe raise some taxes to do it, and Republicans don't want to do that.
INSKEEP: Before dealing with any of this, lawmakers have to make sure the government doesn't shut down.
DAVIS: That's a familiar problem that they're facing. The government runs out of money on January 19. They're trying to find a longer term budget deal. If they don't do that, they'll do what Congress does best - punt, pass a stopgap funding measure...
INSKEEP: (Laughter) What counts as longer term at this point when they've been doing it three weeks at a time?
DAVIS: And that is often how they like to do it. And if they can't get a longer term deal, that is what's expected to happen this time again.
INSKEEP: What happens to the government when they get funded three weeks at a time or whatever it turns out to be?
DAVIS: It runs on autopilot, which good budgeters will say is very bad budgeting.
INSKEEP: OK. Sue, thanks very much, always a pleasure.
DAVIS: You're welcome.
INSKEEP: That's NPR congressional correspondent Susan Davis.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Last night at the Golden Globes, it was all about women working in Hollywood and elsewhere. The host of the awards show, Seth Meyers, really set the tone in his monologue.
(SOUNDBITE OF 75TH GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS CEREMONY)
SETH MEYERS: It's 2018. Marijuana is finally allowed and sexual harassment finally isn't.
(APPLAUSE)
GREENE: Seth Meyers made a few jokes about the disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein and also actor Kevin Spacey. But as NPR's Mandalit del Barco reports, the women who won awards last night did most of the talking.
MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: Women made bold statements, even before the ceremony on the red carpet. They wore black gowns and buttons supporting Time's Up, a Hollywood movement to fight sexual harassment. The founder of the #MeToo movement, Tarana Burke, came as a guest of actress Michelle Williams. Other A-listers invited activists who fight for equal pay and opportunities for women. TV actress Debra Messing even called out cable channel E! during a live interview on the network.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "E! LIVE FROM THE RED CARPET")
DEBRA MESSING: You know, I was so shocked to hear that E! doesn't believe in paying their female co-hosts the same as their male co-hosts. I mean...
DEL BARCO: Empowering women to speak their truth was the theme throughout the ceremony as winner after winner gave their speeches.
(SOUNDBITE OF 75TH GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS CEREMONY)
REESE WITHERSPOON: I want to thank everyone who broke their silence this year and spoke up about abuse and harassment. You are so brave.
DEL BARCO: Actress and producer Reese Witherspoon had encouraged others to wear black. She accepted one of the four awards the HBO series "Big Little Lies" won.
(SOUNDBITE OF 75TH GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS CEREMONY)
WITHERSPOON: People out there who are feeling silenced by harassment, discrimination, abuse - time is up. We see you, we hear you, and we will tell your stories.
DEL BARCO: The film "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" also picked up four Golden Globes. Frances McDormand won a best actress award for her performance as a grief-stricken mother seeking justice.
(SOUNDBITE OF 75TH GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS CEREMONY)
FRANCES MCDORMAND: I keep my politics private. But I - it was really great to be in this room tonight and to be a part of the tectonic shift in our industry's power structure.
DEL BARCO: Barbra Streisand presented "Three Billboards" with the best picture drama award. And in doing so, she slammed the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for not honoring more women filmmakers. She noted that she's the only woman to have won a Golden Globe Award for best director in 1984.
(SOUNDBITE OF 75TH GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS CEREMONY)
BARBRA STREISAND: That was 34 years ago. Folks, time's up.
(APPLAUSE)
DEL BARCO: There was one man who did make history last night - Sterling K. Brown from the NBC series "This Is Us." He became the first African-American actor to win in the best actor category in a TV drama. He thanked his family and the show's creator, Dan Fogelman.
(SOUNDBITE OF 75TH GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS CEREMONY)
STERLING K. BROWN: Dan Fogelman, you wrote a role for a black man, like, that could only be played by a black man. And so what I appreciate so much about this thing is that I'm being seen for who I am and being appreciated for who I am. And it makes it that much more difficult to dismiss me or dismiss anybody who looks like me. So thank you, Dan.
DEL BARCO: And it was a black woman who made history for her lifetime achievement award. Oprah Winfrey brought the audience to tears and to its feet in standing ovations last night. She began by talking about what it was like as a little girl to watch actor Sidney Poitier win an Oscar in 1964.
(SOUNDBITE OF 75TH GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS CEREMONY)
OPRAH WINFREY: I remember his tie was white and, of course, his skin was black. And I'd never seen a black man being celebrated like that. And I have tried many, many, many times to explain what a moment like that means to a little girl, a kid watching from the cheap seats as my mom came through the door bone-tired from cleaning other people's houses.
DEL BARCO: Winfrey noted that Poitier also want to see Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1982.
(SOUNDBITE OF 75TH GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS CEREMONY)
WINFREY: And it is not lost on me that at this moment there are some little girls watching as I become the first black woman to be given the same award.
(APPLAUSE)
DEL BARCO: Winfrey said she was proud of and inspired by women who have shared their stories in Hollywood and beyond.
(SOUNDBITE OF 75TH GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS CEREMONY)
WINFREY: Speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have. So I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed and bills to pay and dreams to pursue.
(APPLAUSE)
DEL BARCO: Winfrey cited not just Hollywood women but domestic workers, farm workers, women in academia, in politics and business. She had a message for them and for all the little girls watching her.
(SOUNDBITE OF 75TH GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS CEREMONY)
WINFREY: That a new day is on the horizon.
DEL BARCO: Even before she finished her speech, Twitter erupted with calls for Oprah Winfrey to run for president in 2020. Mandalit del Barco, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF QUINCY JONES' "FIRST LETTER")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Germany has now been without a government for over three months since the last election. And Chancellor Angela Merkel is in the political fight of her life. Talks to form a coalition have to wrap up by the end of the week. And the political uncertainty over all of this is hanging over Germany for sure but really all of Europe. NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson is in Berlin covering this. Hi, Soraya.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: Good morning, David.
GREENE: All right, so this is Merkel's second attempt now to form a coalition. Not much seems to have changed. I mean, the parties she's reaching out to are not necessarily natural allies. Is there any optimism here?
SARHADDI NELSON: Well, there is for several reasons. One is that the parties that are negotiating now are actually in the old government, the caretaker government. So they're used to dealing with each other. There's also been a lot of advanced preparation for this particular series of talks. And all sides have agreed to a news blackout. So there isn't going to be any negotiating, if you will, in front of the press.
As one of the leaders put it, less talk, more work. Merkel also has a more visible role. And she and other party leaders say they're coming to the table with an open mind. But there are definitely red lines.
GREENE: What do you mean by red lines?
SARHADDI NELSON: Well, several issues that just absolutely - where they're all opposed to each other. One is the issue of EU reforms, which is on the table today. In other words, does the EU or the member states, do they integrate more politically and economically or less so? The other issue is whether Germany will actually reach its 2 percent of GDP spending on defense in NATO, which is something that's being demanded by the Trump administration.
The Conservatives say, yes, and the central Social Democrats say, no. But the biggest hurdle is probably the refugee policy because the Conservatives are very worried that if they don't tighten this, that more voters are going to go to the Alternative for Germany Party, which is a far-right party that is now in parliament.
GREENE: Well, and that party has power and influence right now. I mean, they won enough votes this last time to enter Germany's parliament for the very first time. They have been critical of Angela Merkel, almost mocking her the last time she tried to build a coalition. So what is their role right now?
SARHADDI NELSON: Well, they're pretty quiet about this particular gathering, if you will, of these talks. But the reason maybe is because they win no matter what happens. If the Social Democrats go into government, they become - or the Alternative for Germany becomes the main opposition party, which brings with it major key - or major posts within parliamentary committees and more money. And even if they don't win and there are new elections, they end up getting more disgruntled voters, or at least that's what the polls seem to indicate.
So as much as Merkel and other mainstream politicians are vowing not to work with Alternative for Germany, they're not going to have much of a choice.
GREENE: Well, I mean, this just sounds like so much uncertainty and so much of a mess to have a country this size without a - an acting - a working coalition government. How long could these talks go on?
SARHADDI NELSON: Well, the people who are meeting at the moment have said that they will wrap this up by Thursday. And then at that point, the individual parties will have to decide. It's important to remember, though, that the membership within these parties don't necessarily - they're somewhat opposed or many of them are opposed to the leaders and the negotiators who are at the table at the moment.
They've lost a lot of power because of this political paralysis. And so as a result, it could be longer than Thursday before we hear an answer.
GREENE: And does this then go back to voters if they can't do this? I mean, is there a new election if Merkel can't pull this off?
SARHADDI NELSON: That's certainly the most likely solution that there would be a new election. And does Merkel end up being the chancellor? That becomes much more doubtful if that's the case.
GREENE: One of those moments where you really see a parliamentary system at work and being tested. NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reporting in Berlin. Soraya, thanks.
SARHADDI NELSON: You're welcome, David.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene. The Museum of Ice Cream in Miami Beach has a pool of fake sprinkles you can swim in. They advertise that a hundred million sprinkles mean a hundred million dreams and anything is possible. That includes the feel good Museum of Ice Cream being fined for creating an environmental hazard. Evidently, the sprinkles can clog storm drains and harm marine life. Museum officials say they're taking precautions, including making sure visitors are sprinkle free when they leave. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The current White House adviser took a chance over the weekend to attack a former adviser. On CNN, Stephen Miller critiqued Steve Bannon, the adviser who spoke in a book of a presidential campaign meeting with Russians as treason.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "STATE OF THE UNION")
STEPHEN MILLER: It's tragic and unfortunate that Steve would make these grotesque comments so out of touch with reality and obviously so vindictive.
INSKEEP: Now, the host, Jake Tapper, eventually cut off Stephen Miller, accusing him of playing to an audience of one, the president, who in fact did soon after tweet praise of the TV appearance. Jonah Goldberg has received hardly any praise tweets from the president lately. He's senior editor of the National Review He's in our studios again. Good morning, Jonah.
JONAH GOLDBERG: Great to be here, Steve.
INSKEEP: So what does Steve Bannon's flame out, if that's the phrase, say about the Republican Party right now?
GOLDBERG: I actually hope it's something of a return - normalcy is a high bar these days.
INSKEEP: OK.
GOLDBERG: But it's a step in the right direction. As I wrote over the weekend, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at what's happened to Steve Bannon. And I think he was a force for polarization for pushing the Republican Party to a kind of white identity politics. And the fact that he is now finding himself isolated and alone I think is a welcome thing. I do think it's a little creepy to watch people like Stephen Miller, who were longtime friends of Bannon's, almost in a Soviet way have to personally denounce this wrecker (ph) for his role in badmouthing or denigrating the supreme leader. I mean, there's a weird creepiness...
INSKEEP: Because he and Bannon had been seen as allies very much so.
GOLDBERG: That's right. That's right.
INSKEEP: And now he has to say the opposite, or does say the opposite.
GOLDBERG: And he's not alone. Everyone has to sort of come forth and theatrically rend their cloth about how terrible Steve Bannon is now.
INSKEEP: So there's this other issue that's come up, because of this book by Michael Wolff, having to do with the president's mental fitness. Wolff said that having spent time with a lot of White House staffers he felt that they all did not believe the president of the United States was up to the job. The president chose personally to respond over the weekend by saying I'm, quote, "like, really smart" and "a very stable genius." These are quotes from the president of the United States in writing. Does that put the question to rest?
GOLDBERG: (Laughter) No. I mean, there's a very old rule - I think goes back to Mark Hanna or maybe Colonel House - in American politics that says if you have to tell people you're a stable genius...
INSKEEP: (Laughter).
GOLDBERG: ...You got a problem.
INSKEEP: I didn't know that phrase was part of the American political tradition up to now.
GOLDBERG: But, you know, in fairness, I do think a lot of this sort of armchair psychoanalyzing is probably a bad precedent. And simply because a lot of people in a chaotic White House in the beginning said that the president wasn't up to the job, that it's different from saying - from offering a cogent psychological analysis. I don't think this is a healthy place to go. At the same time, the president's tweets invite this kind of speculation. And I think...
INSKEEP: You don't think it's healthy because we can't diagnose this person from the outside - is that what you mean by that?
GOLDBERG: I don't like the intrusion of psychoanalysts or psychiatry into politics. There's too much of that already where people think that differences of politics have to do with different, you know, with altered mental states, you know, from Bush Derangement Syndrome, you know, that kind of thing, going forward. And I just think it's a conversation that is - can lead to a lot of bad places.
INSKEEP: OK. So Axios over the weekend reported that they'd gotten a hold of a copy of the president's real daily schedule, and the story is not really denied at all by the White House, just an effort to explain it. And they find that the president doesn't start practically at dawn the way George W. Bush did or start work at 8 or 9 like President Obama did. He starts about 11. He takes a couple of meetings during the day, and then much of the day is blocked off for what's just called executive time. What's executive time?
GOLDBERG: It's good work if you can find it. I think it's sort of fascinating. Apparently, it is a deviation. Apparently, he did have a fuller schedule earlier on. Apparently, the president - there's a certain Nixonian thing maybe of him wanting to sort of brood and watch TV.
INSKEEP: And tweet.
GOLDBERG: And tweet. And the White House doesn't actually deny it. I have a feeling that we're going to hear the phrase executive time creep into pop culture pretty quickly where, you know, lazy sitcom dads are going to say, you know, dammit, I need more executive time.
INSKEEP: (Laughter).
GOLDBERG: And it does point to a larger problem my friend Yuval Levin calls the supernumerary president where a lot of this White House, a lot of this government, is run on essentially autopilot as the party regulars and the bureaucracy and the political appointees are sort of on autopilot.
INSKEEP: Jonah, thanks. I'm going to let you head off and get some more executive time.
GOLDBERG: I appreciate it. Thank you.
INSKEEP: That's Jonah Goldberg of the LA Times and National Review.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The uncertainty for immigrants in the United States is prompting more to cross the border into Canada. The latest people unsure of their future are about 200,000 Salvadorans who are in the U.S. under temporary protected status, which the Trump administration could extend or not today. Haitians and others have faced similar moments, and the net result is testing the U.S.'s northern neighbor, which historically welcomes refugees, as Lorne Matalon reports from Montreal.
LORNE MATALON, BYLINE: Here's a recent bulletin from Canada's national public network, the CBC.
(SOUNDBITE OF CBC NEWS BROADCAST)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Canada is bracing for a possible new wave of asylum-seekers.
MATALON: Among the new arrivals is Agathe St. Preux, a Haitian. I met her as she shared lunch with other Haitians at a cafe. She says she lived in Miami for 12 years, but last summer, as signs signaled the end of a temporary U.S. residency program for Haitians, St. Preux crossed into Canada illegally and made her way to Montreal.
AGATHE ST. PREUX: It's like I breathe better. Life is quiet here, and people are kind.
MATALON: Canada has historically valued the skills and money that many migrants bring in. But Canada's refugee system's become overloaded since the election of President Donald Trump.
DAVID BERGER: We've got a backlog today of maybe 30,000 claims, whereas about two years ago, the backlog was maybe 10 or 15,000.
MATALON: That's David Berger, an immigration lawyer and former member of Canada's Parliament. New arrivals are supposed to get an immigration hearing within 60 days. That isn't happening. Berger says there aren't enough immigration judges, known in Canada as decision-makers.
BERGER: We believe the government has to appoint more decision-makers. A hundred and twenty decision-makers is just not enough.
MATALON: One national poll suggests 4 in 10 Canadians believe the country is taking in too many refugees. Canada's prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has been criticized for a tweet he sent out last January saying, to those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you. Trudeau says immigrants benefit Canada culturally and economically.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRIME MINISTER JUSTIN TRUDEAU: ...That being welcoming and open is a source of strength and...
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
MATALON: In 2017, Canada took in 43,500 refugees, many who arrive by walking illegally into Canada. That number will rise to more than 50,000 by 2020, part of what Canada's ruling Liberal Party calls the most ambitious immigration levels in recent history. The fate of refugees has also complicated the Canada-U.S. diplomatic relationship at times. Trudeau's tweet was sent out the same day the Trump administration moved to ban travelers from seven majority-Muslim nations. Marjorie Villefranche heads Maison d'Haiti - Haiti House - a resource center for refugees.
MARJORIE VILLEFRANCHE: I think that the tension is, how can a country like Canada, you know, admit that the United States is not a safe country? Politically, it's very difficult to - you know, to say that.
MATALON: Canada does a lot to at least help refugees get started, even before a final decision on whether or not they can stay permanently. When refugees arrive, they get a monthly stipend - around $650. Their children can go to school, and like all Canadians, they get healthcare. Philip Oxhorn's a political scientist at McGill University.
PHILIP OXHORN: There's undoubtedly overcrowding, but the state has done as much as one might expect, given the huge relative increase in the numbers of people coming.
MATALON: Oxhorn says Canada is wrestling with those numbers. But given the government's plan to increase immigration levels, he expects the country will continue to value the place that refugees hold in Canada's multi-ethnic tapestry. For NPR News, I'm Lorne Matalon in Montreal.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE ACORN SONG, "MISPLACED")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
President Trump is going to be addressing farmers today in Nashville. That is where the American Farm Bureau Federation is holding its annual convention. The president's address comes after years of decline in the farm sector, and it also comes at a moment when some farmers are expressing concern about the president's trade policies. For one thing, U.S. farmers sell a ton of corn to Mexico - well, actually 14 million metric tons a year to be exact. And they do that through NAFTA, a trade deal that the president has spoken about scrapping. In past speeches, President Trump has promised that his policies will only improve the livelihood of farmers.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Today, America's farmers feed not only our nation but millions of people around the world, and we're going to open that up much more for you folks because, as you know, it's not totally open, to put it mildly.
GREENE: The president's secretary of agriculture, Sonny Perdue, is in Nashville for this convention, and he joins us on the line now. Mr. Secretary, good morning.
SONNY PERDUE: Good morning, David.
GREENE: So you've been part of the Task Force on Agriculture and Rural Prosperity that the president set up. It sounds like you have recommendations that have come out today that, I mean, they just - there's a lot, going from access to capital, to Internet connectivity, to the opioid epidemic. We can't run through all of them in the time we have. Can you point to one that really excites you that you think could be a real difference maker?
PERDUE: I think the one difference maker we see in here's broadband connectivity across the United States. The farms of today rely on connectivity. They rely on big data. They've got machines that are GPS guided, and therefore the rural communities need access to health care, education, entrepreneurship. So broadband connectivity, I think, can be a huge difference maker across the country.
GREENE: I saw some statistic that suggested nearly 40 percent of people in rural America might be without Internet connectivity. Is that right, as far as you know?
PERDUE: I think our numbers are about 37 percent. So it's almost 40. And what many people don't understand in urban areas is that, which is taken for granted, is when you have rural areas with no connectivity, that's a sociological impact as well.
GREENE: Yeah. I'm sure in this job you spend a lot of time with farmers. So what is life like for an American farmer in 2018 without using the Internet?
PERDUE: Well, it's tough. Obviously many of them will hound information, as any good businessperson does today. And without that connectivity - as I said, we're building machines today that connect directly there and provide precision agriculture, which is more productivity with less inputs. These things are unavailable when the connectivity's not there.
GREENE: How much money is it going to cost to connect a lot of these communities, and do you feel like you have the backing from, you know, from lawmakers to make it happen?
PERDUE: Well, what we're doing - we're already spending billions of dollars currently there. What we're trying to do is coalesce the federal government in a cooperation with local governments, the private sector, state governments in order to have really a federal program and plan to do this. Similar to what we did with the interstate highway system, telephone communicate connectivity in '34 and rural electrification in 1936. So it's the same kind of need and the same kind of plan that needs to get us there.
GREENE: Secretary Perdue, we're going to hear from the president this morning. I'm sure that he stands with American farmers. But we've also heard President Trump talk tough on trade, and I just want to play you a little clip from over last summer talking about NAFTA.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: I don't think we can make a deal. So I think we'll end up probably terminating NAFTA at some point, OK? Probably.
GREENE: Don't farmers rely heavily on NAFTA?
PERDUE: The farmers do rely on NAFTA. NAFTA has been overall good for agriculture. Most of agriculture, really, in all three countries have been benefited, between Mexico, Canada and the U.S. There are some vegetable growers that have not done quite as well, but for the most part, NAFTA's been good for the U.S.
GREENE: You've actually said - I read in one statement you made - that pulling out of NAFTA could have tragic consequences for U.S. producers. So are you telling the president that this would be a terrible idea for American farmers?
PERDUE: I've told the president that. The president is a tough negotiator. The president has a New York-style of negotiating that believes that unless you're willing to walk away from the deal, you're not going to get the best deal. He's proven to be a good negotiator in his business dealings, and I think also his government dealings, as president. So I've got confidence he will, at the end of the day, have a great deal for American farmers and the American economy.
GREENE: Although he has suggested that making a deal with these other countries might be impossible and that he might scrap NAFTA - so I just want to ask you, is the option of scrapping NAFTA all together, is that still on the table for this president?
PERDUE: Well, I think all options are on the table, just as any kind of negotiation would be. I agree with him. At some point, if you're not going to get a deal that benefits American farmers and American economy then you've got to be willing to walk away. I believe at the end of the day Canada and Mexico understand this has also been very good for their economies, and they're going to want a deal. Canada's been rather reticent in coming to the table and addressing some of these issues. I believe they will. Mexico, less so - more inclined to communicate and do that. But I think at the end of the day, we'll have a modernized NAFTA that's beneficial for American farmers.
GREENE: Do you think the president faces a credibility problem as he addresses farmers today in Nashville when he has talked about scrapping a deal that is so important to many of them?
PERDUE: Look, farmers are the president's people. They know that. They know he listened to them on the very first day I was sworn in. He convened this interagency task force and asked me to chair 22 federal agencies on rural prosperity. These are the people that the president - elected the president. The president knows that. These are the people the president cares about, and he wants them to enjoy the American dream just like all the people in the cities.
GREENE: Sonny Perdue is the secretary of agriculture, and he's going to be with President Trump today in Nashville, where the president will be addressing farmers. Mr. Secretary, thanks for your time.
PERDUE: Thank you, David.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We are about to bring you voices of people who've hardly been heard in the national conversation about sexual harassment and assault. They are Americans who are exceptionally vulnerable. Yet, up to this moment, their experience has rarely been discussed. NPR's Investigations Unit spent a year reporting on sexual assaults against people with intellectual disabilities. Our correspondent Joseph Shapiro found previously undisclosed government numbers showing they are attacked far more often than other people.
And Joe, how often is it?
JOSEPH SHAPIRO, BYLINE: People with intellectual disabilities are sexually assaulted at a rate that's seven times that of people without disabilities.
INSKEEP: Seven times more.
SHAPIRO: Seven times. We asked the U.S. Department of Justice to calculate that rate for us. I knew from my reporting that it collected the data, but it hadn't released it until we asked. We are calling this an epidemic of sexual assault.
INSKEEP: Now, when you revealed this exceptionally high number to people who work with those who have intellectual disabilities, were they surprised?
SHAPIRO: It matches their experience. Like Sheryl White-Scott - she's a physician in New York City, and she has a practice just with people with intellectual disabilities. And she figures at least half the women that she sees have been the victims of sexual assault.
SHERYL WHITE-SCOTT: We'd be outraged if it was, God forbid, children or if it was the elderly that was abused at that high a rate. We would be outraged. And it's underreported and unrecognized.
INSKEEP: But why would the rate be so high for this particular population?
SHAPIRO: Part of it is that people with intellectual disabilities, they need to rely upon other people. They're taught to trust other people. We told you, we're going to hear lots of voices in this series, people with intellectual disabilities who are survivors of rape. And here's one of them - James Meadours from San Antonio.
JAMES MEADOURS: I think it's more common because a lot people sometimes - I don't want to say easy target, but it is a easy target because people try to work so hard to try to find friends and try to fit in our community.
SHAPIRO: These people are at risk all the time in their group homes, at school, at work, in the vans that take them to those places. Our numbers show they're more likely than others to be sexually assaulted by someone they know. And Steve, another reason for the high rates of assault is that these cases rarely get prosecuted. That means an abuser is free to abuse again. In one of my stories, I went back to Essex County, N.J. That's where one of the first cases ever got national attention. In Glen Ridge, N.J., there was a trial in 1992 and 1993. And Steve, I know you covered that trial.
INSKEEP: Yeah, it was one of my earlier stories as a reporter - dismaying story of high school athletes - four of them who were convicted of luring a 17-year-old special education student into a basement and raping her.
SHAPIRO: Right. And one of the stories in my series looks at what prosecutors learned from that case 25 years ago and what they're doing now.
INSKEEP: And that's one of the stories we'll be hearing over the next couple of weeks as this NPR investigation unfolds. What drew you to this topic, Joe?
SHAPIRO: I've been writing about this population for 30 years, and people with intellectual disabilities themselves - they keep telling me these stories. They tell me about the pain of the sexual assault in their lives. We've got a story tomorrow on a visit that we took to a sex ed class in Maine. And here's a clip of a teacher. She's at a whiteboard, and she's writing down answers.
PARK: Why do we want to be in a relationship?
JULIAN: For love.
PARK: For love.
JULIAN: And sexual reaction.
PARK: So yeah, love and sex - right? - pleasure - what else? How about romance?
(CROSSTALK)
ZACH: There's nothing wrong with that.
PARK: Nothing wrong with that.
SHAPIRO: Some of the women in that class said they want romance. They desperately want to be in relationships. But the biggest barrier, they told us, was dealing with the sexual assault that was common in their past.
INSKEEP: And we will hear their voices tomorrow - voices rarely heard in our national conversation - here on MORNING EDITION. It's the start of an NPR investigation that will unfold over the next two weeks. Joseph Shapiro, thanks very much.
SHAPIRO: Thanks, Steve.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
An NPR investigation has revealed an epidemic of sexual assault against people with intellectual disabilities. This morning, we're going to hear about one part of a solution - sex ed classes. This is because the first step is to name what is abusive. And just a warning here - there are descriptions of sexual assault in this report from NPR's Joseph Shapiro.
(CROSSTALK)
JOSEPH SHAPIRO, BYLINE: We're in a large room - it's full of windows and light - at a center in Casco, Maine, run by a group called Momentum that works with people with intellectual disabilities. They come here during the week for different programs. They go kayaking and biking. They go to the library and do volunteer work at the local food bank. And on this morning, a dozen adults evenly split between men and women take chairs around the large room.
KATY PARK: Wake your bodies up. Great. Keep you motivated.
SHAPIRO: They're here for the sex education class.
PARK: All right, let's do a little brainstorming first. Let's talk about...
SHAPIRO: It's a class about healthy relationships and healthy sexuality.
PARK: Why do we want to be in a relationship?
SHAPIRO: That's the teacher, Katy Park. She's holding a marker and writing the answers on a whiteboard.
JULIAN: For love.
PARK: For love.
JULIAN: And sexual reaction.
PARK: So yeah, love and sex - right? - pleasure. What else?
SHAPIRO: There's a range of disability here.
PARK: How about romance?
ZACH: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Romance.
ZACH: There's nothing wrong with that.
PARK: Nothing wrong with that.
KACHINA: (Laughter).
SHAPIRO: You can look at some of the men and women - maybe someone with Down syndrome - and see they have a disability. And others, even after you talk to them, you might not figure out they have an intellectual disability, like this woman.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Yeah, he was strangling me and stuff like that.
SHAPIRO: For her, like for others in this class, there's something that gets in the way of relationships. It's her own history of sexual assault.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: He was - the R-word - I hate to say it, but rape.
SHAPIRO: The R-word she's talking about, the word she says softly, is rape.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: He did that to me. I've been that eight times, so I don't know how I'm alive today, actually. And he choked me where I almost - I blacked out. He used to hit me, kick me.
SHAPIRO: We're not using her name. She's 22 now. She was 18 then, and her boyfriend was several years older. She says he was controlling. He didn't let her have a cellphone or go see her friends. And she thinks she was an easy target for him because of her mild intellectual disability.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: I think people, like, take advantage. They like to take advantage of disabilities because I have disabilities not as bad as theirs. But I think he liked to take advantage, which is wrong. I hate that.
SHAPIRO: She says the class helped her better understand what she wanted and had a right to in a relationship, and that she's got a kind and respectful boyfriend now.
PARK: So let's try it where I start it and then you guys follow, right? My body is my own.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: My body is my own.
PARK: And I get to decide what is right for me.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: And I get to decide what is right for me.
SHAPIRO: The material in this sex ed class is not watered down for these people with intellectual disabilities. They take on complex issues, like breaking up and abusive relationships. The main accommodation is that the material is broken down and spread out over 10 sessions, and each class lasts for 2 1/2 hours. The people here are completely attentive. They do take a couple very short breaks to get up and move around.
PARK: OK, I'm going to start the music.
SHAPIRO: And at one point, they take a break and get up and dance.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARETHA FRANKLIN SONG, "RESPECT")
SHAPIRO: Everyone in this room says they want love and relationships. They see their parents, their siblings, their friends in relationships. They see it when they watch TV and go to the movies. They want the same things as anyone else. But the men and women in this room know that in the eyes of the rest of the world, they're not seen as people who are going to find love, romance or sex. They're considered childlike or incapable or just uninterested.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "RESPECT")
ARETHA FRANKLIN: (Singing) R-E-S-P-E-C-T - find out what it means to me.
SHAPIRO: When they were in school, they probably didn't get the sex ed classes the other kids got. And now that they're adults, it's harder for them, compared to other people, to develop relationships. Just going on a date is hard. They probably don't drive or have cars. They rely on public transportation. They don't have a lot of money. They live at home with their parents or in a group home where there's not a lot of privacy.
PARK: Nice moves, guys.
(APPLAUSE)
SHAPIRO: And then there's that history of sexual assault - the thing that really complicates relationships for people with intellectual disabilities. They suffer some of the highest rates of sexual abuse. Our NPR investigation used unpublished federal crime data and found people with intellectual disabilities are sexually assaulted at rates at least seven times the rate for people without disabilities.
PARK: Oftentimes it actually is among the only sexual experience they've had.
SHAPIRO: That's Katy Park, who teaches the class.
PARK: When you don't have other healthy sexual experiences, how do you sort through that?
SHAPIRO: And that's why Park brought the sex ed curriculum because the best way to stop sexual abuse is to give these men and women the ability to identify what's abuse and then how to stop it.
PARK: And then it's breaking the chain, being empowered to say, no, this stops with me.
SHAPIRO: One woman in the class, Lynne, says she'd like to find a boyfriend. She's 38 now. But in her past, she's experienced sexual assault.
LYNNE: All my friends were with this guy, this older guy that knew us. They wanted us to do some stuff, and I didn't want to do it. And they just forced us to do it.
SHAPIRO: How old were you at the time?
LYNNE: Fourteen.
SHAPIRO: Fourteen.
And the next year when she was 15, she was sexually assaulted again, this time by a boy at her school.
So were you able to tell somebody about that one?
LYNNE: No, I had to - I was trying to scream but...
SHAPIRO: Trying to scream.
LYNNE: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: And?
LYNNE: To get help.
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
LYNNE: But I couldn't because he had his hand over my mouth telling me not to say anything to anybody.
SHAPIRO: Those rapes and others left Lynne - and we've agreed to identify her by her middle name - unable to have relationships.
LYNNE: I couldn't trust anybody.
SHAPIRO: She says this class has helped her realize she wants a romantic relationship and that it's something that's maybe finally possible for her now.
LYNNE: By taking the class, I can really try to trust people to like me and then they can just get to know people instead of just rushing into a relationship.
SHAPIRO: Lynne is trying to turn around a history of repeated sexual abuse. It's her personal history, but it's also the common story of people like her with intellectual disabilities across America. Joseph Shapiro, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SEAS OF YEARS' "LIKE TALL SHIPS UPON THE SKY")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Last spring, MORNING EDITION traveled to Russia, and one of the stories we reported on there was about gay men from the Russian republic of Chechnya. They were being hunted down and tortured by authorities. Some had made their way to an LGBT community center in Moscow, and there, one of them - we changed his name to Arnie to protect his identity - told his story through an interpreter about being delivered to his family's home unconscious in a burlap bag or parcel.
ARNIE: (Speaking Russian).
UNIDENTIFIED INTERPRETER: Some guys came to his house and told the relatives, this is your son, he is homosexual. And everyone was shocked. And Arnie's uncle took him out of the parcel, he held his neck and was going to kill him.
GREENE: As you can imagine, many of these men were uncertain about their future. Some have now found refuge in the Netherlands. That's the first country in the world to recognize same-sex marriage, but it sounds like now their future is uncertain once again. Some of them are facing deportation, as Joanna Kakissis reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRAIN STATION AMBIENCE)
JOANNA KAKISSIS, BYLINE: Joanna. Nice to meet you.
I meet Abdul Kadr outside Amsterdam's train station. It's not his real name. He chose it for himself. And we're also distorting his voice for his safety. Abdul Kadr is serious and silver-haired, a married father of four from Grozny, Chechnya. Being married to a woman was how he hid his love affair with a man, also married and also a father. In Chechnya, where gay men are reportedly sent to torture camps, it was a way to survive.
ABDUL KADR: (Through interpreter) When I was with straight people, I totally condemned other gay men. You really have no other choice in Chechnya.
KAKISSIS: But Chechen police started following Abdul Kadr and outed him to his wife and relatives.
KADR: (Through interpreter) My wife found out the day. It was a life or death matter. On the night, the relatives came to kill me. She chose to hide me. She saved my life.
KAKISSIS: He fled to Moscow, where LGBT activists helped him reach the Netherlands last year. It's one of a handful of European countries opening their doors to gay Chechens. Abdul Kadr has befriended another Chechen here, Artur, also a name he chose for himself. Artur is a mop-haired 25-year-old with bright blue eyes. He says the police tortured his friends into outing him.
ARTUR: (Through interpreter) The police electrocuted my friends, beat them, denied them food and water. They slept on concrete while the drug dealers and terrorists slept in beds.
KAKISSIS: Artur and Abdul Kadr worried that Chechnya's secret police may even find them in Europe. But what's been hardest for them, it turns out, is just talking about their sexuality. Abdul Kadr found himself giving monosyllabic answers during a crucial immigration interview.
KADR: (Through interpreter) I couldn't overcome my fear and give them details even if it meant my life was hanging by a thread. I was terrified.
KAKISSIS: Listening with a grimace on his face is Sandro Kortekaas, who runs a volunteer network that helps LGBT refugees in the Netherlands.
SANDRO KORTEKAAS: For all refugees who come from countries where you can't be gay, you couldn't speak to someone about this. So when you have the Dutch immigration service, who ask you to tell your whole story, and if there is something which is not good, it means that they can say, sorry, we don't think you are gay - that's horrible.
KAKISSIS: The Dutch immigration service does not register the sexual orientation of those who apply for asylum so there's no way to know how many have been rejected.
ANNICK OERLEMANS: It's just a really individual assessment in every individual case.
KAKISSIS: Annick Oerlemans is an immigration officer.
OERLEMANS: We have interviews with LGBT asylum-seekers basically every day, I think. And we're actually trained to make people feel as comfortable as we possibly can in order to get them to speak about those things.
KAKISSIS: Elias Karam tries to help asylum-seekers open up even before that immigration interview. He's a refugee himself and works at Secret Garden, an Amsterdam nonprofit that helps LGBT refugees.
ELIAS KARAM: Many of these refugees, in their home country they are not used to talk about sexuality in general. So when it come about homosexuality, about their homosexuality, they don't know how to talk.
KAKISSIS: Karam encourages refugees who come to Secret Garden's weekly dinner meetings to talk to each other. At one recent meeting, held largely in Arabic and in English, a transgender woman from Lebanon admits she had a panic attack walking out in makeup and heels for the first time. Others talk about beatings, of rejection, isolation.
Back at the train station, Abdul Kadr and Artur, the two Chechens, are working out their own experiences. Artur says he often thinks about something that seems suicidal, returning to Chechnya. He breaks down as he explains why.
ARTUR: (Through interpreter) I was never looking for freedom to be openly gay. I didn't want my family to have any problems because of me, and now they have huge problems. My mom is literally losing her mind because the police come to our house every day.
KAKISSIS: Artur recently received asylum. Abdul Kadr is still waiting to find out. For NPR News, I'm Joanna Kakissis in Amsterdam.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Millions of people have tried online dating or at least thought about it. Almost one third of Americans who have never been married have gone on dating apps or dating sites, according to the Pew Research Center. And a recent study based on data from the National Academy of Sciences found the rise in digital dating coincides with a rise in interracial marriages. One possibility here is that online users are exposed to people they normally might not meet in person in our segregated lives, including people of different races and ethnicities. But there's also some data here suggesting that race and ethnicity play into online dating in a more complicated way.
CHRISTIAN RUDDER: On these sites, black users especially, there's a bias against them. Every kind of way you can measure their success on a site - how people rate them, how often they reply to their messages, how many messages they get - that's all reduced.
INSKEEP: Christian Rudder is the co-founder of OKCupid, a major dating site, who looked at data from his site and other sites back in 2014. It turns out that online dating reflects something that many people have perceived in the offline world for generations, black women and Asian men are rejected more often than other people. NPR's Ashley Brown talked with some dating app users about whether the numbers reflect their reality.
ASHLEY BROWN, BYLINE: I met Jason on a balmy winter afternoon in Los Angeles. He was about to take his puppy on a walk. He'd just gotten home from his internship. He works with men and women with mental health needs. And we're not using his last name, to protect his privacy and his clients' privacy.
JASON: You got to take care of yourself. Our professors say that all the time. Self-care this, self-care that. But it's true.
BROWN: Self-care ended up playing a big role in Jason's personal life, too. He started using dating apps and websites about seven years ago, and he told me things got ugly.
JASON: The messages were saying, I don't date Asians, sorry not sorry, you're cute for an Asian. Like, it was really disheartening.
BROWN: Jason is gay and Filipino. He says some of the rejections he got were overtly racist.
JASON: It was like, like, I usually like bears, but no panda bears. I'm like, yikes. It really hurt my self-esteem.
BROWN: So Jason says he wasn't surprised to see some of the numbers from OKCupid making headlines back in 2014. The dating site's blog said Asian men and black women were rated the least attractive compared to other races and genders. Even though the numbers focused on straight users, Jason says he could definitely relate.
JASON: It was like an unfulfilled validation. Like, yeah, I was right, but it feels like [expletive] that I was right.
BROWN: I also talked to Ari Curtis. She says she feels the same way. She even started a blog about her experience dating as a black woman. Here's a little bit of one of her blog entries.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ARI CURTIS: For black women like me, this is life. The data are mere tiny representations of a messy existence. And while I'm a big fan of big data, the good stuff begins where the data ends.
BROWN: Her blog is called Least Desirable. One of her posts talks about an OKCupid date she had at a bar in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
CURTIS: This is it. Yup.
BROWN: Ari took me to that bar, and she told me what the date told her over drinks.
CURTIS: He had recently gone home, and he was like, yeah, my family would never approve of you. (Laughter) And I was just like, OK (laughter).
BROWN: Because she's black.
CURTIS: Yeah. Because I'm black.
BROWN: That interaction left Ari feeling confused, really uncomfortable. And, it wasn't a new feeling. She also shared this account of a date with another white man she met on Tinder.
CURTIS: He was like, so we have to bring the hood out of you, bring the ghetto out of you. And I was like, I'm sorry, what? (Laughter). It made me feel like I wasn't enough, that who I am wasn't what he expected and that he wanted me to be somebody else based on my race (laughter).
BROWN: OKCupid told me the site is definitely paying attention to all of this. I talked to their chief marketing officer Melissa Hobley, and she said they've changed a lot about the app over the years. They want to encourage users to focus less on looks alone and more on what she called psychographics.
MELISSA HOBLEY: Things like what you're interested in, what moves you, what your passions are.
BROWN: Hobley said OKCupid's also talked to social scientists about why people's dating preferences come off as racist.
HOBLEY: I think that what OKCupid was seeing in the data was reflective of what happens IRL, in real life. And people tend to be often attracted to the people that they are familiar with. And in a segregated society, that can be harder in certain areas than in others.
BROWN: Ari told me she understands that. She's had to come to term with her own biases. She grew up in the mostly white town of Fort Collins, Colo., and says she was only dating white guys until she moved to New York.
Do you think that people expressing a racial preference on a dating app is just like expressing a preference for any other physical attribute, or is there something different about race?
CURTIS: I feel like there is room, honestly, to say I have a preference for somebody who looks like this, and if that person happens to be of a certain race - it's hard. It's hard to blame somebody for that. It really is. But on the other hand, you have to wonder if racism weren't so ingrained in our culture if they would have those preferences.
BROWN: She says she's still conflicted about her own preferences and conflicted about whether she'll even keep using dating apps, but for now she says her strategy is just to keep a casual attitude about all of it.
CURTIS: If I don't take it seriously then I don't have to be disappointed when it doesn't go well because I wasn't taking it seriously anyway.
BROWN: Jason's out of the dating game entirely now. That's because he ended up finding his current partner, a white man, on an app a couple of years ago. He credits part of his success to making bold statements about his values and his profile.
JASON: Yeah. I said something, like, really obnoxious looking back on it now. I think one of the first lines I said was, like, social justice warriors to the front of the line, please.
BROWN: He says weeding through those racist messages was really hard, but for him, worth it in the end.
JASON: Everyone deserves love and kindness and support. And pushing through and holding that close to yourself is, I think, actually also what kept me in this online dating realm, just knowing that I deserve this. And if I'm lucky enough, it'll happen. And it did.
BROWN: Ashley Brown, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: Hey. That story is part of What Makes Us Click, MORNING EDITION's series on online dating.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un, and President Trump have been trading threats and personal insults. It's even gotten to who has the bigger nuclear button. Now, the U.S. secretaries of state and defense insist that despite that, they are still pursuing diplomacy. But that does not mean the United States is not preparing for a different scenario.
Here's Defense Secretary James Mattis speaking last fall.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JAMES MATTIS: Now, what does the future hold? Neither you nor I can say, so there's one thing the U.S. Army can do and that is you have got to be ready to ensure that we have military options that our president can employ if needed.
GREENE: Military options when dealing with North Korea. Those are some pretty strong and important words that we should explore more with NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman, who's here. Hey, Tom.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Hey, David.
GREENE: So what have you been looking at? Are there actually options being, I mean, considered for North Korea?
BOWMAN: Well, one of the things the Army is doing is training many more soldiers, thousands more soldiers, in tunnel warfare. Now, usually, the Army has one or two brigades - and a brigade is about 4,000 soldiers - trained in this kind of activity. They want to double, maybe even triple the number of soldiers because North Korea is basically honeycombed with tunnels and bunkers, thousands of them.
And this is all an effort just to get ready should the president say, it's time for military action against North Korea.
GREENE: So for decades, the north has been - what? - building this network of tunnels anticipating a possible war with the south or the U.S. or somebody?
BOWMAN: Absolutely. They bury chemical, biological weapons in these tunnels. They have some for troops. They're miles long, some hundreds of feet deep. Nuclear weapons can be put in these tunnels. Even artillery...
GREENE: Wow.
BOWMAN: ...Can be put in these tunnels and rolled out when need be. Now, they've discovered some of these tunnels under the demilitarized zone and some have even gotten closer to Seoul. One is now a tourist site in Seoul that people can go into.
GREENE: I also went to the demilitarized zone. There's a tunnel you can go down right up to the North Korean border. Is that one of these tunnels, too? I mean, it's...
BOWMAN: I'm not sure if that's one, but it could be.
GREENE: Maybe they've recreated it. But I'll certainly go there next time and it won't be as much fun with all these tensions that are there. How much does the U.S. know about these tunnels? It's not like this is a country that, I presume, they can get a ton of intelligence from. I mean, do they have a good sense of what these tunnels are like, where they are? How much prep can they actually do?
BOWMAN: Well they can see from satellites some entrances and exits from some of these tunnels. They know there are thousands of them and, again, hundreds of feet deep.
But again, if there is military action against North Korea - and some of them are so deep, you're going to have to send soldiers, U.S. soldiers, South Korean soldiers, into these tunnels to either, you know, find nuclear weapons or chemical and biological weapons because they're so far underground, they're going to be, you know, not be able to be taken out by bombs or missiles.
GREENE: Totally different kind of warfare it sounds like.
BOWMAN: Absolutely. And I'm told that the soldiers from the 101st Airborne and the 82nd Airborne are among those soldiers to have to get this kind of training. They've also bought specialized equipment, bolt cutters, acetylene torches, special night-vision goggles because in the tunnels, there's no ambient light, special radios as well.
And they're going to be training throughout 2018. But I think it's important to note that this is just getting ready. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has said the Army must be ready. This does not mean that the U.S. is inching closer to war. It means, as Mattis said, the Army has to be ready if the president needs options.
GREENE: OK, so this is the kind of thing that might go on with different scenarios that the military is considering around the world.
BOWMAN: Absolutely.
GREENE: But it is noteworthy that they are specifically looking at the situation in North Korea and what the U.S. military could confront.
BOWMAN: Right. And the Army's doing this quietly. They're not basically coming out and putting out press releases about this training.
GREENE: That would probably not be the best idea.
BOWMAN: Right. It is very quietly being done.
GREENE: NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman. Tom, thanks.
BOWMAN: You're welcome, David.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Reporters in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea are getting a chance to see something rare.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Yeah. North and South Korea are holding direct talks in a village there - the first time they're doing this since 2015. And this round has actually been partly open to the press. OK. So here's the news. The two sides have agreed on one thing - North Korea will send athletes, government leaders, maybe even a cheering squad, to the Winter Olympics in South Korea next month.
INSKEEP: We've got spirit, yes, we do. We've got - so on and so forth.
GREENE: There you go.
INSKEEP: Something like that. NPR's Elise Hu joins us now from Seoul. Hi, Elise.
ELISE HU, BYLINE: Good morning.
INSKEEP: So what are these talks like?
HU: Well, only the first part of the dialogue was open to the press, but from what the reporters and the cameras caught, both sides - folks on both sides were in upbeat moods. They seemed earnest about getting started and making a deal at the outset. To get to the meeting itself, the lead North Korean negotiator actually just had to walk right over the border. He was in a black suit, no coat, flanked by other North Korean officials and just surrounded by cameras. And he continued being trailed by all those cameras as he walked about - I don't know - a football field's length to the building where the South Korean negotiators were waiting for him. And once the delegation got inside, the opening conversation was about the weather...
INSKEEP: Naturally.
HU: ...Which you'd expect (laughter).
GREENE: A topic that always brings them all together.
(CROSSTALK)
HU: Talk for a while, so you kind of need an icebreaker there. But North Korea's negotiator actually talked about how inter-Korean relations were more frozen than normal - used a metaphor - and that the will of the people is that those relations thaw.
INSKEEP: Oh, OK. So what kind of thawing did they manage to do?
HU: Well, so far already, that main question of whether North Korea would take part in the Olympics is resolved. North Korea said it would indeed send a delegation to the games. That's likely to include a figure skating pair that recently qualified and has been getting a lot of attention. For South Korea, the interest is to use these talks as groundwork for more talks in the future. South Korea is proposing another meeting next month to discuss family reunions for the families separated by the Korean War. South Korea also did bring up the need for dialogue to discuss peace and denuclearization. The North heard the South but didn't respond specifically to that point.
INSKEEP: OK. So they're getting on to family reunions. That's actually going to affect, you know, real people's lives in a divided country. But what about that fundamental nuclear question that is transfixing the world?
HU: Well, North Korea is extremely practiced in posturing on this issue. Now, we know, of course, the American leader, his Twitter messages - Donald Trump's Twitter messages are also seen as posturing. The substantive work here, though, on the relationship is being done not by the U.S. and North Korea but by Seoul and Pyongyang. The U.S. so far isn't a party to these discussions, but to the extent tensions can be dialed down by South Korea's diplomacy here, they dial down tensions for the U.S. and the rest of the globe, too. So that is happening despite the rhetoric that we're hearing from North Korea and Washington.
INSKEEP: OK. Those are our talks with NPR's Elise Hu. Elise, always a pleasure having a discussion with you.
HU: You bet.
INSKEEP: All right. And we should remember that in spite of those talks, it was only a week ago that President Trump and Kim Jong Un of North Korea were going back and forth about who had the bigger nuclear button.
GREENE: Right. So those conversations about the nuclear button going back and forth even as members of the president's Cabinet have been insisting that they are pursuing diplomacy. That doesn't mean that the U.S. military is not preparing for a darker scenario, though. Here's Defense Secretary James Mattis speaking last fall.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JIM MATTIS: You have got to be ready to ensure that we have military options that our president can employ if needed.
INSKEEP: Options? NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman learned something about one of the options and some of the planning. Hi there, Tom.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Hey, Steve.
INSKEEP: What are you looking into?
BOWMAN: Well, one of the options is tunnel warfare, and the U.S. Army is training thousands more soldiers in tunnel warfare because North Korea basically is honeycombed with tunnels. They hold troops. They could hold artillery, chemical, biological weapons, nuclear weapons. So they're training more American soldiers in the event of a military conflict to go into these tunnels.
INSKEEP: I'm just thinking about the fact that the demilitarized zone is basically a battle line. It's where the battle lines were in 1953.
BOWMAN: Exactly.
INSKEEP: Are you telling me that North Korea's had since 1953 to prepare its side of the battle zone in case it gets invaded?
BOWMAN: Absolutely. And some of these tunnels go under the DMZ and some of them were actually near Seoul. Some have been discovered, and one is actually a tourist site.
INSKEEP: They go under to the South Korean side.
BOWMAN: That's right.
INSKEEP: And some of them have become tourist sites, but some of them are exceedingly - exceedingly dangerous.
BOWMAN: Right. And the U.S. Army is also buying specialized equipment, night vision goggles, specialized radios, acetylene torches, bolt cutters and the like that would be used by these soldiers, and South Korean soldiers of course, in the event of war going into these tunnels.
INSKEEP: You know, anytime I've read about a scenario of another conflict between the Koreas, it sounds like an utter nightmare. The North Koreans have massive artillery. You'd have utter destruction in the opening minutes perhaps. And when you tell me about tunnel training, it doesn't sound like things would get any better after those opening minutes.
BOWMAN: No, absolutely not. And Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who told the Army you have to get ready, has also said, listen, the number of casualties in the event of war with North Korea would be worse than in anyone's memory. So everyone's concerned about this. But again, Defense Secretary Mattis wants the Army to be ready in the event of any sort of military conflict, and this is part of that.
INSKEEP: OK. Let's keep it in perspective. They'd be training regardless of the level of tensions.
BOWMAN: Well, they would. You know, generally, the Army has some soldiers training in tunnel warfare. There are, of course, tunnels in Afghanistan. But now they're doubling, if not tripling, the number of soldiers that would be used for this kind of tunnel warfare.
INSKEEP: Wow. That's getting to the question that's on my mind. They would be training regardless, but I'm wondering how tense the military is at this moment. It sounds, like, pretty tense.
BOWMAN: It is tense. And the chief of staff of the Army, General Mark Milley, in particular wants his soldiers to be ready. He's really pushing this hard.
INSKEEP: Tom, thanks very much for the reporting, really appreciate it.
BOWMAN: You're welcome, Steve.
INSKEEP: That's NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: OK. Last night, there was a VIP at college football's national championship game in Atlanta. President Trump was there and stood for the national anthem. Then he dipped out at halftime.
GREENE: This was part of a pretty busy day for the president, which included more headlines about that special counsel Russia investigation. News reports are saying now that Robert Mueller could soon interview the president himself. It is not clear when that might happen, but the White House has been saying all along that it is cooperating.
INSKEEP: OK. NPR's Mara Liasson has been traveling with the president this past day. She joins us now. Mara, good morning.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning.
INSKEEP: What would you make - what would it mean if, as NBC News is reporting, the special counsel ends up wanting to interview the president himself?
LIASSON: If the special counsel is ready to interview the president - we don't know that for sure because the White House lawyers have only confirmed that they're cooperating - it would mean that the special counsel is getting ready to finish up the investigation. Generally, you would interview the president at the end. And White House lawyers have been predicting that he would finish up his investigation soon for quite some time. But that would be one thing it would predict. It's not unusual for a president to be interviewed in a special counsel investigation.
INSKEEP: What would be quite high tension, I would think though, is the fact that he's then talking to federal investigators, which would mean, for the president or anyone else, it would be a crime if he told a lie. Is that right?
LIASSON: That's right. And there would be a lot of negotiations about exactly how the interview would be conducted. Would it be in writing? How long would it last? Would he meet with them in person? A lot of - a lot of negotiations.
INSKEEP: So that's happening behind the scenes or that's at least being discussed behind the scenes so far as we know. And then out in public, the president is out giving almost campaign-style speeches, talking to the American Farm Bureau Federation and then talking about tax cuts that he recently signed into law and talking about immigration. Let's listen to some of that.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We are going to end chain migration. We are going to end the lottery system. And we are going to build the wall.
INSKEEP: One promise after another that will get a lot of people talking.
LIASSON: Yes. And we know that a bipartisan group of senators are going to meet with the president at the White House today to discuss immigration policy. And what you just heard the president do at that Farm Bureau Federation meeting was he laid out his negotiating terms for an immigration deal that would legalize the DREAMers, those young people who were brought here in some cases illegally by their parents. Democrats and Republicans both say there is a compromise to be had, a way for the president to say he got a wall and for Democrats to say he didn't get a wall. But the question is, what does a wall mean? Does it mean more than just border security?
And I found it really interesting that yesterday Oklahoma Senator James Lankford, a Republican who was at that meeting last week at the White House for Republicans only to discuss immigration, tweeted that the wall is not necessarily a big, physical barrier. It could just be fencing. In other places, he says, drones and surveillance could be more effective. And these are things that Democrats have voted for in the past. So in other words, he's saying it doesn't necessarily have to be a big wall. What we don't know...
INSKEEP: It depends on what the meaning of the word wall is.
LIASSON: We don't know what the president requires politically in terms of a wall to agree to a deal on the DREAMers.
INSKEEP: OK. Mara, always a pleasure talking with you. Thank you very much.
LIASSON: Thank you.
INSKEEP: That's NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson.
(SOUNDBITE OF B-SIDE'S "BADLANDS")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I'm David Greene.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARIAH CAREY'S "HERO")
GREENE: You might think you recognize this song, but wait.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHAD CADDELL: Good morning, Union Pointe Academy parents and students.
GREENE: That's Chad Caddell, a school principal in Kentucky, announcing school was closed because of winter weather, doing it in a video with his own version of Mariah Carey.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CADDELL: (Singing) School is canceled for today. Go back to bed, and go out and play.
GREENE: Mr. Caddell, you are my hero. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The president of Iran all but took the side of his country's protesters. Hassan Rouhani spoke after days of demonstrations and essentially told his cabinet that the ruling class in Iran is out of touch, that Internet censorship is a problem, that people want more freedom, that they're not just protesting about the economy. It was an especially frank statement in a country where people often speak in euphemisms and metaphors and code if they talk politics at all. NPR's Peter Kenyon has covered Iran for years. He's on the line. Hi, Peter.
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: How significant are Rouhani's comments?
KENYON: They're important. It's not often you hear an Iranian president say one cannot force one's lifestyle on the future generations or ask whether you can buy freedom with some economic improvements while people stay cut off from the Internet or face other restrictions. I mean, it's unusually plain and direct speaking by the standards of Iranian political discourse, certainly, but, making a tough speech is one thing, taking tough action is, of course, another.
INSKEEP: Well, let's try to figure out what's going on here. We should remember, I guess, that there are different factions in Iran's government. Some are more moderate, or reformist, as they say. Some are much more conservative or hard-liner. And it sounds with remarks like that like Rouhani is aligning himself with the reform people and taking aim at the more conservative factions. Is that really what's happening?
KENYON: Certainly the latter, taking aim at hard-liners. Yes. They've been constantly attacking him since his re-election last May. They've been frustrating his efforts to revive the economy to some extent. And hard-liners, including the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his very latest remarks, continue to blame all this unrest on the U.S. and Britain, on outside agitators. But also what Rouhani was doing with these remarks was refocusing anger away from himself. He was the target, remember, of some of these protests, as well as hard-liners, and now he's saying, no, let's look at the other side, the conservatives.
These protests in essence took on the entire theocratic system, and that's not what Rouhani's about. He's not about changing that. But this is him trying to seize the high ground. I asked Iran analyst Ali Vaez at the International Crisis Group. He says Rouhani really needs to pivot from being a target to being a champion of reforms even though he's not a radical reformer himself. Here's how he put it.
ALI VAEZ: What he needs to do is to submit to the parliament a package of major reforms including constitutional amendments that would empower the elected institutions and secure the supreme leader's consent for enforcing these reforms - because without such bold measures, the country would simply be buying time until the next uprising.
INSKEEP: OK. I'm just thinking through what we've heard and remembering that axiom that one of the jobs of a politician is to figure out the direction the crowd is already going and get in front of them if at all possible so you look like a leader, I guess. That might be what you could say Rouhani is doing, but is there a risk to him in pressuring the more conservative parts of the government?
KENYON: Absolutely. As we've been pointing out, Iran's president doesn't really control all the levers of power in his country. Hard-line political opponents do control many of them. Some think these protests may have started with encouragement from hard-liners who just wanted to make Rouhani look bad and they simply got out of control. And now if he does take this path of getting out in front of big reforms and the supreme leader doesn't back him up then you could see a hard-line backlash that could weaken him for the rest of his second term. At the moment he remains broadly popular, especially in the big cities, and he may be able to use this crisis as some kind of opportunity.
INSKEEP: Broadly popular, but the protests are showing, as Rouhani himself pointed out, people want more freedoms. They want some change. How much time does he have to turn things around?
KENYON: Not nearly as much as he would like. I mean, none of the even limited economic reforms he's been seeking so far provide instant relief to ordinary Iranians. And in the meantime, his move to reduce cash payments and subsidies will effect the poor rather instantly. Rouhani has got to walk a very difficult path.
INSKEEP: Peter, thanks very much.
KENYON: You're welcome, Steve.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Peter Kenyon.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Many Salvadoran residents of the United States are in a state of shock this morning. Yesterday the Trump administration announced that it will be ending a humanitarian program that has allowed nearly 200,000 of them to live and work in this country. This program followed earthquakes in 2001 that devastated El Salvador. Now they're worried about their future and also worried about their relatives in El Salvador. NPR's Nurith Aizenman has more.
NURITH AIZENMAN, BYLINE: Practically all of these Salvadoran immigrants work, and a huge share of them regularly send a portion of their earnings to family in El Salvador.
MANUEL OROZCO: Approximately 80 to 85 percent are sending money back home.
AIZENMAN: Manuel Orozco is a political scientist with the D.C. think tank Inter-American Dialogue. He's spent decades tracking these money transfers, or remittances, as they're called, using government and financial data as well as detailed surveys he's conducted.
OROZCO: We estimate that this is about 150,000 people sending to households in El Salvador.
AIZENMAN: On average, each immigrant sends back $4,000 a year, for a grand total of about $600 million annually, more than official U.S. aid to El Salvador. It's about 2 percent of El Salvador's GDP, and El Salvador has only been growing at about 2 percent a year. Orozco says that makes this remittance money a major lifeline for El Salvador's economy.
OROZCO: In practical terms, if you were to stop this money, their economy couldn't grow.
AIZENMAN: But he says even that statistic doesn't quite capture the impact. Most significant is his finding that 1 in every 20 families in El Salvador depends on these remittances to get by. Take Edyt Mendoza de Urqilla and her husband. She's 58. He's 62. They grew up poor in a small town. She was only able to study through eighth grade and is a homemaker. He always worked as a security guard making $300 a month. So they were already struggling when the 2001 earthquakes hit.
EDYT MENDOZA DE URQILLA: (Through interpreter) Our house was totally flattened. We lost everything.
AIZENMAN: Fortunately for them, their eldest son was in the United States at the time, illegally. But once he got the work permit through the temporary protected status program, he was able to get a better-paying job remodeling bathrooms in Gaithersburg, Md. Soon he was helping his parents cover the cost of a new house in El Salvador.
MENDOZA DE URQILLA: (Through interpreter) He's just given us $8,600 to pay it off completely.
AIZENMAN: Now, critics of the temporary protected status program say it was always meant to be temporary. But Mendoza de Urqilla says the money her son sends, about $500 a month, is still just enough to tide them over.
MENDOZA DE URQILLA: (Through interpreter) The salaries we earn here don't even cover our cost of food, let alone hospital costs when you get sick.
AIZENMAN: She does have three other adult children in the U.S., but they haven't been able to contribute as much because they're in the country illegally so they make less. Now that her eldest is set to lose his work permit too, Mendoza de Urqilla doesn't know how she'll cope. "I'm worried for my son," she says, "and for myself." Nurith Aizenman, NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Recessions, as we know, can be painful. People lose jobs, families lose their homes, and it can take years for an economy to recover. But there are researchers in the United States and in other industrialized nations who are finding out that recessions can have a counterintuitive effect on health and mortality. And let's explore this with NPR social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam.
Hey, Shankar.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Hey, David.
GREENE: So recessions can be good in some ways?
VEDANTAM: In some ways, David, recessions seem to change the mortality rate, and not in the direction you might expect. I was speaking with the economist Erin Strumpf at McGill University. Along with Thomas Charters, Sam Harper and Ari Nandi, she studied the effect of the Great Recession a decade ago by looking at 366 metropolitan areas in the United States, which cover about 80 percent of the U.S. population.
ERIN STRUMPF: We find that in areas where the unemployment rate is growing faster, mortality rates decline faster. So during the Great Recession in the U.S., we saw increases in the unemployment rate of about 4-5 percentage points, so that translates to about 50,000 to 60,000 fewer deaths per year, the same order of magnitude as the number of people who die from influenza and pneumonia every year.
VEDANTAM: To be clear, David, of course, no one is suggesting that we should have recessions more often.
GREENE: Sure.
VEDANTAM: This is just an opportunity to understand how the economy shapes health.
GREENE: Well, what is that relationship? Let's explore that.
VEDANTAM: Well, there are theories about why it is that this relationship might occur and - but no one really knows for sure. We've seen similar effects in other recessions starting in the United States in the 1970s. Strumpf told me the biggest declines in mortality were in motor vehicle accidents and in heart attacks. Now, the traffic-death decline might be attributable to fewer people driving. Strumpf thinks the decline in heart attacks might have something to do with the stresses people experience at work or other lifestyle changes.
STRUMPF: When the economy is worse, people have less money to spend. They may go out and have unhealthy meals less often. They may smoke less or drink less. They may drive less. That's kind of what people have in mind when they're thinking about why increases in unemployment are linked to decreases in mortality.
GREENE: Shankar, just to be clear here, we're talking about fewer deaths among people who are out of work, specifically. That's all?
VEDANTAM: Not necessarily. The study is not saying that mortality rates decline among those who are unemployed. The declines are in areas that experience higher levels of unemployment. So in other words, we see declines in mortality among people who are not in the workforce - among the elderly, for example. That could be because caregivers who are out of work are more likely now to be available to help elderly parents, for example. I think it's fair to say, David, that this is a provocative finding that's still in need of a good explanation.
GREENE: Well, we'll keep looking for one, Shankar. Thanks so much, as always.
VEDANTAM: Thanks, David.
GREENE: That is NPR's Shankar Vedantam. He is NPR's social science correspondent, and he also hosts a podcast and radio show that explores the unseen patterns in human behavior. It is called Hidden Brain.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now let's recall the life of a woman who broke a barrier in the United States military.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WILLIAM WESTMORELAND: Colonel Hays, it is a great pleasure for me now to join with Lieutenant General Hal Jennings, surgeon general of the United States Army, in pinning on your new insignia of rank.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
That rank of brigadier general was given to Anna Mae Hays on June 11, 1970, by General William Westmoreland, making her the first female general in the U.S. armed forces, or, as Westmoreland put it, the first in the Western world since Joan of Arc.
INSKEEP: General Hays joined the Army as a nurse during World War II, posted to the China-Burma-India theater. She later treated some of the first casualties of the Korean War and then went on to become chief of the Army Nurse Corps during the Vietnam War before her promotion to general.
GREENE: She reflected on that promotion in a video for the Army Heritage Center Foundation.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARMY HERITAGE CENTER FOUNDATION VIDEO)
ANNA MAE HAYS: Well, it really was something, you know, to have stars on your shoulders because a woman didn't have those. This was impossible. No one ever thought it was going to happen.
INSKEEP: Anna Mae Hays, the first American woman to be an Army general, who died this week at 97.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOONCAKE'S "NOVOROSSIYSK 1968")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
And I'm Steve Inskeep with the tiniest of steps toward peace on the Korean Peninsula. Instead of talking about nuclear weapons, North and South Korea are talking of the Olympics. North Korea will send a delegation to the Winter Games in the South that includes athletes, government leaders, possibly even a cheering squad. That announcement emerged from the first direct talks between the two Koreas in more than two years. South Korea's unification minister, Cho Myoung-gyon, welcomed this move. He's speaking here through an interpreter.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHO MYOUNG-GYON: (Through interpreter) As lots of countries, including athletes from North Korea, will participate in the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics and Paralympics. It will be a successful festival for peace.
INSKEEP: NPR's Elise Hu is covering this story for us, joins us from Seoul.
Hi, Elise.
ELISE HU, BYLINE: Hey there.
INSKEEP: So what was it like when the negotiators sat down together?
HU: It was a great moment to see because we haven't had the two Koreas come together in about two years now. Only the first part of the dialogue was open to the press, but from what the cameras caught, both - diplomats on both sides were in upbeat moods. They seemed earnest about trying to make a deal at the outset. Now, to get to the meeting, the chief North Korean negotiator had to just walk right over the border in a black suit, no coat.
He was flanked by other North Korean officials, surrounded by a pool of cameras. He continued being trailed by these cameras as he headed into the building where South Korean negotiators were waiting for him. Once they got inside, the two sides were on - both side - or on two sides of a long rectangular table facing each other. And the opening conversation was about the weather.
INSKEEP: Of course, because he left his coat behind, as you pointed out. So it's on his mind, but anyway, go on, go on.
HU: (Laughter) Yeah, the negotiator from the North, Ri, he talked about how inter-Korean relations were more frozen than the typical climate.
INSKEEP: Uh-huh.
HU: ...But that the will of the people is that those relations thaw. So he used a metaphor there at the outset.
INSKEEP: OK, so what did they manage to thaw in the opening hours of these talks?
HU: Well, that main question about the Olympics participation is resolved. North Korea said it will send a delegation to the games in Pyeongchang, which is in South Korea, next month. That is likely to include a figure skating pair that recently qualified. North and South Korea also agreed just recently to reopen another hotline, a military hotline that connects the two countries in the Yellow Sea that had been shut down. So that was other progress that was made in the talks.
INSKEEP: Elise, I know all of this is choreographed. But did anything surprise you so far?
HU: North Korea actually tried to make the meeting more transparent. That was a surprise, I think, to the South Korean side, too. The North Korean negotiator brought up in the opening session the possibility of, hey, maybe we should live broadcast this because there's so much interest in this meeting. South Korean negotiators were calm in their reaction, saying that, hey, that's a reasonable request, but that it would actually prefer to keep things closed since the two sides hadn't met in a long time and they wanted things to go smoothly. Some analysts I spoke with believe the South actually reacted this way because they know the North is quite savvy in playing optics and propaganda.
INSKEEP: Ooh - thought that they might get taken advantage of. Let me just ask, how does all of this peaceful talk and collaboration fit in with this broader dialogue about North Korea's nuclear program, and the presidents of North Korea and the United States talking about their nuclear buttons?
HU: Right. North Korea is extremely practiced in posturing. The American president is also quite effective with his Twitter messages and posturing that's - or what's seen as posturing. Now, the substantive work here on the relationship is being done by South Korea and North Korea. The U.S. isn't a party to these discussions, but to the extent that tensions are dialed down by South Korea's diplomacy work, then they do dial down tensions for everyone, despite all of the rhetoric coming out of Washington and Pyongyang.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Elise Hu in Seoul. Elise, thanks very much.
HU: You bet.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Here's a court case illustrating some of the tensions of our time. A former Google engineer filed a lawsuit against the company saying he's a victim of workplace discrimination and retaliation. He says Google discriminates against conservative white men. Here's NPR's Laura Sydell.
LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE: Last year, an engineer at Google named James Damore wrote a long criticism to Google's HR team about the company's diversity program. In it, he cited studies that he said suggests that biology rather than discrimination is the reason there are fewer women engineers at Google. When his essay found its way to the public, there was a storm on social media. Ultimately, Google fired Damore. Harmeet Dhillon, Damore's attorney, says Damore was encouraged at Google to share his opinion, and he shouldn't have been fired for it.
HARMEET DHILLON: They had this vague, gestalt response, saying he perpetuated gender stereotypes. Well, Google perpetuates negative gender stereotypes about men every day.
SYDELL: The case was filed in California's Superior Court. Dhillon says in California it's illegal to discriminate against someone because of their political opinion. Damore is joined in the suit by other employees who Dhillon says were fired because of their political opinions.
DHILLON: It's equally offensive to me to hear that white people should get rid of their toxic whiteness at Google. That's offensive. But nobody gets fired for saying that.
SYDELL: Google did not respond to requests for comment. However, when Damore was fired, Google's CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google employees can express themselves, but that doesn't mean that anything goes. Deborah Rhode, a law professor at Stanford, says what the case is likely to pivot on is whether the comments of Damore, and the others bringing the lawsuit, made it a hostile work environment. She says women and minorities have special protections under the law.
DEBORAH RHODE: There's also a whole line of cases on what creates a hostile environment, and verbal conduct can do that.
SYDELL: Ironically, Google is facing this suit while at the same time it's fighting claims that it has systematically underpaid women. Laura Sydell, NPR News.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
When a series of deadly earthquakes hit El Salvador in 2001, President George W. Bush extended Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, to nearly 200,000 Salvadorans. This allowed them to live and work in the U.S.. The Trump administration announced yesterday it was revoking that status, arguing that the program was meant to be temporary and that the country recovered from those earthquakes.
Now Salvadorans under TPS have until September 2019 to either leave the United States or obtain legal residency, and this group includes our next guest. Yanira Arias is with the immigration advocacy group Alianza Americas. She faced violence as a journalist in El Salvador and came to the U.S. in 2000. She later got that Temporary Protected Status. She told me this morning that TPS has allowed her to send money back to her elderly parents, also her brothers and their families.
YANIRA ARIAS: Since my eldest brother is a parent of three teenagers, that money's not been only a lifeline for his bills but also for making sure my nephews and niece go to school and have food. So I can definitely tell you that if TPS comes to an end in September 2019, my family will be in very difficult situation without my support.
GREENE: I wonder what the last 24 hours have been like for you since you heard the announcement that the program would be ending.
ARIAS: It's been a very difficult situation. Being a part of an organization such as Alianza Americas, organizing communities around the country and meeting the stories of thousands of TPS recipients, I know there are thousands of families that are fearing to be torn apart by the termination of TPS.
GREENE: And what are your personal plans now? Are you going to go back to El Salvador?
ARIAS: First, we have 18 months to continue the push for a potential legislation. As an organizer, my first thought is that this is an announcement. Next step, we need to go to the streets, continue to organize and see what we can achieve, continue to reach out to elected officials in both chambers, in both parties. I will take a decision down the road, but my hope is we will find a legislative solution.
GREENE: If your legal options run out, could you see a future in El Salvador?
ARIAS: It's a very difficult question to answer. My - I am 45 years old right now, and it's very hard for you to find a job in El Salvador if you're over 30. We don't have good jobs. Needless to say, we have a high rate of violence. And although we no longer have some of the buildings that were destroyed by the earthquake in 2001, but the economy is in rubbles. Therefore, I don't see a future.
GREENE: I wonder if there is someone listening to your story and finds it incredibly compelling and wants the best for you but accepts the argument from the Trump administration that this was a temporary program, and that this is a country with not endless resources and if a very difficult decision like this has to come, that the administration might be following the law here. What is your message to that person?
ARIAS: Well, the only thing that we are seeking here is that after many years under the government support is that we can find a solution. The Department of Homeland Security said it - President Trump said it, as well - that only Congress can find a solution to this issue. For anyone listening to this story, we believe it's in the values and the history of the United States of welcoming communities fleeing violence and looking for a better opportunity. And I am very confident that we can find support in the floors of Congress.
GREENE: Thank you so much for talking to us and taking the time.
ARIAS: Thank you for the invitation.
GREENE: Yanira Arias is with the immigration advocacy group Alianza Americas, speaking to us on Skype.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Georgia and Florida have been fighting over water for nearly 30 years. Florida says Georgia uses too much from the rivers that the states share, and this week this fight escalated all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Molly Samuel from member station WABE in Atlanta was at yesterday's oral arguments.
MOLLY SAMUEL, BYLINE: Florida is suing Georgia. It says that Atlanta homes and businesses and South Georgia farms consume too much water, so much that it's hurt the environment and the fishing industry in the Florida Panhandle. The Apalachicola Bay is famous for its oysters, but it's in rough shape. In 2012 following a drought, the federal government declared the fishery a disaster, and people down there say it's never really recovered.
DAN TONSMEIRE: Florida has to have more water.
SAMUEL: Dan Tonsmeire is with the Florida environmental group Apalachicola RiverKeeper.
TONSMEIRE: The only place to get that is for Georgia to use less.
SAMUEL: So Florida asked the Supreme Court to limit how much water Georgia is allowed to use. The court designated a man known as a special master to hear evidence in the case and to make a recommendation. His name is Ralph Lancaster. Last year he suggested that the court deny Florida's request for a cap on Georgia's water use. But he wasn't totally siding with Georgia. Lancaster agreed with Florida that the Apalachicola Bay and its oyster industry are in trouble and that Georgia has managed water irresponsibly. But here's the sticking point. Lancaster didn't agree that limiting Georgia's water use would fix anything because there are a bunch of dams in this river system, and they're managed by the federal government. The Army Corps of Engineers decides how much water flows out of those dams into Florida. Lancaster says capping Georgia's water use wouldn't change that amount.
During arguments yesterday, not all of the justices seemed to buy that. Justice Ginsburg asked if there wasn't something the court could do to help Florida's Apalachicola Bay or at least keep the situation from getting any worse. Gil Rogers is an attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, who attended the arguments.
GIL ROGERS: That may spell the fact that the court is willing to allow Florida to have another go of proving its case and showing how changes in Georgia could benefit things on the Florida side of the line.
SAMUEL: The justices don't have to take the special master's recommendation. They could side with Florida or send the case back to the special master in the states to tell them to gather more evidence. Tonsmeire, from Florida's Apalachicola Riverkeeper, says he hopes the justices rule in a way that would get the states to sit down, and, after decades of fighting, finally agree on a solution.
TONSMEIRE: The litigation has made both collaboration and communication almost impossible for so many years.
SAMUEL: Whatever the ruling in this case, it won't be the end of the water wars in the Southeast. In recent years, even more lawsuits have been filed over how to manage this water. For NPR News, I'm Molly Samuel.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep with a home repair project gone wrong. In the freezing weather in Taneytown, Md., a building suffered frozen pipes and a maintenance worker did what anybody might. He turned a hairdryer on them. When that didn't thaw the pipes, he switched to a blowtorch. It took 90 firefighters to put out the resulting fire, which caused $300,000 in damage.
And it was apparently 1 of 2 frozen pipe-related fires in the same area. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Two of Apple's biggest investors don't like what Apple products do to kids. One investor is called Jana Partners. The other is the California State Teachers Retirement System. And they wrote an open letter to the company. It says smartphones are especially addictive for kids, and they want Apple to give parents more tools to protect children. The investors were advised by our next guest, Dr. Michael Rich who runs the Center on Media and Child Health at Boston Children's Hospital. Good morning, sir.
MICHAEL RICH: Good morning.
INSKEEP: Is addictive the right word for an iPhone?
RICH: I do not believe addictive is simply because not only are we not seeing physiologic changes either when using or withdrawing, as you do with alcohol or heroin, but we're calling it problematic interactive media use for the reasons that they do get functionally impaired. They lose sleep. They place it as a priority over other activities and often will withdraw themselves from society, from families, from friends in order to stay online. So while these behaviors look much like addiction, it's actually not an accurate term, nor is it one that's helpful because of it's stigma.
INSKEEP: OK, so let's not say addiction. But let's say it's a problem and something that you could find in my family if you looked around the kids in my family from time to time. But let's talk about who's responsible for fixing that. I mean, you have this device that's designed to be really easy and pleasant to use, and there are all kinds of apps, which have been deliberately designed to get people hooked on them. What is Apple's responsibility when that phone gets into the hands of a child?
RICH: Well, I think it's all of our responsibility as individuals and as a society to address this. Apple has a part in that because they are brilliant designers not only of the technology but of the interface between the human psychology, the human mind, eye and finger and this thinking machine. So the goal of this letter, as I understand it, is to bring together the stakeholders - bringing their different expertise together to really think this problem through, working with the science that I and other researchers have put together and working with the technology to come up with a better mousetrap here.
INSKEEP: Is the answer that I as a parent might have better tools to monitor the phone than perhaps my kid has in his or her hands?
RICH: Absolutely, given the tools - but also the education and empowerment to use them. I think that what's happened is because many parents feel less adequate or less facile in that digital environment than their children, is that they check out of parenting in that space.
INSKEEP: You know, that raises one other thing I want to ask you about. Anya Kamenetz, our education reporter, has talked a lot about screen time for kids on this program and has noted that you can argue that screen time is good for kids if it's interactive, if it makes them think and if the parents are participating with the kids in some way.
RICH: Exactly. You know, this is really a tool just as, you know, a walk in the woods is a tool or a blackboard and a piece of chalk is a tool. We have to realize that the human element is what matters here. And whether that's a parent, whether that's a teacher, whether that's a clinician, we need to use these tools and keep them in their role in the children's lives. And ultimately what we owe our children is a rich and diverse menu of experience of which media can be one.
INSKEEP: Would you keep a phone away from a kid?
RICH: It depends on the age of the kid, and it depends on the kid.
INSKEEP: What age?
RICH: I think that, first of all, we have to give different tools to different kids at different developmental stages. And very early use, preschoolers, et cetera, they will get attracted and sucked into it, but they will not be able to regulate themselves.
INSKEEP: Dr. Michael Rich, thanks very much - appreciate it.
RICH: Thank you.
INSKEEP: And Apple has responded saying it takes responsibility for its products and is committed to exceeding customers' expectations, especially when it comes to protecting kids.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The University of Alabama won the national football title again. It's the fifth time in a decade, and the game was dramatic. It began with some political protests and ended in overtime before the Crimson Tide beat the Georgia Bulldogs 26-23. Here's Ross Terrell of our member station WABE.
ROSS TERRELL, BYLINE: Before the game started, President Trump took the spotlight. He was greeted by protesters outside the stadium, including Isabel Hidalgo.
ISABEL HIDALGO: Basically, we don't want him to think he can just come here without anybody saying, we don't like you. We want you impeached. You're nuts. Get out of our town.
TERRELL: Inside, he stood on the field for the national anthem where he was met with applause and boos.
(CHEERING, BOOING)
TERRELL: But then it was time for the main event - the national championship game. It was a raucous crowd as the game began.
(CHEERING)
TERRELL: And Georgia jumped out to a 13 to zero lead at halftime. Defensive player of the game Da'Ron Payne says something changed in the Alabama locker room at half.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DA'RON PAYNE: I think we went in and Coach Saban told us that we needed to tighten things up. And I guess the team heard Coach and we came out and tried to play our best ball.
TERRELL: In the third quarter, Alabama head Coach Nick Saban rolled the dice and came up big. He benched their starting quarterback for a true freshman, Tua Tagovailoa.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
NICK SABAN: I thought Tua would give us a better chance and a spark, which he certainly did.
TERRELL: Tagovailoa led the Crimson Tide to their first touchdown of the game about six minutes into the third quarter. UGA responded with a touchdown of their own, but Alabama scored the next 13 points of the game to tie it at 20 apiece. They missed a field goal that would've won it in regulation but instead finished the job in overtime.
(CHEERING)
TERRELL: Tua threw a game-winning 41-yard touchdown pass to fellow freshman, DeVonta Smith.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DEVONTA SMITH: I looked back out and he was wide open, so I hit him and now here we are now. Thank God.
TERRELL: It was the freshmen that helped win it all. That turned out to be the play and the story of the game. Alabama coach Nick Saban says he can't remember a time when they had to rely on so many young players to win a matchup.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SABAN: A lot of those guys are really mature for their age, and they were ready to make contribution. And they certainly did a fantastic job for us this year. There's no doubt about that.
TERRELL: With the win, Saban remains undefeated against former assistant coaches. He's now 12 and zero. This time, he knocked off Georgia head coach Kirby Smart, who worked with Saban for nine years at Alabama. The Crimson Tide claimed their 17th national title. For NPR News, I'm Ross Terrell in Atlanta.
(SOUNDBITE OF MENAHAN STREET BAND'S "GOING THE DISTANCE")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The #MeToo campaign forced many industries into a moral reckoning over sexual harassment and abuse.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
But video game developer Brianna Wu says she's still waiting for the gaming industry to take a hard look at itself. Back in 2014, Wu and several other female gamers endured a campaign of harassment and abuse that was dubbed Gamergate. The FBI investigated but no one was prosecuted.
BRIANNA WU: I can tell you in 2018 looking back at it, nothing of note really happened. We expected help to come, and it didn't.
INSKEEP: Here's something that is happening in 2018 - Brianna Wu is running for Congress in the state of Massachusetts. She spoke with our co-host, Rachel Martin.
WU: The video game industry traditionally has been a very male-dominated field. You know, with the advent of the iPhone, the number of women gamers exploded. We're actually more than half of gamers in 2018. And Gamergate was kind of a very aggressive backlash to that growing diversity. And what ended up happening is women like myself that have been advocating for greater inclusion in our field, we received just an extreme avalanche of death threats and rape threats and really the destruction of our personal lives in a way that was just horrifying for many people to watch.
RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: So now we are in this #MeToo moment and the associated movement around this larger social reckoning about sexual abuse and sexual harassment in the broader culture. Is that changing things when it comes to online harassment and abuse?
WU: You know, it's hard for me because I want to have a hopeful message, especially for young women that are out there listening to this, but when it comes to the game industry itself, we are not having a #MeToo moment at all. I think what a lot of women in the game industry saw with Gamergate is they saw if they came forward, help was not going to come. They saw that they will be out there on the front lines and, you know, you'll certainly have journalists that are happy to capture the spectacle. But as far as change, as far as getting backup from the industry, I think that they are scared to come forward because so many women have had their careers destroyed trying to come forward. So what I need is I need our investigative institutions to start looking at game studios. Look at the hiring, look at the culture, look at who makes it up the food chain. Because we've really created a culture of silence in my field that is very similar to why Harvey Weinstein was able to go for so long unchecked.
MARTIN: So what are the broader implications if sexual harassment, gender-based abuse online isn't curtailed?
WU: So if you look historically at what engineering is, you know, engineers build societies. That is what we do. So when you have an entire field of engineering and STEM where women are kind of just shown the door very subtly, what that means is that women don't get a voice in how society is running. So I think what you're seeing with the Internet right now where it's an institution that was created by men for men, and there are a lot of voices that weren't heard in the creation of that. So when we're talking about women being able to pursue STEM careers, we're really talking about women having a voice in how online systems function.
MARTIN: Brianna, thanks so much.
WU: Always a pleasure.
(SOUNDBITE OF SABREPULSE'S "TAKEN")
INSKEEP: Game developer and congressional candidate Brianna Wu talking with our colleague, Rachel Martin.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The president of the United States spent part of Monday addressing what he trusted was a supportive audience - farmers at a meeting in Nashville.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Oh, are you happy you voted for me.
(LAUGHTER)
TRUMP: You are so lucky that I gave you that privilege.
INSKEEP: It was a campaign-style appearance, and it happens while an investigation of the 2016 election gets closer to some conclusion. Several past Trump campaign aides were indicted or pleaded guilty as a special counsel examines Russians - Russia's involvement in the election. NBC News first reported that special counsel Robert Muller is thinking of interviewing President Trump himself. NPR's Mara Liasson has been traveling with the president.
Hi, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: I'm just thinking, Mara, the president's staff decided against sending him out for a year-end news conference. They don't like him answering a lot of questions. What are the odds they'd willingly submit to an interview by the special counsel?
LIASSON: Well, the president's lawyers say they are cooperating with the special counsel. We don't know if Robert Mueller is, as he has been reported to be, ready to interview the president. If he is, that would mean he's probably getting to the end of his investigation, something that the president's lawyers have been predicting. But if he does want to interview the president, there probably would be a series of negotiations that would ensue about under what terms, and would it be in writing, would it be in person, et cetera.
INSKEEP: We should remember, though, whatever the president says to a federal investigator - whatever a citizen says to a federal investigator - it has to be the truth, right? It'd be a crime to lie to a federal investigator.
LIASSON: Absolutely. And that's how presidents in the past have sometimes gotten in trouble in investigations.
INSKEEP: So that is looming over the president as he begins 2018, but he is trying to get started with legislation in 2018, which he talked about a little bit in this speech to farmers. He spoke of immigration policy yesterday in Tennessee. Let's hear just a little bit of what he had to say.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: We are going to end chain migration. We are going to end the lottery system, and we are going to build the wall.
INSKEEP: OK - chain migration, lottery system, building the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border - but this is a negotiation where he needs Democratic votes. What's in that for Democrats?
LIASSON: That's right. This is a negotiation over a deal that, presumably, would legalize the DREAMers, those young people who, in many cases, were brought here illegally as children by their parents. And what the president just did is lay out his demands for legalizing the DREAMers. Now, Democrats and Republicans both say that there is a compromise to be had, and it would presumably be some kind of a deal where the president could say he got a wall and Democrats would say he didn't get a wall, but what we don't know yet is, what does a wall mean? Is it more than just border security?
And it was interesting that Republican Senator Jim Lankford, who was at the White House last week for a Republicans-only immigration meeting, tweeted about the wall the other day where he said that there is no plan to build a 2,500-mile concrete wall. There are places where fencing or drones or more border agents would be more effective. These are all things he pointed out that Democrats have voted for in the wall. So what he's trying to say is a wall doesn't mean a big physical barrier. What we don't know is what does the president think he needs politically in terms of a wall.
INSKEEP: Of course, there's already a fence over hundreds of miles...
LIASSON: Yes...
INSKEEP: ...Of border...
LIASSON: ...There's already a fence.
INSKEEP: ...Security measures. I want to ask about one other thing, Mara Liasson, because I want to talk about big, one-name stars in politics. Now, when I think of big, one-name stars, I think of Mara just for starters...
LIASSON: Ah, thank you.
INSKEEP: ...But there's also Oprah. What do you make of Oprah being talked about as a potential candidate?
LIASSON: Well, Oprah made a very powerful speech at the Golden Globes, and all of a sudden, Twitter was atwitter with Oprah running for president in 2020...
INSKEEP: Twitter was atwitter...
LIASSON: ...With her partner encouraged, and the president's spokesperson, the other day, said that Trump is running for re-election and he welcomes all comers. But what's interesting is back in 1999, Trump said that he wanted to run for president and his first choice for vice president would be Oprah. He said, she's great. We'll win.
INSKEEP: (Laughter) But, you know, the president can change his mind. Sometimes he...
LIASSON: Yes...
INSKEEP: ...Does it.
LIASSON: Yes. And he does.
INSKEEP: Well, Mara, thanks very much, really appreciate it.
LIASSON: Thank you.
INSKEEP: That's Mara, also known as NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We're going to introduce you now to a man named Usama Canon. He's a Muslim preacher, and he has developed a significant following by helping American Muslims - from youths to converts to inmates - explore and understand Islam in their daily lives. Usama Canon now faces a new challenge. He's discovered that he has Lou Gehrig's disease or ALS. NPR's Leila Fadel spent some time with him.
LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: Usama Canon has this laid-back West Coast vibe. He wears a beanie and prayer beads wrapped around his wrist like a thick bracelet. And he sits on the floor.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Singing in foreign language).
FADEL: A drum circle sings praises of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad at Ta’leef Collective's Chicago campus. It's one of two, The other in Northern California. It's part lecture hall, part sanctuary, part gathering space. Mint tea is served on gold trays as incense burns and Canon begins to teach us.
USAMA CANON: If you find yourself religious but your religiosity has led you to be unkind or to be less than loving or less than patient, then you're doing something wrong.
FADEL: He's the California-born son of a black Baptist father and a white Christian mother. He became Muslim in 1996, embracing the faith through hip-hop and a pursuit of social justice. He spent many years working as a Muslim chaplain in the California prison system, calling those prisoners some of his greatest teachers. On a car ride on a rainy night, Canon describes Ta'leef.
CANON: It's rooted in the idea that Islam is not a foreign thing, and Islam is not suspect, and Islam is not malignant. Granted, I mean, there's all this insanity in the world, and there are Muslims doing the same things. But the core of the religion is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
FADEL: After studying with Islamic scholars in the U.S. and then abroad, his teachers convinced him to start Ta'leef over a decade ago.
CANON: Ta'leef was born. And so I just did what I knew how to do, which was like feed people and talk to them and hang out with them and hold them in a non-judgmental way.
FADEL: Zareena Grewal calls Canon unique. His online lectures have made him a global figure. She teaches at Yale University and writes extensively about U.S. Muslims.
ZAREENA GREWAL: He understands that there is a need for affirmation. Muslims feel really lonely. Pressures on the community often manifest in Muslim infighting, of feeling judged.
FADEL: She says he's been successful creating a third space between the mosque and home that is unreservedly welcoming, especially for young or new Muslims who feel judged by non-Muslims as a threat and then judged inside their own communities on whether they're Muslim enough. More than half of U.S. Muslims came of age after 9/11. Also, he makes Islam look cool, Grewal says, in the way he dresses - bow ties, pocket squares, lush fabrics - and the way he speaks, slipping from references to hip-hop to personal stories to quotes from the Quran.
GREWAL: It's really modeling a much more kind of expansive vision of what it means to be an ethical Muslim, and that to prove your piety, you don't need to don a turban or bow your head and be very quiet. You can have a little swag. You can be cool.
FADEL: Twenty-four-year-old Fatima Saleck met Canon at a Ta'leef mentorship program. The college student was struggling. Muslim extremists committing acts of violence left her angry and confused. Canon helped restore her faith, reminding her that humans are capable of bad and capable of good.
FATIMA SALECK: The connection that he gave us was so authentic. There's no facade behind it. There's no, oh, I'm a teacher, and I have studied overseas. It was just, hey, my name is Usama, and I understand what you're talking about.
FADEL: That authenticity is his greatest appeal says acclaimed Muslim hip-hop artist Brother Ali. He says Canon taught him there isn't just one way to be a good Muslim. Everyone has their role, and Brother Ali recalls Canon telling him his is his music. That message inspired his most recent album.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "UNCLE USI TAUGHT ME")
BROTHER ALI: (Rapping) Uncle Usi taught me - can't teach what you don't know, can't lead where you don't go.
FADEL: But Canon's disease, ALS, will eventually steal the voice he uses to teach and paralyze his body. He talks about sharing the diagnosis.
CANON: And then folks showing up. And it was almost kind of being a ghost in the room. I'm like, dude, I'm not dead yet, dude. Like, I'm right here. Like, why are we pre-mourning?
FADEL: His first thought when to his five kids. He may never see them marry. Most people die within 3 to 5 years of finding out. And with a time limit on his life, he thinks about the things that drive his faith and his work - orphans, the homeless, a prison system he sees as broken.
CANON: When we do this thing called community, we put our own twist on it. And the twist I put on it is a Northern Californian mixed kid who comes from a hip-hop, reggae, hacky-sacking, boogie-boarding...
FADEL: He reflects on what he's created.
CANON: It's only as lasting as the women and men that have hopefully benefited and learned.
FADEL: The next day, Mansoor Kazi of Ta'leef Chicago introduces Canon to a crowd of hundreds.
MANSOOR KAZI: Anyone in the audience that believes that Usama has also had a significant impact in their life, please stand.
FADEL: Every person stands. Leila Fadel, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "UNCLE USI TAUGHT ME")
BROTHER ALI: (Rapping) Uncle Usi taught me - can't teach what you don't know, can't lead where you don't go.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PAPA'S GOT A BRAND NEW BAG (PART 1)")
JAMES BROWN: (Singing) Come here, sister.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
James Brown once said, I've only got a seventh-grade education, but I have a doctorate in funk, and I like to put that to good use.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PAPA'S GOT A BRAND NEW BAG (PART 1)")
BROWN: (Singing) He ain't no drag. Papa's got a brand-new bag.
MARTIN: James Brown taught the funk, and his students flourished - George Clinton in the '70s, Morris Day in the '80s.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE BIRD")
MORRIS DAY AND THE TIME: (Vocalizing) Hallelujah. (Singing) Oh...
MARTIN: Now a brand-new Funk Music Hall of Fame is preparing for its big ribbon-cutting this spring. And where would that be? Why, Dayton, Ohio, of course.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE BIRD")
MORRIS DAY AND THE TIME: (Yelling) Squawk (ph).
MARTIN: OK, that took us by surprise, too.
DAVID WEBB: Dayton is the funkiest place on earth.
MARTIN: So says David Webb - he's the president and CEO of The Funk Music Hall of Fame. He was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio's sixth largest city. And it turns out that's not just civic pride talking. He's actually right. But before we make the case for Dayton, we asked him to walk us through an audio tour of the Hall of Fame, and it starts at a giant mural, a wall of famous faces peering back at us. David Webb calls it "Mount Funkmore."
WEBB: Isaac Hayes, Sly Stone, James Brown, from Prince to Roger Troutman - and they're in the clouds in heaven.
MARTIN: Walk past that and you see one glass display case after another filled with outrageous shiny outfits and vintage instruments.
WEBB: And Sly and the Family Stone's guitars, Roger Troutman's lit-up guitar - it's so much memorabilia here. It's tremendous, tremendous.
MARTIN: David Webb has been working on this for more than 10 years. It is a labor of love, and like many Dayton kids before him, that love affair started with one local band, the Ohio Players.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FIRE")
OHIO PLAYERS: (Singing) Fire. What I said, child - ow.
MARTIN: In the mid-'70s, the Ohio Players had a nationwide No. 1 hit with "Fire," followed by another one, "Love Rollercoaster."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOVE ROLLERCOASTER")
OHIO PLAYERS: (Singing) Roller coaster of love. Loving you is really crazy. Oohoo-hoo-hoo (ph).
MARTIN: The success of the Ohio Players encouraged other Dayton kids to try their hands at making funk music, and that set off an explosion of hit-makers.
WEBB: Dayton has so many groups out of here, like Slave.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SLIDE")
SLAVE: (Singing) Slide, slide. Why don't you slide?
WEBB: ...Lakeside...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FANTASTIC VOYAGE")
LAKESIDE: (Singing) Come along and ride on a fantastic voyage.
WEBB: ...Sun, Zapp, Roger, Dayton, Platypus. I could go on and go on.
MARTIN: Wait a minute, Platypus?
WEBB: Platypus was with - we can walk over this way a little bit. Platypus is with Casablanca Records back in the day. They were on the label with Kiss - remember the group Kiss? - Donna Summers (ph). Yeah, Platypus - they did a song, "Dancing In The Moonlight." We have their outfits right here. We're standing in front of their outfits.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DANCING IN THE MOONLIGHT")
PLATYPUS: (Singing) Is it any wonder? Dance and dance and groove (ph). I like dancing in the moonlight.
MARTIN: So who knew Dayton is the city that made us one nation under a groove?
WEBB: As the great Marshall Jones of the Ohio Players says, God stepped his foot in the Miami Valley, and the sweat off of God's feet - that's what made it funky.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MORE BOUNCE TO THE OUNCE")
ZAPP: More bounce.
MARTIN: That's David Webb, the president and CEO of the new Funk Music Hall of Fame and Exhibition Center in Dayton, Ohio. It's open by appointment now. The grand opening's coming once it warms up a little bit. We asked David Webb what the 20 most essential funk songs of all time are, and he curated a playlist for us. You can check that out at our website, NPRmusic.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MORE BOUNCE TO THE OUNCE")
ZAPP: More bounce to the ounce - much more bounce. More bounce to the ounce. Yeah.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Before he was banned for gambling, baseball player Pete Rose was famous for the headfirst slide, the definition of a player who puts it all out on the field. Here's an Olympic sport that consists entirely of a headfirst slide. Competitors at the Olympics in South Korea will ride sleds on their stomachs headfirst 90 miles an hour. NPR's Melissa Block met Americans training for skeleton.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Sled in track, sled in track from start one. This is Katie Uhlaender.
KATIE UHLAENDER: Hi, I'm Katie Uhlaender - three-time Olympian, World Cup champion and world champion for the sport of skeleton.
(SOUNDBITE OF SLED ROLLING)
UHLAENDER: I go headfirst on ice, and I love it.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Katie U. will be through curve 19, crossing the finish line with a down time of 55.61.
MELISSA BLOCK, BYLINE: That's right. In the time it's taken us to get this far in this story - 55 seconds - a skeleton athlete will have hurdled down a mile-long track headfirst, face-down, at speeds up to 90 miles an hour.
UHLAENDER: It is the perfect combination of meathead and freestyle as an athlete. Honestly, like, and I think due to my short attention span, it suits me well.
BLOCK: Katie Uhlaender is 33, her hair dyed a vivid crimson. Growing up, she competed in just about everything - skiing, powerlifting, track, baseball.
UHLAENDER: Yeah. I played baseball all the way until I realized I was 5-foot-3 and female and the major leagues were a far reach (laughter).
BLOCK: After high school, she turned to skeleton and found it was a natural fit. She zoomed up the ranks super fast. When she's racing, Uhlaender loves submitting to her fear, embracing it.
UHLAENDER: I start chasing the speed and just dancing with the curves. It's like those dreams where you're flying, except if you mess up here, you're going to hit a wall (laughter).
BLOCK: Speaking of which, picture this scene a few years back. Another skeleton athlete, Savannah Graybill, is racing right here in Lake Placid. It's the first time her parents have come to watch her race. They're standing just inches away, watching as her sled slams into a wall and hits a patch of exposed concrete.
SAVANNAH GRAYBILL: And sparks fly everywhere.
BLOCK: Her folks run to the finish line terrified.
GRAYBILL: And they're freaking out, you know. We just saw sparks. We saw you come through here. We thought you were dead. I'm like, oh, no. It was fine. And they're just, you know, looking at me like, what are you - you're crazy. You're literally crazy.
BLOCK: So is it as scary as it looks?
MATT ANTOINE: Watching skeleton is maybe a little more scary than actually doing skeleton. Even for myself, sometimes when I'm going watching other sleds go down the track, I don't even realize how fast we're going.
BLOCK: This is skeleton racer and Olympic bronze medalist Matt Antoine.
ANTOINE: I think maybe you have to have a little bit of fear because you always have to be on your toes in this sport. When you're moving 80, 90 miles an hour, you can't get lazy.
(SOUNDBITE OF SLED ROLLING)
BLOCK: After you dive onto the sled, you have to mold your body into it and relax. Staying as still as you can, going 90 miles an hour, you steer with small movements of your shoulders and knees. Your feet hang off the back, your head and neck off the front. Your chin is just an inch or two off the ice.
ANTOINE: Obviously, you don't want your face scraping across the ice because it does slow you down, but it also doesn't feel good.
BLOCK: You keep your head aerodynamically low so you can only see a few feet in front of you. But you've memorized the course ahead of time, visualized the curves and planned your lines.
UHLAENDER: For me, I feel the ice move under my chest, so that's how I can feel the pressures and know how to direct my sled.
BLOCK: Again, Katie Uhlaender.
UHLAENDER: And I almost visualize myself from a bird's eye point of view of where I want to end up and I somehow end up there. It's like the force.
BLOCK: As another skeleton athlete tells me, we get to go 90 miles an hour headfirst - that never gets old.
Melissa Block, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
OK, arguments start today in a big voting rights case before the Supreme Court. The case centers on an Ohio law that is meant to clean out the state's voting registry. The law says if you don't vote in two straight elections, and if you don't respond to a letter confirming your address, you're out - can't vote. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Larry Harmon is ticked off. He thinks the state of Ohio is trying to pull a fast one to get voters off the rolls. He normally votes in presidential election years but not the midterms. But in 2012, neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney rang his chime, so he decided not to vote. When he did decide to vote, a few years later, he found he was no longer registered. He'd been purged from the voter rolls because he hadn't voted in the previous two elections.
LARRY HARMON: I kind of got angry. I'd been paying taxes and doing all the things required of me to be a good citizen. But they had turned me away and taken away my right to vote.
TOTENBERG: He says he doesn't remember getting any sort of mailed request from the state to confirm his voting address. After all, he says, he's lived at the same address for more than 16 years. And he and his neighbors often get each other's mail.
HARMON: I don't know why they trusted the U.S. mail, you know, unless they were going to send me a registered letter.
TOTENBERG: Besides which, he notes, there are lots of other ways to check addresses - by checking tax forms, property tax listings and driver's licenses - to name just a few. I've earned the right to vote, says the Navy veteran.
HARMON: Whether I use it or not, you know, is up to my personal discretion. They don't take away my right to buy a gun if I don't buy a gun.
TOTENBERG: So he sued the state, represented by Demos, a liberal public policy organization. And he won. The lower court said that Ohio's voter purge law violates the National Voter Registration Act, better known as the motor voter law. The law is aimed at making voter registration easier. And it says that while states should take steps to keep their voting rolls up to date and accurate, they may not remove people from the rolls, quote, "by reason of a person's failure to vote."
Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine declined to be interviewed for this broadcast, but the state claims that it's not using failure to vote as the reason for striking Larry Harmon and thousands of other voters from the rolls. Rather, it says, it is striking from the rolls those who do not vote for two years and who fail to confirm their registration at the same address over the next two years. Harmon and his lawyers contend that the trigger for removal is in fact the failure to vote in two consecutive elections.
Twelve states, largely controlled by Democratic officeholders, have filed briefs supporting Harmon. They all point to methods, they say, are far more effective than unregistered mail for ascertaining whether someone has changed his or her legal voting address. And they point to other reasons people may have temporarily moved but not changed their voting address, including military service. Nineteen states, largely controlled by Republican officeholders, are supporting Ohio's position though none has a law as aggressive as Ohio's in seeking to verify the voter registry. Stuart Naifeh, who will argue the case for Larry Harmon today, notes that both Democratic and Republican secretaries of state have used this system in Ohio for decades.
STUART NAIFEH: We don't believe it's a partisan case. We believe that what Ohio is doing is unlawful under the National Voter Registration Act, regardless of the party of the secretary of state.
TOTENBERG: Failure to vote is not unusual in this country. In 2016, 29 percent of the registered voters in Ohio failed to vote. And nationwide, the number was even higher - more than a third according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Lawyers arguing against the Ohio voter purge system note that once you miss two federal elections in that state, if you go to vote and cast a provisional ballot, that ballot will not be counted because you're no longer registered. The irony is that by casting a provisional ballot and swearing to your address, you will be able to vote in the next election.
Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOEY FEHRENBACH'S "EDISON CYLINDER")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Philadelphia is looking at a new tool to fight opioid addictions - supervised injection sites. That's where people can safely inject heroin or other opioids under medical supervision. It would be the first such site in the U.S., as Bobby Allyn of member station WHYY reports.
BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: It's a divisive idea - letting people shoot up with clean needles and their own drugs while under the watch of medical staff. Advocates say this form of harm reduction can be a bridge to treatment. There are 90 such facilities around the world, and Philadelphia might just be uniquely positioned to host the nation's first. Opioids were the main driver in what officials believe were 1,200 drug overdose deaths in Philadelphia last year. That's quadruple the city's murder rate.
LARRY KRASNER: Supervised injection sites are a form of harm reduction. They've been proven to be very important.
ALLYN: That's the city's new left-leaning district attorney Larry Krasner, who was sworn in last week. If a safe injection site opens, he's promised not to prosecute drug crimes there. To backers, that's huge.
KRASNER: The only way to get people to turn their lives around is to keep them alive long enough so they can do that. And we're going to do that.
ALLYN: Sources close to Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney talk about him favoring safe injection sites. But publicly, Kenney says he's still studying the issue. Thirty-nine-year-old electrician Johnny (ph) from Philadelphia suburbs hopes the mayor will soon be outspoken about supporting an injection site.
JOHNNY: I would absolutely go there.
ALLYN: We're withholding Johnny's last name since he uses illegal opioids. He's standing under a bridge in the neighborhood Kensington, the heart of the opioid crisis and the likely location of a safe injection site. On both sides of the trash-strewn road, there are long rows of ragged tents. Visitors like Johnny use the mini-encampment as a private space to do heroin. He says he'd rather use a medically supervised facility.
JOHNNY: People aren't going to be shooting up on your front stoop, you know, or in your back yard, hiding or even here. You know what I mean? They come down here and get high, and they die here, like, under a bridge.
ALLYN: Others would prefer to fight the epidemic with handcuffs. Philadelphia's police commissioner has been skeptical about designating a place for the use of an illegal narcotic. And even if local police can be convinced, the proposal is likely to provoke a standoff with the federal government, which has promised to aggressively crack down on a similar plan in Vermont. Patrick Trainer is a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency's Philadelphia field office.
PATRICK TRAINER: Are we going to do that? And next year - the year following, are we then going to be talking about, OK, well, there're still overdose deaths, so maybe we need to look into government-supplied, you know, drugs?
ALLYN: Yet supporters of safe injection sites say when people consume drugs alone, they're more likely to die of an overdose. Jen Bowles' research backs this up. She's studied the opioid crisis in Kensington at Drexel University.
JEN BOWLES: There's a tremendous fear that says if we create a space in which drug users can more safely consume drugs, that that may somehow be encouraging drug use. But that conflicts with the science that has found that not to be true.
ALLYN: And another study in the journal The Lancet found that overdose deaths around a safe injection site in Canada dropped 35 percent around the facility after it opened. Despite that evidence, the safe injection site is still likely to be a tough sell for Kensington neighbors. Standing along the row of tents, Johnny says he would make this case to those troubled by the idea.
JOHNNY: Someday, their children could be out here using. Wouldn't they want their kids to be in a safe environment if they're not able to beat the disease?
ALLYN: As the safe injection site debate goes on, the city has other initiatives underway - from education campaigns trying to end the stigma around opioid use to making sure overdose-reversing drugs are in the hands of more people.
For NPR News, I'm Bobby Allyn in Philadelphia.
(SOUNDBITEOF JOY WANTS ETERNITY'S "DEATH IS A DOOR THAT OPENS")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A remarkable scene played out at the White House yesterday.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Yeah, President Trump gathered lawmakers from both parties, and they sat at a long table at the White House. You know, it's a photo opportunity, and then the cameras are supposed to leave.
MARTIN: Right.
INSKEEP: But instead, the cameras stayed as the president and lawmakers started exchanging views on immigration.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KEVIN MCCARTHY: You have to have security, as the secretary would tell you.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But I think that's what she's saying.
UNIDENTIFIED LEGISLATOR #1: No, she's not. She's saying (unintelligible) sustainable.
UNIDENTIFIED LEGISLATOR #2: Why do think I'm...
MCCARTHY: No, no, no - I think she is saying something different.
UNIDENTIFIED LEGISLATOR #3: Mr. President...
INSKEEP: Here's what they're talking about. Democrats are pushing to protect young immigrants, known as DREAMers, brought to the country illegally as children. Republicans want changes to legal immigration, and the president wants money for a border wall. The president said he'd sign whatever Congress comes up with but that it should be a, quote, "bill of love."
MARTIN: NPR's White House correspondent Scott Horsley is on the line now.
Hey, Scott.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: All right, a bill of love - it comes with some urgency, though, because lawmakers are up against this deadline to get something done on DACA. Right?
HORSLEY: A couple of deadlines, actually - the first just over a week from now, when Congress needs to pass a spending bill to keep the government operating. Democrats are trying to use that must-pass legislation as a vehicle for an immigration fix. And then the second deadline was to be in early March, when some of the DREAMers were going to begin facing the threat of deportation if no fix is arrived at.
MARTIN: So something happened last night. A judge in California ordered that the Trump administration must start renewing DACA applications while lawsuits play out. So how's that going to affect this debate?
HORSLEY: Right. This ruling came in a challenge filed by the state of California along with several others who argued that the administration had acted illegally in setting up that second deadline. This gives the DREAMers at least another temporary reprieve. And it could act as a kind of release valve, taking some of the pressure off of Congress. You know, we've seen time and again that lawmakers only act when they are up against a deadline. This judge's ruling in San Francisco may have the effect of sort of pushing that deadline back.
Now, advocates for the DREAMers hope that is not what happens here. And they are pushing Democrats not to use this ruling - which could be appealed - as an excuse to stop pushing for a permanent DACA fix.
MARTIN: So we heard Senator Dianne Feinstein yesterday in this meeting turn to the president and say, let's just pass a clean DACA bill, which essentially means let's just parcel out the DACA issue, pass it and then address comprehensive immigration reform. And the president seemed to say - yeah, that's good. And then his Republican colleagues said no, that's not good. Where do we - where does the president stand on this?
HORSLEY: The president has said he will go along with whatever the lawmakers can agree to. So he's not going to be the stumbling block here. You know, the thing about this session at the White House yesterday - for all the sort of televised drama, it was not actually a negotiating session. There was no horse trading. It was just a chance for all sides to sort of state their positions. And those positions are still in conflict.
You know, there is widespread support for the DREAMers, at least among the public - that they are a sympathetic case. The question mark is what other pieces of the immigration puzzle get, you know, piled...
MARTIN: Right.
HORSLEY: ...Into the legislative knapsack that those DREAMers are expected to carry.
INSKEEP: You know, this is an issue of policy but also an issue of emotion. The president used that phrase a bill of love. A lot of his rhetoric has actually played on a different emotion, anger. And one of the biggest questions here is whether they can balance not only the policy interests but the emotions on this issue.
MARTIN: Right. NPR's Scott Horsley - thanks so much, Scott.
HORSLEY: You bet.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: All right, the man who built Breitbart News into the, quote, "platform for 'alt-right'" - his words - has now left that network.
INSKEEP: Steve Bannon has been under attack since his criticisms of President Trump and his family were published in Michael Wolff's book "Fire And Fury." Bannon, of course, helped to lead the Trump campaign at one point and then served as White House strategist before losing that job last summer. So what led him to give up this job?
MARTIN: Let's ask Paul Farhi of The Washington Post. He's been covering all this.
Good morning, Paul.
PAUL FARHI: Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: All right, so Steve Bannon is out at Breitbart. What was his ultimate undoing?
FARHI: Well, his ultimate undoing was talking to Michael Wolff for that book that you just mentioned. He said that he found it treasonous that Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, and Donald Trump Jr. would meet with Russian representatives at that infamous Trump Tower meeting during the 2016 campaign. That quote got lots of headlines last week, and the president certainly saw it and was not pleased with it.
MARTIN: So that makes sense as to why the rift with the president. But does that not necessarily mean the end of his career at Breitbart? I mean, it clearly does, but make the connection there.
FARHI: Yes. Well, the key figure here are Robert and Rebekah Mercer. They are the very wealthy political donors who are also the bankrollers of Breitbart, so they get a big vote in what happens at Breitbart. They happen to be big supporters of President Trump. They didn't like what Steve Bannon told Michael Wolff. And they exercised their options, shall we say, in forcing Steve Bannon out the door.
MARTIN: What was Bannon's legacy at Breitbart?
FARHI: Well, he really turned it into this "alt-right" platform. Now, "alt-right" can be a kind of phrase that people debate what it means. I think what they meant was a lot of what President Trump is all about - economic nationalism, America First. They're anti-immigrant, anti-globalist - meaning they didn't like any of these trade agreements - and very anti-establishment, anti-conventional Republican politics. There are certain...
MARTIN: So does that mean - sorry to interrupt you - does that mean now the Bannon's out, it is not going to be those things?
FARHI: I don't think so at all. In fact, that's their stock in trade. That's their brand. There's really no reason why they would abandon that. But they do abandon a very big personality. Steve Bannon was the personification of their website. And with him gone, you wonder who they build themselves around. They do have a big following, but they now lose kind of their living embodiment.
INSKEEP: There is an irony here as well because President Trump and people around him on the White House staff have periodically demanded that this or that media figure or this or that reporter be fired, be dismissed, be shoved aside for their reporting or for their various statements or for things that they tweeted.
MARTIN: Right.
INSKEEP: And finally we do have an occasion where the president seems to have been at least peripherally involved in getting a media figure fired, and it's somebody who professes, actually, to be a very strong supporter of the president
MARTIN: Right.
FARHI: That is a great irony.
MARTIN: The Washington Post's Paul Farhi - thanks so much for being with us this morning, Paul.
FARHI: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: In Southern California, one natural disaster has led to yet another.
INSKEEP: We are talking about communities just recovering from California's biggest-ever wildfire. Those areas were then hit by a rainstorm, which is not good right after a wildfire in mountainous territory because the rain unleashed mudslides, sending boulders and debris tumbling down hillsides and into homes from areas that had been burned and lost their vegetation. At least 13 people have died. Here's Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BILL BROWN: It looked like a World War I battlefield. It was literally a carpet of mud and debris everywhere with huge boulders, rocks, downed trees, power lines.
MARTIN: So today a big search and rescue operation continues. And we are joined now by KCLU's Lance Orozco, who has been covering all this there.
Lance, thanks so much for being with us.
LANCE OROZCO, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: I understand you were out surveying the damage yesterday. What did you see?
OROZCO: Well, I got to tell you - it's overwhelming because the rocks and the boulders that you were just talking about a second ago, they're the size of small cars. And what really sticks with you - literally - is the mud. It looks like it's solid. And you step in it, and it feels like quicksand. You're in it up to your knees. And then you see the bulldozers trying to move it, and it looks like they're trying to move Jell-O. It just flows around the bulldozer blades - so very, very difficult for them to deal with this mud.
MARTIN: Officials there knew this was coming. They knew this was going to be serious, and they told residents to leave. But clearly, not everybody heeded that evacuation order.
OROZCO: They really tried. They had an event - even back on Friday, they had a news conference. I was there. A lot of other reporters were there. And they said, listen, we want to get the word out early. And then Monday, they issued a mandatory evacuation order for much of Montecito, Carpinteria and Summerland - three communities up against the foothills. And you know, they let people know. And then Monday, before the storm came, they even pre-positioned extra firefighters in the area because they knew there was the potential for flooding.
MARTIN: What did you hear from people you spoke with? I imagine - I mean, just one after another natural disasters is hard to take.
OROZCO: You know, people are really in a state of shock because many had to deal with two weeks of evacuations, and then this happened. And I think a lot of people were just overwhelmed. And I think part of the problem might be that after being evacuated for, you know, a week or two at a time, a lot of people maybe just said - you know, we can't do this again. We can't evacuate again.
MARTIN: What's likely to happen today in terms of cleaning up at this point?
OROZCO: Well, really the focus still - the focus overnight and the focus today is going to be more search and rescue efforts. You know, most of the people who live in the zone have been cleared out. They've asked people that are still there to shelter in place while they continue their search and rescue efforts. And the focus is just looking for people who are missing. And part of the problem is we don't know exactly how many people are missing at this point.
MARTIN: Oh, my. We'll keep following this. Lance Orozco of member station KCLU - he joined us on Skype. Lance, thanks so much.
OROZCO: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOEY FEHRENBACH'S "EDISON CYLINDER")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Steve Bannon will no longer be running Breitbart. That departure follows on the heels of his removal as senior adviser to President Trump last year. Their breakup became exceptionally ugly in recent days, although it's not unprecedented. So let's ask Cokie about past presidential splits with staffers, like the one between President Eisenhower and his chief of staff, Sherman Adams. Adams was accused of accepting favors from regulators in 1958. Ike initially defended him.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: I admire his abilities. I respect him because of his personal and official integrity. I need him.
INSKEEP: And then Eisenhower made him resign. Cokie Roberts answers your questions about how the government works.
Hi there, Cokie.
COKIE ROBERTS, BYLINE: Hi, Steve. Good to be with you.
INSKEEP: So there's one example of a relationship that turned sour. What's another?
ROBERTS: Oh, there are lots. But probably the most famous was Nixon firing his close aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman during the Watergate scandal. Nixon hoped he could save himself by jettisoning various aides all along the way. He praised Haldeman and Ehrlichman as fine public servants as he announced their, quote, unquote, "resignations." Of course, they both went to jail, and Nixon didn't save himself.
INSKEEP: Oh, but you make sure to say fine public servants on the way out the door.
ROBERTS: Right.
INSKEEP: I am also thinking of an occasion from when I was a kid. Ronald Reagan had a chief of staff with a rather similar name.
ROBERTS: Don Regan. And I was not a kid. I was here covering it.
INSKEEP: (Laughing) I wasn't going to mention, but go ahead.
ROBERTS: And Don Regan was famously fired by Nancy Reagan. And she just wanted him out of there big-time, had screaming arguments with him on the phone. And then he was horrified to discover that his replacement, Howard Baker, had been named - Regan discovered that by reading the newspaper. So he was summarily dismissed by the first lady, who thought he was not protecting her husband well enough. But Regan got back. He wrote a book where he just went after Nancy Reagan - his book called "For The Record."
INSKEEP: Oh, well, I'm glad you mentioned the book because, of course, there was a book involved here - not Steve Bannon's book, but he was quoted extensively in this book making disparaging remarks about various people. And we have a question from Sarah Eggers, who asks...
SARAH EGGERS: When did the trend of tell-all books start? And was there ever a time that that was considered gauche and the aides wouldn't do that?
ROBERTS: What a lovely thought, that there was a time when things were considered gauche, right? I mean, that's passed. But the first time - in modern history, anyway - that you had a former staffer going after his president while the president was still in office was James Fallows after - who was Jimmy Carter's former speechwriter - going after him in The Atlantic magazine. And that at the time was considered somewhat gauche. But then the floodgates opened, and the Reagans had book after book written about them, including by their own children, while they were in the White House. Now, of course, Mrs. Reagan got back with writing "My Turn."
But the first tell-all was probably in the Lincoln administration when the very impressive, formerly enslaved Elizabeth Keckley, who was the dressmaker to the Washington stars of the mid-19th century, wrote a book called "Behind The Scenes," which recounted intimate conversations between the Lincolns, and among the Lincolns and herself, and Mary Lincoln's letters. Now, that didn't end well for Mrs. Keckley. She had to go out of business because people were afraid she'd write tell-all books about them.
INSKEEP: You know, I'm thinking about a lot of these memoirs. They certainly are entertaining. They make news. But they tend to focus on personality conflicts, less so than policy. In fact, that's a critique of this latest Michael Wolff book. Do we actually learn very much from these tell-all books?
ROBERTS: Well, they're titillating and interesting to read, and we probably do learn a lot of personal things about the presidents. But in the end, Steve, since you and I are both in this business, I'm happy to say it's the historians who have the last word. And they rely heavily on the president's own words and the words of the people who were making the policy.
INSKEEP: Cokie, thanks, as always.
ROBERTS: Good to talk to you.
INSKEEP: Commentator Cokie Roberts. And you can ask Cokie your questions about how politics and the government work by emailing us at askcokie@npr.org, by tweeting us with the hashtag #AskCokie.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump has signed an executive order to help more military veterans get mental health care from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Suicide prevention is a top priority for the VA. An estimated 20 veterans take their own lives every single day. The rate is particularly high among younger vets, who don't always have access to VA health care when they leave the service. The executive order will enroll them for VA mental health care automatically. NPR's Quil Lawrence reports.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: At a White House ceremony, the president said he was fulfilling a promise to reform the VA and make sure veterans get the help they need.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Every single veteran who needs mental health and suicide prevention services will receive them immediately upon their separation from military service. They get out of the military, and they had nobody to talk to, nobody to speak to. And it's been a very sad situation, but we're taking care of them.
LAWRENCE: At his side, VA Secretary David Shulkin explained the importance of support when troops are in transition from active duty to civilian life.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DAVID SHULKIN: That 12-month period after you leave service is the highest risk for suicide - almost 1 1/2 to 2 times highest risk in that first 12 months when you leave the service.
LAWRENCE: Most veterans have no trouble returning to civilian life, but the VA says the minority that needs help often doesn't reach out to VA or other services. And veterans are not automatically enrolled. They have to qualify in one of several ways, like having an injury connected to their service - until now, says Shulkin.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SHULKIN: Currently, up until your executive order, only 40 percent of those service members had coverage in the VA to get mental health. Now 100 percent will have that coverage.
LAWRENCE: President Trump also took the opportunity to tout his administration's achievements on VA reform, including a 24-hour hotline for veterans and changes to make it easier to fire corrupt or incompetent staff.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: We will not rest until all of America's great veterans receive the care they have earned through their incredible service and sacrifice to our country.
LAWRENCE: The order will go into effect on March 9 after the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and VA design a system to seamlessly transfer vets from the Pentagon's care to the VA - a challenge that neither agency has been able to overcome despite decades of plans and policy. While the executive order drew bipartisan praise, several Democrats raised concerns about a lack of details - specifically, how the VA will absorb the hundreds of thousands of service members who get discharged each year when the VA's mental health care system is already severely understaffed.
Quil Lawrence, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF EAST WEST QUINTET'S "INTERSTELLAR")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep with another tale of winter weather safety. We told you of the man who set a fire when he warmed up frozen pipes with a blowtorch. In Erie, Pa., a man removed in giant chunk of ice from the side of his house - 6 by 10 feet. He chipped it off, and it fell on him. Most of the weight was borne by a woodpile. The Erie Times-News reports the man suffered only minor injuries, and the fire chief calls him the luckiest man on earth. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Here's what a federal judge said about President Trump's move on DACA - that's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, protections for people brought to the U.S. illegally as children. President Trump said he would end President Obama's program. That created pressure for Congress to extend it by law. And then last night, a judge in California issued an injunction, saying much of DACA will remain in effect for now. The judge said Trump's effort to remove it is likely to be found arbitrary and capricious and, thus, illegal. You're not supposed to be arbitrary and capricious when you're president. NPR's Scott Horsley joins us now.
Hi, Scott.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: So what was the political backdrop for this court ruling?
HORSLEY: Well, lawmakers have been facing a couple of deadlines to deal with DACA. One is just over a week from now when Congress needs to pass a spending bill to keep the government's lights on. And Democrats had hoped to use that must-pass bill as a vehicle to do something about DACA. The second deadline was coming in early March when some of the so-called DREAMers were going to be facing the risk of deportation...
INSKEEP: Yeah.
HORSLEY: ...If something wasn't done. Now, the ruling in San Francisco may sort of defuse that second deadline, but advocates for the DREAMers are urging Democrats not to use that as an excuse to take the heat off.
INSKEEP: OK. So some of the pressure is off, but it is a temporary injunction. We don't know what the final ruling would be in that court case or when it would come. So in the midst of all of this, there's this meeting yesterday. The president brings a couple dozen lawmakers to the White House - Republicans and Democrats - and they start chatting at the table, photo opportunity, but then the cameras just stay and stay and stay as they talk.
HORSLEY: Yeah, that's what made this unusual. It wasn't the ordinary 30-second photo op where the press corps is then shooed out of the room. In this case, reporters and TV cameras were able to listen in for almost an hour. Most of the conversation was very respectful. Let's take a listen to the president.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I feel having the Democrats in with us is absolutely vital because it should be a bipartisan bill. It should be a bill of love. Truly, it should be a bill of love, and we can do that.
INSKEEP: I'm kind of choked up - a bill of love.
HORSLEY: (Laughter) Yeah, that "Kumbaya" feeling, though, is actually pretty superficial. There is no getting around the fact that the immigration bill is just still very divisive. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who is one of the hardliners in the GOP on immigration, he says there's a real lack of trust, both between Republicans and Democrats and also within the Republican Party.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TOM COTTON: Most fundamentally, a lack of trust between the American people and our elected leaders on not delivering a solution for many, many years about some of these problems.
HORSLEY: Cotton is one of the lawmakers who has been calling for big changes in the legal immigration system, including a reduction in family-based immigration, or what the critics call chain migration, as well as an end to the visa lottery. Those are both changes the president has embraced along with his call for stepped up border enforcement and, of course, a wall.
INSKEEP: Of course, Democrats are not big fans of any of those proposals. So what is it that Democrats would want to get out of this deal?
HORSLEY: You know, Democrats say they're not opposed to some kind of enhanced border security, but they don't think a wall is a good way to achieve that. And they say, look, immigration is so complicated, but the DREAMers are a relatively easy, sympathetic subset. So why don't we just try tackling DACA by itself, first? Here's the way Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein broached the idea with the president.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DIANNE FEINSTEIN: What about a clean DACA bill now and with a commitment that we go into a comprehensive immigration reform?
TRUMP: I have no problem - I think that's basically what Dick is saying. We're going to come out with DACA. We're going to do DACA. And then we can start immediately on the phase two, which would be comprehensive.
FEINSTEIN: Would you be agreeable to that?
TRUMP: Yeah, I would like to do that.
KEVIN MCCARTHY: Mr. President.
HORSLEY: For just a moment there it sounded as if the president was ready to make a deal with the Democrats. And that's when House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy jumped in and said wait a minute.
(SOUDNBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MCCARTHY: Mr. President, you need to be clear, though. I think what Senator Feinstein's asking here - when we talk about just DACA, we don't want to be back here two years later. You have to have security, as the secretary would tell you.
TRUMP: But I think that's what she's saying.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: No, she's not.
MCCARTHY: No. No. No. I think she's saying something different.
INSKEEP: (Laughter).
HORSLEY: McCarthy's referring, there, to the homeland security secretary. And the White House later clarified that Trump's idea of a clean bill here would include border security and changes to legal immigration.
INSKEEP: So no magical agreement.
HORSLEY: That's right. And, you know, for all the drama surrounding this made-for-TV moment, I'm not sure it really moved the ball very much. You know, Republicans still want concessions on immigration in exchange for a DACA fix. Democrats are trying to figure out what they can live with. They are very reluctant to bankroll Trump's border wall, especially to the tune of $18 billion, which is what the Homeland Security Department has asked for. Trump is adamant he can build a wall for a lot less than that.
INSKEEP: Just got a couple of seconds here. Let's listen to Donald Trump's - President Trump's bottom line in this meeting.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: My positions are going to be what the people in this room come up with. I am very much reliant on the people in this room. I know most of the people on both sides, have a lot of respect for the people on both sides. And my - what I approve is going to be very much reliant on what the people in this room come to me with.
INSKEEP: Scott, what do you make of that?
HORSLEY: Well, so the fate of the DREAMers, the wall and the shape of future immigration flows, it's all up to Congress.
INSKEEP: NPR's Scott Horsley, thanks.
HORSLEY: You're welcome.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Now to North Carolina, where a panel of federal judges has thrown out that state's congressional voting maps for being too partisan. Among those celebrating the ruling was Democratic Party activist Jake Quinn who brought one of the lawsuits.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JAKE QUINN: It is the first time in history that a U.S. federal court has struck down any kind of federal districting based on partisan gerrymandering.
MARTIN: From member station WUNC, reporter Rusty Jacobs has more.
RUSTY JACOBS, BYLINE: A federal court had already found that two of North Carolina's congressional districts drawn in 2011 were illegally racially gerrymandered. But now in a majority ruling, a three-judge panel found Republican legislators drew heavily partisan maps designed to, quote, "dictate electoral outcomes." The judges said the invidious partisanship of the Republican-drawn maps ran contrary to the voters' constitutional right to elect their representatives. The court cited one GOP lawmaker's statement that he thought electing Republicans was better than electing Democrats so he, quote, "drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country."
While courts have found that gerrymandering on a racial basis is clearly unconstitutional, they had yet to rule definitively on whether partisanship alone could yield unconstitutional voting maps. The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a partisan gerrymandering case out of Wisconsin involving state legislative districts. The judges in the North Carolina case have given Republican lawmakers until January 24 to offer replacement maps or yield to an appointed special master. The GOP legislators are likely to appeal and ask the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the ruling while the justices consider the Wisconsin case.
For NPR News, I'm Rusty Jacobs in Durham, N.C.
(SOUNDBITE OF TOE'S "TREMOLO AND DELAY")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The Super Bowl is just weekends away - four of them. Commentator Mike Pesca is already anxious - not about which team will make the Super Bowl or which team will win but the referees will rule.
MIKE PESCA, BYLINE: To me, the word catch means the act of grasping and holding a projectile, but the NFL has expanded the definition. According to the official rulebook, if a player is thought to have caught the ball, he, quote, "must maintain control of the ball until after his initial contact with the ground. And if the ball touches the ground before he regains control, it is not a catch." Jargony definitions of a simple act are not actually the problem here. The problem is this definition leaves open the possibility that a catch - regarded as a catch since the pioneer and coach Newt Rockne conceived of the forward pass - could actually become an un-catch (ph) when subjected to withering scrutiny.
In today's NFL, we have the technology. We can scrutinize every play. We can observe, dissect, replay and debate every squirt and wiggle of the spheroid in the receiver's hands. And what should be the most glorious moments of a football game are second-guessed before they're even first experienced. Here's Tony Romo, CBS announcer, analyzing the only touchdown of last weekend's playoff game between Jacksonville and Buffalo.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JIM NANTZ: He's got his man for the touchdown.
TONY ROMO: It was good defense, and it was a great throw. I got to make sure he caught this, though. That ball looked like it may have moved in his hands.
PESCA: It didn't move. It was a touchdown, and it was met by doubt when it should have been met by rapture. It's not just catches, all plays in a sport that should be dictated by sinew and fast-twitch muscles are now mere excuses for cautious forensic videography. Here is Sean McDonough's call on ESPN in what should have been the most interesting play of the game between the Titans and Chiefs.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SEAN MCDONOUGH: It deflects back to him for a touchdown for the moment. But was he across the line of scrimmage?
PESCA: He wasn't. That call should have gone - Mariota, pass deflected. He caught it. Mariota caught it himself, of all the crazy backwards inverted abaft plays. But no, instead of celebrating, we had to dwell on it. We had to stew in our own doubt. Baseball announcer Jack Buck, in one of the most famous home run calls ever, yelled, I don't believe what I just saw. Now, announcers sheepishly dampen the marvel. Now, we don't believe what we just saw. And this could be an explanation for the NFL's modest decline in popularity, along with politics and head trauma.
We no longer know what we've just seen. We have to stop and debate what was once evident. We're not an audience. We're land surveyors or jewelers squinting through a loop. As with so many aspects of life, technology has promised clarity, but, in fact, it has muddied our experience. Referees were once the gatekeepers. They were sometimes wrong, but their word was final. And now that these arbiters have given way to ambiguity, we are finding ourselves unpleasantly awash in uncertainty.
INSKEEP: I don't believe what I just heard. Mike Pesca, the author of the forthcoming book "Upon Further Review: The Great What-Ifs In Sports History' and also the host of the Slate podcast "The Gist."
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Some senators are trying to take in the big picture of the ambitions of Vladimir Putin. Some Senate Democrats have just released a study of the Russian president. You're hearing about it first here. The Democrats find Putin's goals are to preserve his power and increase his net worth. To do that, the Russian president divides opposition at home and also abroad. And the report finds Russia interfering in many democracies, not just the United States. Democratic Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland joins us. He was involved in producing this report. Senator, good morning
BEN CARDIN: Steve, it's good to be with you. Thank you.
INSKEEP: How does this change your view of Russia's strategy in the world?
CARDIN: Well, it's clear that Mr. Putin has a plan, and that plan includes not just the use of his military but also cyberattacks, disinformation, support for fringe political groups, the weaponization (ph) of energy resources, organized crime and corruption, all of that to compromise democratic institutions. His primary target is Europe. He's trying to influence countries particularly where there is Russian-speaking populations but also Western Europe. And he's also been interested in the United States, as we saw in the 2016 election.
INSKEEP: Although you also mentioned that Russia has funded the far-right party in the last French presidential elections, supported a coup attempt in Montenegro you allege and also conducted a disinformation campaign during Germany's parliamentary elections. I'd like to ask though, other than the United States, where the intelligence agencies did find Russia with substantial interference, has Russia actually changed the election results in very many places?
CARDIN: Well, that's impossible to tell. We know that they were very active, as you pointed out, in France and Germany. We know in the U.K., they were active in the Brexit referendum. Did they influence the result? I don't think we'll ever know for sure. But we know that they did try to interfere with the democratic institutions of free elections.
INSKEEP: And I guess we should be clear as well, there's no evidence also that Russia specifically changed the result in the United States but that Russia was involved seems pretty clear according to U.S. intelligence agencies. How would you say the president of the United States is doing in confronting this threat?
CARDIN: Well, he's ignoring it. He's basically - has, at times, said that he believes Mr. Putin and that when Mr. Putin said he did not interfere in the U.S. elections, even though that is, I think, beyond any credible dispute today. So the presidential leadership has been missing.
In Europe, we've seen many European leaders' countries take direct action to protect their country and protect their democratic institutions with a game plan and with preparation. In the United States, President Trump has not acknowledged the problem, has not set up the type of interagency fusion cell that's necessary to deal with this type of threat and has not produced a coordinated strategy to protect us against future attacks by Russia.
INSKEEP: Can I mention, Senator Cardin, this is a product of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrats? Republicans have not been involved, even though a lot of Republicans have expressed concern over the months and years about Russia. Is this in some way a partisan document that's just designed to embarrass the president?
CARDIN: No, not at all. In fact, during the production of this document, we had a lot of input from Republicans. It was a decision made early in 2017 by the Democrats that this type of report had to be made, that it was important for the American people to understand that the interference in our elections was part of a greater plan by Russia.
We've had Republicans work with us to implement many of the recommendations that we're making. I can mention Senator McCain specifically has been an outspoken partner in trying to bring to the American people this concern. And there are many other Republicans. I work very closely with Senator Corker, the chairman of our committee. I kept him informed throughout the year. This was a priority that the Democrats decided needed to be done in 2017, we decided that early. But the product tier, I believe, is one that is important for our country to pursue.
INSKEEP: Very briefly, why didn't Republicans sign on? It would probably be politically more powerful if they had.
CARDIN: Well, it was not really in that type of a format where you could have gotten - assigned one at the last minute. This has been a year product, and it was done under the auspices of the Democratic staff. I am confident that this report will be embraced by Democrats and Republicans and that we know what we need to protect America's security.
INSKEEP: Senator, always a pleasure talking with you. Thank you very much.
CARDIN: Thank you, Steve.
INSKEEP: Ben Cardin is the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he joined us via Skype.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
In Syria, so much of the focus in recent years has been on the fight against ISIS there. But the country is also ensnared in a civil war that's been going on for seven years. Over half a million people have been killed, and more than half of the country's population has been displaced.
Now a new phase of this war is unleashing even more horrors on the civilians there. A rebel-held province called Idlib, in the north of Syria, had become a place for civilians to find refuge from other parts of the country. Over Christmas, it became the focus of a new offensive by the Syrian government, fighting to take the territory back.
Here to explain this more, NPR's correspondent Ruth Sherlock who is on the line from Beirut. Hi, Ruth.
RUTH SHERLOCK, BYLINE: Hello.
MARTIN: Ruth, if you could, just first explain a little more about Idlib province. Syrians were fleeing there from other places. Right?
SHERLOCK: Exactly. So this has been a heartland for people who oppose Bashar al-Assad - for rebels who oppose the regime. And they took it pretty early on in the war. And it's one of the last major holdouts now. As the government takes territory back, this is kind of one of the last places left for the opposition. And as part of the process of taking this territory back, the government has been offering these kind of cease fire deals - where it won territory in other parts of the country, it allowed people to flee to Idlib.
So it became a sort of uneasy safe haven. And in the last year, over a million people have fled to this area. Often they've got nothing. They leave their homes. They don't know where they're going. They don't know what to expect when they get there. But at least it was sort of safe.
MARTIN: So this was supposed to be a refuge. That's what people thought it was going to be for them. And now the Assad regime has launched an offensive there. What is that looking like?
SHERLOCK: Well, exactly. So this started just before Christmas, and it's been going at a ferocious rate. There's been - they've taken about 12 - no, 14 - sorry - villages and towns recently in the southern part of the province. Looks like they're going for a strategic air base called Abu al-Duhur. And there's also a key highway that links Damascus to northern parts of the country, which is very important for the regime. But they are extremely reliant on airpower. And a lot of it is indiscriminate, and it's hitting civilian areas.
We spoke with Ahmed Al-Sheykoun who's a White Helmets member. That's a kind of volunteer emergency services. They dig people out of the rubble. And he was just talking about airstrikes. Listen to what happened next.
AHMED AL-SHEYKOUN: (Speaking Arabic).
(SOUNDBITE OF AIRSTRIKE)
SHERLOCK: That's an airstrike that hit just close to him. This was one of several that night - just a tiny snapshot of what it's like there.
MARTIN: Wow. As you were talking to him, another airstrike happened.
SHERLOCK: Exactly.
MARTIN: So what have you been able to discern about how civilians are coping?
SHERLOCK: It's pretty dire. You know, people who fled to Idlib now having to move again - the U.N. says there's about 70,000 people that have upped sticks in Idlib and are trying to move closer to the border to the northern parts that are safer. That's on the border with Turkey.
I spoke to an aid worker yesterday. He was just overwhelmed. He said, you know, the roads are jammed up. There's lines and lines of cars crammed full of people with whatever possessions they can find. And villages are emptying out. They had prepared some camps for more people to come from other cease fires from other parts of the country, but they say they're not prepared for this.
MARTIN: There's a lot of imprints in Syria when it comes to international players - the U.S., Iran, Russia. What are you hearing in terms of international reaction?
SHERLOCK: The extra complexity is that Idlib was a de-escalation zone. That's one of the zones that was set in these Russian-led peace talks to try to kind of quieten the fighting in the war. Turkey has responded furiously, saying - you know, this is a violation of that zone, of this kind of cease fire, of end of fighting. So they've summoned the Russian and Iranian ambassadors today to talk to them about that.
But it's unclear if it's going to make a difference. You know, the regime - it's a part of a pattern that the government has of making military gains on the ground ahead of peace talks to strengthen their hand at the negotiating table.
MARTIN: NPR's Ruth Sherlock in Beirut. Thanks, Ruth.
SHERLOCK: Thank you.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
An evolving natural disaster has entered a new phase. First, wildfires stripped hillsides bare in Santa Barbara County, Calif. Then, rain fell on those hillsides. And then, the hillsides started moving. Mudslides and flash floods struck Montecito, Calif., and have now killed 13 people. Here's reporter Stephanie O'Neill.
(SOUNDBITE OF HELICOPTER FLYING)
STEPHANIE O'NEILL, BYLINE: Helicopters scour the Santa Barbara County coastline, circling over the disaster zone in a search for survivors trapped in the deadly Montecito mudflow. Dramatic rescues, including that of a baby buried in the mud, punctuated a day that also saw a growing death toll and large-scale devastation. Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown says knee-deep mud on roadways has slowed rescue efforts.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BILL BROWN: It looked like a World War I battlefield. It was literally a carpet of mud and debris everywhere with huge boulders, rocks, downed trees, power lines.
O'NEILL: Officials say the mud swept homes off their foundations, some of them with sleeping residents inside. As rescuers searched for victims, flash flood warnings sounded on cell phones throughout Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. Bill Pintard of nearby Carpentaria says even though his home wasn't in a mandatory evacuation zone, the flash flood alerts were worrisome.
BILL PINTARD: We live by a bunch of creeks on both sides, and so we were nervous. And I remember previous floods. And then I was here in 1969. I was a youngster then, and this all went then. And Highway 101 was closed, probably for a month.
O'NEILL: This time, too, mud and debris flows have forced the closure of Highway 101 in both directions for 30 miles. That left morning commuters like Jimmy Ventura, also of Carpenteria, searching for a way around so that he could get to work. He says one road with about a half foot of water seemed safe enough.
JIMMY VENTURA: I got about halfway through. And then all of a sudden, the creek started overflowing. And water started coming in the side of my window. My car stalled out twice. I finally got it to start. I turned around, and I got out.
(SOUNDBITE OF TRUCK BEEPING)
O'NEILL: Crews are working around the clock to clear the highway and surface streets. Stan Medel is a contractor for the California Department of Transportation. He says picking up the carpet of slushy mud and ash isn't easy.
STAN MEDEL: It's just so sludgy and soupy that it's just even hard to pick up and load into the trucks.
O'NEILL: Clearing the debris will be vital so that rescuers can get into areas of Montecito where people remain trapped.
For NPR News, I'm Stephanie O'Neill in Carpenteria.
(SOUNDBITE OF FAIT'S "SOLACE")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. A teacher in Kansas wanted to teach his third-graders how quickly information can spread, so he sent a tweet explaining his lesson and asking people to retweet so his class could track it. It was tweeted in Oklahoma in minutes, and the kids were amazed. By recess, New York; overnight, Malaysia, Japan, Kenya. The actor Eric Stonestreet retweeted. So did the political analyst Dana Perino. The lesson - yes, information travels fast. The real lesson - be careful what you tweet. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
One year ago, Steve Bannon was at Donald Trump's side in photo after photo, arguably the president's most-trusted political adviser. Months ago, Bannon was ousted from the White House. And this morning, he is out of another job. He is no longer the executive chairman of Breitbart News. This follows his very public alienation from President Trump over his quotes in the White House tell-all book "Fire And Fury."
NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik has been following these changes, and he's on the line now. Hey, David.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Rachel Martin, good morning.
MARTIN: Good morning. Explain what has led to this moment.
FOLKENFLIK: Well, Bannon has liked to describe himself as something of a revolutionary. He's described himself apparently in recent days as like the former British adviser to the king, Thomas Cromwell. In a sense, it's like more like the French Revolution. He turned his fire on his - Democrats and liberals, then on Republicans he saw as too much allied with the establishment and now with people in the Trump inner circle. He attacked that Trumps' son, Donald Jr., and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in the book "Fire And Fury" for taking acts which he saw were, you know, possibly criminal, possibly even treasonous by meeting with Russians.
And he criticized President Trump himself, saying he lacked intelligence, focus, the ability and the characteristics needed for a president. One of the Breitbart's chief owners, Rebekah Mercer, has been a financial backer of the president in the last year and a half. And she made public comments making it clear the writing was on the wall. He couldn't stay at Breitbart News.
MARTIN: Which is fascinating - right? - because this is why the president embraced Steve Bannon, because he was a flamethrower, because he was anti-establishment. He wanted to break things. And now it is those same traits that have led to his demise.
FOLKENFLIK: And now they're broken. And, you know, Breitbart was very useful for the president when Bannon decided to steer it and use it as a vehicle for Trump's ambitions and for Bannon's own ambitions. What's clear in the comments he made in the book was that he saw Trump as a vessel, not as a figure for whom he had much respect, at least in the comments as reflected by the author, Michael Wolff. And also, you know, his own ambition and ego led him to decide that he could help while leading Breitbart once more - a political movement of conservative populism and nationalism. He meddled in the Alabama Senate race and lost it for Republicans. That was a blow to the president, too.
MARTIN: So Bannon's satellite radio program on Sirius has also been canceled, I understand. So where does this leave him? What does Steve Bannon do now?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, as I said, he had been picking up the idea that he was going to lead this conservative wing of the conservative party of the country and perhaps let it be a bit of the same kind of platform that he turned Breitbart into. That is for real cultural conservatives nursing a grievance not only against liberals and against institutions but against a lot of the major figures in the Republican Party as well.
The Mercer family, which backed Bannon's ambitions, backed Breitbart and which turned its loyalties from Ted Cruz in the primaries to Donald Trump as he gained momentum. You know, they're no longer going to underwrite what he has to offer. And so it's a real question if somebody else will step forward to do that. I figure he's - he looks right now like a figure very much in the wilderness.
MARTIN: And very quickly, does this mean changes for Breitbart itself?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, Breitbart has seemed a little bit adrift and awash as you've seen this - fissures between Bannon and the Trump White House grow into the Grand Canyon. And I think they're going to have to pick themselves up. They had to reinvent themselves after the death of their founder, Andrew Breitbart. Bannon provided that sense. They're going to have to go to a 3.0 and figure out what they're doing. They've been declining in recent months in audience. And I think it's a real question of definition for them.
MARTIN: NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik, thanks.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
During another week in the age of the raw transcript, it's a week when President Trump's entire 55-minute talk with lawmakers about immigration was televised. It's also a week when the entire private interview before Congress with a figure in the Russia investigation has been released. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein released the full testimony of Glenn Simpson, who ran Fusion GPS, a firm that arranged for a dossier of damaging claims against then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. NPR justice reporter Ryan Lucas is here.
Good morning, Ryan.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Good morning.
INSKEEP: So how exactly did this come to light?
LUCAS: Well, this is the transcript from an interview that Glenn Simpson had in August with the Senate Judiciary Committee. And Simpson, as you noted, is the co-founder of Fusion GPS, which was hired by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign to conduct opposition research on Trump. So Simpson's interview was - it was a long one. It was 10 hours. And the transcript holds true to that. It's about 300 pages.
INSKEEP: Wow.
LUCAS: But it is a fascinating read. Now, what do we learn from it, right? That's the big question here. Simpson says that the former British spy who compiled the information in the dossier, a man by the name of Christopher Steele, went to the FBI in the summer of 2016 because he had concerns that Trump might be being blackmailed.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
LUCAS: Steele met with an FBI agent in Rome in September to discuss what he had learned from his inquiry, and in Simpson's word, the FBI wasn't surprised, in part because it had information that supported Steele's concerns about Trump's ties with Russia.
INSKEEP: In other words, the dossier that was being produced by this firm was not the sole source of concern for the FBI - at least, as far as Simpson could tell, was not the only source of concern about Donald Trump.
LUCAS: Right. The FBI had heard elsewhere, and it turns out that from what Simpson says, it was from an informant inside the Trump campaign who had similar concerns to Steele about the potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
INSKEEP: And you realize what a spy novel this is and how much paranoia there is. There's also a point in the testimony where it is said that Christopher Steele and maybe Glenn Simpson himself was - they weren't sure of the motivations of the FBI in all of this.
LUCAS: Well, that's right. Steele, at one point - this was shortly before the election. He broke off contact with the FBI because he thought that they weren't treating what he had brought them, what he had told them, seriously enough. Now, one quick thing that I need to mention about the informant - there's been conflicting reports now, and it appears that Simpson may have mischaracterized who this informant was. There are some reports that he may instead have been referencing a tip that the U.S. had received from an Australian diplomat about George Papadopoulos, who, of course, was a Trump campaign adviser and later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
INSKEEP: Didn't Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic senator, release this transcript in the midst of a series of Republican attacks on the man who compiled the dossier, Christopher Steele?
LUCAS: There has been a consistent push by Republicans to try to discredit Christopher Steele, Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS. Just last week, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Charles Grassley, and Senator Lindsey Graham referred Steele to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. And so, yes, this releasing the transcript in a way is kind of returned fire by the Democrats to try to push back against what they say are Republican attempts to undermine the whole Russia investigation.
INSKEEP: Is a bipartisan investigation dead, then?
LUCAS: It's hard to see how a bipartisan investigation in the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as the House intelligence committee investigating Russia, continues. This certainly seems to be unraveling.
INSKEEP: Ryan, thanks for coming by, really appreciate it.
LUCAS: Thank you.
INSKEEP: That's NPR justice reporter Ryan Lucas.
(SOUNDBITE OF BERRY WEIGHT'S "THE WAY OF THE DODO")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
In another twist in the debate over DACA, a federal judge in California has issued an order that the Trump administration needs to keep DACA protections in place. These are so - for the so-called DREAMers. DACA is the Obama-era program protecting the status of these young people who were brought into this country illegally. That surprise ruling came just hours after President Trump convened a meeting with Republicans and Democrats yesterday at the White House, trying to broker a deal on immigration. They talked about issues that have long divided lawmakers, not just DACA, but how to reform legal immigration and how to boost border security.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: So I'm appealing to everyone in the room to put the country before party, and to sit down, and negotiate and to compromise. And let's see if we can get something done.
MARTIN: There's a timeline for this. Lawmakers have just nine days to reach a deal before the government shuts down. Henry Cuellar is a Democratic congressman from Texas. He represents a district that runs along the border with Mexico. He was at that meeting yesterday at the White House, and he is with us now.
Congressman, thanks so much for being with us.
HENRY CUELLAR: Thank you. And it's a pleasure being with you.
MARTIN: I want to ask you first about this new ruling by a federal judge in California saying DACA protections have to be reinstated. How does this change the debate, if at all?
CUELLAR: Well, I think the court ruling, from what I heard was it's reinstated till the legal proceedings are finished, so it gives us a little bit of time. It might be beyond March 5, but we in the Congress - we're going to be looking like if the deadline is on March 5.
MARTIN: March 5 is the deadline that President Trump established for Congress to come up with some kind of agreement. There's also this other deadline now - the government getting a spending bill through. That's the deadline we're talking about in nine days. Are you any clearer on the president's position on immigration coming out of that meeting than you were going into it?
CUELLAR: Well, in many ways, the president said yes to different people in the room. But the bottom line is, he at the end said that if there is something that we're able to work out, that we will - he would go ahead and sign it. So that allows us to narrow it down to four issues - one, DACA; two, border security. And the press and the Republicans kept saying the wall as a second item, and I kept saying, no, border security - border security, which is different.
And then, of course, the No. 3, No. 4 was what we call chain migration. How many people can a person - let's say that DACA - you have a DACA recipients. How many people can he bring in? Is it the immediate family or is it the grandparents? Is it somebody else beyond that? So that's what we mean by chain migration.
And the last, No. 4 - the fourth issue is what we call diversity, or lottery, visas. There're about 50,000 of those that are allowed to bring in people from countries that usually don't come into the United States, so we decided to narrow it down into phase one, which are those four items. And then the president said, hey, let's do comprehensive immigration reform, which I think took the Republicans that were sitting there by - off guard, as a phase two or longer progress.
MARTIN: So you just outlined a lot there. I want to unpack some of this because you raised this question that was central to the conversation yesterday. Does - what does border security mean? I mean, does that mean that a solution to DACA can't go forward unless the president gets approval for the wall?
CUELLAR: Well...
MARTIN: Are these two linked?
CUELLAR: It depends. Well, the president and the Republicans want to link - they're saying DACA and the wall. What we're saying - well, they're - some Democrats are saying just a clean bill on DACA without border security, the wall. With all due respect to my Democratic friends, it's not going to happen. We got to have DACA and some sensible border security.
The problem is that the Republican and the presidents (ph) equate border security to the wall. And if you notice, I had a little discussion with the president and with the secretary of Homeland on my position about the wall because the wall - it's - you know, GAO did a report on it, and between the years of 2010, 2015, it got breached - the wall that we know of, the GAO knows about - got breached 9,300 times.
MARTIN: Right.
CUELLAR: That means people were able to get over it. And the final thing is, I said - and if you see the interaction I had with the president and the Homeland secretary, I said, look, your own border patrol chief and the other border patrol chiefs have said that a wall will buy you maybe a few minutes or sometimes even a few seconds, so are you going to spend billions of dollars to slow down somebody for a couple minutes? I don't think so.
MARTIN: So you think that there has to be some border security linked to DACA, not necessarily a wall. But let me ask you in closing, do you think this White House has a chance of succeeding where so many others have failed when it comes to passing comprehensive immigration reform?
CUELLAR: Well, first, we're going to focus on a narrow topic called DACA. The other issue is going to be phase two, which is more complicated. The last time we had it was between a Republican president and Democrat Congress. And if you look at the history of immigration reform in the United States, it's got to be bipartisan.
MARTIN: But you're convinced that DACA will happen.
CUELLAR: ...So it's been since Ronald Reagan.
MARTIN: You're convinced DACA will happen.
CUELLAR: I feel optimistic that we could reach an agreement.
MARTIN: Henry Cuellar is a Democratic congressman from Texas. Thanks so much for your time this morning.
CUELLAR: Thank you. Thank you so much.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The latest federal judge to block a Trump administration initiative stopped his move on DACA. The judge in California issued an injunction temporarily affecting Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The judge said President Trump's action ending that program was likely to be found arbitrary and capricious so it cannot take full effect for now. The ruling came just as Republicans and Democrats were talking with the president about extending DACA as part of an immigration deal. White House legislative director Marc Short was in the room yesterday for that meeting, which many people saw on video, and he's on the line. Mr. Short, welcome back to the program.
MARC SHORT: Steve, thanks for having me on this morning.
INSKEEP: Does the judge's ruling, keeping DACA in place largely for now, take the pressure off to do anything?
SHORT: I don't think so. I think, in fact, the reality is that this is a problem that's needed to be solved for many, many years. In fact, lower courts had ruled the Obama administration's actions unconstitutional. And I think that even the Obama administration recognized the shaky legal ground that they were on, but they were just frustrated that Congress had not acted after promising to act for so long. What this White House did is it gave Congress six additional months to come up with a solution when we made our decision back in October. And so we're anxious to get a solution. We think the reality is that the Ninth Circuit, as you know, in San Francisco has ruled against this administration on several occasions only to be overturned later at a higher level. And so if we let this drag out, the risk would be that the Supreme Court would say, yeah, we're overturning the decision and immediately DACA ends. And so it's better to give us some opportunity to find a legislative fix opposed to risking status for all of those individuals.
INSKEEP: So the president has this meeting yesterday. Fifty-five minutes were televised. It's a discussion with Republicans and Democrats in the same room around a giant table there at the White House. And I want to try to figure out what it is that the president says he is willing to agree to. As you know well, having watched the discussion, Senator Dianne Feinstein at one point asked the president if he would support a clean DACA bill, meaning a bill that's just fixing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, doesn't include anything else. The president says, quote, "yeah, I would like to do it." And then a Republican in the room says, wait a minute, I don't think you mean that.
Did the president mean that? He would do that?
SHORT: Well, there was a lot of crosstalk at the moment. What the president was referencing is that Chairman Feinstein stepped in after a previous conversation, said, we want to do this in two steps. The way the administration views the two steps is there is a long list of priorities we sent to Congress back in October to say here's what we want as part of our overall immigration policy.
INSKEEP: Build a wall, security, things like that.
SHORT: Correct. We've refined that list. And then where we ended the meeting is recognizing there's four things that we're trying to solve here. One is the status for the DACA recipients, which we all want to protect. These are people who are age 16 to 36 who came into our country by their parents and had been working. And assuming there's no legal problem, we want to make sure they stay here and continue to contribute to our economy. Two is border security. Three would be ending chain migration and four would be ending the visa lottery program. Those are what we'd view as our first step. There's some things, other additions that we want as well that we're saying let's do later. There are some things Democrats want that we're saying let's do that later. So that would be the first step.
INSKEEP: So if there's a clean DACA bill, is the president a yes for that?
SHORT: Well, we view a clean DACA bill as those four categories, Steve.
INSKEEP: Meaning not actually a clean DACA bill. You would combine other things and try to make it one.
SHORT: There are other things that we all want to do under the immigration portfolio that we would look to do at a later date, and many of those include interior enforcement priorities for this administration, as well. But we recognize that there's not stomach on that for Democrats right now, and things that they want to do that we would also be willing to do later.
INSKEEP: Has the president given up on the wall as a physical wall? Is he willing to accept, as many Republicans seem to prefer, as well as Democrats, better border security that might take other forms?
SHORT: Steve, Democrats voted in 2013, 54 Senate Democrats. They were for $40 billion in border security, including a physical wall. They voted in 2006, including Chuck Schumer, including Hillary Clinton, including Barack Obama for the Secure Fence Act. It is what Democrats have voted for before. It's what Customs and Border Patrol career officials tell us we need to secure our border. This is not rhetoric from a campaign. This is what professionals tell us is needed.
INSKEEP: Well, they talk about drones, they talk about sensors. They do talk about fences...
SHORT: Yes, Steve, we want all of that.
INSKEEP: ...Not necessarily a concrete wall. You want a concrete wall?
SHORT: No. It includes a wall. It includes those things, too. But it also includes a physical barrier. The president has said himself in talking to CBP, in many cases, they say it's not a concrete wall. It's in some cases fencing because it's better for them to see through and enables them to better protect the border. But it is a physical barrier. It is not simply cameras and drones.
INSKEEP: Can I ask, Mr. Short, about the emotions on this issue, which seem to be almost maybe even more important than the policy? Because there is a lot of emotion. The president used the phrase a bill of love. He would like a bill of love to emerge from this process. But I'm remembering that his presidential campaign opponent, Jeb Bush, was mocked for using the word love, talking of immigration sometimes as an act of love. Is the president taking the side of illegal immigrants here?
SHORT: I think the president believes that people who are here under the DACA program, again, are contributing to our society, and we want to make sure that they stay here. There is a lot of immigration rhetoric on both sides, but the reality of what we want is, I think, something that is practical to secure our country, to change immigration laws moving forward and to protect those who are here. I think the president views that as something that is very empathetic and sympathetic on both sides.
INSKEEP: I'm also thinking about a remark by Ann Coulter, who is a provocateur, has been very much at times a supporter of the president. But she tweeted yesterday, nothing Michael Wolff could say about President Trump - Michael Wolff, the author of that controversial book - nothing Michael Wolff could say has hurt President Trump as much as the DACA love fest right now. Is he abandoning his political base here?
SHORT: As you said, Ann Coulter is provocative. I think that the president is very anxious to find a solution to this problem, and it's one that we need. You look at the two terror attacks that happened in this year. One of them, the individual who drove over five innocent individuals, came here on a visa lottery program and brought other family members via chain migration. The pipe bomb incident in the subway in New York was an immigrant terrorist who came here under chain migration. We need to fix these problems to secure the nation.
INSKEEP: And, we'll just mention, you're giving us a connection there between immigration policy and a couple of specific cases that other people would dispute. One last question in about a few seconds here. Is the president willing to sign onto a path to legal status as part of comprehensive immigration reform? He suggested that yesterday very briefly.
SHORT: The president is very open to that. The president is willing to go there for the DACA participants. But we're also asking for cooperation on the Democrats for what we think are practical, common sense solutions. And the two incidents, again, that I just mentioned are actually factual.
INSKEEP: OK. Got to stop you there. Marc Short, thanks very much. Always appreciate it.
SHORT: Thank you, Steve.
INSKEEP: He is the White House legislative director.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Here's something we are learning about how to help the world's poorest people. Instead of trying to create jobs where those people live, a growing body of research suggests that helping them leave can be a lot more effective. NPR's Nurith Aizenman has the story beginning with a farmhand in Bangladesh.
NURITH AIZENMAN, BYLINE: Mariful Islam has lived in a rural village his whole life.
MARIFUL ISLAM: (Through interpreter) I plant, and I harvest rice in the rice paddies.
AIZENMAN: But there's this two-to-three-month period when the rice is just growing, which means there's no work for Islam to do, which means he and his wife and his 1-and-a-half-year-old son have to get by on his meager savings.
ISLAM: (Through interpreter) We have a lot of problems getting enough food.
AIZENMAN: Instead of three meals a day, they cut back to two, skipping lunch. And it's mostly just rice. This seasonal famine period is so widespread across Bangladesh, it's got a name. Mushfiq Mobarak is an economist at Yale University.
MUSHFIQ MOBARAK: So it's called monga.
AIZENMAN: Monga. As a kid, Mobarak heard that word a lot because he grew up in Bangladesh where, he says, every year, the newspapers would be filled with reports about the latest multimillion-dollar aid program to get people through the monga season.
MOBARAK: So for example, the government had been running food-for-work programs in rural areas, trying to create employment.
AIZENMAN: But Mobarak was struck by a major flaw in this approach. There's just a limit to how many jobs you can create in a place like rural Bangladesh. But there's no shortage of jobs in Bangladesh's cities. That gave Mobarak an idea.
MOBARAK: Why don't we try to move people to where the jobs are?
AIZENMAN: Migration is an age-old response to poverty. But people also often hesitate because it can be risky. So Mobarak set up what's been a years-long series of experiments to see if a little aid could ease the way. During the monga season, he gives farm workers a one-time, very low-interest loan they can use to get themselves to the city - less than $20.
MOBARAK: That pays for the round-trip bus fare to the city, plus a few days of food.
AIZENMAN: The result - the workers who have gotten the help have been about 60 percent more likely to try their luck in a city. Most of them have succeeded in getting a job, mainly pulling rickshaws. And with the extra money, their families have consumed an average of at least 36 percent more food. That's a much better track record than the traditional food-for-work or food-for-distribution programs.
MOBARAK: About five times as cost effective.
AIZENMAN: So impressive, it prompted several funders to partner with Mobarak to scale up his idea into a charity - it's called No Lean Season - that today is helping about 160,000 people a year. Mobarak's work has also contributed to what's been something of a mind shift among poverty researchers. Michael Clemens is with the Center for Global Development, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
MICHAEL CLEMENS: Very recently, economists have been looking at a different kind of policy that helps people move to where opportunity is.
AIZENMAN: Clemens and others have been rigorously studying a host of programs and just situations that have allowed poor people to migrate - sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently, sometimes within their countries, sometimes overseas. Invariably, the conclusion is that...
CLEMENS: If you want to help somebody who is in poverty, by far, the most effective thing you can do to assist them is to assist them in moving.
AIZENMAN: And yet, governments and aid groups aren't exactly rushing to embrace this strategy because, well, it's fraught. Take the case of Mariful Islam, the farmhand in Bangladesh. Last month, he used a loan from No Lean Season to make his first trip ever to the city, and it was tough.
ISLAM: (Through interpreter) I stayed in a room with 15 other men. The place was filthy and smelly.
AIZENMAN: Mushfiq Mobarak says that's a scenario a lot of officials raise when he tries to sell them on bringing migrants to their cities.
MOBARAK: The reaction I often get is that, oh, actually, we've been trying to do the opposite. We don't like all these migrants coming in and dirtying up our city. And these people might actually be better off in the rural area.
AIZENMAN: To which he replies - not if they're going to starve there. Mariful Islam would agree. As unpleasant as his time in the city was, he says, next year, I'm definitely going back.
Nurith Aizenman, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SIGNAL HILL'S "A SECRET SOCIETY")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Our special correspondent, Susan Stamberg, has been visiting an art gallery in New York. The Carter Burden Gallery is like plenty of other galleries with one important difference, and the difference tells you a lot about age discrimination in the art world.
SUSAN STAMBERG, BYLINE: So I'm 59 years old.
I'm playing make believe with gallery director Marlena Vaccaro.
And I have a wonderful painting, and I'd like to show it here. Would you take a look?
MARLENA VACCARO: I probably wouldn't take a look, but I would say there's good news and bad news. Good news is you're 59. Bad news is you're 59. Come back next year and, you know, that would be great.
STAMBERG: The Carter Burden is for artists 60 years old and older. The oldest is 95. No kids allowed. Why?
VACCARO: Older adults do not stop being who they are because they hit a particular age. Professional artists never stop doing what we do. And in many cases, we get better at it as we go along.
STAMBERG: What does change is the art market. With rare exceptions, artists who were hot when they started out found that galleries and certainly museums cooled to them as the years passed. They kept working but weren't being shown or bought. The Carter Burden mission is to give them a wall.
VACCARO: Because walls are the thing we need.
STAMBERG: Very few galleries represent older professional artists, Vaccaro says, unless they're really famous.
VACCARO: And I get that galleries are a business. They need to show artists that are going to bring in big bucks.
STAMBERG: Carter Burden is different. It's nonprofit, supported by a board a corporate sponsor and philanthropists.
VACCARO: And that allows us to show the work that is purely an aesthetic choice and not be concerned if I'm going to get $25,000 for a painting that sells. We could not do that if we had to survive just on the sale of the work.
STAMBERG: Three artists came by the day we were there. Nieves Saah, age 67 from Bilbao, Spain, has painted all her life.
NIEVES SAAH: Yes, my first show was in SoHo in '85. And I had like 28 paintings there. I sold a few. Then from that, I got many shows. So I think that year I was like in 15 shows.
STAMBERG: And then things slowed down, not much interest for 10 years. Nieves kept painting vividly colored cheerful oils, figures, fantasies. One day, she heard about Carter Burden and decided to apply online.
SAAH: I was in the show one month after I sent the application.
STAMBERG: A group show, two or three artists together, always at Carter Burden, also always and only artists who live in New York. Nieves has been in four or five shows now. She likes the concept - artists supporting one another, making community.
VACCARO: Tons and tons and tons of loyal people come.
STAMBERG: Again, Director Marlena Vaccaro.
VACCARO: All of the artists come out to support each other. Every artist brings their people in. Those people become your regulars. And it just builds and builds.
STAMBERG: Shows are up for three weeks, then there's a weeklong break, then another three-week show. Five-hundred people can turn up at openings. There's always wine, pretzels and chocolate. Visitors nosh, schmooze, buy. Artists get to know one another and see and comment on one another's work.
ELISABETH JACOBSEN: It is community. When you do your art work, you usually are alone.
STAMBERG: Elisabeth Jacobsen is 68, from Long Island. She does assemblage, puts wood, fabric, various objects together in elegant three-dimensional works. She's exhibited pretty consistently since the late 1980s, and at Carter Burden, since 2014. But that took time.
JACOBSEN: When I first heard of the gallery, I sent an application but I was rejected and got one of these letters like, you know, in a couple years try again, blah, blah, blah, you know.
STAMBERG: She did and now shows and sells there often. Werner Bargsten is a newbie, had his first show this past October - stunning, powerful sculptured wall hangings made with clay and copper tubing formed into what looked like wrapped packages. Werner had stopped doing art for 30 years. His career was making props for TV and films. Retired now, we spoke before his Carter Burden show opened.
WERNER BARGSTEN: I'm supposed to have expectations, but I don't have really expectations because I feel like, you know, I'm lucky to be here. Every day is - I'm lucky to be alive. I feel good. It'd be great to have a lot of people here and see the work. And my expectation, I guess, is to just show up, put the piece on the wall and have a cookie or a glass of - I can't have wine anymore. You know, no more wine. So that's it pretty much.
STAMBERG: Well, he sold some drawings, but there weren't any cookies. At 69, Bargsten is glad to be part of the Carter Burden over-60 crowd.
BARGSTEN: I mean, look. It's always harder to get out of bed the older you get. But most of the artists that I've met here seemed like they missed that memo that they were getting old. Most of them have the brains of a 20-year-old or a 30-year-old or something. So they haven't really aged in terms of their spirit.
STAMBERG: Isn't this ageist what you're doing here?
VACCARO: I think it's more a defense against ageism.
STAMBERG: Again, Director Marlena Vaccaro.
VACCARO: I think it's giving an opportunity to a group of people that have had the opportunity removed simply because of their age. Opportunities are few and far between at any gallery for any artist of any age. So I think we're trying to just right a wrong rather than get in the way of anyone else having an opportunity.
STAMBERG: It's such a lively, bustling place the Carter Burden Gallery in Chelsea, makes you wish you'd get 60 quicker to be part of it. Making believe again, I'm Susan Stamberg, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Since Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, more than 20,000 students have left the island, which has put the future of some schools in jeopardy. NPR's Merrit Kennedy reports.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Buenos dias.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Buenos dias.
MERRIT KENNEDY, BYLINE: Students in yellow-and-blue uniforms line up in rows on a school basketball court going through their morning exercises. It's a sign of how things are getting back to normal at Gaspar Vila Mayans elementary school. It's in a low-income area in the capital of San Juan. And this school was relatively lucky. It reopened just two weeks after the storm hit. It quickly became a lifeline for the community, providing food, activities and a sense of normalcy to students and their parents. But all that may be at risk. This and other schools across Puerto Rico may need to shut down because so many students have left for the mainland, and it's unclear whether they'll come back.
RITA BARRETO: A lot of kids went to the United States - almost 50.
KENNEDY: Principal Rita Barreto walks down a hallway where some classrooms are completely empty. The school was already at less than half capacity before the storm. Weeks after Maria, the Education Department shut the school down temporarily due to low enrollment, forcing kids and teachers to go elsewhere. Now Barreto admits that it's not clear that the school has the numbers to continue after this academic year.
BARRETO: The school needs students to operate. If you don't have students, you don't have a school.
KENNEDY: And more students are planning to leave the system, like 11-year-old Janiel, who says his family is heading to Florida at the end of the school year.
JANIEL: I will meet and new teachers.
KENNEDY: Around the corner, Yahaira Rodriguez is dropping off her son, a fifth grader. She says for them, the school's temporary closure in October-November was a disaster.
YAHAIRA RODRIGUEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
KENNEDY: She says she was blindsided by the decision. The school was where her family came for meals and support. Her son attended two different schools when this one closed, and now his mom says he's behind in his classes. This debate over shutting down schools infuriates Mercedes Martinez. She's the president of the Puerto Rican Teachers Federation, one of the island's main teachers unions. She says the Education Department is using the hurricane as an excuse to accelerate school closures.
MERCEDES MARTINEZ: Our secretary of education has a plan to shut down schools, and she wanted to close more, but the communities have fought back.
KENNEDY: Secretary of Education Julia Keleher says she has no choice.
JULIA KELEHER: Oh, we definitely have to close schools, yeah.
KENNEDY: Keleher says dramatic changes were needed even before the storm, and the hurricane is making a reorganization of Puerto Rico's entire education system all the more necessary. The schools and the whole government of Puerto Rico are in a fiscal crisis. The Department closed nearly 170 schools after last school year, and Keleher points to another 180 with fewer than 150 kids. There may also be federal funding cuts looming due to reduced enrollment.
KELEHER: There's not enough to go around to that many sites to ensure some level of quality of service.
KENNEDY: Keleher says she inherited a system with too much bureaucracy and a random, uneven budget distribution. There are still too many schools with low enrollment, she says, and the cost of keeping them open could mean a lack of resources for crucial supplies like books.
KELEHER: I can't lose sight of the obligation that I have to be a good steward of the limited resources that we have.
KENNEDY: Keleher says she understands the pain this can cause at schools like Gaspar Vila Mayans. But she says whether schools like that one are going to stay open is going to come down to the numbers.
Merrit Kennedy, NPR News, San Juan, Puerto Rico.
(SOUNDBITE OF YO LA TENGO'S "MY HEART'S REFLECTION")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
For more on Arpaio's chances and what the high number of departing members of Congress could mean for the Republican Party, NPR political editor Domenico Montanaro joins us now.
Hey, Domenico.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: All right, so Joe Arpaio served in public office for many years as sheriff, a very well-known quantity in Arizona - although not without controversy, obviously. Do we have any sense yet of what kind of shot he's got at this?
MONTANARO: Well, look, he's got high name identification in the state, means a lot of people know who he is. And that gives anybody something of a head start. Remember, this is a Republican primary. No single issue has fired up or galvanized the Republican base like immigration. And Arpaio's entrance is just going to make that issue, that hard-line talk be something that dominates. You know, just see President Trump's win for evidence of how immigration plays in a Republican primary.
On the other hand, establishment Republicans, ironically, are kind of smirking about this because they think his entry into the race could ironically help the establishment's preferred candidate because Arpaio could split the vote with another conservative in the race, Kelli Ward. And tomorrow, we're expecting Congresswoman Martha McSally, who would be the establishment's preferred candidate, to announce that she's getting in the race. A local poll out yesterday in Arizona confirms this because it's got McSally up 31-29 over Arpaio, with Ward at 25. So pretty even and could give McSally a path.
MARTIN: How much does that matter to the party?
MONTANARO: It matters, you know, what the outcome is and also what the process is in this race. You know, the National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Cory Gardner, the senator from Colorado, yesterday declined to say whether or not the NRSC would back Arpaio if he wins the primary. In other words, they could back him if he were in a general election - different than their stance on Roy Moore.
MARTIN: Yeah.
MONTANARO: The thing is, in Arizona, it's almost a third Latino. And across the country - you know, the country is becoming browner. And Republicans have had a very difficult time appealing to Latinos. And Arpaio's entry can only exacerbate that.
MARTIN: So we mentioned Jeff Flake, who's not running for re-election in Arizona. He's one of 31 Republicans choosing not to run again. Is that a big number?
MONTANARO: Well, the 31 Republicans in Congress is a big number because it's bigger than in any midterm for any party since 1994. And that was a huge Republican takeover year from Democrats. Now, if I were to tell you that that would be the number this early in the cycle, that might indicate a wave. And it certainly might indicate a wave, but some of the fundamentals are still on Republicans' side when it comes to how these districts are drawn, which races are up. They still do favor Republicans. And let's remember - more globally here, the economy is doing very well, and the United States is not in any kind of a hot war that is going as badly as the Iraq War did in 2006, when Democrats took over.
MARTIN: So where does this leave Democrats in 2018?
MONTANARO: Well, they certainly feel good. You know, this is coming on the heels of a couple of wins in Virginia and in Alabama. They certainly feel like they've got momentum and a couple things to hang their hat on at this point.
MARTIN: All right, Domenico Montanaro, NPR's lead political editor this morning for us. Thanks so much, Domenico.
MONTANARO: It's going to be fun. You're welcome.
MARTIN: (Laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF MAMMAL HANDS' "WRINGER")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We are beginning a midterm election year. Every seat in the House of Representatives is up for election, along with a third of the Senate. And in this year, an awful lot of Republicans are retiring or just choosing not to run for re-election.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
All right, Congressman Darrell Issa is the latest to make this choice, bringing the total number of Republicans bowing out in 2019 to 31.
INSKEEP: 31 - let's talk about that number with Domenico Montanaro, NPR's politics editor. Domenico, good morning.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Hey there, Steve.
INSKEEP: Is that a big number?
MONTANARO: It's a huge number. It's more than any party in any midterm since 1994. I mean, that's a long time. And you might remember that's the year of the Republican takeover in the House giving them control of that chamber. It was the first time since World War II that Republicans were in control of the House and gave us Newt Gingrich as speaker and that "Contract With America." Notably though, it's also more retirements than Democrats left in 2010. And, you know, that was the year of the Tea Party.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
MONTANARO: And Republicans won 63 seats - and more than 2006 when Democrats took over from Republicans.
INSKEEP: Let's figure out what is going on here on a basic level. I guess, we assume that incumbents are considered stronger. They've got the fundraising. They've got the name recognition. You'd rather have your incumbents run for re-election and just have safe seats. But when you have a lot of retirements, does that mean a lot of politicians are looking around and thinking, even as an incumbent, I don't think I can win this district?
MONTANARO: Well, yeah, I mean, there's part of that. And then also they're looking at their president. And when the president's approval rating is in the 30s, then they wind up looking around saying, is this something that I want to do? Is this where I want to be? And I always judge politicians through the lens of the way they think about themselves which is, can I win?
INSKEEP: Well, can Republicans win a majority in the House of Representatives in spite of all these retirements?
MONTANARO: Well, there's certainly the possibility still for Republicans that they will maintain the House because - you know, just because Democrats have this one fundamental advantage, there are a lot of other fundamentals that favor Republicans. You know, the economy is good. The - there is no hot wars going on that are going badly like in 2006 for Republicans. And the playing field frankly favors them because of the way these districts have been drawn after Democrats lost so many governorships and state legislatures over the past decade.
INSKEEP: Oh, yeah, absolutely, I'm thinking about these state legislative elections in Virginia. Correct me if I'm wrong here. Democrats in the election last November won something like 55 percent of the vote and still don't have control of the Virginia legislature because Republicans were the ones who got to draw the districts.
MONTANARO: Well, that's how it works when you win the state.
INSKEEP: And that's going to be a situation for the House of Representatives. I guess we should mention there's also the Senate. But Republicans are considered to have an advantage there.
MONTANARO: Absolutely, they are. And, you know, there are almost a dozen seats that President Trump - 10 seats that President Trump had - states that Trump had won that Democrats are trying to defend.
INSKEEP: OK, let me ask about something else here while I have you, Domenico, because President Trump has been asked again about the possibility of being interviewed by the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. The president said some months ago - he was asked would you testify - would you testify under oath. He said 100 percent. He was asked again and didn't say that - said his more vague formulation of, we'll see what happens, which he says about a lot of things.
MONTANARO: Right, and he said it's unlikely you'd even have an interview because he said this is a Democrat hoax, and there was no collusion. And look. Like any other president - or any other citizen, he could invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to testify against himself - but, boy, almost zero percent chance of that happening because the political risk that that would carry would be huge in the way it would look to the American public. Instead, his lawyers are trying to negotiate something like written answers to questions rather than a sit-down face-to-face.
INSKEEP: OK, so he can't really say no, but he can try to game the system a little bit.
MONTANARO: Right, and it would be pretty rare in modern times actually for a president not to be deposed actually. We've seen that happen quite a bit. But he would be the first president to have to take questions about himself and his own conduct since Bill Clinton, of course.
INSKEEP: Domenico, thanks.
MONTANARO: You're welcome.
INSKEEP: NPR's Domenico Montanaro.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: We have an update now on the Iran nuclear deal - you know, the deal that President Trump once called the worst deal ever.
MARTIN: So this was the basic bargain. Iran agrees to limit its nuclear program. And in exchange, the U.S. and its partners agree to lift some tough economic sanctions. And even though he has criticized it time and again, President Trump has repeatedly upheld this deal by signing a waiver that keeps those sanctions lifted. He has to do this every few months, and tomorrow is yet another of these deadlines.
INSKEEP: NPR's Peter Kenyon has covered all the deadlines. He's on the line. Hi there, Peter.
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: Hi, Steve.
INSKEEP: Has the president signaled what he might do this time?
KENYON: Well, reports out of Washington say he's being advised to keep on waiving the sanctions and continue to work on other measures against Iran. And what he does should be known pretty soon. As you said, tomorrow's the first deadline. That one's on crucial oil and banking sanctions. I can tell you one way Iran is responding. The foreign minister was in Moscow yesterday talking to Sergey Lavrov. Today he's in Brussels meeting with diplomats from the U.K., France, Germany. So Tehran seems to be thinking, we should look to Europe and Russia and maybe China for help because we're probably not going to be getting any from the U.S.
INSKEEP: You know, this has got to be an awkward situation for the Iranians though, right? They want sanctions to be lifted - to remain lifted. They want to have economic activity with the rest of the world. But even if President Trump never reimposes sanctions, there's this uncertainty every few months. There's the question mark out there, and businesses have to think about that.
KENYON: That's right. And it is holding back European companies and banks. And there's some question as to whether Congress is going to rewrite the law that includes all those deadlines. But in the meantime, Iran has been facing all of these anti-government protests. And that actually could work in favor, at least in Washington, of this argument that maybe we shouldn't impose new sanctions. Maybe we shouldn't go back to that because you've already got Iranians blaming their own government for their problems. Why should we distract from that by putting back nuclear-related sanctions now when everyone says Iran is holding up its end of the deal?
INSKEEP: Oh, wait a minute - because if the U.S. were to reimpose sanctions, it gives the government a chance to blame the United States for things. Is that what you're saying?
KENYON: That's right - not that they aren't trying that already. But if the sanctions come back on, that could lend some real weight to those claims.
INSKEEP: Let me circle back to something you said at the very beginning. You said that the U.S. has kept the nuclear deal while pressuring Iran in other ways. What are some of those other ways?
KENYON: Well, what they're trying to do is get - writing up of new sanctions. They're trying to rally Western ally support for either new talks or new sanctions or new pressure on issues, like the behavior in Syria, in Yemen, in missiles. So the question is can the alliance work on a new way to pressure Iran without crumbling this nuclear agreement.
INSKEEP: Peter, thanks as always.
KENYON: You're welcome, Steve.
INSKEEP: NPR's Peter Kenyon.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
INSKEEP: Just last week, it looked like Florida's coastline would be opened up to oil and gas drilling.
MARTIN: This week - not so much.
INSKEEP: Nope.
MARTIN: Florida got an exemption from the Interior Department's controversial new permitting guidelines, so its coastline will remain pristine. Florida Senator Bill Nelson, who's a Democrat, is calling the move a political stunt.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BILL NELSON: The administration and Secretary Zinke shouldn't be playing politics with an issue that is so important to all of our futures - but especially so to Florida's future.
MARTIN: He's talking about interior secretary Ryan Zinke there. Zinke took Florida off the list after meeting with the state's Republican governor, Rick Scott.
INSKEEP: NPR's Greg Allen is on the line from Miami. Greg, good morning.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: OK, so why really change course when it comes to Florida drilling?
ALLEN: Well, you know, Florida always - drilling has always been banned off the coast of Florida here because our beaches are kind of a key part of our tourism economy down here, and people are pretty much opposed to it. Last week when Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke unveiled this plan to greatly expand offshore drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf, it led to immediate opposition here, including from our Republican Governor Rick Scott who said he immediately contacted Zinke, said he wanted a meeting this week with Zinke. He flew to Tallahassee, had a short meeting with Scott. And then he quickly came out and announced that Florida will be, in his words, taken off the table. That led to charges that this was a bit of a political move, one that would boost Scott in his expected run against Bill Nelson, the Democratic incumbent for the Senate later this year.
INSKEEP: Oh, Scott is finishing his governorship and thinking about other offices he could run for, OK.
ALLEN: That's right. He's finishing his second term now. And he hasn't indicated yet, but he's been raising a lot of money. And it seems like he's going to be running against Bill Nelson.
INSKEEP: But wait a minute. If I'm hearing that Florida is being exempted from offshore drilling, and I'm a tourism official in South Carolina, I might say wait a minute. What about Hilton Head? If I'm from North Carolina, I might say wait a minute. What about the Outer Banks? Is every other state going to want to be exempt too?
ALLEN: Just about every other state on the coast - the West Coast and the East Coast - have said they want the same treatment. They kind of brought quite of an uproar yesterday. And we've heard this from Democrats and Republicans. And South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster there says their beaches need protection for the same reasons that Florida beaches need protection. You know, New York, Delaware, Maryland, Oregon, California - you name it. They're all saying the same thing. And this raises questions about the arbitrary and capricious manner - is what some people are saying - that the way this decision was made and whether that could stand up to legal challenges if the states want to go to court here.
INSKEEP: This is the second time this week we've had this phrase arbitrary and capricious applied to the administration. It's just the idea that they must apply the law in a fair and sensible way, right?
ALLEN: Right, and this is a long process to be going forward. It will take lots of public comment. A spokesman for Zinke says a lot of people will be able to make question - make public comment here, and governors are welcome to come and meet with Zinke and express their concerns. And they'll see how this goes forward.
INSKEEP: Greg, thanks as always.
ALLEN: You're welcome.
INSKEEP: NPR's Greg Allen in Miami.
(SOUNDBITE OF MONMA'S "BONFIRE")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
In the first year of the Trump administration, the State Department did not always have too much to say. Our next guest was hired to change that. Steve Goldstein was confirmed to a job working for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. He's now undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. He's overseeing efforts to make sure the United States is selling itself effectively in a world flooded with disinformation.
Rex Tillerson had been criticized for rarely talking to the media and leaving key jobs unfilled. Steve Goldstein insists that image is not correct.
STEVE GOLDSTEIN: What we're trying to do is bring foreign policy back to the Department of State.
INSKEEP: What do you mean by bringing foreign policy back to the State Department?
GOLDSTEIN: That we control the foreign policy of the United States - that we're responsible for it and working with the president of the United States and with the Trump administration, in this particular case, trying to determine where we stand with each nation.
INSKEEP: Let me ask about that...
GOLDSTEIN: Sure.
INSKEEP: ...Because, as people may know, the Pentagon is extremely powerful in foreign policy.
GOLDSTEIN: Sure.
INSKEEP: The Pentagon has the money...
GOLDSTEIN: They do.
INSKEEP: ...Far more money than the State Department, far more personnel. And in some parts of the world, four-star generals can be more powerful than ambassadors, I should think. Would you argue that there is some place in the world where the State Department is reclaiming power, reclaiming primacy that it had lost over the years?
GOLDSTEIN: Last week, I spoke out quite forcefully about the fact that we wanted President Rouhani and Iran to open up Internet access. We think the Internet and social media is a legitimate form of communication. We were not pleased that Instagram and telegram and other - Twitter had been blocked. We are pleased that the president - Rouhani opened up Instagram last week and did acknowledge that there shouldn't be a permanent shutdown. So when we see things that we think are not in the benefit of the people for that country as it relates to certain freedoms, we're not afraid to mention that.
INSKEEP: When you speak out against the crackdown on protests in Iran...
GOLDSTEIN: Yes.
INSKEEP: ...Effectively speaking up for freedom in Iran...
GOLDSTEIN: Yes, we are.
INSKEEP: ...Are those statements part of any larger strategy in trying to spread democracy, spread personal freedoms or anything else around the globe?
GOLDSTEIN: Absolutely. We believe that people should be free. They should have the right to dissent, to speak openly to their government about concerns that they might have. And we're not shy about talking about that. But we don't go into a country and try to create regime change. Just as we told North Korea, our interest was not in creating regime change. It was in creating a more open society and denuclearizing that whole area.
INSKEEP: Is that message of promoting freedom and democracy undermined when you have a president who has insisted that America's self-interest comes first to a greater degree, perhaps, than other presidents have said, has been friendly with authoritarians like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping of China and who denounces his own domestic critics as fake news?
GOLDSTEIN: Well, I think - look, in the end, the president sets the policy. And so our job is to work with the president to explain what we think that policy should be. If the president believes that the policy should be somewhat different - and that has not been the case so far...
INSKEEP: But your job is public diplomacy. And what the president has is a giant megaphone - a way bigger megaphone than the State Department.
GOLDSTEIN: Exactly. But remember, we're one the...
INSKEEP: Does he overwhelm you?
GOLDSTEIN: Well - but it doesn't really because we're on the ground in every country. And we have people throughout who do public diplomacy. Public diplomacy can take a while. It can take an ongoing program for several years.
INSKEEP: We had Ben Cardin, senator of Maryland, on the program yesterday.
GOLDSTEIN: Yes, sir.
INSKEEP: And he was talking about a report that Senate Democrats have put out about Vladimir Putin of Russia, arguing that the Russian president essentially has a global strategy to undermine democratic institutions around the world.
GOLDSTEIN: Yes.
INSKEEP: First, do you accept that that is happening?
GOLDSTEIN: I do accept that that could be happening. And we do accept the fact that there is disinformation that goes out on a daily basis. I have been working with the technology companies. I met with Google a couple of weeks ago. I'm meeting with them again next week. I'm going - talking to Facebook either Friday or Saturday. We've reached out to others. I mean, we believe that there has to be a multipronged approach to resolving the disinformation component and also the interdiction component and that the technology companies can play a large part in that.
INSKEEP: Steve Goldstein, thanks for coming by.
GOLDSTEIN: Thank you. It was my pleasure.
INSKEEP: He's the new undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy remains defiant after federal charges were dismissed against him for his role in the armed standoff over cattle grazing back in 2014. Bundy says he will continue to let his cows roam on U.S. public lands without paying a dime to the federal government. NPR's Kirk Siegler reports some Westerners are nervous about what comes next.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: After the charges were dismissed, the Bundy family took to social media, saying they want to kick the Federal Bureau of Land Management out of Nevada. And yesterday, the 71-year-old Cliven Bundy called a press conference, clutched a black megaphone and again claimed that the U.S. government has no jurisdiction to own or manage federal land. It's a theory widely debunked by decades of court rulings.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
CLIVEN BUNDY: Don't let them think they're going to tell us what to do in Clark County on our land.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Woo-hoo.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Amen.
SIEGLER: Bundy then blasted the local sheriff, Joe Lombardo, who he said isn't protecting him from a so-called federal army. Bundy became a national symbol for those who believe the federal government is overreaching. Armed militia from around the country came to his defense in the Nevada desert in 2014, forcing federal agents who had come to impound his cows to stand down. Asked what Cliven will do if the government returns, some of his supporters in this small crowd tried to answer for him.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Whatever it takes.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: No, listen...
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: He'll go back again.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: Yeah, I guess it would be whatever it takes.
JJ MACNAB: I was watching for a call to arms. I didn't quite see it.
SIEGLER: For domestic extremism experts like JJ MacNab, this was classic Bundy.
MACNAB: These are the same rhetoric he was using in 2014. He never explicitly says anything. He doesn't say we're going to point guns at the federal agents. He says, we're going to do whatever it takes, you know, and let them use their imagination on what that phrase means.
SIEGLER: After all, Bundy largely stayed away from the standoff itself. His militia supporters were the ones pointing guns at the armed federal agents. The charges against Bundy only involved the standoff. This case had nothing to do with cattle grazing. But University of Nevada law professor Ian Bartrum says some ranchers in the West may see what happened to Bundy as a signal.
IAN BARTRUM: They still, under the law, have to pay their grazing permits if they want to graze cattle on federal land. But - you know, not speaking legally - I'm sure it does embolden them to say - well, they can't enforce their policy. Why should I pay attention to it?
SIEGLER: There are still two court orders that Bundy remove his cows. He owes an estimated million dollars in fees and fines. Neither the Justice Department or the BLM is saying what their next move will be.
Kirk Siegler, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF THIS WILL DESTROY YOU'S "THERE ARE SOME REMEDIES WORSE THAN DISEASE")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. It's that time of year when the ornaments are packed away and the Christmas trees end up on the sidewalk for pickup. One woman in California looked at her old tree and saw dollar signs. She showed up at Costco and demanded a full refund last week because her tree was dead. And even though she was shamed by other customers in line, would you believe she actually did get her money back? Now, if she tries to bring in a moldy jack-o'-lantern, I would draw the line. It's MORNING EDITION.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Let's ask what people really talk about when they talk about chain migration.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Chain migration is a total disaster which threatens our security and our economy.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
HENRY CUELLAR: ...What we call chain migration. How many people can a person...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
TOM COLE: ...And dealing with chain migration, I think a reasonable proposal. So...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: The lottery system and chain migration - we're going to end them.
INSKEEP: You heard President Trump's voice there, also a couple of congressmen - Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar and Oklahoma Republican Tom Cole. President Trump is saying he wants to end chain migration as part of any immigration deal. So let's discuss this with NPR's Tom Gjelten, who wrote a book about immigration called "Nation Of Nations" (ph).
Tom, good morning.
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: What exactly is chain migration?
GJELTEN: Well, when an immigrant comes here legally and ultimately becomes a U.S. citizen, he or she has the right to bring family members along behind, not just spouses or children, but parents, even adult siblings and their spouses. And in time, those people can, of course, then bring in their relatives, so one immigrant coming here legally can set in motion a whole migration chain. And actually, this is how about two-thirds of all legal immigrants moving to this country come in now.
INSKEEP: Well, let me just ask you, Tom, if I say chain migration, it sounds kind of bad, kind of unsavory, but can I call the very same thing family reunification?
GJELTEN: You can. You know, in my book that you referenced, I'd used the term chain migration throughout the book because I just thought it was a descriptive pattern. You can say it in a neutral way or you can say it - it all depends on context and tone. When President Trump says it's horrible, you know, that sounds pretty bad.
INSKEEP: How did we end up with this policy that emphasizes family reunification?
GJELTEN: Well, it was actually a compromise because up until 1965, we chose immigrants on the basis of national origin, giving - actually giving preference to people coming from northern and Western Europe, the idea...
INSKEEP: Basically, from whiter countries, if we're going to be brutal about it.
GJELTEN: Well - exactly. I mean, the idea was that white Europeans made the best Americans. Then along came the 1960s. We decided this is a discriminatory policy; we need to change it. But there was concern, mostly from conservatives, that if you moved to, let's say, a merit-based immigration system, there's no control over who's going to come into the country. And so they came up with this compromise, that - let's do away with national origins, but let's give preference to people who have relatives here already. That would be a way to make sure that we just sort of had the same people coming as we're already here.
INSKEEP: Did that happen?
GJELTEN: No, it didn't happen. And, you know, it's interesting because people who were opposed to national origin quotas thought that this is, like, a backdoor way to get to the same thing. What no one realized is that the demand to move to the United States had changed, and it was no longer coming from Europe. It was coming from Asia, Africa, the Middle East. And as long as you had one person coming here on a student visa or an employment visa, they could bring their family members with them, and it opened the door to a huge surge of immigration from those regions.
INSKEEP: People of color coming from different parts of the world.
GJELTEN: Immigrants of color - it was exactly the outcome that it was originally intended to preclude.
INSKEEP: So let me just ask you, Tom, can we really talk about chain migration without referencing, in some way, this racial backdrop that you just described?
GJELTEN: Well, that was certainly the historical background to it. I do think that you can - you know, you can move to a different system. Family unification, you know, is actually a pretty functional way to do it.
INSKEEP: There's also the question of whether you could go to a skills-based system, though. There is this other way you could talk about it.
GJELTEN: That's the way it's done in Canada.
INSKEEP: Tom, thanks very much.
GJELTEN: You bet, Steve.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Tom Gjelten.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
For many teachers, finding an affordable place to live near their schools, where they work, is really tough, and buying a house can be an even bigger challenge. But there's an effort in Indianapolis to change that. Jeanie Lindsay of Indiana Public Broadcasting reports on a new housing project for teachers.
JEANIE LINDSAY, BYLINE: Like many public school systems, the one in Indianapolis has a big turnover problem. Each year, some 400 teachers, a whopping 20 percent, either switch schools or quit. Sabbath McKiernan-Allen teaches second grade at Thomas Gregg elementary close to downtown. She says the high turnover rate affects students and learning in many ways.
SABBATH MCKIERNAN-ALLEN: You know, with teachers not coming back at winter break, we have a new teacher, and she has to start all over again, which then takes away from the learning time because you are going over procedures and establishing that rapport with a student.
LINDSAY: Elsie Owolo is with a group called Teach Plus. She says keeping teachers around is a complicated issue, but housing often plays a key role, and even in Indianapolis, it can be a problem.
ELSIE OWOLO: So in order for them to be able to afford something, our teachers have expressed that they've, No. 1, had to stay with parents, had to stay with roommates, or, you know, the ultimate result is living out in the suburbs and just having a longer commute.
LINDSAY: And that causes problems that can lead to turnover. So the school district and a collection of nonprofits are working on a new housing project called the Teachers' Village. It's here on the corner of 10th and North Rural Street, where a trio of boarded-up houses sit as cars drive past. This is a neighborhood ripe for renovation. A lot of properties here have sat vacant for years, and it's here where they broke ground for the Teachers' Village last fall.
JOHN FRANKLIN HAY: It's really two blocks, and all the houses...
LINDSAY: Community developer John Franklin Hay heads the group responsible for the renovation and construction of a hundred homes in the neighborhood. He's working on the blueprint for the Teachers' Village.
HAY: What we really want to do is to invite and encourage IPS and urban charter school teachers to consider living here, and becoming rooted here and becoming a community leader here.
LINDSAY: The idea is pretty straightforward. The group will renovate and build nearly two dozen homes in a two-block area. They'll be offered at a subsidized price, targeting teachers. Hay says the plan is to both revitalize the area and help the city's teachers with affordable housing. Cities working to provide affordable housing for teachers isn't a new idea. Newark has an apartment complex. Communities in North Carolina and California offer teachers subsidized rent. But this project offers an opportunity to buy a home. Not everyone agrees cities should target teachers for affordable housing. Matt Chingos, who's with the Urban Institute, says high housing costs affect everyone, and there should be other ways to help teachers find a place to live close to where they teach.
MATTHEW CHINGOS: At the same time, we also have to be concerned, if we can't attract teachers to an area because it's expensive, well, there's something we can do about that other than give them housing. It's, we can pay them more.
LINDSAY: But teacher pay raises rarely keep up with rising housing costs. Teacher Sabbath McKiernan-Allen wishes they did.
MCKIERNAN-ALLEN: I understand, why not pay teachers enough where they get to choose where they live? Why are you forcing us to live here if we want an affordable house? But for me, personally, I think it's awesome.
LINDSAY: This new village is intended as a first step. If it succeeds and more teachers decide to stay, there could be more villages like this one throughout Indianapolis. For NPR News, I'm Jeanie Lindsay.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER FAI'S "TO THE GREEN TOWN")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Long Island, N.Y., is home to many large Salvadoran communities. Thousands of them now face deportation after President Trump revoked their protected status this week. That's left immigrant families in turmoil, some local officials worried about the economy and others saying it is time for them to go. Charles Lane from member station WSHU reports.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Speaking Spanish).
CHARLES LANE, BYLINE: Here at a community center in Brentwood on Long Island, immigrants get help with legal paperwork and social services. And on Tuesday, the phone calls and questions started coming in. What do they do now?
AMINATA ROMERO: (Speaking Spanish).
LANE: Aminata Romero crossed the border illegally in 1998. Three years later, a pair of earthquakes devastated her native country. She and nearly 200,000 Salvadorans in the U.S. were given temporary protected status, or TPS. The humanitarian program protects immigrants from being deported to countries ravaged by war and natural disasters. The U.S. has renewed El Salvador's TPS designation 10 times until Monday.
ROMERO: (Speaking Spanish).
LANE: Romero was surprised. She had followed the rules, and every 18 months, she checked in with immigration and had her fingerprints taken. Now, she expects to lose her job with the county government, as well as her health benefits and pension.
ROMERO: (Speaking Spanish).
LANE: But like many other Salvadorans, Romero says she'll stay in the shadows so she can continue to send money back to her two daughters. TPS status was never meant to lead to U.S. citizenship. It was just a temporary work permit. Now these immigrants have few, if any, options to stay legally. Walter Barrientos is a community organizer for Make The Road in New York, which advocates for immigrants.
WALTER BARRIENTOS: For many of them, it's not really a choice. I think many of them are being forced to remain in this country undocumented. They have children here who are U.S. citizens. They have businesses. They have mortgages.
LANE: It's not just immigrants who will be impacted - also, the community. For Long Island in particular, undocumented immigration is the only thing that has kept the population from declining.
BARRIENTOS: And now you are seeing this massive exodus of people because they're being pushed out without this program.
LANE: Sentiment is split here. Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin represents parts of Long Island. He says the program was never intended to allow these immigrants to stay permanently, and the fact that some may have been here for 17 years underscores how broken the immigration system is. But other local officials worry about the economic impact. Suffolk County estimates ending TPS will cost the local economy $638 million, about 1 percent of the county's GDP. Theresa Ward is the planning commissioner.
THERESA WARD: It would be this immediate economic drain.
LANE: Fewer people paying taxes and buying things, also fewer workers in industries like construction and retail. Ward worries as many as 1,070 mortgages could go to foreclosure.
WARD: When you spread that 1,070 homes around the county, it's going to bring all the homes right around it - those property values down.
LANE: So far, the Trump administration has ended designation for three countries - El Salvador, Haiti and Nicaragua - because officials say those countries have recovered. Immigrants point to ongoing violence and political instability, and they hope Congress will intercede. Still, many are preparing to upend their lives.
RODMAN CERANO: We are still very much trying to deal with this and trying to figure out how we will be able to make adjustments and preparations for the worst-case scenarios.
LANE: This is Rodman Cerano. He and his sister were born in the U.S. Their parents are TPS recipients and put them through college. But right now, he says, their future is uncertain.
For NPR News, I'm Charles Lane.
(SOUNDBITE OF FEVERKIN'S "OF THE WRIST")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
All right, here's some art that you might enjoy if the news sometimes makes you want to punch something. At the LA art show in downtown Los Angeles right now, 20 red punching bags hang in the gallery. It's part of an interactive piece of conceptual political art. Each bag bears the face of a controversial world leader. Visitors are encouraged to punch them. NPR's Neda Ulaby stopped by.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: Excuse me, sir. Who did you punch just now?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Kim Jong whatever.
ULABY: You can punch people like Kim Jong Un or Fidel Castro. The artist grew up in Cuba. Antuane Rodriguez says he learned to distrust politicians as a young child. The name of the work, "Left Or Right," is both boxing and a political pun. Though, Rodriguez says it's supposed to be healing.
How is punching someone in the face healing?
ANTUANE RODRIGUEZ: It's healthy for your body.
ULABY: Healthy says, Rodriguez, because listening to the news is stressful, and it demands psychic release. Because we're at an art show in California, it's no surprise our current president is the most popular face to punch.
JEFF CRANDALL: Whoa (ph). Sorry (laughter).
ULABY: Visitor Jeff Crandall had a few bouts with the bags. And afterwards, he said it was a little healing.
CRANDALL: I feel purged (laughter). I feel so much more calm.
ULABY: And ready for yet another round in the ring we call the news cycle. Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF RJD2'S "DISCONNECTED")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The Trump administration is up against a deadline on whether to reinstate sanctions against Iran. You have heard that sentence before, likely, because this is something the president is required to do every few months. So far, Trump hasn't followed through on his promise to end the Iran nuclear deal. But this week, his decision is complicated by recent street protests in Iran. President Trump supported the protesters, saying they were, quote, "expressing legitimate grievances." Many Iranians linked those grievances to economic hardships caused by Western sanctions - the kind President Trump could choose to bring back.
For more on this, we are joined now by Ambassador Dennis Ross. He has advised four different U.S. presidents on the Middle East. He joins us on the line from Jerusalem. Ambassador, thanks for being back on the program.
DENNIS ROSS: Nice to be with you, thank you.
MARTIN: The deadline for reimposing these sanctions on Iran is tomorrow. What do you believe the president is going to do?
ROSS: Well, I think when it comes to predicting the president, somehow I feel it's easier to predict what he'll - it's easier to predict what's going to happen in the Middle East than to predict exactly what he will do. I'm hoping that he will not reinstate the sanctions. I think he can use the fact that he has concerns - legitimate concerns - about what the Iranians are doing both domestically but in the region as a way to say to the Europeans, look, let's join together. Let's see how we can raise the cost. Let's see how we can make it clear to the Iranians that they have some hard choices to make.
He could do that if he doesn't walk away from the JCPOA, the nuclear deal, because if he does that, if he walks away, he walks away alone, and the Europeans are going to feel the need to demonstrate that they are still sticking with the deal. And I think they'll be much less inclined to try to raise the price to the Iranians even on other issues. So I think the best path, particularly if the president is serious about wanting to affect Iranian behavior on the inside and the outside, is not to walk away from the nuclear deal.
MARTIN: If he does choose to reinstate sanctions, does that mean the deal is over?
ROSS: Well, technically, no because if no one else who negotiated this deal, meaning you have the permanent five members of the Security Council - counting us, but that was also the Russians, the Chinese, the British and the French, plus the Germans who negotiated this along with us - they - none of them will walk away from the deal. So Iran then has to decide, do they walk away from the deal? My guess is they probably don't walk away from the deal because they would prefer to isolate us than themselves. And particularly in the aftermath of what's been going on in Iran, they don't need to be more isolated on the outside when they already see there's a level of alienation on the inside.
MARTIN: How might the protests that we saw play out in Iran last month, how might that play into the president's decision, if at all?
ROSS: Well, I do worry that he may feel, particularly at a time when there's been this protests and unrest that reached 80 different cities, that he wants to make a statement that shows he's being tough on Iran and - by walking away from the JCPOA, by reinstituting what were the sanctions taken - lifted because of the deal, he may feel that he is demonstrating that he's being tough. But I guess what I'm trying to say is the best way to demonstrate that he's prepared to try to raise the cost to the Iranians is by doing it in a collective way. What made the sanctions effective is that it wasn't just the U.S. that it was doing it. It was a collective, multilateral set of sanctions. If we walk away from the deal, we reduce that prospect.
MARTIN: If I could get into the weeds for a moment, the president made a different decision last October that compelled Congress to come up with some fixes to the Iran nuclear deal. The president has said that there's not enough transparency, that inspections need to be tightened up. Did that happen?
ROSS: No, it hasn't happened. There is - there have been discussions on the Hill, and there have been some discussions with the administration, but that really hasn't happened yet. Now, the president also said in that October 13 statement - he also said at the time that his administration would work with the Congress and with the European allies to come up with ways to raise the price, not just on issues of transparency but actually to affect the ballistic missile testing, to affect Iran's behavior, its regional destabilizing behavior in the region. And the irony here is that the Europeans don't want us to walk away from the JCPOA and the fact is to keep us in the JCPOA, they might well go along with us on these other issues.
MARTIN: All right. Ambassador Dennis Ross, a distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute, thanks so much for being with us this morning.
ROSS: My pleasure.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Authorities in many coastal states say they want Florida's deal. The Trump administration exempted Florida from offshore oil and gas drilling, and that prompts a question - why Florida and not anywhere else? Here's NPR's Greg Allen.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: When the Trump administration unveiled a plan to greatly expand offshore drilling, in Florida the response was quick. Nearly every member of the state's congressional delegation opposed the plan. Florida's Republican governor, Rick Scott, included himself in the opposition and said he'd seek an immediate meeting with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to discuss his concerns. Earlier this week, after a short meeting with Scott at the Tallahassee airport, Zinke said he'd changed his mind.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
RYAN ZINKE: We are going to take the new oil platforms, new oil, gas platforms, off the table off the Florida coastlines. And so for Floridians, we are not drilling off the coast of Florida.
ALLEN: Drilling for oil and gas has never been allowed off of Florida's coasts. Because of the importance of pristine beaches to the state's tourist economy, Democrats and Republicans alike have mostly opposed offshore drilling. After Zinke's announcement, Scott said he'd, quote, "never stopped fighting for Florida's environment and our pristine coastline." But that statement surprised some environmentalists.
ALIKI MONCRIEF: Really, over the last seven years, he's never stood out as an environmental champion. He's done really the opposite.
ALLEN: Aliki Moncrief, with the environmental group Florida Conservation Voters, says Scott opposed a state constitutional amendment that would have banned drilling off the coasts. More recently, Moncrief says, he didn't speak out when the Trump administration weakened drilling safety regulations.
MONCRIEF: So while I think everyone welcomes him standing up with the rest of us and the rest of our elected officials in opposing offshore oil drilling, it feels like political theater.
ALLEN: For conspiracy theorists, the fact that Scott had lunch with Trump at Mar-a-Lago just days before the offshore drilling plan was announced just thickens the plot. The Trump-owned private club is on the Atlantic in Palm Beach with its own white sand beach. Scott, who is finishing his second term as Florida governor, is expected to announce soon he's entering the race for the U.S. Senate, running against Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. Nelson is calling Zinke's reversal a political stunt designed by the Trump administration to help Scott. Nelson spoke yesterday on the floor of the Senate.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BILL NELSON: The administration and Secretary Zinke shouldn't be playing politics with an issue that is so important to all of our futures but especially so to Florida's future.
ALLEN: The news that Florida was receiving a special exemption from offshore drilling was hardly out before governors and other officials from coastal states began asking for similar treatment. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo tweeted, New York doesn't want drilling off our coast either. Where do we sign up for a waiver? In South Carolina, Governor Henry McMaster, a Republican, said he'll take steps to file his own appeal with the Trump administration.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HENRY MCMASTER: We cannot afford to take a chance with the beauty, the majesty and the economic value and vitality of our wonderful coastline in South Carolina.
ALLEN: A spokesman for Zinke says there will be many opportunities for public comment on the offshore drilling plan and that governors of other states are invited to submit requests to discuss the issue.
Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Federal immigration agents conducted a surprise sweep of nearly 100 7-Eleven convenience stores across the nation Wednesday. They were trying to root out employers whose workers may be in this country illegally. As NPR's Richard Gonzales reports, the action is the largest such immigration enforcement operation conducted under the Trump administration.
RICHARD GONZALES, BYLINE: Agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement targeted for inspections 7-Eleven stores in 17 states and the District of Columbia. Twenty-one people suspected of being and working in this country illegally were arrested. In a statement, the acting director of ICE, Thomas Homan, said the actions were intended to send a strong message to employers that if they hire an illegal workforce, his agency will hold them accountable. Supporters of that approach say it's about time.
PETER NUNEZ: People come here to find work. If they can't find work, they won't come.
GONZALES: Peter Nunez is a former U.S. attorney and board chair of the D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates immigration limits.
NUNEZ: And no one questions that the way to stop illegal immigration is to stop them from getting jobs.
GONZALES: Critics say workplace enforcement actions during the George W. Bush administration were not effective. Michael Kaufman is a senior attorney for the ACLU of Southern California.
MICHAEL KAUFMAN: There were a large number of workers who were arrested, but at the end of the day, it did not create a large deterrent, and it did nothing to solve the problem of the many undocumented workers that remain here contributing to our economy and supporting their families.
GONZALES: For its part, Irving, Texas-based 7-Eleven said in an emailed statement that its franchisees are independent business owners and solely responsible for who they hire and verifying who is eligible to work.
Richard Gonzales, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF EDAMAME'S "LANDSDELAR")
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Russia is cracking down on a group dedicated to exposing human rights abuses. One leader of this organization, called Memorial, is being forced to undergo psychiatric testing. The U.S. State Department says it's troubled by the arrest of another Memorial activist on drug charges. Let's talk this through with NPR's Moscow correspondent Lucian Kim. Hi, Lucian.
LUCIAN KIM, BYLINE: Good morning.
INSKEEP: What is this group finding that's so troubling to President Vladimir Putin's government?
KIM: Well, the first activist you mentioned, his name is Yuri Dmitriev and he's a historian in northern Russia who uncovered a Stalin-era mass grave that contains thousands of bodies from the 1930s. And of course today President Vladimir Putin is telling Russians that they should be proud of their history, and in fact in an interview with American filmmaker Oliver Stone last year, he said he was against the demonization of Stalin. So this pressure against the group doesn't really seem like much of a coincidence. I mean, the message from the authorities is really that only enemies of Russia would want to investigate human rights abuses, whether they happened in the past or today, and that they're probably agents of foreign powers.
INSKEEP: OK. So a past that many Russians would think of as the bad old days, Vladimir Putin prefers to think of as the good old days and doesn't want to look too closely. So what is the government doing to these activists?
KIM: OK. Well, this historian Dmitriev, he's being accused of taking pornographic photographs of his foster daughter who's a minor. And even though he's been cleared by previous psychiatric evaluations, he's now in a clinic in Moscow for further examination. And of course to many people that recalls sort of the Soviet practice of sending dissidents to psychiatric hospitals. Now, the second activist, his name is Oyub Titiev. He is the head of Memorial's office in Chechnya in southern Russia. And this week he was arrested on drug possession charges. Today I called Alexander Cherkasov, the head of Memorial, to find out the latest. And what he told me is that police showed up at Titiev's house yesterday looking for his brother and son.
ALEXANDER CHERKASOV: (Through interpreter) It's a common practice in Chechnya to put pressure on people by using their relatives as hostages.
KIM: So in the case of Titiev, what the authorities want is him to confess possessing marijuana. And right now, according to Cherkasov, he's refusing to admit any guilt.
INSKEEP: OK. So you have one person who's been ordered to undergo psychiatric testing, and when it didn't turn out the government's way, they ordered him to do it again. You have this other person who's being pressed to admit various crimes. Is this part of a larger pattern in Russia right now?
KIM: Yes. It's become much more difficult, not only for human rights groups, but basically all non-governmental organizations to work, and especially those that receive foreign financing like Memorial. They have been forced to register as foreign agents. Of course this has been going on for some time. The head of - a former head of Memorial's Chechnya office was murdered in 2009. Her name is Natalya Estemirova, and we still don't know who her killers were. And some of this is also quite trivial, Steve. I mean, Cherkasov, when I talked to him today, he said just last night there was a camera crew from state television sort of hiding in the bushes outside their offices, and when the employees of Memorial came out to go home, these guys jumped out of the bushes and were showering them with all sorts of provocative questions.
INSKEEP: Lucian, thanks very much.
KIM: Thanks, Steve.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Lucian Kim in Moscow.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Tesla grabs a lot of headlines for innovating electric cars and driverless technology. But recently, those headlines have also been about production delays and quality control problems, which is giving older car companies like Toyota, Mercedes Benz and General Motors a chance to catch up. Here's NPR's Sonari Glinton.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: The keynote speaker at the Consumer Electronics Show, a former furniture executive turned University of Michigan athletic director turned car CEO.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: President and CEO of Ford Motor Company to the CES keynote stage.
(APPLAUSE)
GLINTON: Dressed in a black sweater vest, Hackett seemed to channel his best Steve Jobs. Hackett is coming to CES to make the case for Ford being a mobility company. They won't just build cars, but offer rental or ride hailing - go way, way beyond just making and selling cars. And he's standing onstage in front of a moving display of the street of the future.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JAMES HACKETT: Now as you head down the street, you see just the analog vehicles really in an analog world. They're running into lines that divide the road and signs that tell the driver where to go. In the future, the car and the system will be talking to each other.
GLINTON: Essentially, Ford and the other car companies want to become more Silicon Valley, less Detroit. And whether by choice or not, the cars are becoming more electric. Christoph von Hugo with Mercedes-Benz says electric vehicles, or EVs, are a cornerstone of the company's new strategy along with shared cars and connected cars.
CHRISTOPH VON HUGO: We are investing heavily in making electrification become better and better, but also the same is true for automation. We don't see them as a contradiction, certainly not, but they go hand in hand.
GLINTON: Mercedes-Benz will make an electric or hybrid version of all its cars by 2022, and they're not alone. Volvo will go all electric by next year. Ford has plans for an electric F-150 truck and an electric Mustang. GM will launch 10 electric or hybrid cars in the country by 2020. And von Hugo says the coolness of self-driving cars will help convince the public that the coming EVs will be worthwhile.
VON HUGO: As we progress in autonomous driving, we will also see more and more of these autonomous vehicles being driven with electric powertrains.
JEREMY CARLSON: I am Jeremy Carlson, principal analyst with IHS markets, and I'm in Las Vegas at the convention center for CES 2018.
GLINTON: Carlson started out a car geek, but he says nowadays a car geek has to be a tech geek, as well.
CARLSON: That is correct. However, CES is now one of the biggest automotive shows, certainly in North America, and arguably one of the most influential across the industry at this point.
GLINTON: Carlson says auto-makers have long spent money on various technologies like self-driving and electric cars, but right now there are only a handful of electric cars available around the country. With dozens of EVs hitting the market in coming years, that will change, says Carlson.
CARLSON: The choice that we'll see in the many different types of electric vehicles and the different packaging for these technologies we expect is really going to start to hasten kind of deployment and uptake and interest from consumers.
GLINTON: If an electric hatchback won't tempt consumers, the car companies are hoping that maybe an electric pickup truck will, or a sports car will do the trick. What about an EV lowrider?
Sonari Glinton, NPR News.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. Some say the world will end in fire, others, in ice. That line from a Robert Frost poem comes to mind because Quebec City had a fire at its ice hotel. It's built each year with ice walls 4-feet thick. Something in there caught on fire, maybe a candle lighting something up. Smoke spread through the hotel. The fire department doused the flames, but hotel keepers now seek cleaners who can get smoke stains off the building, which is, of course, entirely white. It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Six months ago, Joe Arpaio, the controversial former sheriff from Arizona, was facing possible jail time. He had defied a federal judge's order to stop detaining people on suspicion of their immigration status. In the end, though, the man who calls himself America's toughest sheriff was spared. President Donald Trump pardoned him.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Sheriff Joe is a patriot. Sheriff Joe loves our country. Sheriff Joe protected our borders. And Sheriff Joe was very unfairly treated by the Obama administration.
MARTIN: Now 85-year-old Sheriff Joe is running for Senate. Befitting his hard-line approach to detention and immigration, Arpaio made the announcement this week as lawmakers debated immigration policy. I recently spoke with Arpaio about how he would handle the future of so-called DREAMers, people brought to the U.S. illegally as children under the DACA program.
JOE ARPAIO: Well, I have mixed emotions on this. I have my own idea. I don't know if you want to hear it. It's sort of out of the box.
MARTIN: Tell me about it.
ARPAIO: When I say out of the box, I do things very unorthodox or maybe controversial. But I'll tell you one thing - why don't we - when we come across these kids - or some are older than just kids - then deport them. You deport them back to the country they came from.
They can do a lot of good in those countries - they have education here - and help out and be good ambassadors to the - you know, from the United States to their country. We have the Peace Corps. You have religious missions that go on missions. And I think this would be good for the DACA people to go back and then come back over legally into our country. And that would solve a lot of problems.
MARTIN: I mean, many of these people come from very dangerous countries, where their life could be at risk if they were to return to those countries. Are you sympathetic to that?
ARPAIO: Well, you know, we have a danger here. So should we deport all the people in Chicago with all the shooting and murders, if they want to get out and go to another country? Should the other countries welcome them? I don't think they would. So it's unfortunate there's problems in other countries. But you have to do it right. So - and now it's time to send them back, especially if those countries have alleviated some of their danger and problems.
MARTIN: If it were up to you, would you close all of the borders to migrants?
ARPAIO: No. Why would we close the border completely? Just make sure you get the right people to come into our country. My father and mother came from Italy, you know. And so I have a personal interest in that situation. So this is complex. I'm sure that the Senate - I would hope - and the House would make some decisions finally, after all these years when they don't have the guts to make a decision. Right now that's what we need is some leadership and get this problem solved.
MARTIN: That was former Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He's running for Senate in Arizona, hoping to replace Senator Jeff Flake, who's one of many Republicans not seeking re-election this year.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It is normal in any election year for some incumbents to retire. Lawmakers look around, ask if they can win another term, and if they doubt it - they're the pros - they may step aside. Now that California Congressman Darrell Issa has decided to step down, though, a total of 31 Republicans in Congress have said they will not run. That's a record in modern times. Some Republicans are seeking other offices. Others are simply quitting.
Matt Schlapp is watching all of this. He's chair of the American Conservative Union. Thanks for coming by our studios once again.
MATT SCHLAPP: Great to be here, Steve.
INSKEEP: How worried are conservatives approaching this midterm election?
SCHLAPP: Conservatives and Republicans, generally, are concerned. It's a lot of retirements. And there's been more political change in the last two years - I really would argue on both sides - than we've seen probably in my lifetime. And for some incumbents, it rattles them.
You'll look at most of these Republicans who aren't running again - it's a couple of factors. Number one, they're in very tough districts. Darrell Issa barely won last time despite the fact that he spends a lot of his own resources because he's a very wealthy guy.
INSKEEP: He's in a district that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016.
SCHLAPP: Right. So you see, that's one dynamic. And in an increasingly polarized America, it's that much harder to win in districts controlled by the other party. The other issue is a lot of these Republicans were chairmen, and they're term limited from keeping their chairmanship. So like Bob Goodlatte and these folks - once you've had that gavel in your hands, Steve, it's hard to just see yourself as a mere mortal, regular member.
INSKEEP: Yeah. There must be lawmakers - you talked about political change on both sides in the last couple of years that parties have been resorting and shifting particularly because of President Trump and some of his positions. Do you think there are a lot of Republicans who do not feel comfortable in their party anymore?
SCHLAPP: I think that - remember, Donald Trump didn't change the dynamics, although he's changed a lot of things. There were changing dynamics that gave Donald Trump a lane to get the nomination of the Republican Party. He beat, you know, 16 other candidates that most of us thought this was like, you know, this was the top of the class here. And he just worked through them. Won almost every primary.
And on the other side, Bernie Sanders, who's not even a Democrat - he's a socialist - really upset the order of things. And a lot of people believe that if it wasn't for Debbie Wasserman Schultz at the DNC, who was a close Hillary Clinton ally and such, he might - and superdelegates - he might have been the nominee. So you have a guy, Donald Trump, who wasn't really a lifelong Republican getting the Republican nomination. And Bernie Sanders, a socialist, almost getting the Democratic nomination.
INSKEEP: Has it been a mistake for Republicans to approach the president the way that they have? And I just want to summarize here. Republicans are appreciative of the fact that the president signs onto their agenda, and they go for that. And they just keep trying to look the other way when he says something embarrassing or tweet something embarrassing. Is that just not working for Republicans?
SCHLAPP: I think it's working great. I think that the president is a unique personality. He has not - as I said, he hasn't been a longtime Republican. He hasn't run for office as a Republican. He is an outsider president, which we probably haven't had since our founders. And I think my advice to Republicans all the time - I met with a bunch of House Republican conservatives the other day - is since the president is a unique individual, you don't have to agree with absolutely everything he does...
INSKEEP: Yeah, but wait a minute...
SCHLAPP: ...But if you have a shared agenda, you ought to work together.
INSKEEP: So there's a shared agenda. I'll grant that.
SCHLAPP: There definitely is.
INSKEEP: But I get a sense, Matt, that there are a lot of Republicans who would like to just support the president on the issues, and he keeps making it so very hard. He talks about nuclear buttons. He raises the prospect of nuclear confrontation. He announces that he's a, quote, "very stable genius." I mean, do you think the president is a very stable genius?
SCHLAPP: I think he's very stable, and I think he's a political genius. How the heck would a guy who's never really been in politics in his very first run get the top job? I mean, you have to agree, Steve.
INSKEEP: You think he's very stable?
SCHLAPP: I know people...
INSKEEP: You don't think this guy is continuously angry and continuously on the verge of going after...
SCHLAPP: No. No. You know, I get a benefit a lot of people don't get. I knew him before he ran for president. I've talked with him and worked with him as he was running for president. And, obviously, you know, I'm going to be at the White House today on an initiative they're working on. So I deal with him and his people.
And I find him - yes, he's unique. He's a unique New Yorker. There's no question. He is a character. But he's also very bright. Unlike a lot of politicians when I talk to them, he engages me and asks me a bunch of questions. And he listens, which is a very rare commodity in politics.
INSKEEP: I've got to tell you. There are a lot of New Yorkers who are outspoken, but not very many call themselves a very stable genius. So I'll just mention - I'll just mention...
SCHLAPP: (Laughter).
INSKEEP: I want to ask about one other thing very briefly. Steve Bannon, of course, has been more or less read out of the Republican Party, for the moment anyways. He's lost his perch at Breitbart. He's been denounced by the president.
SCHLAPP: He's had a rough week.
INSKEEP: But not long ago, this former presidential adviser spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and he was saying things like this. Let's listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
STEVE BANNON: I think if you look at the lines of work - I kind of break it out into three verticals or three buckets. The first is kind of national security and sovereignty. And that's your intelligence, the defense department, Homeland Security. The second line of work is what I refer to as economic nationalism - rethinking how we're going to reconstruct our trade arrangements around the world. The third, broadly, line of work is what is deconstruction of the administrative state.
INSKEEP: Here's my question - do those views persist even as Steve Bannon does not?
SCHLAPP: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. First of all, I was the person interviewing him in that...
INSKEEP: There we go, OK.
SCHLAPP: ...A year ago, and CPAC is coming up in February. So that was a year ago. It's amazing - short period of time. And as I said, he's had a rough go here. But yeah, I think he animated and explained very well where - it's not a Republican thing - where a lot of Americans felt we had missed the mark on trade agreements.
It's not about whether you're free trade or not. It's whether the trade agreements are really working and whether or not we have this extra constitutional government in these independent agencies and whether they're outside the bounds of the Constitution.
INSKEEP: Matt Schlapp, head of the American Conservative Union, thanks for coming by.
SCHLAPP: Thanks for having me here.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
President Trump is ready to let states make changes to Medicaid. That is the government-run health program for the poor. The administration says it will allow states - if they want - to add work requirements for able-bodied adults who seek Medicaid. A number of states have been asking for that authority, and that's the beginning of our discussion with NPR's Scott Horsley.
Hi, Scott.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: So work requirements - what's that mean exactly?
HORSLEY: Well, it could be actual work. It could also be other forms of what the government calls community engagement, such as job training or volunteer work or maybe caregiving. You said it. This is an authorization for states to add that requirement. It's not a requirement from the federal government. But the agency that oversees Medicaid says it's had requests from about 10 states. And so it's offering this kind of flexibility. We should stress this requirement would only be available for able-bodied adults, not children - and children are, of course, some of the biggest beneficiaries of Medicaid...
INSKEEP: Yeah.
HORSLEY: ...And not for people who become eligible for Medicaid because they are disabled.
INSKEEP: Does this strike a certain political chord for Republicans?
HORSLEY: Certainly. This is something that is popular with Donald Trump's base. He was at a rally in Missouri a few weeks ago, and he got a big round of applause when he talked about welfare reform. Critics, I should say, consider this unwarranted and maybe even mean-spirited. They note that a lot of people who get Medicaid now already work. They just don't earn enough money to buy their own health insurance.
And critics of this kind of move argue that more people on Medicaid would work if they had the assurance of good health that government assistance provides. Seema Verma, though, the woman who oversees Medicaid...
INSKEEP: Yeah.
HORSLEY: ...Before she went to work for the federal government, she was a consultant to states like Indiana and Kentucky that have been seeking this kind of flexibility. So it's no surprise that she would pioneer this kind of move.
INSKEEP: I don't want to get hung up on a word here, Scott, but you said welfare reform. When you say the word welfare, what that traditionally has meant is some kind of cash payment or food stamps to people who don't have a job or whatever. This is something different, though. Isn't it? This is health care.
HORSLEY: Well, in this case, I'm using the term that the president himself has used. And...
INSKEEP: That's what I mean, yeah.
HORSLEY: ...So you can define it lots of different ways. Remember, there's kind of a split among lawmakers - Republican lawmakers about how far the government should go in tackling popular entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. Medicaid, which is a program that benefits the poor, is perhaps a juicier target. Paul Ryan, the House speaker, has wanted to move aggressively in the new year to go after entitlement programs. The Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, is much more wary about that. He says any such move to go after entitlements would have to be bipartisan. And that's not likely.
So it may be that the kind of welfare reform you are likely to see from the Trump administration in the new year will be this kind of administrative move, things that administration can do without the help of Congress. And other targets might be food stamps, which you mentioned.
INSKEEP: Well, now, there's another question. You're saying the administration can do this unilaterally without moving anything through Congress. Is that right?
HORSLEY: This is under existing authority. That's right.
INSKEEP: OK. Scott, thanks very much. Always a pleasure talking with you.
HORSLEY: Good to be with you, Steve.
INSKEEP: NPR's Scott Horsley on a Trump administration announcement that they will allow states, if they wish, to add work requirements to Medicaid.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We're launching a new series today looking back 50 years to some of the most momentous events of 1968. There were political events, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy; big scientific milestones, like Apollo 8, the first spacecraft to orbit the moon; and iconic moments in the arts, like the one we are remembering today.
This weekend marks 50 years since Johnny Cash played a concert for inmates at California's Folsom Prison. The album "At Folsom Prison" pulled his career out of a slump, and it helped Cash set his sights on something else, prison reform. Chloe Veltman of member station KQED has the story.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHNNY CASH: Hello, I'm Johnny Cash.
(CHEERING)
CHLOE VELTMAN, BYLINE: Johnny Cash uttered those words in the cafeteria at Folsom Prison, northeast of Sacramento, Calif. Cash had wanted to record an album in a prison for a long time.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FOLSOM PRISON BLUES")
CASH: (Singing) I hear the train a-comin'. It's rolling 'round the bend. And I ain't seen the sunshine since I don't know when.
VELTMAN: This was the second of four appearances that Cash made at Folsom. He played a lot of prison shows during his career though he never did hard time himself.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FOLSOM PRISON BLUES")
CASH: (Singing) But that train keeps rollin' on down to San Anton (ph).
VELTMAN: The singer's daughter Tara Cash Schwoebel says her father's interest in prisons went back to his days serving in the U.S. Air Force in Germany in the early 1950s. That's when he saw the noir crime drama "Inside The Walls Of Folsom Prison."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "INSIDE THE WALLS OF FOLSOM PRISON")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) What I wouldn't give to crash out of this joint and get some decent chow for a change.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Yeah. Me, too.
TARA CASH SCHWOEBEL: And I think that's where all of this kind of grew from. He was just moved by the film.
VELTMAN: Cash wrote the song "Folsom Prison Blues" in 1955. It was his first big hit.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOHNNY CASH SONG, "FOLSOM PRISON BLUES")
VELTMAN: But by 1968, he hadn't had a hit in several years. He'd become notorious for missing concert dates. Addicted to prescription pills, he was usually out of it when he did show up. When he arranged the date at Folsom, Cash at least knew he'd have a captive audience.
W. S. HOLLAND: One thing he liked about playing prisons - if he did something the audience didn't like, they couldn't leave.
VELTMAN: His drummer W. S. Fluke Holland was there. He says he didn't expect much would come of the two sessions the band played that day.
HOLLAND: I told everybody, it won't sell enough to pay for the expense of going out with the recording equipment. Now that shows how wrong I was (laughter).
VELTMAN: When the album "Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison" was released in May of 1968, it topped the country charts. The album still appears on critics' best-of lists and has sold millions of copies worldwide.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "COCAINE BLUES")
CASH: (Singing) Early one morning while making the rounds, took a shot of cocaine, and I shot my woman down.
VELTMAN: Cash's career took off again. He recorded another best-selling album from San Quentin. Schwoebel says her father continued to perform in prisons around the country and to use his celebrity to speak out on behalf of prisoners.
SCHWOEBEL: I think it really spoke to his rebellious side. He really had a passion for standing up for these people who were locked up, you know - and treated so poorly.
VELTMAN: In 1972, Cash testified at a U.S. Senate subcommittee on prison reform. Among other proposals, he called for keeping minors out of jail and focusing on rehabilitating inmates.
SCHWOEBEL: Between the attention that he created through his performances and being seated at the Senate, he created a lot more awareness.
VELTMAN: But Johnny Cash never saw the transformation he had hoped to see. He eventually refocused his energies on other causes, like helping the families of police officers who'd been killed in the line of duty.
(SOUNDBITE OF BLIND JUSTICE SONG)
VELTMAN: Today in the cafeteria at Folsom Prison, inmate Andrew Clayton plays guitar as part of a California prison program which provides training in music, painting and other creative pursuits. He's the lead guitarist with Blind Justice, one of the penitentiary's in-house bands. Country music isn't his thing, but he still finds Cash's connection with Folsom inspiring.
ANDREW CLAYTON: Just the fact that he played here and I'm playing here, I feel like I'm a part of something special.
VELTMAN: Despite Johnny Cash's desire for reform, in the 50 years since "At Folsom Prison" was recorded, the percentage of Californians in state prisons has nearly doubled.
For NPR News, I'm Chloe Veltman.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FOLSOM PRISON BLUES")
CASH: (Singing) I bet there's rich folks eating from a fancy dining cart. They're probably drinking coffee and smoking big...
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It's Friday, and it's time for StoryCorps. Among the most powerful images from the civil rights era are news photos of lunch counter sit-ins across the South, young African-Americans seated at a counter patiently waiting to order while circled by a hostile crowd of white people. The images may be famous but not necessarily the names of the protesters involved. As we head into the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, we're going to meet one of those protesters. His name is Dion Diamond. He grew up in the 1950s in Petersburg, Va. And at StoryCorps, he talked about how he got started in the civil rights movement.
DION DIAMOND: I was 15 years of age when I first started having my own private sit-ins. I guess I got tired of looking at signs that said whites only. So I would go into the five and dime store, sit at the whites-only lunch counter. And whenever the police came, I scooted out of the back door. My family had no idea. The only way they found out was from the newspapers, you know, like a reporter calls them, do you know your son's in jail? And my parents became very proud of me but they wished it would have been somebody else's child. I've done some crazy things, but you take chances when you're young. I call it youthful exuberance.
I can remember having a sit-in at the lunch counter in Arlington, Va. And word spread throughout the neighborhood. And that's when they started gathering around this child. I'd say he was about 12, 13 years old. He took his finger and pointed to me like, get out. You know, you aren't wanted here. I can only hope that as he got older, some of his attitudes regarding equality and equal rights changed. The last time I was arrested in Baton Rouge, La., I was their guest on more than one occasion. So the guards - the white guards - told these inmates, we got a troublemaker here, gang. If you give them a hard time, you may get time off for good behavior.
I think that was the time I was most frightened. Except a couple of the guys in there, they knew somehow who I was. And they told the guys, don't mess with him. That was my salvation. Today, when people read my name, they may not know who I am and most likely they won't. I have three grandkids. They aren't the least bit interested. But any time I pick up a historical publication, I feel as if a period or a comma in that book is my contribution.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: That's Dion Diamond for StoryCorps in Washington, D.C. You can see photos of him taking part in lunch counter sit-ins at npr.org.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
With an update on a story out of Texas about enrollment targets on special education - the U.S. Department of Education has ruled that by imposing enrollment targets, Texas has failed to comply with federal laws to ensure free appropriate public education to students with disabilities. This follows a 15-month investigation. For details, we turn now to NPR education correspondent Anya Kamenetz. Hey, Anya.
ANYA KAMENETZ, BYLINE: Morning.
MARTIN: So just start off by explaining what is wrong with an enrollment target for special ed.
KAMENETZ: So by federal law, any student who is eligible for special education has the right to receive these services. What was wrong - not only setting a target, but Texas set a very low target of 8.5 percent of enrollment of all students. Nationwide, about 13 percent of students are identified as needing special education. And so an investigation in the Houston Chronicle brought this to light and found that perhaps - you know, many hundreds of thousands of children, potentially, were denied services because districts were penalized if they went over that very low 8.5 percent target.
MARTIN: So what's been the reaction from - at the federal and state levels?
KAMENETZ: So the federal government looked into this for about 15 months. They held listening sessions. And they found that Texas, in fact, is in violation of the federal requirement to provide a free appropriate public education to all special education students as well as what's called child find, which is the requirement to identify every child who may need special education services.
Now, Texas got rid of the law - the target last year. And since then, enrollment has surged. But in response to this finding, Governor Greg Abbott gave the Texas commissioner of education one week to come up with a detailed plan to address these findings. And the commissioner says he's committed to more training, more resources for parents and hiring more support staff.
MARTIN: Explain why this is a national issue - all the repercussions of this nationwide.
KAMENETZ: Well, so Texas may have been unique in setting a literal black and white target. But the number of students in special education does vary around the country, and so does the quality of services. So NPR Ed's reporting in Florida and in Indiana, for example, finds that many parents have trouble accessing that free appropriate public education. And if they have the means, they - many of them are hiring lawyers, switching from school to school and paying out of pocket to get what is needed for their kids.
And this is a bottom line issue because special education students - they cost about twice as much per student compared to general education. So where resources are scarce, accessing them can be really tough, especially for groups like English language learners.
MARTIN: So where does this go from here? What happens now?
KAMENETZ: Well, I think that special education advocates see this as a hopeful sign. There had been some worries, you know, with the secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, being such an advocate of school choice. You know, it's an issue there because many students who attend private schools do not have that access to a free appropriate public education. So, you know, advocates are happy to see this kind of aggressive pursuit of Texas. And hopefully, that will mean something for the future.
MARTIN: All right, NPR education correspondent Anya Kamenetz for us this morning. Thanks so much, Anya.
KAMENETZ: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF PHRONESIS AND JULIAN ARGUELLES AND FRANKFURT RADIO BIG BAND'S "UNTITLED #1")
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Now along with border security, the president made law and order a central focus of his presidential campaign. And yesterday, President Trump said he wants to do more to help people who are leaving prison. NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson has more.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: President Trump considers law enforcement officers among his closest political allies. He says his administration will keep working to reduce crime and put dangerous people behind bars. But Trump says the prison system can be improved.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We'll be very tough on crime, but we will provide a ladder of opportunity for the future.
JOHNSON: The president says the government needs to help inmates who struggle when they leave prison. The numbers are stark. About two-thirds of the 650,000 people released from prison every year are arrested again within three years.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: We can help break this vicious cycle through job training - very important - job training, mentoring and drug addiction treatment.
JOHNSON: White House aide Jared Kushner, whose father served prison time, has led the way on these issues for months. But Congress has failed to act on broader measures that would cut prison terms for drug offenders. And it's not clear lawmakers will want to address the issue in 2018, a midterm election year. At the Justice Department, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been reluctant, too. In the U.S. Senate, Sessions supported stiff punishments for criminals. On Thursday, he suggested he might be willing to compromise on modest ideas like job training. Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Six senators - three Republicans, three Democrats - think they have a solution for DACA. That's the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
But only if they can convince the president and other members of Congress to get onboard. And Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters not to give this any attention, which pretty much happened because during a meeting with senators about immigration policy President Trump used a vulgar slur to describe African nations. And that ended up overshadowing everything.
GREENE: It sure seemed to. And we have Scott Detrow, our colleague who's host of NPR's Politics Podcast. Hey, Scott.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Good morning, David.
GREENE: So how are congressional leaders reacting to the president's vulgar comment?
DETROW: So there was broad condemnation. Many Democrats had reactions very similar to what Steny Hoyer, the number-two Democrat in the House said. His quote was that President Trump's comments are racist and a disgrace. They do not reflect our nation's values - many Republicans critical as well. Utah Republican Mia Love, who has Haitian roots, put out a statement saying the president's comments are unkind, divisive, elitist and fly in the face of our nation's values. You know, that being said, this is kind of in line with many things President Trump has said in the past. Remember. He began his presidential campaign making sweeping statements that Mexicans entering the country illegally were rapists.
GREENE: And I guess it's important to point out he used that vulgar term - he was referring specifically, it seems, to African countries. But also suggested that Haiti is a place where fewer immigrants should come to the United States...
DETROW: Yep.
GREENE: ...And suggested maybe Norway and places like that would be better places for immigrants to come. So this all happened when these bipartisan senators - this group of senators there talking about what seemed like an immigration deal. President Trump had been signaling he might support something like this. Where are negotiations now?
DETROW: Yeah, this is a group of three Democratic and three Republican senators. Before the meeting, they put out a statement saying they had a plan dealing with everything Trump wanted in a deal - DACA protections, border security and changes to the legal immigration system as well - said they're now trying to sell the rest of Congress on it. After the meeting, Dick Durbin's office says that has not changed. They're sticking to their plan as of now, and they're still trying to make that sales pitch. There are a couple of different other negotiations going on right now - different clusters of lawmakers. But this one in the Senate has been the most serious so far and has been the center of attention.
GREENE: So if this one has or had a lot of momentum - we know how President Trump feels about these talks - what is the rest of Congress feeling like as all these talks go on?
DETROW: You know, momentum is relative because most of Congress agrees on the general premise of doing something to keep DACA protectees in the country. After that, it splits very quickly. And you're going to have to cobble together a majority from a group of Republicans, many of whom want broader crackdowns on immigration - on illegal immigration, and Democrats, who are frankly resentful of the fact that they need to trade anything in order to get a permanent status for DACA protectees. So it's going to be hard. And you might have the rare case where it would come to the floor and the House, and Democrats who are in the minority would have to provide the majority of votes to get this passed. That's something that hardly ever happens.
GREENE: Scott Detrow is the host of the NPR Politics Podcast. Scott, thanks.
DETROW: Thank you.
GREENE: All right, so another crucial decision on the president's table - it's whether to keep the United States in the Iran nuclear deal.
MARTIN: Yeah, remember. The deal with Iran and six world powers gave Iran sanctions relief. It lifted sanctions on Iran. And in return, Iran is supposed to limit its nuclear program. As early as today, the president could decide whether he wants to reimpose some of these sanctions that the U.S. had lifted as part of that deal.
GREENE: All right, here to talk about this - NPR national security correspondent Greg Myre in the studio. Hey, Greg.
GREG MYRE, BYLINE: Good morning, David.
GREENE: So the Treasury Department is involved in sanctions in other countries. And yesterday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin seemed to give us a hint of what we might look for today, right?
MYRE: Right, he talked about the possibility of new sanctions - that this is what he was expecting. This may not be quite as much as he makes it sound because it's sort of out of the playbook, which there'll be minor sanctions against some companies or individuals but not big overarching sanctions against the government. It's a way to keep the pressure on Iran - or certainly the appearance of keeping the pressure on Iran without blowing up the entire nuclear deal.
GREENE: So his hope is that he can do as promised - keep pressure on, impose enough sanctions to look like he's doing that but hope that the deal itself can still stay in place for now.
MYRE: Right, and they could do that. The U.S. still can place non-nuclear sanctions on Iran.
GREENE: Oh, I see. There's a distinction in there.
MYRE: Absolutely, and so that's why you might see some of these smaller non-nuclear things, related to companies involved with missile testing in Iran or human rights abuses or things like that but not on the four corners of the nuclear deal.
GREENE: Why does this keep coming up? Why do we keep talking every so often about do we keep the deal - does the U.S. keep the deal in place or not? What does Trump do? Why does it happen?
MYRE: I think the president is asking the same question, David. And he can really blame or thank the Republican Congress for this. A lot of these laws were written during the Obama administration. And they were not pleased with President Obama's attempt to get this nuclear deal. And so they wanted him to come forward every 90 or 120 days and say, OK, is this still a good deal? Is this still in the U.S. interest? And sort of, you know, put him in a bit of an awkward position to keep defending the deal publicly.
Well, now that's carried over to President Trump. And so he has to keep coming forward and addressing this deal, which he has called the worst deal ever. He hates it, but yet he's got to come forward. His advisers are saying, eh, it's not a great deal. We're not big fans of it, but it's the best way to go. So it's putting Trump in this difficult position.
GREENE: Well, I wonder now that it's come up this time. This is - it seems like a sort of a different moment because we've had these big protests in Iran. Has that changed the dynamic of the debate here?
MYRE: It's certainly given it more attention now. And it's returned it to this fundamental question. A lot of the Republicans are saying look. This hasn't - the deal - the nuclear deal has not changed Iran's behavior. They're still cracking down on dissidents. They're supporting militant groups throughout the region. So see. The nuclear deal is not successful. But the supporters of the deal are saying look. This is specifically about Iran's nuclear program. They have had to scale it back and freeze it. There's intrusive monitoring. So Iran is abiding by the deal. The Trump administration has to sort of grudgingly acknowledge that they support the deal. And so that's sort of where we stand.
GREENE: All right, NPR's Greg Myre speaking to us about that Iran nuclear deal. Greg, thanks. We appreciate it.
MYRE: Thank you, David.
GREENE: All right, President Trump has also canceled a visit next month to the United Kingdom, which of course is considered America's closest ally.
MARTIN: Many in London think that's because he is worried about mass protests. But the president says it's because the new embassy, which he was supposed to open, cost too much.
GREENE: And he blamed President Obama and called that embassy deal a bad deal on Twitter. NPR's Frank Langfitt is in London. Hey, Frank.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: Hey. Good morning, David.
GREENE: All right, so why is the president canceling here. Is it about the embassy, as he suggested on Twitter? Or is he worried about all these protests?
LANGFITT: Well, there were really big concerns about protests. There were big one - big protests after the inauguration here. But I spoke to somebody this morning who's familiar with how this all played out, and I learned that the president actually complained about this earlier this week - said he didn't like Prime Minister Theresa May, here in the United Kingdom, and as a real estate developer thought the embassy got a bad deal. And he didn't want to go to England. So it seems, to some degree, what the president said on Twitter may well be true.
GREENE: OK, so can you remind me of the backstory of this embassy.
LANGFITT: Yeah, sure. Yeah, we had an old - we had an embassy here for obviously an extremely long time. And the old embassy, it was in central London, prime real estate. And President Trump blamed President Obama for not getting enough money for it. The decision actually to move though was made under President Bush, and it was partly to get something that would be much more secure to prevent terrorism. The new embassy is south of the Thames River. Trump says it costs $1.2 billion. I think the big takeaway here is that the president seems to see his visit with a big ally in part through the prism of his former job as a businessman and sort of less as a politician or statesman.
GREENE: This is not a small thing.
LANGFITT: No.
GREENE: I mean, the U.K. and the U.S. have what's always been called this special diplomatic relationship. Normally, you wouldn't think that concerns over the cost of an embassy would do enough to cancel a presidential visit. So what's really going on here?
LANGFITT: Well, the other factor here is that the president seems to be pretty down on Prime Minister Theresa May. And the reason for that apparently is because she criticized him. After the president announced recently that the U.S. was going to move the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, she publicly disagreed with him on the decision. He shot back on Twitter basically saying, you know, you need to focus on fighting terror in the United Kingdom. So relationships between the two have been kind of frosty.
GREENE: And is that - how are people in London reacting to that? I mean, the idea of their country not getting along with the United States - I mean, is it awkward? Does it feel weird to people?
LANGFITT: That's a great question, David. I think that a lot of people are glad that he's not coming. He's very unpopular in multicultural London. But people are also concerned that the relationship is so important, especially as the United Kingdom moves to leave the European Union. They need new trade deals. They're worried about the economy. But a typical answer I got today - we got today - our producer went out - Sam (ph) went out to talk to someone. Her name was Anna Kayoko (ph). She's a retail manager at a major department store here. And here's what she had to say.
ANNA KAYOKO: Honestly, he no coming is good. U.K. don't need arrogance like that.
GREENE: Wow, that's simple and straightforward.
LANGFITT: And very typical, David.
GREENE: Huh. Is the visit ever going to happen? Could this be rescheduled?
LANGFITT: (Laughter) Yeah, it's been put off and put off. Remember. This was offered a long time ago.
GREENE: Right.
LANGFITT: Both sides apparently are hoping to get a working visit in, which is what this was supposed to be, sometime before this fall when there is expected to be a state visit by the president to meet the Queen. So this is not over at all. This is a very important relationship to both countries. The president is expected to come. And maybe the hope will be that if he is not as active on Twitter criticizing the United Kingdom's prime minister and other officials here, maybe things will calm down a little bit. And if he comes here in the fall for a state visit, they won't have quite as big protests as what they've been concerned about.
GREENE: Our colleague Frank Langfitt speaking to us from London. Frank, we appreciate it as always. Thanks.
LANGFITT: Happy to do it, David.
(SOUNDBITE OF BEAUTIFUL KILLING MACHINE'S "RIGHT IS")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Besides the ongoing debate over DACA - the status of children brought to the country illegally by their parents - the White House has identified three other key issues as part of their focus on immigration - chain migration, border security and the visa lottery system. Today, we're digging into the issue of border security. President Trump's legislative affairs director, Marc Short, told us earlier this week that the plan isn't just about a literal wall.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
MARC SHORT: The president has said himself, in talking to CBP, in many cases, they say it's not a concrete wall. It is, in some cases, fencing because it's better for them to see through and enables them to better protect the border. But it is a physical barrier.
MARTIN: The estimated cost of that barrier and other border security enhancements - around $18 billion over 10 years. I spoke to Doris Meissner about that. She was head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service under the Clinton administration. And I asked her what that money - $18 billion - is supposed to buy along the border and what's different about that from what's already there.
DORIS MEISSNER: According to the estimates that they gave, it buys, I believe, about 700 miles of fencing. Some of that is replacement fencing. The enforcement budget at the present time for the southwest border is somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 billion a year, so adding 18 billion is doubling that just for fencing. So it is putting an enormous amount of investment into a response that has proven to be useful only as a partial response.
MARTIN: There are, however, still 300,000 people a year coming over that border. So how do you keep them from coming?
MEISSNER: Well, there are 300,000 apprehensions. There are less actual people that are being apprehended. That sounds like a large number, but that's not compared to just 10 or 15 years ago, when it was well over a million - 1.6 million. So the overall trend here is dramatically down. The more important thing is the change in the character of the flow.
The flow is now more than half people from Central American countries. They are asylum-seekers. They are looking for a Border Patrol agent to turn themselves over to or they're coming more and more now to ports of entry and presenting themselves. And those reasons are less likely to be mitigated by fencing than they are by an effective and timely decision system in our immigration courts and in our asylum system in order to decide these cases in a timely fashion. The other investment that is very important to make at the present time is at our legal ports of entry.
MARTIN: Places like - give us a couple examples.
MEISSNER: Well, San Ysirdo, Nogales, El Paso - the bridges and the highways that bring people and trucks and goods into the United States and hundreds of millions of crossings in some of these ports of entry every year. That's a big infrastructure issue of building those out in ways that makes it possible for enforcement personnel to examine more people coming into the country. That's...
MARTIN: And you think that should - that is where the investment dollars should go, into something like that?
MEISSNER: Definitely investment dollars should go there because more and more, that is the weak link.
MARTIN: Let me ask you this. Earlier this week, we spoke with the White House's head of legislative affairs, Marc Short. And he said that Democrats should get on board with the idea of the wall - as loosely defined - because they have voted for something similar before. He's referring to the so-called Gang of Eight immigration plan. Here's what he said.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SHORT: They voted in 2006 - including Chuck Schumer, including Hillary Clinton, including Barack Obama - for the Secure Fence Act. It is what Democrats have voted for before. It's what Customs and Border Patrol career officials tell us we need to secure our border.
MARTIN: Is he right? Is that an accurate characterization?
MEISSNER: Yes, it's certainly true that Democrats have voted for funding for barriers in the past. I mean, when I was commissioner in the 1990s of the immigration service - it was a Democratic administration - we were the first to go to the Congress with proposals for fencing. So this - fencing has been part of the border response for a long time. Democrats are not walking away from strengthening border security and from strategies that include fencing and maintaining the fencing. They are objecting, however, to the idea of a wall across the entire southwest border - 2,000 miles - at a price tag that is astronomical.
MARTIN: But I hear you saying you believe there is common ground to be reached?
MEISSNER: I think there could be common ground. Whether they really want to come to the table and resolve this, well, it's hard to say. But if there is goodwill, there certainly is common ground.
MARTIN: That was Doris Meissner. She's the former commissioner of the INS and currently a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. This week, some of the world's top tech entrepreneurs gathered for the annual CES trade show in Las Vegas. These people tackle really complicated problems with the most cutting-edge solutions. But all this innovation couldn't keep the lights from going out. On Wednesday, the whole convention center temporarily lost power. The entire place went dark, and all the fancy displays were shut down. One news site tweeted - lights out at CES 2018. Does anybody have a battery pack? It's MORNING EDITION.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump has another chance to reimpose sanctions on Iran today. In the past, the president has promised to scrap the Iran nuclear deal and bring back sanctions. Although, so far, he has chosen to keep the status quo. NPR national security correspondent Greg Myre is with us in the studio this morning. Hi, Greg.
GREG MYRE, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel.
MARTIN: What's going to happen today?
MYRE: Well, we got a hint yesterday. The treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said, I expect new sanctions. That sounds like potentially a big deal...
MARTIN: Right.
MYRE: ...But probably something we've seen from the playbook in the past, which is limited sanctions against the company or a few individuals, sort of a slap on the wrist, the intent being to show that the Trump administration is keeping pressure on Iran but does not want to blow up the entire nuclear deal.
MARTIN: Got it. So we're expecting the president to again keep the deal in place?
MYRE: I don't want to give you a guarantee on that. But we are sort of expecting that he'll, again, decertify the deal, which he did in October. And that's mostly symbolic. And that there's these sanctions, oil and banking sanctions, which have been suspended every few months by President Obama and now President Trump. We expect he will continue to suspend those sanctions. If he reimposed them, that would be a big deal. Iran would complain loudly and the whole deal could unravel.
MARTIN: Just take a step back and explain why we end up talking about this every few months because there are a couple different obligations that the president has under the original deal, right?
MYRE: Yeah, and I think the president is probably wondering about that himself. And you have to go back to the Obama administration. And the Republicans in Congress sort of wanted to hold the president's feet to the fire and make him come out every three or four months and say, OK, is the nuclear deal still working? Is this...
MARTIN: Make him take ownership over it.
MYRE: Absolutely, absolutely. And he had to do that. But now that's carried over to the Trump presidency. And so Trump says, I hate this deal. It's the worst deal ever. Yet every three or four months, he has to come out and make these decisions on it, and he wants to show how much he dislikes it. But the advice he's getting from defense secretary, secretary of state is Iran is still technically in compliance, and it would be a bad idea to blow it up. We don't have the support of the Europeans and others. So very grudgingly he makes this decision every three, four months.
MARTIN: So this particular decision is happening in the context of these protests that we've seen on the streets of Iran. How's that playing into the decision, if at all?
MYRE: Well, it certainly made it a bigger debate right now. And it's reenergized, I think, both sides of the debate. Those who are critical of the nuclear deal say, this is exactly what we were worried about. Iran could still behave badly. It can crack down on protesters. It can fund militant groups around the region. It's not changing Iranian behavior, and they're getting more money from the sanctions relief. So they can - you know, they're feeling a little bit better about things.
But the supporters of the deal say, this was strictly a deal about the nuclear program and Iran is complying. They have scaled back and frozen their nuclear program. This was the intent. It's working. And even if you did, if you reimpose the sanctions, the Europeans and others are not going to buy back in, so they wouldn't be nearly as effective as they were a few years ago.
MARTIN: All right, NPR's national security correspondent, Greg Myre. Thanks so much, Greg.
MYRE: Thank you, Rachel.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Search and rescue crews are slowly making their way into these areas that were hard hit by mudslides in Southern California. In Santa Barbara County, a 30-square-mile debris flow in the town of Montecito has killed at least 17 people, and that includes several children. The number of missing is in the dozens.
Reporter Stephanie O'Neill followed a crew of firefighters as they were looking for survivors.
STEPHANIE O'NEILL, BYLINE: As rescue vehicles and earthmoving tractors worked to clear debris-laden Highway 192 in Montecito, Ventura County fire chief John McNeil surveys the wreckage in this once-pristine neighborhood.
JOHN MCNEIL: It was thick and lush and, you know, creeks separating houses. And now it's completely opened up. I mean, the only thing that looks like it's still here are some of the trees that survived the flows. But I mean, there's boulders the size of our vehicles, if not bigger.
O'NEILL: Boulders that were pushed down wildfire-scarred mountains by a deluge of rain early Tuesday morning along with a massive debris flow. Now a thick blanket of mud, rocks, tree trunks and shards of homes that no longer exist blanket the ground for as far as the eye can see. The flow peeled back the roof of one home and busted the walls out of others. On one side street, every home has disappeared. Only mud and boulders remain. Still, McGrath says, hope remains for survivors.
BRIAN MCGRATH: It's not uncommon that we find people that have survived in a hidden space or some kind of confined space.
(SOUNDBITE OF GLASS BREAKING)
O'NEILL: Ventura County firefighter Brian McGrath breaks open a sliding glass door on the backside of a house. Its fire alarm pierces the air as he and his partners probe the waist-high mud with sophisticated listening devices. With a camera on a stick, they search behind and under furniture. I ask McGrath how they know where to look.
MCGRATH: The thing is to look at where the mud would push them. And you start searching there.
(SOUNDBITE OF FIRE ALARM BEEPING)
O'NEILL: Have you found anybody in your searches yet?
MCGRATH: Nobody alive, no.
O'NEILL: We continue to the next house, plowing slowly through sticky, quicksand-like mud that tries to suck the boots off our feet. We step over a downed power line, one of the many hazards rescuers here face. And McGrath points out more overhead.
MCGRATH: Can you duck?
O'NEILL: I can duck.
MCGRATH: Because there's a power line.
O'NEILL: OK. I definitely can duck.
Next door, retired doctor John Crowder inspects his home. He put plywood around all doors, and the mud stayed outside his house. He learned that trick after a 1969 flood that rolled boulders and pushed mud - albeit far less - through the neighborhood. Crowder spent this day surveying the damage around him.
JOHN CROWDER: I went around, looked at my neighbors' houses. And I called them and told them what's going on. So I was the volunteer to come in here.
O'NEILL: Seeing most of his neighbors' homes destroyed shocked him. Montecito resident Daniel Cabe feels the same. He, like many here, was first awakened Tuesday morning by a gas explosion and house fires, likely caused by the mud and debris breaking gas lines. Cabe's home, situated on a hill, escaped harm.
DANIEL CABE: But all around us is just destruction and houses just wiped off the earth and new rivers where there wasn't before. And it's just - it's hard to describe. It's hard to show in pictures and video. You really can't get an idea unless you see it.
O'NEILL: And concerns continue that more rain will bring more destruction.
For NPR News, I'm Stephanie O'Neill in Montecito, Calif.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
President Trump has canceled a visit next month to the United Kingdom. And this is a pretty big deal because the U.K. is considered America's closest ally. Many in London think he did this because he's worried about mass protests, but Trump says it is because the new embassy - which he was supposed to open - cost too much. He blamed President Obama. And said it was a bad deal when he was on Twitter. NPR's Frank Langfitt joins us from London.
Hi, Frank.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: Hey, David.
GREENE: OK. So do you know why the president is really canceling? Is it crowds? Is it this embassy deal? What is it?
LANGFITT: Well, there were big concerns about massive protests. If you remember, right after the president's inauguration, we had a version of the women's march. There was one here in London. Tens of thousands of people came out, jammed the streets, filled Trafalgar Square. So there were concerns about - protests would be even bigger.
But I spoke to somebody this morning who's familiar with how this all played out. And this person said the president actually did complain earlier this week that he didn't like Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom and that as a real estate developer, he thought the U.S. got a bad deal on the embassy. He didn't want to go to England. And so it seems to be that what he said on Twitter may well be true.
GREENE: So what is the backstory of this embassy?
LANGFITT: Well, you know, the United States sold the old embassy, which was located here in central London. It's prime real estate, just south of Marble Arch, east of Hyde Park. And Trump, as you were saying, blamed President Obama for not getting enough money for it. When he tweeted, he said, we sold it for peanuts. But the decision to move it was actually made under President Bush. It's been moved to a new location south of the Thames, which is more secure. And a big reason for this was to make it easier to protect against terrorism. President Trump says the new embassy cost $1.2 billion. But kind of, David, the big takeaway here is the president seems to see this visit - that was supposed to happen - to this big ally, in part, through the prism of his former job as a businessman and less as a politician or statesman.
GREENE: But there's also the relationship with Theresa May that might be at play here. Right? I mean, why is Trump so down on her?
LANGFITT: That seems to be another element. And the reason he's down on her is because she publicly criticized him. And as we know, the president of United States does not take public criticism lightly at all.
GREENE: Not well, no.
LANGFITT: No. And so after the president announced that the U.S. was going to move the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Prime Minister May broke with him and disagreed with him on it and said, you know, this is unhelpful to the peace process. The president didn't take it. He shot back on Twitter. And he said, you know, don't worry about U.S. policy. You need to focus more on fighting terrorism at home in the United Kingdom. And of course, this is after a year in which the U.K. suffered a series of terrorist attacks. So relations are - you know, seem to be a bit frosty right now.
GREENE: Well, these countries have gone through years of having different leaders from different parties. And....
LANGFITT: Sure.
GREENE: ...The relationship always seems close. I mean, how are people in London reacting to the idea that an American president would cancel a trip?
LANGFITT: He's deeply unpopular here. And most people this morning said they were glad that he's staying away. Our producer, Sam, went out to talk to people around Oxford Circus. And he talked to a woman named Anna Kayoko (ph). She's a retail manager at a major department store here in London. And here's what she said.
ANNA KAYOKO: Honestly, him not coming is good. U.K. don't need arrogance like that. U.K. don't need self-centered, ignorant people as Donald Trump, to be honest. We could do without people like that in the world.
LANGFITT: And another person that Sam talked to said, you know, I don't like him, but it is important this relationship with the U.S. - hoped that he would come, see the protests and understand how people here feel about him.
GREENE: Could he still come at some point?
LANGFITT: Oh, I think so. The prime minister's office said this morning that President Trump is welcome here and that he has accepted an invitation. Both sides, apparently, are trying for a working visit later this year before a state visit that would happen in the fall when President Trump would meet the queen.
GREENE: All right, NPR's Frank Langfitt speaking to us in London. Frank, thanks.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Mary J. Blige is having a moment. The nine-time Grammy-winning singer has been getting lots of award nominations for acting in the film "Mudbound." NPR's Mandalit del Barco was on the scene yesterday as she was honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: I love you, Mary.
(CHEERING)
MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: Hundreds of fans lined Hollywood Boulevard in front of the Shake Shack and SoulCycle to greet the woman known as the queen of hip-hop soul.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARY J. BLIGE SONG, "FAMILY AFFAIR")
DEL BARCO: Wearing a chic black pantsuit, Mary J. Blige beamed before her newest accolade.
MARY J. BLIGE: God has put my name on a star.
DEL BARCO: A sidewalk star honoring her musical career, including multi-platinum albums and hit singles, such as "Real Love," "Not Gon' Cry" and "Family Affair."
BLIGE: I'm so grateful for this star right now because I've earned it probably three times. But I'm so grateful that I have it (laughter).
(CHEERING)
BLIGE: And I say that with confidence and not arrogance. I say that because I know it now, and I know my worth. And I understand what this means. Thank you so much.
DEL BARCO: Blige reflected on how far she'd come from her roots in the Bronx and Yonkers.
BLIGE: Growing up in the projects, I just loved to sing. It set me free from all of the negativity and confusion that was happening outside of our home.
DEL BARCO: Blige thanked those who stuck by her through hard times, including her divorce, which she chronicled in her most recent album "Strength Of A Woman."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SURVIVOR")
BLIGE: (Singing) No matter how low I go, I'm going to rise up.
DEL BARCO: During the ceremony, Blige was honored by Andre Harrell, who first signed her up to his label Uptown Records in 1989. He told about the first time he listened to a tape recording of her.
ANDRE HARRELL: I heard the truth. I said, who is this young girl singing with all this emotion and pain?
DEL BARCO: Harrell had Sean Diddy Combs produce her debut album in 1992. The hip-hop mogul was also on hand to honor her.
SEAN COMBS: We been through a whole lot. We started from nothing. I used to pick Mary up from the projects, and we would just drive down the highway in New York and just - we would just dream. We would say, like, man, we want to be somebody. We want to be big. We want to be something for our people. And we want to come and shake up the world. And we did that.
DEL BARCO: Combs also led the crowd in singing to her.
COMBS: (Singing) Happy birthday to you.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Singing) Happy birthday to you.
COMBS: Louder.
(Singing) Happy birthday to you.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Singing) Happy birthday to you.
DEL BARCO: Mary J. Blige is now 47 years old.
Mandalit del Barco, NPR News.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
So earlier this morning I spoke to Congressman Paul Gosar. He's a Republican from Arizona. And just so you know, when I spoke with him about all this, NPR was at that point not broadcasting the vulgarity that the president is alleged to have used, and we did not use that word in our conversation.
I want to ask you about comments made by your colleague. Republican Congresswoman Mia Love of Utah called on the president to apologize for these comments. She said that they were unkind, divisive, elitist and fly in the face of our nation's values. Do you join her in that condemnation?
PAUL GOSAR: I can't condone, you know, vocabulary that one of - another person actually utilizes in that aspect. But I also understand that the president is not a career politician, that, you know, may say things that are not politically correct in the world of politics.
MARTIN: So you're saying the term that he used is just - it's just politically incorrect. It's not offensive on its face.
GOSAR: It's - I think there's - any word we can use can be utilized in an offensive aspect, Rachel. I think the intent is that when we look at other countries, the lawlessness that is exacerbated by their capacity makes them not something to be wanting to stay. That's why you see such a precipitation of people wanting to come to the United States. So maybe a poor choice of words but, you know, everybody has to acknowledge their comments.
MARTIN: Lots of folks are saying this is more than a poor choice of words. No surprise, Democrats are lashing out. Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal described the comment as, quote, "racism masquerading poorly as immigration policy." Do you understand the racial element of that term and how he used it?
GOSAR: Oh, I do. But I think when you - when we start slinging the racial slurs, you know, I think that's a poor choice on both sides. I think we...
MARTIN: Even though he said he would prefer immigrants from Norway, a predominantly white country?
GOSAR: You know, looking all the way across the board, you know, for immigrants coming to a country from very different statuses - you know, higher-status living that are presented in Norway versus maybe what you would see in Haiti or in parts of Africa. And that's part of the rule of law. You know, I think that was what his comments were, maybe a very, very poor choice of how to place that. But once again, starting to use the racial slur - I think we've used it way more on both sides. And I think it really clouds the issue of having a very good debate.
MARTIN: It is the issue for some people. But I want to move on and ask about the substance of this bill that was brought to the president. Senator Jeff Flake was at the helm of this thing. And it's notable that the president had said earlier - on Tuesday, actually - that he was going to sign anything that congressional members came up with. This is what he said.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: What I approve is going to be very much reliant on what the people in this room come to me with. I have great confidence in the - if they come to me with things that I'm not in love with, I'm going to do it.
MARTIN: So why won't the president sign this deal that a bipartisan group brought to him yesterday?
GOSAR: Well, first of all, being in the House, I don't always appreciate what the Senate comes up with. So there's that animosity as well. So - but I think the president has been very firm up until that point was - is that a framework for immigration had to have border security, had to have a kibosh to chain migration and other aspects...
MARTIN: Which this did. It also just had DACA protections in it to prevent so-called DREAMers from being deported. Do you think that should be included in any immigration bill?
GOSAR: Well, I think what we have to do is be very, very careful and that there's no special status that is given until we look at the bigger problem. And that is - why are we taking 700,000 people and moving them to the front of the line in the victim category? Isn't there a bigger category of immigrants that are the victims that are trying to do it the right way that we ought to really concentrate on and make sure that we have the full status in regards to how do we look at our immigration from top to bottom in a fair and equitable way? I think that's the biggest key because the rule of law is key here.
MARTIN: All right, we're going to have to leave it there. Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona, member of the conservative Freedom Caucus, thank you very much for your time this morning.
GOSAR: Thanks so much, Rachel.
MARTIN: All right. NPR congressional correspondent Scott Detrow is still in the studio with us. So, Scott, I want to take us back to the beginning of that conversation we just heard with Congressman Gosar. Clearly, Republicans in Congress finding themselves yet again trying to do some cleanup after President Trump says something that they say is just inarticulate.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Sure. Pick a tweet, pick a statement from the campaign and from his presidency - there's dozens to pick from - where Trump says something that many people find incredibly offensive. And you have this dance that many Republicans do - especially in the House, where Trump is deeply popular in many House Republican districts - where they want to distance themselves from the statement, from the tweet, but still support the president. And you heard that again there.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Scott, we, I mean, are spending much of this morning - and we have at different times during this presidency - talking about, like, a tweet or a word. There's policy to talk about, too. I mean, this meeting was at a moment when there has been talk for some time about DACA and immigration being a real place of potential for bipartisan compromise. Where do negotiations stand right now? Is it still heading in that direction despite this moment at the White House?
DETROW: Well, after that meeting, Dick Durbin's office said that they still were sticking with the plan of before the meeting. They're trying to sell this agreement that this group of six senators came up with to Congress. It's tough, though, because, well, there's a majority in both Houses who want DACA protectees to stay in this country. Beyond that, it's very hard to reach a compromise that everyone's happy with. A lot of...
MARTIN: I mean, we heard this congressman, Gosar, saying that he doesn't want DACA protections.
DETROW: Exactly.
MARTIN: So at least he has questions.
DETROW: And the broader push of wanting to have a big crackdown on illegal immigration and to limit legal immigration is something many Republicans in the House especially want to see. And at the same time, you have Democrats who are resentful of the fact that DACA protectees are part of a broader bargain that would lead to policies they don't like.
GREENE: And it's not just immigration. We've been talking about immigration, even infrastructures, things that we might see bipartisan compromise. But you head into a midterm election year where there are a lot of issues where the parties are truly dug in. I mean, there's no guarantee of that.
DETROW: That's right. And often it's the activist voices who speak loudest, who influence primaries and who influence the decisions that members in both parties make. And that's one reason why there has not been a broad bipartisan immigration bill to get to a president's desk in decades.
GREENE: NPR congressional correspondent Scott Detrow. Scott, thanks a lot.
DETROW: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF LOWER SPECTRUM'S "NOCTURNAL")
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Elon Musk's Tesla company has created a cutting-edge image with its bold approach to building electric cars and expanding solar energy. But it has also faced a lot of criticism over how it handles complaints about harassment and discrimination in the workplace. From member station KQED in San Francisco, Alyssa Jeong Perry reports on a Silicon Valley company under scrutiny.
ALYSSA JEONG PERRY, BYLINE: Tesla CEO Elon Musk aims high with futuristic projects. He says in this company video that Tesla can make the world a better place.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ELON MUSK: Why does Tesla exist? Why are we making electric cars? It's because it's very important to accelerate the transition to sustainable transport.
PERRY: Musk has also said people who work at Tesla should not be jerks on the job, especially to those from historically underrepresented minority groups. That was in a memo that Tesla leader published in full to defend him and the company. Uber, Google and now Tesla are all Silicon Valley companies that have defended themselves in court and in the media over hiring practices and workplace culture. The Silicon Valley ideal is to be brilliant, competitive and fast-paced. People who work in that industry acknowledge that the culture of cultivating genius can be dismissive of everyday problems in the workplace.
Marcus Vaughan says he heard and saw racial tensions when he started working at the Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif., last April. A week into his new job, he says he saw a supervisor picking on another black worker.
MARCUS VAUGHN: And then from there, there was other people that would say the N-word. Like, N-word go get this. N-word go get that. You know, I'm like, what - what is this place?
PERRY: The Tesla factory is the same place that, according to one woman's lawsuit, generated a notorious nickname among women who work there. At a company meeting last year, several women said male co-workers catcalled and whistled at them when they walked in a certain part of the plant. Engineer AJ Vandermeyden was at the meeting and watched as one woman spoke after another.
AJ VANDERMEYDEN: Another woman came up and said, you know, this is - it's as bad as she's saying, if not worse. The area she works in we've nicknamed the predator zone. They were telling the VPs, like, put a GoPro on a woman, have her walk there.
PERRY: Vandermeyden sued in 2016 over gender discrimination. She was fired last May after Tesla said her claims were unfounded. The factory worker, Marcus Vaughn, complained about what he saw on the job. He says he was let go for not having a positive attitude. He filed a class action discrimination suit after his contract was not renewed in October.
Tesla says the lawsuits do not reflect how seriously the company takes discrimination. Gaby Toledano heads the Tesla human resources department. She says the company requires antidiscrimination and anti-harassment training. And starting last year, Tesla has a special team to investigate harassment claims. But Toledano acknowledges that when there are disputes between workers, she sometimes hears about them far too late.
GABY TOLEDANO: So I am trying to change that aspect of this culture and every culture. We need to know immediately. And I would like to be fired if anyone in my group doesn't immediately respond and take action.
PERRY: Right after AJ Vandermeyden was forced out, Musk sent that all-staff email in which he asked people not to be jerks. But then he kept going. He said if someone was a jerk to you on the job but apologized, you should have thicker skin and accept that apology.
Joelle Emerson is a gender and diversity expert in tech. She says the culture of a company starts at the top.
JOELLE EMERSON: If you have a company leader saying that people need to develop thicker skins, that's not only, you know, related to harassment, it's actually what causes harassment and what enables it to persist.
PERRY: Tesla's Gaby Toledano says focusing on that comment takes it unfairly out of context. But Emerson says harassment develops in a work culture where people believe it's OK, and that it's not enough for company leaders to just react.
EMERSON: They need to really focus on the culture that they create and what types of behavior that allows for, what types of behavior it condemns.
PERRY: Tesla says it's against any form of discrimination. The lawsuits are still in play. With Vandermeyden's case, Tesla says they're in arbitration. And with Vaughn's case, Tesla had said it would rather fight than settle, even if it costs ten times as much. For NPR News, I'm Alyssa Jeong Perry in San Francisco.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: This story was reported with the help of Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
President Trump has thrown a wrench into negotiations trying to find a solution for DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy. A bipartisan group of senators thought they had figured out an agreement to extend protections for people in the country illegally who were brought here as children. But at a White House meeting, President Trump erupted when he learned the details of the deal.
And according to our sources, Trump used vulgar language. And I want to acknowledge what I'm about to say could offend some people. He asked why the U.S. would admit people from African nations which he called shithole countries. Trump then told lawmakers he would rather see more immigrants from Norway. The vulgar comment drew swift condemnation. Many saw it as racist.
NPR congressional correspondent Scott Detrow is in the studio to talk to us this morning. Hi, Scott.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Morning, David.
GREENE: All right, last night the White House pointedly did not deny these reports about this word the president used. Today President Trump is saying something different.
DETROW: Yeah. Earlier this morning he said on Twitter, the language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used. What was really tough was the outlandish proposal made - a big setback for DACA. And I'll say that we have multiple sources telling us - many other news outlets do as well. And the White House issued statements on this last night and pointedly never pushed back on the notion that he used that language.
GREENE: OK. And there's some vagueness in the tweet this morning, we should say, but - saying he didn't use that language. Congressional leaders reacting to this comment - what have they been saying?
DETROW: There was immediate broad condemnation. Many Democrats said something very similar to what Steny Hoyer said. He's the No. 2 Democrat in the House. His statement said, President Trump's comments are racist and a disgrace. They do not reflect our nation's values. There was Republican criticism as well, notably from Utah House Republican Mia Love, whose family has Haitian heritage. She said, quote, "the president's comments are unkind, divisive, elitist and fly in the face of our nation's values. This behavior is unacceptable from the leader of our nation."
And we should say this does fit into a broader track record for President Trump. Remember; he launched his presidential campaign by making statements that Mexicans crossing into the country illegally, many of them were rapists. And that at the time was condemned from all sides.
GREENE: And we should say you mentioned Haiti. I mean, the comment - the word was used, we think, to refer to African nations, but the president in this meeting also said that he would prefer immigrants coming from places like Norway and not from places like Haiti. He included Haiti...
DETROW: Yes.
GREENE: ...In that list as well. How surprising was it that President Trump reacted so negatively to this deal?
DETROW: You know, going back to when President Trump first started the process of ending DACA, he's really shifted many times on what he's pushing for. He said I'll need a wall, other times he said the wall can wait till later. Listen to what he said on Tuesday.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: There should be no reason for us not to get this done. And, Chuck, I will say when this group comes back - hopefully with an agreement - this group and others from the Senate, from the House comes back with an agreement, I'm signing it. I mean, I will be signing it. I'm not going to say, oh, gee, I want this or I want that. I'll be signing it because I have a lot of confidence in the people in this room that you're going to come out with something really good.
DETROW: And here he was last night and this morning saying just that - I want this or that and then having major problems with the deal.
GREENE: All right, NPR's Scott Detrow in our studio this morning. Scott, thank you.
DETROW: Thank you.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: NPR has decided in this case to spell out the vulgar word that the president reportedly used because it meets
DAVID GREENE, HOST: Good morning. I'm David Greene. Salvage law deals with shipwrecks and lost vessels - you know, like who owns the treasure if it's found. But does it apply to buildings? That's one question after a shed in Maine was torn from its moorings during a blizzard and floated to Canada. The damaged building is a national historic landmark, part of Maine's fishing history. But so far, Canada won't give it back, citing its citizens salvage rights. For two countries that usually get along so well, isn't this fishy? It's MORNING EDITION. DAVID GREENE, HOST: With dozens of congressional Republicans opting not to run again this year and a president who is - popular support is polling just in the 30s, this year's midterm elections seem like a strong opportunity for Democrats to take back control of Congress. But there are some in the party who are worried that not enough is being done to make sure that happens. Representative Cheri Bustos of Illinois is one of the Democrats raising the alarm. She thinks that more could be done to attract Midwestern and rural voters. She has a new report out called Hope from the Heartland, and she joins us on the line. Congresswoman, welcome back. CHERI BUSTOS: Thank you very much. GREENE: So Democrats - not a bad 2017 in terms of picking up governorships, winning that Senate seat in Alabama. I mean, couldn't you argue that the party is on the right track at the moment? BUSTOS: Well, I hope we're on the right track. And the report that we just issued yesterday is a way to take a look at Democrats from the heartland. We talked with 72 Democrats who have been elected in more rural, blue-collar, Republican-leaning areas and took their best practices on how they made it work. And you know, the old Tip O'Neill saying, all politics is local. This is taking a look at how people who have run as Democrats have been successful. And all I want to do with this is make sure that we learn from people who have done it right, how they've figured out how to localize their elections and what we can learn from that. That's the whole point of this report. GREENE: But there are parts of your report where you talk about what might be wrong. And I just want to focus on one thing that really stood out to me. You wrote that too often, heartland voters view national Democrats as fixated on siloed messages to specific groups that don't include them or are too focused on controversial social issues to the exclusion of economic concerns. I mean, are you suggesting that Democrats went too far in their backing on issues like gay marriage or transgender rights and that has been part of the problem? BUSTOS: Well, I don't think we should ever lose sight of fighting for the people who need us to fight for them, whether it's, you know, the LGBTQ community or whether it's communities of color. You know, we're Democrats, and we fight for people and for better lives for families. But what I'm saying is that we need to stay relentlessly and I - you know, just keep our eyes on the ball for economic recovery in areas that have yet to see it. You know, when we say that we're the big-tent party, you know, that doesn't mean that you leave one group outside pounding the stakes and you let other people - you let them in the tent. When we say we're the big-tent party, we've got to be inclusive, and we've got to fight for everybody. And that includes people in the heartland who have gone through some tough times. GREENE: I just want to be - when it comes to concrete solutions to some of the problems you're talking about, I mean, are you saying that Democratic candidates in some of the rural areas that you're talking about should - if they craft a speech or craft a message - focus less on issues like, say, race or transgender rights - things that are important to a lot of communities - and focus more on something else? I mean, you can't put everything into a speech. Is that the advice that you're suggesting? BUSTOS: Well, I'm not the kind of person who writes a prescription and says, you know, this works in every part of the country or even saying that this works in every one of the Midwestern states or throughout the heartland. But we have some suggestions in here that say that - focus on our Democratic policies that revolve around jobs and the economy, and that is a uniter. And I don't care what community you're in. If you're saying that we want your family to be in a better place in a year or five years or 10 years than you're in right now, I don't think we can go wrong with that message. GREENE: Congresswoman Cheri Bustos, a Democrat from Illinois - thanks so much for your time this morning. BUSTOS: Thank you, David. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: It is nasty out there, folks. And I'm not talking about winter weather. The flu, horrible colds, stomach bugs - we are a sick bunch of people right now. Millions are getting sick from these ailments, which, of course, leads to missing days of work or school, doctor's visits. But for some people, this can be extremely serious. They are ending up in the hospital or even, in the worst cases, dying. NPR health correspondent Rob Stein joins us now to explain what is happening this flu season. Hi, Rob. ROB STEIN, BYLINE: Hey, Rachel. MARTIN: So health officials had predicted that this winter season was going to be really bad when it comes to the flu. Just how widespread is this right now? STEIN: Yeah. Rachel, unfortunately the worst fears seem to be coming true. The flu season started early, and it's hitting hard, and people are getting the flu all over the country. It's pretty much everywhere in the United States at this point. And it's really intense in dozens of states. You know, some places are being hit harder than others right now, like the South, where it started the earliest, in California, where some hospitals say their ERs are being overrun by flu cases. The CDC says that the proportion of people that are running to the doctor with the flu is already as high as it gets in a really bad flu season. Like, the last time we had a really bad flu season was 2014, and we're already at that point with that - with the proportion of people going to their doctor for the flu. MARTIN: All right. So the big question - why? I mean, why is this so bad right now? STEIN: Yeah. So one reason is it did start early. But another big reason is that the kind of flu that's out there is a strain that's known as H3N2. And it's a notoriously nasty kind of flu. It tends to hit people harder than other strains, especially the people who are most vulnerable to the flu like young children and the elderly. MARTIN: So what about the flu vaccine, though? We're all told we're supposed to get the flu vaccine. And then it's going to prevent us from getting the flu. STEIN: Yeah. So the vaccine does help. But another bad thing about the H3N2 strain is that it tends to mutate when the vaccine's being made, and that's exactly what happened this year. There's big questions about how well the vaccine works. In Australia, for example, the vaccine was pretty much a dud. Australia has its flu season before ours and usually kind of predicts what's going to happen in this country. And in Australia, it only was about 10 percent effective. MARTIN: So what's to prevent people from saying, hey, those odds just aren't good enough for me to take the time to get the shot? I'm just not going to do it. STEIN: Yeah, well, health officials are pretty clear on saying you should definitely still get the vaccine. There is plenty of vaccine out there. And there are several reasons for that. The vaccine could end up working better in this country than it did in Australia because there could be a different mix of viruses that circulate. Any protection is better than no protection at all. And it could turn out that other strains of the flu end up being more common in this country, and the vaccine does work much better against those. And if you need another reason, getting vaccinated doesn't just protect you. It protects people around you, like, you know, the people who are most vulnerable, like your kids or your elderly parents. MARTIN: So are we near the end of this now? I mean, how long is the flu season? STEIN: Yeah, that's a good question. And we don't really know. There are some indications that we may be peaking already with the flu in this country. But the big question is, does that mean it's going to end early, and we're going end up with just a typical flu season? Or will it continue on for weeks and weeks and weeks and end up being the really bad season that everybody's really worried about? We just don't know yet. It's too soon to tell. MARTIN: All right. NPR health correspondent Rob Stein. Thanks so much, Rob. STEIN: Oh, sure, Rachel. (SOUNDBITE OF SLEEP DEALER'S "MY SORROW") DAVID GREENE, HOST: Let's sum up President Trump's message on immigration yesterday. And I want to warn you - according to our sources, he used a word that might offend you. He asked why the United States should welcome immigrants from shithole countries. He was referring to nations in Africa. And Trump suggested, maybe bring people from places like Norway instead. I want to turn to NPR's congressional correspondent Scott Detrow who's with me. Hi, Scott. SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Hey, David. GREENE: All right, so some questions this morning about whether the president actually said this word or not. What's going on? DETROW: So here's what we know. Multiple sources told NPR last night that he did say it. Many other news outlets reported the same thing. Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin was in the meeting. He talked to reporters this morning. Here's what he says. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) DICK DURBIN: I cannot believe that in the history of the White House and that Oval Office any president has ever spoken the words that I personally heard our president speak yesterday. DETROW: Now, President Trump this morning tweeted - (reading) the language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used. But again, David, I would say last night when the White House issued a statement on this topic, they did not deny that he used those words. GREENE: You mentioned DACA. That's the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. This was central to the discussion that was going on at the White House. Some senators came looking for a bipartisan deal on immigration. Instead, the president has overshadowed all of that with these comments. What has been the reaction on Capitol Hill? DETROW: You know, there's been broad condemnation of this statement, and there was right away. Here's one statement from Democrat Cedric Richmond of Louisiana. He's the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. He said this statement is yet another confirmation of Trump's racially insensitive and ignorant views. A lot of Republicans are criticizing Trump as well. Mia Love, a Utah congresswoman, called the statements unkind, divisive and elitist. She said they fly in the face of our nation's values. GREENE: Scott, thanks a lot. DETROW: Thank you. GREENE: That was NPR's Scott Detrow. Now, that vulgar term the president was using was for African nations. The president also had some disparaging comments in that meeting about Haitians. And they seemed to contradict what he told Haitian-American voters in September of 2016. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Whether you vote for me or you don't vote for me, I really want to be your greatest champion. And I will be your champion. GREENE: Very different comments about Haitians yesterday. Our sources tell us that in that meeting, the president questioned why the United States would admit people from countries like Haiti. Earlier this morning, we spoke about this in our studios with the Haitian ambassador to the United States, Paul Altidor. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST) GREENE: Thanks for coming in. We appreciate it. PAUL ALTIDOR: Thank you for having me. GREENE: And I do think we should note that this is the eighth anniversary of a devastating earthquake in your country. And we're certainly all thinking about the ongoing recovery efforts there. ALTIDOR: That's correct. And it's quite regrettable that we are not discussing about the earthquake and how Haiti is moving forward. And yet, we are talking about something that is quite sad today. GREENE: Well, unfortunately, I do need to talk to you about this because this was a comment by the president of the United States yesterday... ALTIDOR: Of course. GREENE: ...Referring to your country. And I do want to ask what your reaction was. ALTIDOR: Well, we were surprised, disappointed. Also, we want to condemn if those statements were made. Unfortunately, we fear once again Haiti finds itself in the midst of a very negative narrative in the U.S. And we're hoping this conversation would be an opportunity to address the Haiti conversation here in the U.S. once and for all. DURBIN: Is your government talking about possible ways to respond to these comments? ALTIDOR: Well, first, we - again, those statements have not been verified other than what we've been hearing in the press. So as a government, what we did - we did summon the U.S. charge d'affaires in Haiti to clarify, to at least say whether or not these statements were true - and if they were to be true, possibly an apology, again, for what was said here because we thought they were misplaced - they were misguided. A lot is being said about immigration and immigrants, in particular Haitian immigrants, here. And unfortunately, it appears that if the president were to have said those things, he was misinformed or ill-advised on them, in part because there's a long history between the people of Haiti and the people of the United States. Haitians came here and fought in the American independence war back in 1779. So as a people, as a country, we've been a partner. We've been a strong neighbor. We've been a good friend of the people of the United States. And today Haitians are still here working hard, contributing to the social and economic fabric of this country. GREENE: Well, can I ask you about that contribution because when the White House was responding to all of this yesterday, the White House suggested that what the president is talking about - although they did neither confirm nor deny the exact comments - but that his essential argument is that preference should be given to immigrants into this country who are bigger contributors to the United States' economy. If you had the chance to talk to him, what would you say to him in response? ALTIDOR: Again, that's what I'm saying. This - there's a lot of misconception. There's a lot of cliches here about Haitians and our contribution to this society. The great city of Chicago was created by a Haitian. And to this day, if you go on college campuses - if you go in many - even if you go to NASA, there are Haitian scientists working there. In many communities - whether you go to Florida; whether here in Washington, D.C., and the DMV area; whether you go in Boston - in many parts of the country, Haitians have been great contributors to this country. So the notion that we're simply here to actually take advantage of the U.S., it's actually misinformed information. So those cliches, we hope, as a result of the statement that was allegedly made, we can begin to move away from those narratives because they're actually not true. GREENE: Haiti's ambassador to the United States Paul Altidor joining us in our studios this morning. Mr. Ambassador, thank you very much. We really appreciate it. ALTIDOR: It's a pleasure. Like I said, we hoped that this would have been an opportunity to talk about the earthquake and the good progress the country of Haiti is making today. Thank you very much. GREENE: As I said, we're all thinking about the recovery efforts. I know it's been a long, long journey. ALTIDOR: Thank you. [EDITOR'S NOTE: NPR has decided in this case to spell out the vulgar word that the president reportedly used because it meets our standard for use of offensive language. It is “absolutely integral to the meaning and spirit of the story being told.” ] RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: President Trump and congressional Republicans have said now that they've gotten their tax bill through, the next priority is to overhaul entitlement programs. And we are seeing the first steps in that. Yesterday, the Trump administration announced it will allow some states to require Medicaid recipients to get a job. Jeff Colyer is the lieutenant governor of Kansas, one of the states that supports the idea of implementing this kind of work requirement. He's also a practicing physician, and he joins me now. Lieutenant Governor, thanks so much for being with us. JEFF COLYER: Good morning. MARTIN: So you like this idea of requiring Medicaid recipients to work, explain why. COLYER: The health benefits of work are very obvious. You're going to have lower rates of depression, for example. It gives you an opportunity to work, to have somebody else involved with your life so that we make sure that you're taking your medications and that you have better general health. There's a lot of data that suggests that this can be a very protective effect. MARTIN: So this is supposed to be for able-bodied people only. Those are the ones who are supposed to be required to get a job under this. But what if people don't have a physical disability but an intellectual one, would this apply to them? COLYER: No, it would not apply to people with intellectual disabilities. For example, in Kansas, we are - of the 430,000 Kansans that are on Medicaid, this would apply to about 12,000 people. What we're talking about is using this only for able-bodied adults. But if you're a pregnant mother, if you're a child, if you're somebody that has a disability or if you're somebody that has a substance abuse disorder and you're receiving treatment for that, we certainly wouldn't require you to work. MARTIN: So it seems to me that the art in this is going to be able to discern who is able-bodied and who is not. How do you make those choices? COLYER: Well, we make those choices in a lot of different programs as well such as Welfare to Work and in - which is called TANF. We also do that with the food stamp programs. And it is something where the states can work very closely and very individually. In our Medicaid program, where we work very closely on these different types of programs, they are called waivers. And individuals, say, that are in the developmental disability waiver are not required to work in this. We're talking about only able-bodied adults. MARTIN: So you are confident that no one's going to fall through the cracks here, that no one who is physically disabled or mentally unable to work will be deprived of benefits or forced to get a job unnecessarily? COLYER: Oh, no. And there is also a process that people can appeal, you know, these issues with it. It also gives people an opportunity to sign up for additional programs. So what you can do is you can actually go and have additional work training. You can have apprenticeships. You can work in a variety of different options in your community. If there's a community where there may be a special volunteer situation, you can work with them. If you have a disabled person at home that you're helping with, you're not going to be forced to work. We want you to work with your child, with your family member. MARTIN: So you're taking that in consideration, people who are full-time caregivers? COLYER: Oh, absolutely. MARTIN: Is - do you get the sense that there are a lot of Kansans who are out there gaming the system and living off Medicaid money on unnecessarily? I mean, why does this change need to happen? COLYER: What this does is it promotes health benefits for people. I think when we look at an individual and we're trying to help them, we're trying to help them to independence. And so there are a lot of different programs that are available to somebody such as work training and health care and different educational benefits. MARTIN: But critics would say that in order - that the order's reversed here, that you should have - you should secure health care for someone before they can actually get a job. Otherwise, is there a chance they might get sicker? COLYER: Oh, no. People that are sick are, of course, going to be excluded from this. There are certainly exemptions, you know, that if, you know, let's say you had a serious cancer. Of course we wouldn't do that. It's not that it's backwards. What we're trying to talk about is only people who are able to work. And we're going to - when the results of this - when we see this in our other programs, we're seeing their incomes increase 240 percent over the next couple of years. MARTIN: OK. This is something we are going to continue to look into. Thank you so much for joining us. Jeff Colyer, lieutenant governor of Kansas. DAVID GREENE, HOST: All right. This morning, meet the new German government. It is the same as the old German government. Chancellor Angela Merkel, her conservatives and center-left allies ended a 15-week-long political crisis and struck a deal to form a government. NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson has more on this from Berlin. SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: Merkel looked exhausted after a marathon 24-hour final session to clench the deal for a new governing coalition. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) CHANCELLOR ANGELA MERKEL: (Foreign language spoken). NELSON: She said she wasn't sure until the very end that the deal would happen and lauded the negotiators for persevering. Without a deal, Germany would've faced new elections. But no one, not even the negotiators, is thrilled about having the same governing coalition that ended up costing its members the worst election showing in history last fall. Horst Seehofer of the conservative CSU party in Bavaria says he and the other coalition partners now get what the German public wants. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) HORST SEEHOFER: (Foreign language spoken). NELSON: He promised sweeping changes that will create more opportunities and benefits for all Germans. A 28-page deal is also set to cap asylum seekers coming to Germany for the first time at no more than 220,000 per year, which is something the conservatives have been demanding. The new governing coalition still has to be approved by members of each of the three parties. Details of the new government, including who gets what cabinet posts, still need to be hammered out. That means the new German government isn't likely to take office before April. Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Berlin. (SOUNDBITE OF PRECIOUS FATHERS' "BRAD QUINN, MEDICINE MAN") SCOTT SIMON, HOST: On the coastline of Beirut, they're building out into the Mediterranean. It's land reclamation, like they do in a lot of places. But in this case, they are doing it to try to solve the country's trash crisis. They're dumping garbage into the sea. Some people worry it's a threat to fish stocks and the Mediterranean. NPR's Ruth Sherlock took to the water to check it out. RUTH SHERLOCK, BYLINE: It's a bright, beautiful day, and I'm on a small boat in the Mediterranean, just off the Lebanese coast. It should be idyllic, but there's an acrid smell that burns my throat. CLAUDE JABRE: The stink is horrible. I wish the camera can take the smell. It's really horrible. It's unbelievable. The eyes hurt, and the throat hurts. SHERLOCK: Claude Jabre is an activist with You Stink, a movement that developed in response to Lebanon's yearslong trash crisis. Garbage floats in the water around us. At one point, Jabre thinks he sees a turtle. JABRE: See? This is a turtle. Oh, no. No. It's a tire (laughter). I thought it was a turtle. We have tires. And everything is in the sea, so the garbage is learning how to swim. SHERLOCK: And along the coast in the water, there's a huge mound of trash and dirt. It's big enough for trucks to drive onto it and upend more loads of waste. It's what they call land reclamation, the process of adding to the country's coastline. We steer the boat in for a closer look. You can see this kind of black liquid that's seeping out of this massive pile and into the water. And then there's bits of plastic. And the sea is just brown around us. Showing us around is Lebanese fishermen Emilio Eid. He says fish stocks have dramatically declined since the project began. What is the impact for your work? EMILIO EID: This area - the fish all die because pollution. SHERLOCK: It's become so bad, says Eid, that he and other fishermen have sued the developer. He says the project has destroyed their livelihoods. We talked back at the small fishing port where Eid has worked most of his life. Trucks loaded with garbage - plastic bottles, tires, syringes, clothes - rumble past, headed for the sea. (SOUNDBITE OF TRUCK DRIVING) SHERLOCK: It was a picture of these trucks that brought this to the public's attention last summer. It caused a national controversy. On paper, the developer's plans do include efforts to limit pollution. For example, a barrier is meant to ring-fence the garbage sea fill. But in practice, the trash dumps began well before the real barrier was actually built. The developer refused to speak with NPR. But Antoine Gebara, the mayor of Jdeideh, the Beirut municipality on whose coastline the project is partly happening, did agree to meet. ANTOINE GEBARA: (Speaking Arabic). SHERLOCK: He says, "yes, it's bad for the environment. But it's necessary." GEBARA: (Through interpreter) To be honest, I know that there's something wrong with the way things are done on the site. But I'm also well aware that if I wanted to stop them, I'd risk having the garbage pile up in the streets. SHERLOCK: The official plans are for this to become a landfill site. But environmentalists say it will fill up in a couple of years, and they suspect the ultimate aim is to turn this into expensive real estate, lucrative for developers and the politicians who back them. To my surprise, Gebara acknowledges that is part of the plan. So this is about money more than the trash? GEBARA: (Speaking Arabic). SHERLOCK: "Of course," he answers. He cites other land reclamation projects that have brought massive financial capital. The project has angered environmental experts in Europe who worry about the Mediterranean Sea. Dr. Paul Johnston is an environmental scientist with Greenpeace in the United Kingdom. PAUL JOHNSTON: I mean, it's just beggars belief really, to be honest. It really comes down to it being waste management from the Dark Ages - I mean, the whole ethic that if we've got to get rid of, we burn it, we bury it or we throw it in the sea. SHERLOCK: He warns there are plastics and other toxins that will badly pollute the Mediterranean Sea. JOHNSTON: Basically, what they appear to be doing here is taking a pretty undesirable landfill site and turning it into an even less desirable landfill site, which is destined, ultimately, to act as a big source of marine pollution. SHERLOCK: Environmentalists in Lebanon, like Paul Abi Rached, the founder of the group TERRE Liban, are frustrated that foreign governments haven't done more to stop the project. PAUL ABI RACHED: This is really the most important question, why all the Mediterranean countries are witnessing this humanity crime and natural crime and they didn't move. SHERLOCK: The answer, say some Western diplomats who spoke without giving their names because this is sensitive, is connected to Lebanon's refugee problem. There are over a million Syrian refugees here. Governments fear a flood into Europe should Lebanon ever ask them to leave. So, the diplomats say, they're careful not to do anything that might upset the Lebanese - even in matters of trash. So environmentalist Rached calls for citizens to act. RACHED: We, as citizens of this planet, of the Mediterranean Sea, let us make more pressure to save this beautiful sea. SHERLOCK: And make sure Lebanon finds a way to deal with its trash on dry land. Ruth Sherlock, NPR News, Beirut. (SOUNDBITE OF ZOE KEATING'S "ESCAPE ARTIST") SCOTT SIMON, HOST: The novel "Red Clocks" imagines a time in which something called the Personhood Amendment has made abortion and in vitro fertilization a crime in the United States, and Canada returns women who slip across the border to seek one. It's a novel set in an alternate reality of an Oregon town near the border that invites inevitable comparison with Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale." Is it also a parable for our times? "Red Clocks" is by Leni Zumas. Her fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines and has been acclaimed for her exquisite wordplay. She's also an associate professor of English at Portland State University and joins us from the studios of Oregon Public Broadcasting. Thanks so much for being with us. LENI ZUMAS: Thank you, Scott. SIMON: You must have begun this novel more than a year ago - before the last inauguration. So what put the story in your mind? ZUMAS: Yeah. I started writing it around 2010. It started from some personal anxiety and anguish of my own. I was dealing with infertility and really wanted to get pregnant and wasn't able to. And I had a lot of questions about why I wanted to become a mother, what it meant to be a mother, what it meant to be fertile or infertile. And when I was starting to pursue in vitro fertilization and doing some research about it, I started to come upon something called the Personhood Amendment and various fetal-personhood movements in the United States - people who wanted to make it a crime to do anything to a single-celled zygote. And so that was something that really fueled my curiosity and, frankly, my anger. And so it started out personal, and it really expanded to be about the political future of our country. SIMON: You've intertwined the stories of four or five women here, and I'll just mention a few - Roberta, or Ro, a teacher who wants a child on her own, her best student, Mattie, who becomes known in the narrative as the daughter. She's 16 and pregnant, decides to run for the border, previously unheralded polar explorer named - I can't pronounce her name. ZUMAS: I say it as Eivor Minervudottir, but I don't speak Faroese, so I'm probably butchering it. SIMON: (Laughter) Well, somebody in our audience, undoubtedly, will let us know that - if you've butchered it. I want to read something that is written in her voice. (Reading) We woke to the floes rafting up around the ship - massive blue-white shelves, thrust vertically by wind and tide, jumped roaring out of the water and smashed at the keel. To my knowledge, I may now add the sound ice makes when it destroys a ship - booming gun cracks, then a smaller yelping. I looked up this explorer because I found those passages so compelling. (LAUGHTER) ZUMAS: I'm glad. SIMON: Imagine my amazement I meant to find out it's all your fiction - isn't it? ZUMAS: I happen to be a person who's long been obsessed with polar exploration and maritime adventure, and so that's what I imported when I was imagining this woman from the Faroe Islands who gets aboard these ships by pretending she's a boy and teaches herself polar hydrology. SIMON: I have to share with you - there was a phrase that startled me a little. At one point, the 16-year-old - the daughter - who becomes pregnant refers to what I'll refer to the entity inside of her as the clump. ZUMAS: Yeah. SIMON: I'll ask - because it is your character - does she do that to distance herself, or what? ZUMAS: That's a good question. I think that she does want to distance herself, but she doesn't know what she's doing. You know, she hasn't quite turned 16. And she herself is adopted, which makes her decision to seek an abortion more complicated. SIMON: Can you see how even some people who believe in abortion rights just might find a phrase like the clump to be a euphemism that aggravates them? ZUMAS: Yes, I can. And I hope that that aggravation starts a conversation, you know, or contributes to a conversation that's obviously already happening. SIMON: As you may know, there are couples that go through IVF, and they see something flickering on that screen and begin to feel very deeply about it. It suddenly - if you will, it's not a clump to them. It becomes something with living properties. ZUMAS: I think that's where the complexity lies in this conversation - that, you know, I remember when I got the call that I was pregnant after many, many tries. And certainly, I wasn't using the word clump to myself. But that doesn't mean that a 15-and-a-half-year-old 1/2-year-old doesn't get to use that word for herself. SIMON: How do you feel about comparisons to "The Handmaid's Tale"? Oh, wait. As soon as I hear myself utter that question, I'm thinking, what's wrong with that? How could that possibly hurt? (LAUGHTER) SIMON: But go ahead, please. ZUMAS: I've admired Margaret Atwood for a really long time, and I love her work. And I think our books are very different in the sense that in "The Handmaid's Tale," she's created such a spectacular and drastic world that does draw on elements of historical fact but which is really so separate from our own world, whereas I think that the world of "Red Clocks" could, frankly, happen next week. SIMON: Leni Zumas - her novel "Red Clocks." Thanks so much for being with us. ZUMAS: Thank you, Scott. It was a pleasure. (SOUNDBITE OF JULIA KENT'S "TRANSPORTATION") SCOTT SIMON, HOST: A new year means a new calendar. And a man in North Carolina has created some very unusual calendars. In fact, they show scenes that you weren't supposed to see. WUNC's Jay Price reports on the only way most people will ever be able to view the CIA's official paintings of past spy missions. JAY PRICE, BYLINE: Yes, CIA paintings with scenes including a spy with a rifle shooting down an airplane from a helicopter and not one but two missions in which planes try to snatch agents off the ground without even landing. Of course, before there could be calendars of CIA art, there had to be CIA art. And there really wasn't any until Erik Kirzinger, a former logger, fly-fishing guide and cowhand, came up with the idea to commission some for the CIA headquarters in Northern Virginia. ERIK KIRZINGER: The idea being that when you looked at the collection, it would tell the visual history of the CIA one mission at a time. PRICE: It was personal. His uncle was a CIA contract pilot who was killed in a 1952 mission in China. Nearly half a century later, Kirzinger listened as then-CIA director George Tenet spoke at an annual ceremony honoring spies killed in the line of duty. KIRZINGER: When he was describing what the men and women were up to when they were killed, I had these visual images of their missions. PRICE: He asked CIA leaders if the agency would be interested in art that told some of its stories. And they liked the idea. He helped pick suitable declassified missions, found private donors to pay for the paintings and commissioned the artists. One of them was Dru Blair, who owns an art school in South Carolina. DRU BLAIR: This is the "Ambush In Manchuria." I'll pull that out. PRICE: It's the mission in which Kirzinger's uncle was killed. Before painting it, Blair built a 3-D computer model of the scene to get it right. BLAIR: So the idea is to figure out point of view, first. And we've decided - in this instance, I needed the plane from underneath and... PRICE: In the painting, the plane is flying low to yank an agent from the ground while taking fire from Chinese machine gunners. The plane is flying toward two poles with a line strung between them. That line attaches to a harness around the agent's body, and a hook dangling from the plane is supposed to snag the line. BLAIR: ...And that's the stunt that you see in a James Bond movie, but they actually use that in reality to lift people off to extract them, basically, from a dangerous zone. PRICE: The plane was shot down. And both pilots, including Kirzinger's uncle, were killed. Two surviving crew members were held in Chinese prisons for decades. After the first few paintings, Kirzinger bowed out. And the CIA now commissions new ones itself. But he got the idea to create calendars, so people who don't get a chance to roam CIA headquarters - meaning most of us - can see them. The idea of CIA art may seem odd, but it's kind of part of a tradition, a genre of art we can call - I don't know - maybe a good phrase is national security art. The Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force - even the Coast Guard have art. VICTOR YOURITZIN: There are thousands of pieces in these collections. They're huge. That's something, I think, many, many people in this country are not aware of. PRICE: Few art experts have seen as many paintings with national security themes, says Victor Youritzin. The professor emeritus at the University of Oklahoma spent years poring over the thousands of pieces of art in the various collections of the U.S. military and organized a show of some of the best ones. YOURITZIN: But I was not aware the CIA (laughter) had an art collection. PRICE: Hardly anyone was. But now anyone can flip to a new CIA painting every month. For NPR News, I'm Jay Price in Greensboro, N.C. (SOUNDBITE OF CANOE CANOA'S "POPULOUS") SCOTT SIMON, HOST: The ugliest profanity President Trump uttered about immigrants in their countries of origin may not be the single word we've heard and read over and over these past couple of days. It's when the president reportedly asked the bipartisan group of legislators at the White House - why do we want all these people here? - an apparent reference to people from Africa especially - then added we should have more people from Norway. The profanity is that the president of the United States said quite plainly that he believes the United States should have an immigration policy that encourages more whites than black or Hispanic immigrants. The word for that is racism, a real profanity. And it profanes the United States that was built by the sweat, muscle and blood of immigrants of all races. Many - millions came from places that were then derided as poor, savage and uncivilized, the holes of humanity of their time. Immigrants came from dirt poor farms in Ireland, the destitute villages of Sicily, the shtetls and ghettos of Russia, Poland and Germany, the parched fields of Mexico and the Caribbean, the hutongs of China and the bustees of India. And of course, millions of Africans came because they were brutally torn from their families and homes and sold into slavery. Few of the immigrants who built this country came to America with wealth, titles or even sure prospects for a better future. They had strong hearts and willing hands. Many had to contend with racism after they arrived here, but the children that were born to them here would have the same rights as any family that came over on the Mayflower. Immigrants from so many impoverished and deadly places made America rich in all ways. They built America's great cities and industries, factories and schools. They made the American dream come alive in the world. As Margaret Thatcher observed from across the ocean, Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy. The immigrants who arrive today from Haiti, El Salvador, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana and a hundred other places keep that dream going with their own lives. The president's choice of language demands attention and has been denounced around the world, including by members of his own political party. But remove that one ugly sensational word from his remarks and what remains might be no less profane. When you slur and insult people from countries who have helped make America, America is smeared, too. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "A DAY FOR THE HUNTER, A DAY FOR THE PREY") LEYLA MCCALLA: (Singing) If I go away, I want you to pray not for me, for the souls who have gone away before. SIMON: Leyla McCalla singing "A Day For The Hunter, A Day For The Prey." SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Condemnation continues of President Trump's profane language about several foreign countries, using an especially crude word. And a warning - you're about to hear that word. At a bipartisan meeting with legislators on Thursday, the president asked why the United States would want immigrants from, quote, "shithole countries." Until last week, roughly 200,000 Salvadorans in the U.S. held temporary protected status. That was put in place after the devastating earthquakes hit that country in 2001. But the White House says it'll end those protections and give Salvadorans until September 2019 to return to El Salvador or face deportation. Carlos Dada is the founder of El Faro, a news site based in San Salvador, and joins us from there. Carlos, thanks so much for being with us. CARLOS DADA: Thank you for having me, Scott. SIMON: What's the reaction in El Salvador been to the president's comments and, for that matter, your personal reaction? DADA: (Laughter) Well, I must say those are not the words you would expect from a stable genius or a statesman. As you can imagine, there's been a general reaction of indignation in El Salvador. And it's been the same, I hear, in the other countries he called names. The government has sent what we call a letter of protest, demanding respect, to Washington. But people are feeling insulted by Trump's words. And they come particularly painful after his government declared the end of TPS for Salvadorans. But that's it. It doesn't change anything in these countries besides the image of the United States and especially the respect for the presidency of your country. SIMON: As it's seen there in El Salvador, what would the effect be of 200,000 Salvadorans perhaps returning? DADA: Well, that's a different story because that's a new earthquake for the country. We have no way of handling the return of 200,000 Salvadoran families back to a country where there's no decent jobs for them. There's high levels of violence. This is a very poor country, so this is a decision that doesn't make sense for anyone, not even for the United States. And if you ask me, I think it's a cruel and an immoral decision. SIMON: What about the argument that - look, it was temporary status and this was 2001 and 17 years is long temporary status? DADA: Well, the thing is that during the two last administrations, which is a Republican administration of George W. Bush and the Democratic administration of Barack Obama, both administrations renewed every time the temporary protected status for Salvadorans. And the argument was not that the effects of that earthquake remained here. The argument was precisely that this country cannot handle the return of 200,000 families. And that has not changed. SIMON: Can you give us some idea of what I'll refer to as the kind of daily earthquake of crime is like in El Salvador in many parts of the country? DADA: We rank among the highest homicide rates in the world. And mostly, the responsibility of the war between the 18th Street gang and the Mara Salvatrucha. These gangs came to El Salvador through the massive deportations that the United States started just after the end of our civil war. And they grew up so fast in a country that had thousands of weapons on the streets. And so they just grew to a point that we can't control them anymore. SIMON: But those are gangs that began in the United States. DADA: Those are gangs that began in the streets of California. And Salvadorans joined the gangs because they left this country running away from the civil war that was, in a good part, financed by the United States government. SIMON: How dependent is El Salvador on the money that comes in from Salvadorans living in the U.S. and who send it back home? DADA: Remittances are one of the main economy stabilizers of this country. Almost a fifth of our GDP comes from those. So if you see, Scott, in the case of the TPS, when I say it doesn't even make sense for the United States, it's because you have - 90 percent of those that are under the TPS program have formal employment in the United States. They pay their taxes. They have bank loans in the United States to pay for their houses that they are buying. So these are exemplary immigrants, and now you're pushing them to become either illegal aliens or to come back to a country that they can't recognize anymore after two decades. SIMON: Carlos Dada of El Faro in San Salvador, thanks very much for being with us. DADA: Thank you, Scott. [EDITOR'S NOTE: NPR has decided in this case to spell out the vulgar word that the president reportedly used because it meets our standard for use of offensive language. It is "absolutely integral to the meaning and spirit of the story being told."] SCOTT SIMON, HOST: President Trump's vulgar remark about immigrants from certain countries has played out differently in this country depending on the media outlet. North Country Public Radio's Brian Mann has a roundup. BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: During President Trump's first year, the same events, the same facts have been portrayed so differently in different media outlets they seem unrecognizable. This week, it dialed up a notch. Trump's comments about countries in Africa and about Haiti drew fierce condemnation from outlets generally seen as being in the middle, the mainstream. On CNN, Anderson Cooper scolded Trump, arguing that the Haitian people have shown courage and dignity. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ANDERSON COOPER 360") ANDERSON COOPER: It's a dignity many in this White House could learn from. It's a dignity the president, with all his money and all his power, could learn from as well. MANN: But this time, a number of mainstream outlets went further than scolding. The New Yorker and the online journal Slate declared that Trump's latest comments revealed him to be a bigot. The New Yorker ran a banner headline claiming that there is a racist in the White House. This narrative was taken up by America's media widely viewed as left-leaning, with commentators like Rachel Maddow on MSNBC saying the time has come to pass judgment on Trump's character. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW") RACHEL MADDOW: One of the things that we can now factor into the balance of harm to this country that is caused by having an openly racist president - I don't say that lightly. One of the things we can factor... MANN: Trump's language did also draw criticism from some outlets considered conservative. But for the most part, they portrayed his comments very differently. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson argued that the president spoke with welcome frankness and honesty. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT") TUCKER CARLSON: President Trump said something that almost every single person in America actually agrees with. An awful lot of immigrants come to this country from other places that aren't very nice. Those places are dangerous. They're dirty. They're corrupt, and they're poor. MANN: This controversial idea that immigrants from Africa and some other parts of the world are undesirable and the president was right to say so out loud echoed widely across conservative-leaning outlets popular with Trump's base, on websites like The Daily Caller and Breitbart and also on Rush Limbaugh's radio show. (SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "THE RUSH LIMBAUGH SHOW") RUSH LIMBAUGH: Forget the words used. The question was, why do you people on the Democrats' side want to continue to bring people to this country that are not going to benefit this country? Why, instead, do you not want to bring the best and brightest of the world to this country? MANN: It's important to remember that it didn't used to be this way. There was a time when Americans mostly saw the same political events portrayed in the same way. DIANA MUTZ: When I was growing up, there were, you know, the three network sources for national news. And that was pretty much it. MANN: Diana Mutz studies media and politics at the University of Pennsylvania. She says a lot of people still get their news from a variety of sources. But we tend to be more and more polarized, she says, seeking information that reflects our convictions. That means we develop widely different views of the world and its leaders. MUTZ: I think they don't converge, unfortunately. People do and always have interpreted political facts in a way that is most congenial for them. MANN: So this week, millions of Americans heard trusted media figures - journalists, writers, news anchors - describe the president as vulgar, offensive, even racist and bigoted. Meanwhile, millions of other Americans opted for equally trusted media who described Trump as plainspoken, a truth-teller willing to violate the norms of political correctness. Brian Mann, NPR News. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: A vulgarity reportedly uttered this week by President Trump upended bipartisan immigration talks at the White House. Looming over all, of course, is the possibility of a government shutdown in less than a week. We're joined now by NPR's congressional correspondent Susan Davis. Susan, thanks for joining us again. SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: Good morning. SIMON: There was this group together with the president - Lindsey Graham, Dick Durbin. What happened? What was the deal that apparently couldn't be reached? DAVIS: So earlier in the week, the White House and a group of lawmakers had agreed on what they believed should be the four pillars of a deal. And this group of six senators reached a compromise on those pillars, which included a path to citizenship for the so-called DREAMers, initial funds for both a border wall and more border security, changes to immigration policy involving your family and changes to what's known as the visa lottery system, which is a random system that lets about 50,000 people come into the country every year. The president rejected that agreement, was particularly angry about the visa lottery system and, in doing so, made - what I think is fair to say - very well-documented comments about certain African nations that sort of blew up the talks. SIMON: What does the president want? Do we know? DAVIS: That is the question. And it seems to be constantly changing. On Tuesday at the White House meeting, the president told lawmakers essentially, if you come up with a compromise, I'll sign what you send me. And so they did come up with a... SIMON: Yeah, he said I'll sign it. I'll take the heat. Yeah. DAVIS: Exactly. And so they thought they had done that. And he rejected it. The White House has never put a particularly fine policy detail on what they want. I think it's fair to say he wants a win. And on this issue, it's tough for him because he needs to be able to bring something back to his base on a key issue in his campaign but also come up with a deal that Democrats can vote for. SIMON: It doesn't sound like a deal's in the offing. DAVIS: It does not sound like a deal is in the offing. But I always caveat that tough deals like this often only come together when there's a sort of a pressure cooker dynamic on Capitol Hill. I'm not quite sure we're there yet. People like to talk about how much they want to see bipartisanship on these tough issues. But the truth is that often bipartisanship means, by nature, that both parties will have to agree to something that their most core supporters are not happy with. And that's tough. SIMON: There is a shutdown looming, which might concentrate the mind. DAVIS: That often has that effect (laughter) among lawmakers. A significant number of Democrats have been arguing that they should withhold their votes on keeping the government open, which is a Friday deadline, when they run out of money. They'll need at least a stopgap measure. And Democrats have made the case that they have leverage at this moment - that they should withhold their votes on government funding unless they can extract an agreement on immigration. House Speaker Paul Ryan, on Friday, said he does not believe there will be a government shutdown. But I also think it's fair to say that comments like the president made have made it even more complicated because there's a significant number of Democrats who look at a White House with a president who has an approval rating hovering in the 30s on an issue that highly motivates Democratic voters. And they're saying, why are we compromising with a president who not only seems to not know what he wants but is making comments that, for a lot of voters, are just seen as racial or outright racist? SIMON: Does either party see political damage in permitting a shutdown? DAVIS: Nobody wants a shutdown. I do believe that's true, although I do think that on this issue - more than a lot of issues - that passions are really high because it's not just talking about fiscal policy or some other thing. We're talking about human lives. And human lives are at stake, and families are at stake. So it's not going to be an easy puzzle to solve. SIMON: NPR's congressional correspondent Susan Davis, thanks so much. DAVIS: You're welcome. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: This week, President Trump signed the Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Reporting Act. It's a bill designed to give money to help process tens of thousands of rape kits around the country that have never been tested. Eight years ago, Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy decided to make processing the 11,341 untested rape kits in the Detroit area a priority. Today she is about 90 percent done. She joins us from her office in Detroit. Ms. Worthy, thanks so much for being with us. KYM WORTHY: My pleasure. SIMON: What have you discovered? WORTHY: We have discovered that we have - just from our project in one city in one county in one state - over 800 identified serial rapists. SIMON: I'm going to imagine that they haven't just been committing crimes in Wayne County. WORTHY: No, no, no. We have also identified 39 other states that have been impacted crimewise by our kits that were found in Detroit. They're not all rape cases. We also have some homicides, some other types of cases that testing rape kits will also help to solve. SIMON: What have you discovered might help processing this huge number of rape kits? You need more money, personnel - what do you need? WORTHY: Well, when we first started, there really was no road map. So we kind of had to put it together ourselves. And the first thing that is of notice, Detroit was a near-bankrupt city. And so we had no money. At that time, it cost anywhere from $1,200 to $1,500 per kit back in '09 to test them. So we're looking at a multimillion-dollar problem just to get them tested. And it doesn't do any good to test them all if you're not going to follow up and investigate and prosecute them like you should have done - or like it should've been done - when this first happened. So those are the challenges we are facing. But my first challenge is basically begging and pleading with foundations, with Detroit businessmen and -women, with the general public - to basically fund the project. SIMON: Did you run into resistance from people who said, look, this sounds like a good thing to do, but Detroit's a city filled with good things to do? WORTHY: Well, we ran into - more of a problem was, this sounds like a good thing, but isn't that the function of government to pay for that? And basically, we had to say, well, we can't wait on Detroit to have any more money. We can't wait and have these victims wait even more because, remember, our kits back then went back 25 years. So now some of these kits are over 35 years old. So we didn't want to be a part of extending the trauma of these victims who were waiting for it. So we basically had to hit the - I - personally, I had to hit the road. I talked to foundations, Detroit businessmen and -women. I knew the Detroit people are very philanthropic, and so that's what got us all started. And then kind of the cherry on the top of the cake was when I met Mariska Hargitay and started working with her foundation, the Joyful Heart Foundation. SIMON: She's one of the stars of "Special Victims Unit." Right? WORTHY: Yes, "Law & Order: SVU." SIMON: Have you been able to begin to give justice to women who might have thought that they would never be able to see it? WORTHY: We have. As of a couple of months ago, we are up to 125 solid convictions, and that represents the defendants. And so there's... SIMON: Yeah. WORTHY: ...Really more cases than that because many of those defendants that we've prosecuted have raped more than one woman. SIMON: I understand that there were a variety of reasons as to why these rape kits were untested... WORTHY: Yes. SIMON: ...Including, as you note, the fiscal problems that Detroit has been enduring for more than a generation. But was there also indifference? WORTHY: Yes, that's all a part of rape culture. Back then, when some of these kits took place, we had law enforcement in Detroit that really didn't take the case seriously. And that's really a national problem - it still is when it comes to sexual assault. I call sexual assault kind of the neglected child of the family - where if we were talking about homicide or if we're talking about carjacking, we wouldn't have this problem. No one would shelve, let's say, guns and knives that were used as murder weapons. So - but they did these kits, which also are - each one of them is a box that contain a lot of evidence that could be tested. And so yes, we have a problem in this country with rape culture. You see that going on right now. It's never been more evident than it is now - rape culture, sexual harassment culture, all of that. And so training was also needed. Back then, when we first started, we had found police reports in some files that we pulled where police officers were writing very disparaging things about our victims - not believing them, dismissing their cases, not bothering to work on them. And so that was a part of it as well - not just the neglect, not just no money but just active rape culture in play, where they just did not care. SIMON: Based on your expertise, this is happening in a number of cities and counties. Isn't it? WORTHY: Yeah. There are estimated to be over 400,000 untested abandoned rape kits in this country. And I don't know if you're familiar with Michigan Stadium right here in our state. It seats over 100,000 people. When I tell people that the amount of untested kits in this country that they're estimated to be - you can fill up the biggest college or national football stadium in the country four times. And that's if each kit represents a victim - which it does - and you think of game day at Michigan Stadium four times over, that's how many we have in this country. And that's probably a conservative estimate. It is absolutely horrible. And hopefully, it is changing, albeit very slowly. SIMON: Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy, thank you. We've learned a lot. WORTHY: You're very welcome. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Kym Worthy is known mainly for her work on the backlog of rape kits. She's been lead prosecutor in Wayne County for more than 13 years. And after we taped our interview with her, Lara Bazelon published a piece in Slate magazine that is critical of Kym Worthy's record on the exoneration of wrongful convictions. Worthy is one of a group of prosecutors Lara Bazelon describes as, quote, "innocence deniers." She joins us now from San Francisco. Thanks so much for being with us. LARA BAZELON: Thank you for having me. SIMON: These aren't prosecutors that are just naturally reluctant to overturn convictions they've won but actively opposing exoneration. What makes someone an innocence denier, in your judgment? BAZELON: They have to be extreme. So they don't simply oppose a wrongful conviction claim - because some claims are bogus or murky and they have to be investigated. Instead, when confronted with overwhelming evidence that the person is innocent, they refuse to let go of the conviction, and they will fight for years through the appellate courts. They will publicly declare their belief that the person is guilty. SIMON: Let's talk about one case in particular because you spent some time speaking with Kym Worthy about a couple of cases. Let's ask about Davontae Sanford's case. Very briefly, what happened? BAZELON: What happened was there was this terrible murder in a house on Runyon Street. It was called the Runyon Street murders. Four people were killed. And the police set their sights on a 14-year-old named Davontae Sanford. He was young. He was alone. He was developmentally disabled. And they got him to admit to what he said was, quote, "something" with his understanding that he would be let go. He ended up signing a confession to the murders. He was indicted. His attorney, who was guilty of all sorts of misconduct, ended up, in the middle of trial, having Davontae plead guilty to the four murders and get an extremely long sentence. Eighteen days after he pled guilty - or maybe 16 days - the actual killer, a guy named Vincent Smothers, confessed to the Detroit Police that he had carried out these four murders and eight other murders at the behest of a hitman. So the Detroit Police, even though they had this evidence, didn't free Davontae Sanford. And at some point, the evidence leaked out. I think that was in 2009. And at that point, he started fighting to be released and was opposed at every turn by Prosecutor Worthy. SIMON: We contacted Prosecutor Worthy, who didn't come in for another interview. But she - there is this statement. And let me read it. (Reading) It should be pointed out that the Runyon Street homicides remain under active investigation. This office dismissed the case against Sanford because we were unable to retry the case. This dismissal is not the same as exoneration. It must be emphasized that Vincent Smothers has had several opportunities to testify under oath to exonerate Sanford but each time has refused. So how do you respond to that? BAZELON: It's hard to know what to make of that statement. My first response is that the attorney general - so the top prosecutor of the state of Michigan - has found that Davontae Sanford is innocent and has accepted that fact and agreed to award him over $400,000 in compensation. Vincent Smothers has declared that he is guilty and has said in a sworn affidavit that Davontae Sanford had nothing to do with it. My understanding is that none of the people to whom Smothers pointed have been prosecuted or indeed will be prosecuted by Kym Worthy. SIMON: Every now and then over the years, I've talked to prosecutors about exoneration cases. And they often say, look, they were legally convicted by a jury. The conviction was upheld on appeal. You can't make the legal system work if it's vulnerable to people showing up years after the fact sometimes, changing their testimony or even confessing - because that can be problematic. BAZELON: It's true that our system does prize this idea of finality, which is 12 people came back and convicted, and then an appellate court upheld it, and then another appellate court upheld that. And we should just stop letting people come back and get second and third bites at the apple. But it's also true that people confess falsely. And some trials are fundamentally unfair because, for example, prosecutors don't turn over all the evidence, and some of it tends to indicate the person didn't do it. And in those cases, when it becomes obvious that any or all of these things have happened, there has to be some kind of a recourse. And our legal system does provide that recourse, provided that prosecutors don't stand in the way. SIMON: Recognizing there might be more than one answer to this, why would a prosecutor oppose exoneration? BAZELON: People think, who've studied it, that it's a combination sometimes of tunnel vision and confirmation bias that you basically look at the new evidence and you discard it as being inconsistent with what you already believe to be true. And then I also think that there's a psychological price that's high, which is admitting to a devastating error. Even if it was an error made by one's predecessor, it's still conceding that the justice system failed in a way that is so profound and stole a huge part of someone else's life. And I think facing up to that consequence is very painful, and people will do anything they can to turn away from it. SIMON: Laura Bazelon, associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and contributing writer for Slate - thanks so much. BAZELON: Thank you so much for having me. (SOUNDBITE OF DJ OKAWARI'S "LUV LETTER") SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Puerto Rico's Governor Rossello held a town meeting this week - not in Puerto Rico but Central Florida. As many as 300,000 Puerto Ricans relocated to Florida after Hurricane Maria, joining more than a million Puerto Ricans already living there. NPR's Greg Allen reports that the governor has begun a campaign to organize Puerto Rican voters in Florida and other states before the midterm elections. GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: When firefighter Oscar Negron sang "La Borinquena," Puerto Rico's territorial anthem, at the Kissimmee Civic Center, many of the hundreds of people there for the town meeting joined in. OSCAR NEGRON: (Singing in Spanish). UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Singing in Spanish). ALLEN: It was after he sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" and a unifying moment for those concerned about their island's future. Darren Soto, a Puerto Rican and the member of Congress for this area, said there's something else that unifies this community - disappointment from the federal response to Hurricane Maria. DARREN SOTO: We're a proud people, and this is a very deeply concerning issue for us that - it's been a hundred days since much of the island has had power. They're just being treated differently, and it hurts our community. It hurts us personally. We take this personally. ALLEN: Puerto Rico's governor was in Washington most of the week lobbying to get his island the help it needs in a disaster bill now before Congress. Rossello was disappointed last fall when Congress passed a tax bill that he says penalizes manufacturing companies on the island. In Kissimmee, he called on Puerto Ricans living on the U.S. mainland to do what people in the territory can't do - register and vote for members of Congress, Senate and in the general election for president in 2020. RICARDO ROSSELLO: So that we can make distinction between those that have been friends of Puerto Rico and those that have turned their back and that we can be influential in the up and coming midterm election... (APPLAUSE) ROSSELLO: ...And the up and coming presidential election and that we can change the path forward. (APPLAUSE) ALLEN: Rossello says because it's a territory and doesn't have representation in Congress, Puerto Rico is at a disadvantage securing its fair share of disaster aid, even though residents are U.S. citizens. The island is competing with the Virgin Islands and some powerful states that also saw disasters this year - Florida, Texas and California. The governor is calling on Puerto Ricans to join him in tracking who in Congress votes to support the island and who doesn't. ROSSELLO: When it's all said and done, we're going to tally. Our community's going to see. And of course, we're going to take strong stands when we see clear differences on policy for the people of Puerto Rico and against the people of Puerto Rico. ALLEN: Rossello said it's not about party but about voting records. Joining him onstage, however, were two leading Democrats, Congressman Soto and Florida Senator Bill Nelson. Nelson, who's up for re-election in the fall, agreed that in the response to Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans were being treated like second-class citizens. BILL NELSON: No American should have to go through what the people of Puerto Rico are still going through. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: That's right. ALLEN: Nelson's expected opponent in the fall, Florida's Republican Governor Rick Scott, was also at the town meeting. Betsy Franceschini is with the Hispanic Federation, a group that's already registering Puerto Rican voters in Central Florida. She says voter outreach efforts will soon be kicking into high gear. BETSY FRANCESCHINI: We're going to hold elected officials accountable. I think we have, right now, the position. It's our time and our influence to make a difference in the elections. ALLEN: Puerto Rican Governor Rossello said he'll be back before the midterms to campaign in Florida, also Pennsylvania, Ohio, Connecticut and other states. Greg Allen, NPR News, Kissimmee, Fla. (SOUNDBITE OF SONIC ELYSIUM'S "WATERWORLD") SCOTT SIMON, HOST: All Alexis Madrigal wanted was a coat. He bought that coat through an ad he saw on Instagram. A sponsored post popped up in his photo feed. He hadn't heard of the retailer, but it billed itself as luxury for modern gentlemen. And what a deal - the price was less than a hundred dollars. The jacket Alexis Madrigal got delivered, however, turned out to be less an expression of luxury and more a lesson into how e-commerce has changed in the age of Instagram and Facebook. Alexis Madrigal wrote about this for The Atlantic, and he joins us now from Oakland, Calif. Thanks so much for being with us. ALEXIS MADRIGAL: Thank you. SIMON: What'd the coat look like? MADRIGAL: Well, it kind of looked like a carpet, I would say, formed into a roughly coat-like shape. (Laughter) It kind of had a velour sheen and kind of the texture of indoor-outdoor carpeting. SIMON: (Laughter). MADRIGAL: It was not the nicest coat that I'd ever seen. SIMON: So what's your complaint? MADRIGAL: Well, the complaint was I wanted to get something for nothing. You know what I mean? I wanted a nice, expensive-looking coat for less than a hundred dollars, which, as it turns out, even with all the magic of the Internet, is still impossible. SIMON: Yeah. Well, explain some of that magic of the Internet because this is territory you know well. How are you - I'm not sure taking it is the word because it seems to me if you were, forgive me, naive enough to think you could get a good coat for under a hundred dollars - well, you can finish that sentence. What was the magic that took you in? MADRIGAL: Well, so what I got really interested in was that when the coat showed up, it showed up in a black plastic package from China Post. So I thought I was buying a coat from some brand that represented itself as kind of this modern gentleman. You know, I was expecting it to have its headquarters, you know, in New York or San Francisco or Los Angeles or something. And this thing is shipped direct from a technology park in China. So I kind of started thinking like, well, what is this brand? And I started diving into this new class of online retailer that use a tool called Shopify, which allows anyone to kind of spin up a retail store in five minutes; sucks products in from a service called AliExpress, which is sort of like Amazon but in China, and it's dedicated to kind of the export market for Chinese and other Asian manufacturers; and allows - basically - consumers in the U.S. to take a different route into this manufacturing ecosystem, which makes so many clothes, which makes so many consumer goods, in Asia. SIMON: When you ordered this coat, were you genuinely surprised to be able to trace this stuff back, or was that the whole idea? MADRIGAL: Well, no. I was genuinely surprised. I was literally - I had been tagged in the Facebook advertising system, which Instagram also uses, as someone who likes to buy clothes. And what I came to find was that this is a pretty widespread phenomenon. Shopify says that they have 500,000 merchants. The overwhelming majority of them are small- and medium-sized businesses. And some subset - although no one's totally sure exactly how large it is - are these people who do what's called drop shipping, which means that they never handle the goods that they sell. They essentially are a front end, just a way of accessing these items that are then directly shipped from their Chinese manufacturers. So in some weird way, it sort of cuts out the middleman of sort of an H&M or a Zara or some other fast-fashion place. But it inserts this new middle person, which is a Shopify e-commerce site that took somebody five minutes to set up. And one of the people that I found doing that was this, you know, 17-year-old, or at least presumed, he calls himself a 17-year-old, living in, like, suburban Dublin. SIMON: Well, he sounds like a very ambitious entrepreneur. MADRIGAL: I think they are, you know. I think the appeal of it, obviously, for entrepreneurs - this drop shipping model - is that it takes almost nothing upfront. You don't need money to buy the stuff. The tools online are very inexpensive, and it's this possibility that these entrepreneurs can get something for nothing - right? - that they can generate money basically out of thin air. SIMON: And not to make any comparisons, but I seem to recall that there was a time when J. Crew was a catalog retailer - didn't have any real stores. And now, of course, they've got plenty of them in addition to a very ambitious online retail site. MADRIGAL: Absolutely. The way that I've thought about these Shopify stores is they're undoubtedly strange because they're new, but their model is fundamentally not that different from, like, a big corporate enterprise. It's just that the tools have democratized the ability for people to tap into the globalized economy. And so before, it took the idea of having a supply chain and having all these people who would know factory owners in China and all these other kinds of things - that took a lot of infrastructure. What these tools have done is eliminate the need for all that infrastructure. And so now it's this alternative way into what is a real thing about our economy, which is that many, many of the goods that we all purchase are made in Asian factories and are sold to us at a very high markup from their production costs. SIMON: So where's the coat now, may I ask? MADRIGAL: It's hanging up in my closet, kind of towards the back - in there with the things that are too small for me to fit into now (laughter). But I'll bring it out at some point, I'm sure. Everyone needs a coat like that, you know, maybe for gardening or something. SIMON: (Laughter) Alexis Madrigal, staff writer of The Atlantic speaking with us by Skype. Thanks so much. And you know, I can tell - even over Skype - you're looking great. MADRIGAL: (Laughter) Thank you, Scott. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: The world's largest collection of Soviet underground art has found a permanent home in New Jersey. A museum at Rutgers has acquired more than 20,000 pieces of art assembled over the course of half a century by a trench coat-wearing American economics professor. Rick Karr reports on the art and the man who collected it. RICK KARR, BYLINE: The late 1950s was an exciting time for art in the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin was dead and denounced. The thaw was on. And for the first time in decades, artists could openly flout the country's official aesthetic, socialist realism - you know, chiseled proletarians facing a bright socialist future under the protective gaze of Uncle Joe. But according to curator Julia Tulovsky, they couldn't break the rules too openly. JULIA TULOVSKY: They would organize apartment exhibitions because they were not allowed to exhibit publicly. So they would exhibit in each other's apartment and invite their crowd. KARR: Most of the art in those apartment shows was abstract, strongly influenced by American abstract expressionism. The critics at the KGB tolerated it, but they didn't like it very much. TULOVSKY: And there are even rumors that abstract expressionism as a movement in the West was supported, in part, by CIA as a style that would be completely opposite to socialist realism. KARR: There were also figurative painters. Some got political. There were sculptors and installation artists. The scene produced a Soviet version of pop art. The thing that united all of these artists was that they worked without the blessing of the official Soviet art bureaucracy. TULOVSKY: They weren't necessarily openly objecting the state or fighting with it. They just wanted to express themselves in the way they wanted to express themselves. KARR: The artists came to be known as the nonconformists. Americans first learned about them in 1960 when they were the subject of a 12-page feature in Life magazine. It caught the attention of a Harvard Ph.D. candidate in economics named Norton Dodge, whose research focused on labor in the Soviet Union. CHARLES FICK: Norton felt that the artists were kind of hammering away at the system and creating cracks. KARR: Charles Fick was Norton Dodge's longtime assistant. FICK: You know, these cracks would eventually bring down the Soviet Union. KARR: By the time Norton Dodge passed away, he'd collected nearly 25,000 pieces of Soviet nonconformist art by around 2,000 artists. Dodge could afford all of that art on a college professor salary because his father had been one of Warren Buffett's earliest investors. One of Norton Dodge's favorite nonconformist artists was Evgeny Rukhin, who created brooding abstract compositions with figurative elements - chessboards, playing cards, sewing machines. Charles Fick says Dodge was disturbed by what happened to the artist. FICK: He liked his art. He liked his story. He liked his personality. And Rukhin perished in a fire. And Norton felt that that was, you know, a deliberate fire and that it was because of his activities in the arts. KARR: After that, Dodge stopped visiting the Soviet Union. But he didn't stop acquiring art. His widow, Nancy, has now donated the entire collection to Rutgers University's Zimmerli Art Museum. Curator Julia Tulovsky, who oversees the collection there, says Dodge almost singlehandedly saved nearly 50 years of art from the Soviet republics. TULOVSKY: And I think that this is a real heroic deed in front of Russian culture because why would American professor of economics would be on such a mission? And that's kind of amazing. KARR: You can find out more about cloak-and-dagger art collector Norton Dodge in the 1994 bestseller "The Ransom Of Russian Art" by John McPhee. For NPR News, I'm Rick Karr in New Brunswick, N.J. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Connoisseurs of '60s music and beyond may know the name Joe Boyd as well as they do the name of BJ Leiderman, who writes our theme music. Joe Boyd is behind records by Pink Floyd, Nick Drake and 10,000 Maniacs, among many others. But he hasn't produced a new album in more than a decade - until now. It features traditional Albanian music recorded in Albania. Where else would they record it? Vicki Barker reports. JOE BOYD: It's the second half of Track 2... ANDREA GOERTLER: Yeah. VICKI BARKER, BYLINE: Joe Boyd and his wife and collaborator Andrea Goertler are in their high-ceiling flat in London's Little Venice neighborhood. Lining the walls are original 1960s posters and 6,000 LPs, dozens produced by Boyd himself. (SOUNDBITE OF SAZ'ISO SONG, "TANA") BARKER: The music filling the room takes us to a mountaintop in southern Albania where a shepherd and his dog are set upon by bandits. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TANA") SAZ'ISO: (Singing in Albanian). BARKER: They grant him his dying wish - to let him play his flute. In the valley below, his beloved hears that wild and desperate tune and understands everything. BOYD: You know, he's about to be killed. The sheep have been stolen. The dog's been killed. And this song appears in different forms all over the Albanian-speaking lands. BARKER: Welcome to the world of Saze music, a world of shepherds and bandits, of partisans battling foreign invaders, tales of heroism and tragedy and yearning. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FOLE MOJ MIKE NJE FJALE") SAZ'ISO: (Singing in Albanian). BARKER: That eerie, wild mingling of voices - that's called iso-polyphony. BOYD: Well, iso-polyphony - some people speculate - is as old as Homer. And maybe that's what the sirens were singing when they were luring Ulysses onto the rocks. BARKER: It's also accompanied Albanian weddings, harvests, funerals and festivals for millennia. It's one of the world's oldest vocal traditions. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TRENDAFILI FLETE-FLETE") SAZ'ISO: (Singing in Albanian). BARKER: When rural Albanians began to migrate into cities in the late 19th century, the resulting collision with modern instruments was seismic, says Andrea Goertler, transforming the country's music. GOERTLER: For centuries, people did not mix instrumental music-making with singing. So you either sang and you even danced to this a cappella singing or you played an instrument. And then suddenly, this moment happens when people combine them. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PENXHERENE E ZOTRISE SATE") SAZ'ISO: (Singing in Albanian). BARKER: For decades, Saze was supported by the communist government. But Albania's political and geographic isolation and its lack of decent studios meant few recordings reached the outside world. So this new album should finally give Saze some long-overdue recognition, says Lucy Duran. The ethnomusicologist and world music producer is an old friend of Boyd's and first introduced him to Saze. LUCY DURAN: This is music which is very, very regionally based. It's very localized. It's totally acoustic. It's absolutely sublime. It doesn't exist anywhere else. And it's amazing that it's finally being given such a great chance to be heard around the world. BARKER: But bringing the singers and instrumentalists together wasn't easy. When communism collapsed in Albania, Saze's musical stars scattered. Male vocalist Robert Tralo became an Orthodox priest. The two female vocalists, Donicka Pecallari and Adrianna Thanou, fled to Greece. BOYD: Donicka came back to Albania to sing in festivals, actually undergoing quite arduous journeys to get back because she was so dedicated to remaining part of that scene, whereas Andrianna got depressed and stopped singing for 25 years. BARKER: So what was it that made Joe Boyd so determined to make this album? BOYD: The form is still very unselfconscious. It just is. It still lives. Even though it's surrounded by modern noise, it lives in a very unselfconscious way. BARKER: In Saze, Boyd says, he has once again encountered the kind of unselfconscious virtuosity and spontaneity that first drew him to the rock music of the 1960s. For NPR News, I'm Vicki Barker in London. (SOUNDBITE OF PINK FLOYD'S "ANY COLOUR YOU LIKE") SCOTT SIMON, HOST: The fight to extend government funding has turned into a fight about immigration as Congress tries to avoid a government shutdown by January 19. Negotiations seemed to be humming along among a bipartisan group of lawmakers on Capitol Hill but reached a screeching halt when the president rejected it. Progress was further impeded when President Trump referred to African nations - and we warn you, this word may offend many listeners - as, quote, "shithole countries." Meanwhile, a U.S. district judge in San Francisco has blocked President Trump's attempt to end the DACA program, saying the administration must continue accepting renewal applications. New applications are not being considered. Janet Napolitano is one of the plaintiffs in that case. She is also president of the University of California, former governor of Arizona, of course, and former secretary of homeland security under President Obama. Governor Napolitano, thanks very much for being with us. JANET NAPOLITANO: Well, thank you. SIMON: Donald Trump ran for election and was pretty emphatic on the issue of immigration and his pledge to build a wall. He was elected. Are you trying to win, in the courts, a battle that you lost in an election? NAPOLITANO: No. What we're trying to do is vindicate the rights of our students - and we have several thousand of them who are in DACA, who have undergone the individualized review that is undertaken in connection with being in DACA, and who are very productive and contributing members of our university community. SIMON: What are some of the practical implications that might befall some of your students in the University of California system? NAPOLITANO: Well, DACA not only defers deportation so that you don't have to live in fear that, you know, you'll be picked up by an ICE agent, but it also provides for work authorization. And, you know, our students - most of them - need to work in order to support themselves while they go through school. So it's that combined removal of fear of deportation and also work authorization that is of such value in DACA. SIMON: DACA's set to expire on March 5. You are very familiar with the legislative process. If you could write a prescription for how to solve this problem legislatively, what would it be? NAPOLITANO: You know, it does seem that, you know, a reasonable compromise would be some reasonable addition to border security and DACA. And put those together and add them either as standalone legislation or, indeed, to the budget bill. SIMON: So what's called a clean bill but maybe also containing funds for border security? NAPOLITANO: That's right because I think both Democrats and Republicans support, you know, having a strong border. And indeed, we've done a lot as a country to reinforce our border with Mexico. The crossings across that border - the illegal crossings are at record lows now. And that decrease in immigration from Mexico and Central America, South America began under President Obama and has continued. And so if you continue to deploy more technology - perhaps some more manpower - along that border, more air cover along that border, you can sustain those current efforts. And so to me, that kind of reasonable border security makes sense. And if it is the price one must pay for DACA, you know, that's the legislative process. SIMON: Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California and former homeland security secretary. Thanks so much for being with us. NAPOLITANO: Thank you. [EDITOR'S NOTE: NPR has decided in this case to spell out the vulgar word that the president reportedly used because it meets our standard for use of offensive language. It is "absolutely integral to the meaning and spirit of the story being told."] SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Kentucky's poised to become the first state to require its residents to work, volunteer or prepare for jobs in order to receive Medicaid benefits. This is after the Trump administration announced it would allow states to begin imposing such rules. The changes will be phased in throughout the coming year. We're joined now by the governor of Kentucky, Governor Matt Bevin, from his office. Governor, thanks so much for being with us. MATT BEVIN: Grateful for the opportunity, Scott. SIMON: And why is this issue important to you? BEVIN: This matters to me for a couple of reasons. One thing I want to clarify is that this requirement is for those that Medicaid was not originally designed for. Why is it important to me? I'm a person who grew up with no access to this type of health care. I grew up well below the poverty level, never had the access to the health care system until I was an active duty Army officer in my 20s. So it's a very personal thing. And I recognize that people in those positions don't need, as Administrator Verma said, to be treated with the soft bigotry of low expectations. She's exactly right. SIMON: Have you considered the effect of requiring people to work in areas that, right now, have a high unemployment rate? BEVIN: Go through any community anywhere, I promise you will see at least one sign where people want an able-bodied person who is not on drugs and will show up on time to apply for and do a job. There are plenty of jobs in America. There are 100,000-plus available in Kentucky right now. And this will start to connect people who want a job and need a job with the jobs that exist. SIMON: Governor, as I'm sure I don't have to tell you, Kentucky has one of the highest rates of death from opioid overdoses in the country. What would you do with people who are struggling with addiction and do need help from Medicaid and other services but are probably in no position to work? BEVIN: Here's the wonderful thing. These folks will be identified through this requirement. If, in fact, they're already receiving benefits, they're going to an office somewhere to get something, they won't have to go to anywhere new. They will now be given an opportunity to get treatment. We will continue to invest like this state has never invested in helping people with recovery. SIMON: And what about those who just, in good faith, can't meet the requirements? Do they get no care, no coverage? BEVIN: Think about this. The requirements are for people who are able to meet the requirements. For those who cannot because of a mental disability or a physical disability, it does not apply to them. SIMON: But will some people lose their coverage? Is that is that the bottom line? BEVIN: Time will tell. I would hope that they do for all the right reasons. If a person gets a job and is now covered through their employer, then they don't need it anymore. And those that we project that will no longer be needing it will not be needing it because they will actually be making enough money. They don't qualify, or they will have coverage through their employers. SIMON: Is that being hopeful? I mean, in - I don't have to tell you, Governor, that you can make a pronouncement. But three or four months from now, news organizations might be doing stories about people who couldn't find jobs and have lost their coverage and have nowhere to turn. BEVIN: It is hopeful thinking, you bet it is. But I'll tell you what, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once noted, nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. Enthusiasm springs from hope. And why should we wallow in misery in the belief that we don't have an alternative other than the failure that we already have? You bet it's hopeful. And the greatness of the human condition is that it's always been improved by exactly that. SIMON: The governor of Kentucky, Matt Bevin - thanks very much for being with us. BEVIN: Thank you, sir. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Eighteen people are confirmed dead in this week's mudslides in Southern California. Hundreds of homes have been damaged in the coastal town of Montecito, and this comes just weeks after the largest fire in state history burned across the region. Search and rescue personnel are digging through mud and hope to find survivors even as the number of missing people remains in question. Jonathan Bastian of member station KCRW has been covering this story and joins us now. Jonathan, thanks for being with us. JONATHAN BASTIAN, BYLINE: Hey. Good morning, Scott. SIMON: What's the area you're in look like now? BASTIAN: Yeah. Well, you know, it's worth mentioning that this is about 30 square miles of mud. Even after five days of cleanup, houses are still buried 6 feet deep. The 101 freeway is partially shut down. Scott, I saw busted cars that floated all the way down creeks and are now sitting on what are normally these beautiful postcard Santa Barbara beaches. The sheriff told me that the hardest hit area looked like a scene from a World War I battlefield. So this place just has a long recovery ahead. SIMON: Of course, you mentioned the 101 freeway has been partially shut down. That's the primary coastal route, an utterly beautiful freeway... BASTIAN: Yeah. SIMON: ...I must say, for those of us who've been lucky enough to be on it. How do people get around on this important artery in the midst of an emergency? BASTIAN: Yeah. I mean, they're really not getting around. The mud and debris flow has completely isolated places like Santa Barbara from Los Angeles and other cities like Ventura. And it's posing these kind of major problems. For example, Santa Barbara has the closest trauma center to the scene of the disaster, the hospital there. And a lot of nurses that work there just simply couldn't get to work. So a lot of them started to jump on boats that was - they were ferrying them around the wreckage. They could actually get there and get the job done. So it's been a long, long week here. SIMON: Yeah. We've learned that many of the deaths and injuries occurred in an area that was not under mandatory evacuation. Any idea why authorities didn't tell residents to get out? BASTIAN: Yeah. It's a little complicated here. But the way it goes is this. There's two designations here. There's mandatory and voluntary evacuations. The mandatory zone was mainly where this fire had burned way up in the hills. That's where authorities thought the flooding would happen. So the rain started up there. And it came down and started picking up intensity. And it came into the lower creek beds. That was a voluntary zone. And that's where all these houses are, right along the creek beds. It's also where all the damage occurred. So safety officials just didn't see this happening or see this coming. It's obviously creating a lot of anger and a lot of finger-pointing right now as well. SIMON: Well, these would have been people who would have had to evacuate - what? - twice in a matter of weeks. BASTIAN: Yeah. Exactly. I mean - and I was one of them. I had to leave my house for two weeks because of the fire. So imagine, you know, people had to move out. They had to move back in. And suddenly, they're being asked to move out again. And it's something we don't like to talk about here, but a lot of folks just didn't want to move out again. And it's a real issue, and I think a lot of people are questioning that decision right now. SIMON: KCRW's Jonathan Bastian speaking with us from Santa Barbara. Jonathan, thanks so much for being with us. BASTIAN: Thank you, Scott. (SOUNDBITE OF BALMORHEA'S "BEHIND THE WORLD") SCOTT SIMON, HOST: President Trump says it's now unlikely he'll be interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller. There were reports this week that Mr. Mueller's investigators into Russian election interference might soon ask the president to take questions from them and their inquiry into ties between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. Of course, there are parallel investigations by a number of congressional committees, including the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. A Democrat on that committee, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, joins us. Thanks very much for being with us, Senator. RON WYDEN: Good morning. SIMON: The president's a pretty busy guy. Is he entitled to say - look, if you have a strong case, you ought to be able to make it without me? WYDEN: Well, first of all, the president had indicated earlier that he would be available to the counsel, Bob Mueller. So this is another area where he's walking back what he said previously. Look, we are now at a crucial kind of stage. Bob Mueller works on the criminal side. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in which I serve has another very important responsibility, which is to explain to the American people, to tell the story of how the Russians attacked the underpinnings of our democracy. And I am not at all satisfied with where that is going. And particularly, we need more transparency in the investigation. The committee's had just one open hearing related to Russia since June of 2017. SIMON: You've accused some of your Republican colleagues on the committee of hindering your attempts to gain access to certain documents. What would you like that they've denied you? WYDEN: We can't, of course, talk specifically about what's being looked at. But let's kind of lay out what this is all about and what the difference of opinion is because that is what this is all about - a major difference of opinion. I feel very strongly that the heart of this inquiry is all about following the money. Since Day 1, I have said financial connections are Counterintelligence 101. The way you compromise somebody is through money. And the committee leadership has resisted making this a special priority. And it's obvious with Paul Manafort, Mr. Papadopoulos, Mr. Flynn - the whole set of issues with respect to laundering money, shell companies and the like - this is what is being missed. So yes, I have put a public hold on a major appointment that the Trump administration wants until we get documents. SIMON: Bank records? WYDEN: Pardon me? SIMON: Bank records? WYDEN: Again, I don't want to be specific about matters with respect to the inquiry. But certainly, shell companies, money laundering - I think that we ought to hear from Mr. Kushner, Mr. Manafort, the president's lawyer Michael Cohen. Let me give you an example of the way the committee's been played. Mr. Kushner insisted on coming and talking to the staff privately. At the same time, he went public and told the American people that there was absolutely no improper activity by the family. When he was done with that, he went to the White House and made another public statement, and he wouldn't answer questions. He said things like, we are family. We don't rely on the Russians for financing our businesses. I looked at that sentence. And I said a lawyer got paid a fortune for writing that sentence because the word rely is subjective. It doesn't say we've never had investments with Russia. It doesn't say we don't have any investments now. So those are the kinds of questions that need to be examined publicly and haven't been. SIMON: I'll ask - just 30 seconds left - but in a rare bipartisan exercise, are you and Republican Rand Paul going to filibuster rather than permit the surveillance bill to be renewed? WYDEN: We're going to do everything we can on a bipartisan basis. We'll have a big collection of us - Pat Leahy, Mike Lee. We just believe that when you target foreign threats, which we support - they're dangerous people - you shouldn't just sit by and let law-abiding Americans get swept up in searches that could be conducted without a warrant. SIMON: Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, thanks so much for being with us. WYDEN: Thanks for having me. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Congressional Republicans seem to be rushing to retire. There are a couple of reasons - one, a lesson from history that after a new president wins, their party usually doesn't fare well in the next election. The other reason could be the challenge of running amid the frequent firestorms set off by President Trump. Here's NPR's Kelsey Snell. KELSEY SNELL, BYLINE: Congressman Charlie Dent is well-regarded on Capitol Hill. And he's often in the spotlight as an influential swing vote. But after more than a quarter of a century in public office, the Pennsylvania Republican has decided that it's time to retire. And at first, he gives a pretty standard answer why. CHARLIE DENT: Certainly, my family felt that I should move on. They felt that way. SNELL: But just under the surface is another reason that's becoming pretty familiar. Dent didn't want to spend the next 10 months talking about or defending President Trump. DENT: You know, this campaign cycle, 2018, will simply be a referendum on the president. We'll be talking about him and his latest tweet or comment or an incendiary remark or whatever. So you're really not speaking about or talking about major issues. SNELL: Dent has made it through difficult elections before. Like a lot of Republicans in districts where Trump is unpopular, Dent says the challenges seem insurmountable given the historic headwinds. Typically, the party that wins the White House one year loses dozens of seats in Congress two years later. House Speaker Paul Ryan acknowledged that challenge Friday at an event in his home state of Wisconsin. PAUL RYAN: Historically speaking, if history's any guide, history says we should lose 32 seats in November. We have a 24-seat majority. So we have to buck history. And we know that we have a challenge in front of us to do that. SNELL: The last time that Republicans faced an election this difficult was 2006. Ohio Republican Pat Tiberi talked about the challenges of that year while chatting with reporters outside the House chamber just as the buzzer sounded for one of his very last votes in Congress. PAT TIBERI: It felt like you were, like, running uphill every day in terms of the environment. And that's how it feels now. SNELL: That year, Republicans lost more than 30 seats in Congress. Tiberi eked out a win. But this time, he's not running. In fact, he left Congress this week to go home and run the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. Part of the reason this year is particularly challenging is that President Trump's approval rating is hovering below 40 percent. That has a growing number of Republicans deciding to leave Washington on their own terms rather than risk exiting on the losing end of a brutal campaign. Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona says he looked at the odds and decided he didn't want to wade into a dirty fight to keep his seat. JEFF FLAKE: I'm not leaving because I'm sour on the Senate or anything. It's just I didn't want to run the kind of race I would have to run to get re-elected. SNELL: Instead, Flake has become one of Trump's chief critics within the GOP. Others are leaving because it isn't particularly fun to be in Congress if you don't have any power. Seven of the retiring House Republicans are committee chairs who are losing those coveted posts because of term limits. But not every embattled Republican wants to back down. DANA ROHRABACHER: Well, you seem to get a couple of Republicans running for the hills, making what I consider to be a very frightened assessment rather than a courageous assessment. SNELL: That's California Republican Dana Rohrabacher. He released a defiant statement bucking the trend. He says he's running, even if the race will be hard. ROHRABACHER: You know, we should have the courage of our convictions. We believe in what we believe in. And we believe that's good for the American people. And I have confidence in those beliefs. SNELL: Rohrabacher says there's nothing wrong with a good fight, and he's sticking around to see if he can come out on the winning end in November. Kelsey Snell, NPR News, Washington. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: We heard this week that President Trump believes some countries produce more desirable immigrants some less desirable. People who met with Trump at the White House reported that he said the United States admits too many immigrants from Africa - he actually used a vulgar term to characterize those countries - and that too few are admitted from countries like Norway. In fact, the United States for many years chose immigrants on the basis of their nationality, but it then abandoned that policy as unjust. Here's NPR's Tom Gjelten. TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: The notion of favoring immigrants from Norway did not originate with President Trump. In 1924, the U.S. Congress endeavored to shape the future ethnic profile of the country by enacting a new visa quota system based on national origin. Countries in Northern Europe from then on would get thousands of immigrant slots each year. Countries in Asia and Africa got maybe a hundred apiece. The new law reflected the blatantly racist recommendations of a congressional commission that classified countries according to the character of their people. Africans were judged to be undesirable. Slavs were said to demonstrate carelessness as to the virtue of honesty. Scandinavians, meanwhile, were considered, quote, "the purest type." By the early 1960s, however, that idea of judging people according to their country of origin had fallen into disrepute. In his 1964 State of the Union message, President Lyndon Johnson called for a new approach. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) LYNDON JOHNSON: A nation that was built by the immigrants of all lands can ask those who now seek admission, what can you do for our country? But should not be asking, in what country were you born? (APPLAUSE) GJELTEN: The Johnson administration proposed to do away with national origin quotas altogether. A new law would have immigrant candidates selected on the basis of their individual merit. The bill's sponsor in the Senate, Democrat Philip Hart of Michigan, portrayed the change as a matter of civil rights. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PHILIP HART: The incidence of religion, of place of birth, of the color God gave us, the way we spell our names - these are not the things on which America judges Americans or anybody else. GJELTEN: There was opposition to the elimination of national origin quotas, largely from the same members of Congress who opposed civil rights legislation. But the new law ultimately passed with bipartisan support. In October 1965, President Johnson signed the new immigration law in a ceremony at the Statue of Liberty. He declared the end of discrimination on the basis of national origin. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JOHNSON: This system violated the basic principle of American democracy, the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. GJELTEN: The national origin quota policy, Johnson said, had been un-American in the highest sense. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JOHNSON: Today, with my signature, this system is abolished. GJELTEN: The country had sent a new message to the rest of the world. MUZAFFAR CHISHTI: That America is not just a place for certain privileged nationalities to come. GJELTEN: Muzaffar Chishti is a senior lawyer at the Migration Policy Institute and himself an immigrant from India. He says the United States, by abolishing national origin quotas, made a promise to open doors to immigrants of all nationalities. CHISHTI: We are truly the first universal nation. That may have been the promise of the Founding Fathers, but it took a long time to realize it. GJELTEN: In the years since, America has become a truly multicultural nation. With the president now saying that some countries send better immigrants than others, the question is whether America will abide by its promise in the years ahead. Tom Gjelten, NPR News. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: And now it's time for sports. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) SIMON: The Winter Olympics open in Pyeongchang next month. That city in South Korea will host athletes from around the world, including, perhaps most unexpectedly, North Korea. And that has Olympic planners scrambling. NPR sports correspondent Tom Goldman joins us. Tom, thanks so much for being with us. TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Always a pleasure, Scott. SIMON: My pleasure, Tom. GOLDMAN: (Laughter). SIMON: So the - all of our - let me take a vote. It's very close. GOLDMAN: (Laughter). SIMON: So the IOC is meeting soon to talk about ground rules about including North Korea. What are some of the details they have to hash out? GOLDMAN: Well, they have to decide which athletes and officials from North Korea will take part. All the deadlines for registration have passed. So far, only a pairs figure skating team is qualified. Now, South Korea reportedly asked North Korea to join forces in women's hockey, so there could be other athletes added. But the IOC has to be careful because other countries who haven't had teams or athletes qualify could say, hey, what about us? And then, potentially, you've got issues. And we don't want issues. The IOC also has to figure out the official protocol with flags and anthems. Will the two Koreas march together in the opening ceremony with a unified flag as they did several times at the Olympics in the early 2000s? And as far as an anthem, Scott, chances are we won't be hearing the North Korean national anthem played during the medal ceremony, at least. North Korea has only won two medals at the Winter Olympics in 1964 and '92. So the Winter Games are not a strong suit. SIMON: Tom, I'm sorry - total theoretical question. Is there anything in the rules that would prevent, like, in the Winter Olympics the United States from getting together with Switzerland and saying, let's you and us be a team together (laughter)? GOLDMAN: I'm going to have to check on that. That's interesting, though (laughter). SIMON: All right. We have some games coming up here. Philadelphia Eagles play the Atlanta Falcons tonight in the National Football Conference playoffs. Falcons - a wonderful team. But they have to play with the memory of maybe the most ignominious collapse in Super Bowl history last year. The Eagles have had a terrific season. But... GOLDMAN: But they're playing without their great, young quarterback Carson Wentz. He injured his knee late in the regular season. And largely because of that, the Eagles are the first team to start the playoffs as a No. 1 seed and as an underdog in their home stadium. Talk about ignominious. SIMON: Oh, my. GOLDMAN: Obviously, that's not playing well with the Eagles or their infamous fans, who are firstly... SIMON: They're going to take it out on Santa Claus again, aren't they? GOLDMAN: They're going to - yeah. Yeah. They are fiercely loyal. They are mean. They pelted Santa Claus in a 1960s game. And they pelted opposing players with worse things. And they are incredibly pessimistic. When Wentz went down, the reaction was a combination of oh, no and, of course we lost our quarterback at a critical part of the season. So they should be happy today because Philly's got a great defense, a strong running attack on offense. And if Wentz's backup quarterback Nick Foles, who's been inconsistent, can be the good Nick Foles, the No. 1 seed should march on. SIMON: In the AFC, we have the Tennessee Titans versus the New England Patriots, the reigning world champions. GOLDMAN: Yes. Much different fan base, of course, in New England. There's an expectation of all things great, even though the Patriots have been going through a controversy of late with tales of a rift between head coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady. New England should be fine against the Titans, who have nothing to lose and probably will. Tom Brady is out to prove that 40-year-old quarterbacks can win Super Bowls. SIMON: But, you know, I read something this week. He and Gisele Bundchen - am I pronouncing that correctly? GOLDMAN: Very well. SIMON: Some kind of film coming out in which Gisele says that, I know I am Tom's second love. Football is his first love. Nothing has persuaded me more that Tom Brady has taken too many hits in the head if Gisele Bundchen is his second love. GOLDMAN: (Laughter). Dear me. SIMON: All right. LaMarcus Aldridge from the San Antonio Spurs - speaking of love - a nice story with his coach. Do we have time for that? Yes. I think we do. GOLDMAN: Interesting story. The Spurs head coach, Gregg Popovich, revealed Aldridge wasn't happy and asked to be traded before the season. In his 20-plus years coaching, Popovich said he'd never had a player say that. So Popovich said he and Aldridge had some dinners and meetings, and they laughed. And after all that, Popovich understood he was partly at fault. He was, in his words, totally overcoaching his player. Popovich said he took care of it. We're assuming that means he backed off. And Aldridge is playing really well. Here's the best coach in the NBA, one of the best in all of... SIMON: Yeah. GOLDMAN: ...Major pro sports, Scott, willing to be honest, self-aware and humble. A sports story that reminds us what good leadership can be. SIMON: Yeah. Tom Goldman, thanks so much. GOLDMAN: You're welcome. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: By the way, there are eight candidates running for the Democratic nomination for attorney general in Illinois, the highest legal officer in the state. This week, Aaron Goldstein, one of those candidates found a way to stand up from the rest of the pack. He was robbed at gunpoint while posing for campaign photos on Chicago's northwest side. Police say the candidate was posing for man-of-the-neighborhood kind of photos when a group of suspects approached the camera crew, flashed a weapon and demanded their equipment and cell phones. No one was injured. No one's in custody. Police say it seemed to be a crime of opportunity, no political motive. But the candidate did get a cycle of coverage in that crowded field. So in the spirit of equal time, let's say that Scott Drury, Sharon Fairley, Renato Mariotti, Kwame Raoul, Nancy Rotering, Jesse Ruiz and Pat Quinn all were not robbed - at least not yet. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Keith Jackson has died. Whoa, Nellie, as he so often said. He was the voice of college football for more than 50 years, announcing dozens of Rose Bowls, Sugar Bowls, Gator Bowls and many Olympic Games - even auto racing. Keith Jackson was 89 and called his last game just 12 years ago, the 2006 Rose Bowl, which the Texas Longhorns won over the USC Trojans with just 19 seconds left. It was one of the great games of all time, and Keith Jackson was one of sports' great voices, rich and brassy like a fine trumpet. He covered the 1972 Olympics where Mark Spitz won seven gold medals, the 1977 World Series in which Reggie Jackson hit three home runs on three pitches for the New York Yankees and 15 Rose Bowls, which he called the granddaddy of them all. By the way, Keith Jackson said whoa, Nellie was a phrase he got from his grandfather. He once told Fox Sports he never hesitated to use an unfamiliar phrase because the worst that could happen is that they'll have to look it up. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: WEEKEND Sunday's puzzlemaster Will Shortz isn't just popular among puzzlers; he's becoming quite popular in Hollywood. He's heading to LA to be a consultant on a movie. Will Shortz joins us now. Good morning, Will. WILL SHORTZ, BYLINE: Good morning, Lulu. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GARCIA-NAVARRO: So I am a little bit envious here. What is the movie about? SHORTZ: It's a crossword mystery in which there is a crossword editor - solves mysteries and... GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter). SHORTZ: ...I'm advising on it. GARCIA-NAVARRO: On what a crossword editor actually does? SHORTZ: Yes. And I'm not sure the movie will adhere strictly to how a crossword editor actually works but doesn't matter. It's a good movie. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. Do you solve crimes in your spare time? SHORTZ: (Laughter) No, I don't. I love mysteries, though, you know, so - especially those little 2 and 3-minute ones where you read, and you try to figure it out. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. SHORTZ: I love those. GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK. It's time to play The Puzzle. Will, remind us of last week's challenge. SHORTZ: Yes. It came from listener Neville Fogarty of Newport News, Va. I said take the first and last names of a journalist well-known to NPR listeners. Remove the first letter of the last name, and the remaining letters can be rearranged to spell two modes of transport. What are they? Well, I'll tell you an incorrect answer we got from a listener. It's pretty funny. Jack Speer - remove the S, and you get Jeep and K-car. But the actual answer is Cokie Roberts. Remove that R, and you get scooter and bike. GARCIA-NAVARRO: This one was pretty challenging. We received fewer than 300 correct responses. And our randomly selected winner is Robert Switzer of West Hollywood, Calif. This is a Hollywood-themed show. Congratulations. ROBERT SWITZER: Thank you very much. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So how did you come up with this week's answer? SWITZER: It's rather strange. I met Cokie Roberts a year ago at a reunion of congressional pages. GARCIA-NAVARRO: How long have you been playing The Puzzle? SWITZER: Since the very, very first postcard puzzle back in the Susan Stamberg days. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Wow. So this is your big moment. All right, do you have a question for Will? SWITZER: Yes, I do have a question. How did the whole puzzle begin? GARCIA-NAVARRO: Take us back to our origin story. SHORTZ: (Laughter) Right. It was Susan's idea. She thought that this program should be the radio equivalent of a Sunday newspaper. And we all know what one of the most popular parts of the Sunday paper is. SWITZER: Crossword. SHORTZ: It's the crossword. We couldn't do a crossword on the air, but I came up with this format. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Nice. Robert, are you ready to play The Puzzle? SWITZER: I'm as ready as I'll ever be. GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) Here we go. Take it away. SHORTZ: Robert, I'm going to give you clues for two five-letter words. Reverse the last two letters of the first word to get the second one. For example, if I said aristocratic and a prestigious annual prize, you would say noble and nobel. SWITZER: Oh (laughter). OK. GARCIA-NAVARRO: This is hard. SHORTZ: Oh, it's not too bad. Number one is a squiggle over a Spanish N and like a bathroom floor. What's that little diacritic... SWITZER: Oh, tilde and tiled. SHORTZ: Tilde and tiled is right. Here's your next one - move along slowly and a thin pancake, move along slowly and a thin pancake. GARCIA-NAVARRO: The first one could also be a horrible man. SWITZER: Crepe and creep. SHORTZ: Oh, you got it. Yeah, creep and crepe. A variety of grape for winemaking and a spotted horse. And that variety of grape - it's a French word. SWITZER: Oh, I've got it. I've got it - pinot and pinto. SHORTZ: Pinot and pinto is right. Something that's 90 degrees on a square and a heavenly figure. SWITZER: Angle and angel. SHORTZ: Right. Bread-making need and an Irish poet who wrote "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." SWITZER: Yeast and Yeats. SHORTZ: Yeast and Yeats, good. An English county and more timid. SWITZER: Shire and shier. SHORTZ: That's it. SWITZER: (Unintelligible) shire. SHORTZ: No, you got it. Feature on a necklace and applauds. SWITZER: Clasp and claps. SHORTZ: That's it. And here's your last one. First sign of the zodiac and to get out of bed. SWITZER: First sign of the zodiac? Oh, dear, I'm not good on zodiac. GARCIA-NAVARRO: It's the ram. SHORTZ: It's the ram is right. And to get out of bed in the morning, you would? SWITZER: Wait, wait - gosh. I - arise. SHORTZ: Arise is it. And? SWITZER: Aries, arise. SHORTZ: Aries and arise. Good job. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Good job. I thought that was really hard, and you did really, really well. SWITZER: It wasn't too bad (laughter). GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) A ringing endorsement. For playing our puzzle today, you'll get a WEEKEND EDITION lapel pin as well as puzzle books and games. You can read all about it at npr.org/puzzle. Robert, what member station do you listen to? SWITZER: I'm a member of two stations. Locally, we have KPCC in Pasadena, and KCRW in Santa Monica. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Robert Switzer of West Hollywood, Calif., thank you for playing The Puzzle. SWITZER: Thank you, Lulu. Thank you, Will. SHORTZ: Thanks. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Will, what's next week's challenge? SHORTZ: Yes. Name a world capital. And it's an older way of spelling the name. Drop three letters. And the remaining letters in order will name another world capitol. And both cities have more than a million residents. What cities are these? So again, world capital - it's an older spelling. Drop three letters. The remaining letters in order will name another world capitol. What cities are these? GARCIA-NAVARRO: When you have the answer, go to our website npr.org/puzzle and click on the submit your answer link. Just one entry per person, please. Our deadline for entries is Thursday, January 18 at 3 p.m. Eastern. Include a phone number where we can reach you about that time. And if you're the winner, we'll give you a call, and you'll get to play on the air with the puzzle editor of The New York Times and WEEKEND EDITION's puzzlemaster, Will Shortz. Thanks so much Will. SHORTZ: Thank you, Lulu. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: NPR's Frank Langfitt filed this postcard. FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: One of the first things you notice when you walk into the store house is a waterfall bathed in blue light, representing the water from the nearby Wicklow Mountains that Guinness uses to brew its stout. The store house is a cross between a museum and an interactive marketing campaign. Upstairs, ingredients are vaporized so visitors can smell the flavors individually. COLM O'CONNOR: This one here is the roasted barley. LANGFITT: Colm O'Connor is a beer specialist. O'CONNOR: This is the hops that you see there. I'm getting slightly grassy notes. Floral - it would definitely remind you of the garden. In terms of the flavor, this is going to give a bitterness. LANGFITT: Beyond ingredients and recipes, Guinness used aggressive exporting and clever marketing to become a global brand. In the '50s, the company's managing director, Hugh Beaver, was on a hunting trip. And he got into an argument with his hosts over which game bird was the world's fastest. O'Connor says it was the sort of debate you hear in pubs across Ireland. O'CONNOR: And a kind of marketing lightbulb went off in his head. He said, you know what we should do? Maybe we'll sort of formulate some kind of compendium of superlatives that we can place behind the bar that will resolve all of these pub debates, and it'll be a nice bit of free PR. We'll put the Guinness name on it. LANGFITT: And so the "Guinness Book Of Records" was born. Another thing that sets Guinness apart is the trademark pour. It's a two-step process that takes nearly two minutes. Colm O'Connor explains. O'CONNOR: The reason why we pour a pint of Guinness in two parts is that if you were to pour it in one fell swoop, the head would be too big. LANGFITT: O'connor says the beer, which uses nitrogen that provides the creamy head, needs time to settle. He instructs me to tilt the glass at 45 degrees, fill it up partway and then stop. O'CONNOR: You need to be patient at this stage, OK? What I would suggest - you look elsewhere. Don't look at the pint. LANGFITT: Once the head settles, O'Connor tells me to flip the tap in the other direction, releasing more beer but with fewer bubbles. O'CONNOR: Just a little bit more, tiny bit more. Yeah, great stuff. So you see that little lip? LANGFITT: Yeah. O'CONNOR: It's like a little shadow forming there at the top. LANGFITT: Although, if we were in a real Irish pub, it would overflow and then end up on the floor (laughter). O'CONNOR: No, no. That wouldn't be a real Irish pub at all. No, no, no. That's called alcohol abuse in Ireland, you know? LANGFITT: Guinness is still the world's best-known stout. But sales have been generally flat over the past five years, which means the store house serves as an important tool for marketing to the more than 1 million people who visit each year. Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Dublin. (SOUNDBITE OF ZOE COMWAY AND JOHN MCINTYRE'S "KILKENNY STATION-LLALY"S FANCY") LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Leila Slimani's new book "The Perfect Nanny" begins with four haunting words - the baby is dead. The book tells the story of an unspeakable crime and lays bare a fear that is buried in the mind of any mother who has ever left her child in the arms of another. "The Perfect Nanny" is the story of an upscale Parisian family and a nanny who starts to unravel. LEILA SLIMANI: I had the feeling that she was like a plate that you put every day on the table, and she breaks every day a little bit. And one day, you put it on the table, and she breaks into pieces. GARCIA-NAVARRO: WEEKEND EDITION's books editor, Barrie Hardymon, spoke with Slimani earlier this week. BARRIE HARDYMON, BYLINE: Where did you get the idea for this frame of the murders? SLIMANI: When I wrote the first version of the book, just about a family and a nanny and their life, it was very boring. And I was like, how am I going to do to build a book that is not boring but a book that is also about our life? The way of a nanny take cares of the children and makes food and feed them and everything. I read an article in a French magazine about a murder in a family in New York, and I was very shocked, of course, by this tragedy. And I began to make research about all the murders of children by nannies in France and United States. And I kind of do a mix between all those stories, and I had the idea of this particular murder. HARDYMON: I must say that that murder was so unspeakable. I remember my nanny bringing it up with me, and it was - we stared at each other and could barely talk about it. It's a brave choice (laughter) to have wandered into that, I have to say. SLIMANI: I think it's a sort of a primitive fear. I remember the first time I saw my child. Of course, I felt love, but I think that the first feeling that I felt was fear. And I looked at him, and I was like, I'm not alone anymore. My - someone needs me. And if something happens to him, I don't know what is going to happen to me. I don't know if I'm going to survive. So I wanted to speak about this fear. HARDYMON: It's really unusual to see the intimacy of the relationship between a mother and their caregiver, their nanny, their babysitter explored so intensely. SLIMANI: You know, I think that's a very, very complex relationship because this is a relationship of power but not as simple as you can think because the mother is the boss of the nanny, but the nanny has a sort of power, too, because she takes care of the children. They live in the same home, but the home is not the home of the nanny. She's sort of a member of the family. Everyone says, oh, she's one of the family, but actually, she's not. You want your children to love the nanny. HARDYMON: Yes. SLIMANI: But at the same times, you want to stay the mother, and you want to be the most loved. Sort of - there is a sort of jealousy between the mother and the nanny. HARDYMON: There's a moment at - toward the end of this book where you describe how Louise is feeling about the children. And she says the children's cries irritate her. She's ready to scream. Nagging whines, foghorn voices. Louise can't sing a song without them begging her to do it again. They want the eternal repetition of everything. And I - you identify with this person that you know is going to murder these children. SLIMANI: And, you know, I wanted - I really wanted to write about the work of all those women coming from Philippine (ph), from Africa, from Maghreb, from Russia to take care of the children of the Occidental woman. And I was saying to myself, without those women, other women couldn't work. They make it possible for us to entertain, to have a working life. But at the same times, we don't value them. We don't see them. It's like, you know, Russian dolls. There's a woman inside a woman... HARDYMON: Yes. SLIMANI: ...Inside a woman. If you want a woman to work, at... HARDYMON: Yes. SLIMANI: ...The end, there is always another woman inside the woman, taking care of the house and of the children. We do as if it was easy, as if we could do everything. But actually, we need help. And those women - they give us a lot of help. HARDYMON: I want to ask you just quickly about the title. The book is - it's - I'm going to say this terribly, so forgive me. It's "Chanson Douce" in French, and it is "The Perfect Nanny" here in the U.S. edition. One is - sort of is lullaby love song, and the other really gets at this idea of perfection in both motherhood and nannyhood (ph) and child rearing. Did you have input into that title? I'm just curious. SLIMANI: Yes. You know, my editor, John Siciliano - he asked me, of course, what I thought about the title. And I thought it was a very good title, especially for the American public... HARDYMON: Yes. SLIMANI: ...I think, because I watch a lot of, of course, of American movies and American TV shows, and I'm always very fascinated by the image of the perfect mother, the soccer mom as you say, no? HARDYMON: Yes... SLIMANI: And maybe our generation is the first generation of woman whose mother told us, you can do everything. You can marry or not marry. You can have children or not. You can do whatever you want. But how can we do everything? Our mother - they didn't tell us how exhausting it was and how much anxiety we were going to feel doing so much thing. GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was our books editor, Barrie Hardymon, speaking with Leila Slimani. Her new book is "The Perfect Nanny." LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: This past week, President Trump used an especially vulgar slur to describe African nations and El Salvador. And a warning - I'm going to say it now. He called them, quote, "shitholes." He also said the U.S. should welcome immigrants from Norway rather than places like Haiti. He made these remarks while having a bipartisan policy discussion on immigration inside the White House. Today, throughout the show, we are going to focus on the issue of immigration. In 2016, 752,800 people became naturalized citizens of this country. And I was one of them. Sitting next to me at the ceremony happened to be a Haitian woman with a big smile. We were both dressed up for the occasion. And together we spoke the oath of allegiance along with dozens of other people. And after, we were shown a video where President Trump welcomed us to this country. Here's part of it. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You enjoy the full rights and the sacred duties that come with American citizenship - very, very special. There is no higher honor. There is no greater responsibility. You now share the obligation to teach our values to others, to help newcomers assimilate to our way of life and uplift America by living according to its highest ideals of self-governance at its highest standards. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Immigrants, in particular, have been roiled by this most recent controversy. And to get reaction, I'm joined now by another immigrant from Haiti. Award-winning author Edwidge Danticat, welcome to the program. EDWIDGE DANTICAT: Thank you. Thank you for having me. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So Friday - the day after the president made his comment about Haitian immigrants among others, it marked a somber anniversary for Haitians and Haitian-Americans - the devastating earthquake. Help us understand what that day was like, especially after you heard about the president's comments. DANTICAT: Well, for a lot of us, it was a day that we were planning to mourn and reflect and reach out to our loved ones who had gone through that terrible day eight years ago. And then we found ourselves in another kind of similar pattern of Haiti being insulted, being stigmatizing, being stereotyped. But this time it was by the president of the United States - a country where many of us work, where our parents have given their labor and their - brought their dreams and have - you know, try to contribute to. So it was very - it wasn't surprising given the nature of his presidency and other things that the president has said before. But it was certainly disheartening and disrespectful and profoundly racist, I think. GARCIA-NAVARRO: How would you describe your country and the people there? DANTICAT: My country is a country born out of revolution. And the people are very hardworking because we've always had to fight from the beginning of the creation of our republic. We were isolated in this atmosphere because Haiti was a nation of black people in a hemisphere where slavery, including in the United States, was still happening. So we were isolated economically. We had to pay our debt to France for our independence, which really hindered progress to - at the very beginning of the country. So we're a country that's always been somewhat marginalized and stigmatized, but that's always made us stronger, want to try harder. We are certainly not the country that the president is describing. We're a poor country. But we're a country full of pride, proud and strong people who are simply, when they leave, looking for better opportunities elsewhere. GARCIA-NAVARRO: We should mention that the president denied having used those exact words, although others who were in the room have confirmed it. I'd like to hear a little bit about your story. You came to the United States as a child. You lived in a predominantly Haitian-American neighborhood. What was that experience like for you? DANTICAT: Well, I came when I was 12. My parents - my father had migrated before, and then my mother had joined him. And when we came, it was 1981. And I feel in some way that I'm living that moment again because Haiti was one of the only countries put on a list of people for high risk for AIDS. So we were people who lost their jobs at that time because of - the Center for Disease Control had said that, you know, we could pass on AIDS. And so people who were working with sick people, who were working in kitchens lost their jobs. And, me - I was beaten up in school a lot because of that. And this is why the president's words also bring all of that back. And what we realize is that if someone says something like he did about Haiti and El Salvador and these countries in Africa - if someone like that say something like that, it gives others permission to discriminate. It can even lead to violence, which I think is really the consequence of having something like that said about you. It happened to me when I first came when people said, oh, you have AIDS. And then kids felt like they could - they had - they could beat us or call us names. So it's something that the community has lived before. Name calling has - of that nature - has very, very - sometimes really strong and detrimental consequences. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Just briefly. We have a few seconds left. What is the mood among the Haitian community now? We've had TPS revoked and these comments. DANTICAT: We are chill - we're going to fight. I think that's what we just have to continue and do - you see our struggle. We have to see that Haitians are always part of the larger struggle for immigration rights and for, you know, racial equality in America. We're going to continue that struggle however we do it, put letters on the streets. And we're going to try to take care of our neighbors who have come to this country, just like we did in the past, for a better opportunity. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Thank you so much. Edwidge Danticat joined us from Key West, Fla. She's the author of many novels and memoirs. Thanks for joining us. DANTICAT: Thank you for having me. [EDITOR'S NOTE: NPR has decided in this case to spell out the vulgar word that the president reportedly used because it meets our standard for use of offensive language. It is “absolutely integral to the meaning and spirit of the story being told.” ] LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: For conservative groups that are courting Latinos, Trump's remarks are likely to make their work more difficult. Let's turn now to Daniel Garza. He is the president of The LIBRE Initiative, a free market advocacy group founded by the business and political titans Charles and David Koch, specifically to strengthen Republican support among Latinos. Garza also worked in the George W. Bush administration. And he joins me now from Mission, Texas. Welcome to the program, sir. DANIEL GARZA: Thank you, Lulu. It's a pleasure to be with you. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So I'd like to get your reaction to the president's comments first. GARZA: Well, I mean, I felt the president's remarks were counterproductive to trying to resolve, I think, the DACA negotiations. And, of course, I think it entirely inappropriate. Still, I suspect any political fallout will be mitigated by, I think, the booming economy that we're seeing, resulting in record low unemployment for U.S. Latinos, 3 percent-plus GDP growth and increases in wages because of the tax reform. So, you know, it's - they were not appropriate. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So it seems like Latinos, at this point, might be a tough crowd, though, for Republicans. Immigration constantly polls as one of the main issues for them. And many view Republicans as being on the wrong side of this debate. GARZA: Well, look. Latinos care about the economy. They care about education. They care about health care and national security. So when you weigh those things on a scale, you'd be surprised how much folks embrace the conservative message. In fact, more Latinos self-identify as conservatives than they do as liberals. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right. Obviously, Latinos are not a monolithic group. Many Cubans, for example, vote Republican because of their particular history. But how do you sell the conservative view at this particular point in time? You may have a powerful economic message. But can that resonate if an entire demographic may feel demonized and under threat? GARZA: Look. Latino citizens are smart, mature, educated voters who understand and can disassociate the comments of the president with what, you know, they need for solid policy that is going to make their lives better. I mean, that's what you have to ask yourself at the end of the day, you know, when you vote for some one person or the other, or one party or the other. Will that person make my life better? And that's the calculation that everybody makes. And Latinos do, too. So look. It's up to the candidate. And it's up to the party to sell their message, to market their message. We're a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization. And what we advance are principles. And that's what Latinos embrace. GARCIA-NAVARRO: But it's not just the president. The Republican Party and its base has swung to the right on the issue of immigration and how to deal with it. There hasn't been a discussion, for example, of reform, looking at how people can work here legally but rather enforcement, deporting people, building walls. GARZA: Well, look, you know, we have been very vocal in our support for DREAMers solution that is permanent. And - so we can get a - I think, an answer for the DREAMers. But at the same time, you know, the president, I think, is being politically shrewd in leveraging this important issue in a way that would allow him to deliver on his campaign promises. That's not really a misstep. That's standard operating procedure in Washington to leverage one issue for another. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right, but that's - might sort of placate his base or support his base. But if you're trying to bring people into the tent, if you're trying to bring Latinos into the Republican Party - and it's had trouble doing that - isn't this problematic? GARZA: Of course it is. Look. There's no question that the Republican Party, for the longest time, marginalized Latinos - actually, ignored them. I don't know why. Don't tell me why, or don't ask me why. But it was actually the left - the Democrat Party that did a lot of the engagement that invested in the communities. And I think just now, the conservative movement and those in the Republican Party are starting to understand that ignoring the Latino vote is to do so at your own peril. And so they are now being much more aggressive. Look. Somebody like Cory Gardner got 45 percent of the Latino vote in a state that Michael Bennet had received 90 percent of the Latino vote as a Democrat. So the Latino vote is not baked in. You just need to do the outreach and earn their vote like anybody else. GARCIA-NAVARRO: What would you like to see from the president and the party on immigration? - just briefly. We have 30 seconds. GARZA: Look. We feel that no society can flourish when a significant part of its members live under the threat of being deported, especially those that - where the decision was made for them. There is political will on both sides. So I think we can get to a real solution that is going to address this problem and bring certainty to these kids. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Daniel Garza is the president of The LIBRE Initiative. Thank you so much for joining us on a Sunday. GARZA: A pleasure. (SOUNDBITE OF RATATAT'S "CREAM ON CHROME") LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: In Washington, a comprehensive deal around immigration remains elusive. One of several sticking points - building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Last year, I went down to the Rio Grande Valley, and I spoke with the mayor of one border town, Joel Villarreal of Rio Grande City, Texas. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST) JOEL VILLARREAL: We do want a secure border, but the wall is not going to be effective. GARCIA-NAVARRO: We wanted to follow up with the mayor to see how the debate in Washington is being felt in his city. Welcome to the program. VILLARREAL: Good morning. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Good morning. VILLARREAL: Thank you for having me. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Do you still feel a wall wouldn't be effective? VILLARREAL: Absolutely. No. I mean, again - and I've said this before - a wall is definitely not going to be statistically significant. And the current existing wall, in fact, has had many issues. In reference to breaching the wall, I know some of the reports out had, existing walls have been breached thousands of times. And again, going back to the price tag that is going to cost the American taxpayer - it's just an incredible amount of money that's just going to be wasted. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'd like to talk about how this is impacting your area. Last year, you were predicting that the wall was coming - or at least part of it - and that you were going to see tussles over land, water use. What's happening there on the ground right now? VILLARREAL: Well, so far, at this point, we had multiple conversations with the people charged with building the wall or at least looking at the path as far as where it's going to traverse through the different ranch land. And in having conversations, one of the things we looked at was, of course, having local input - for example, making sure we have access to the river. Many landowners need access to the river because they do have water rights. The Rio Grande river is our lifeblood, and we actually pump water from the river. So, of course, we're going to need access if there's a wall constructed there with our property. GARCIA-NAVARRO: From your viewpoint as a mayor of a border city, where does border security rank among your city's other current needs? VILLARREAL: Well when you're looking at - I believe it's 29 to 32 miles of proposed wall here in Stark County, which covers Rio Grande City, La Grulla, Roma. And the price tag for that was going to be somewhere from $700 to $800 million. Now, we are one of the poorest counties in the nation. And bringing in $800 million into our county for a wall that's not going to be effective - and what we could actually do with that money - improving roads, improving drainage, improving affordable housing, shelters, for example. We've always had border security in this area. We have a virtual wall already. We have sensors and cameras and aerostats and drones. So border communities are in favor. And, again, I must stress that because, sometimes, it is portrayed that we're not in favor of sensible border security. But we are because it's beneficial for Mexico and the U.S. to have border security and to address some of these issues across both sides of the border. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Mayor Joel Villarreal, thank you so much for joining us. VILLARREAL: Thank you. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Now it's time for the Call-In. Last week, we put nurses on call. Depending on where you live, nurses can be in short supply with potentially big consequences for patient care. What does it mean for the nursing industry, and how is the job changing? Well, we heard from a lot of you. Here's Ed Stern of Falls Church, Va., Gina DeMarco of Colorado Springs, Jennifer Steele of Milwaukee, and Christopher Todd of Big Pine Key, Fla. ED STERN: I think nursing has changed. It's evolved. It's not just fluffing pillows and passing medications. GINA DEMARCO: It's physically demanding. It's stressful. The hours are long. There's days it's rewarding, but I would say I second guess what I'm doing. JENNIFER STEELE: This has been the most challenging and rewarding work. Nursing is not what I do; it is who I am. CHRISTOPHER TODD: There's always been a nursing shortage. And it's only going to get worse because the average age of a nurse is getting up there. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Twenty years ago, the nursing industry was in danger of a serious shortage, but that's changed more recently. PETER BUERHAUS: The good news is we have had a surge of people coming into nursing over the past 10 years such that we believe we'll be able to avoid a large massive shortage of registered nurses that would cause access to care difficulties and delay care. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Peter Buerhaus is a professor of nursing and a healthcare economist at Montana State University. He says around the country, though, there could be regional shortages in the near future. BUERHAUS: I get a little bit worried around both coasts. New England, particularly, there's a large number of nurses who are going to be retiring in the New England region but not as many new replacement nurses coming in. The West Coast could also be a troublespot. We just don't see the growth there as we do in the middle part of the country. So I'm a little bit worried about future shortages developing there. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'd like to focus on nurse practitioners because we're hearing a lot more about them. Explain what they are and why they're becoming a more important part of the workforce. BUERHAUS: Nurse practitioners are nurses who have gone back to graduate school for advanced education. They choose a specialty. It could be primary care, or it could be caring for individuals in the emergency room or in acute-care settings. And what's happening is that when we are looking at projections of physician shortages, we're seeing that nurse practitioners can fill many of those medical roles that are opening up. So NPs are growing very rapidly. They also are more likely to be working in rural areas of the country where we have some of the biggest shortages of primary care physicians. So there's a lot of good reasons to be backing that sort of initiative in the nursing workforce. It's helping out quite importantly. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So you've mentioned this expanding world of opportunity for nurses. But might it also not be the case - and we heard this from some of our callers that they feel overworked, overstretched - that they're being asked to do much more than they might have been previously? And that has been a burden. BUERHAUS: Yeah. What we've seen, I think, over the past 10 years, is a significant push to improve quality and safety in our hospitals particularly. Oftentimes, though, this means that a nurse will come to work complying with so many regulations, so many check-off forms to note that they did a particular procedure in accordance with the qualifications that are important. Hospitals are under pressure to document that because this is how they're going to get paid. So it it shifts down on to nurses, and it's taking them away from the essence of establishing a relationship with a patient. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And is there another issue, as well? We're seeing, as you mentioned, younger nurses coming into the workforce, but they don't have the institutional knowledge. They don't have the experience, quite frankly. Is that a problem when you see senior-level nurses retiring? BUERHAUS: It's a great question, and it does concern me. It's not that these nurses are not qualified or unprepared. But what concerns me about this, Lulu, is at the same time we have younger people coming in to replace the exiting baby-boom RNs, we're going to have a surge of older people qualifying for Medicare. Many of them will be hospitalized. And they're coming in to institutions with multiple chronic conditions - heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes. They're complicated patients. A lot is going on. And they're coming in just as the newer, less experienced nurses are coming in to take care of them. GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was Peter Buerhaus, a nursing professor at Montana State University. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) ASHLEE DOVER: Hey, Monica. MONICA COFFEY: Hi, Ashlee. DOVER: I am a nurse for about two years. So I'm a baby. COFFEY: Well, congratulations. DOVER: Thank you. COFFEY: I'm Monica. And I've been a nurse for 41 years, which is probably older than you are (laughter). GARCIA-NAVARRO: We brought two nurses together to share their experiences in nursing. Ashlee Dover is 24. Monica Coffey is 65. She remembers having a strong mentor when she got started decades ago. COFFEY: I had a head nurse, Alice McGee (ph). Her office was on the floor. If things got busy, she came and helped pass meds. She gave lunches. And not only did she help me become a better nurse, she helped me to become a better human being. Now I think young nurses are not supported when they are starting out. They come into nursing with far less clinical background than I did as a new grad. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Ashlee, does that sound right? DOVER: Yes. That is absolutely correct. Most of the time, it's just me, a bunch of other new nurses and maybe one or two senior nurses if I'm lucky enough that week to work with them. When you have 6 patients each - all of us - there's really no time to really say, hey, how are you doing mentally, emotionally? What's nursing like for you right now? It's more of - do you need help passing meds, or cleaning up this patient? Can I help you like this? GARCIA-NAVARRO: Ashlee, do you have any advice that you'd like to ask Monica? DOVER: How did you mentally and emotionally make it through as a young nurse and, like, keep yourself emotionally, mentally put together for your patients and your family? COFFEY: Well, I had other interests - an avid reader, hiker. But the thing about nursing is that, every day, I always felt like I was getting to do good work. I feel like the ethics of nursing sustain me. And even when it's hard, even when it's discouraging, I always feel like I'm getting to do the best I can do as a human being. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Does that resonate, Ashlee? DOVER: That completely resonates because I didn't go into nursing to try to save lives or anything like that. I went to - I went into nursing to provide care, a shoulder, a listening ear to people in their times where they felt like nobody was listening or they didn't know what was going on. And that's my motivating factor is to be there for them. And sometimes it's hard. You know, you've got six patients to take care of, and three of them require head-to-toe, like, complete care. And you just wonder, like, I don't want to hurt them. I want to be there for them. COFFEY: Yeah. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So listening to this, it's obviously really stressful and also very rewarding. And I just want you both to briefly talk to the patients right now. What do you want them to know? COFFEY: You go first, Ashlee. DOVER: OK. I am so privileged to be a part of your care. And I am so absolutely thankful that you let me into your life during these darkest moments. And I want you to know even if I'm late or if I haven't checked on you in over an hour or two hours, I have not forgotten about you. Your care and everything about you means so much to me. And I promise to give you the best care possible. COFFEY: That's a beautiful sentiment and well stated. I would speak to the patients in this country and say, please, get informed about the issues surrounding health care. Think about improving and maintaining access to health care for all Americans. GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was Ashlee Dover of Nashville, Tenn., and Monica Coffey of Ellsworth, Maine. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GARCIA-NAVARRO: And next week on the Call-In - it's been a year since the women's march movement brought huge numbers of demonstrators to the streets across the country. Did you participate last year or did you skip it? What have you done since then? Call in at 202-216-9217. Be sure to include your full name, where you're from and your phone number. And we may use it on the air. That's 202-216-9217. (SOUNDBITE OF THE ANTLERS' "INTRUDERS") LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Five-hundred Pennsylvania National Guard soldiers are deploying to the Middle East for the next year. Their mission is to support U.S. Central Command by coordinating troops and working with partner countries across the region. From member station WITF in Harrisburg, Rachel McDevitt reports families of the soldiers put on a brave face at a farewell ceremony this weekend. UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Daddy. RACHEL MCDEVITT, BYLINE: Children, spouses and parents ran across the auditorium to embrace and take pictures with their soldiers after a send-off from Pennsylvania's governor and National Guard generals. It's the 28th Infantry Division headquarters' first mobilization since the Korean conflict. Though, many individual soldiers have deployed with other units within the 28th infantry. Sgt. Dave Zadzura was surrounded by family and friends after the ceremony. DAVE ZADZURA: I'm prepared for the mission, not prepared to say goodbye. That's the hardest part. MCDEVITT: Zadzura deployed once before to Bosnia in 2003, but that was before he started his family. His kids are 9 and 10 years old now. ZADZURA: The first time I went, I was single, so it was kind of easy. You just picked up and went. My parents, I had to say goodbye to and stuff. But this time, it's a little more difficult. MCDEVITT: Division leaders say those who join the National Guard shouldn't exactly expect they'll be deployed. But they say the old dynamic of Guard members as weekend warriors is changing. The National Guard now makes up nearly 40 percent of the U.S. army's operational force. The command mission the 28th is taking over, historically, would have gone to a traditional active duty unit, but now Guard units have the same capabilities, and they can get called up more often. Twenty-five-year-old 2nd Lt. Stephen Brynok joined the Guard two years ago. STEPHEN BRYNOK: I think, as a military member, it is something that you sign up for and that you're always willing to do. MCDEVITT: Brynok's family appeared somber. His father, also named Stephen, says he hoped his son wouldn't have to go overseas. STEPHEN: It's kind of tough watching your first son be deployed for the first time. But, you know, we're all in this together. And we'll stick together. And we'll all get through it pretty well. MCDEVITT: But Brynok's mom, Lisa, says she's concerned with what she called mother's worries, like - where he'll be, what he's doing over the next year. LISA: I love him so much. I know he'll do his job the best as he can. He's very disciplined in what he does. So I'm proud of him, too. MCDEVITT: A tear escaped her eyes, and she wiped it away. Brynok's wife, Megan, held back her emotions. They were just married last summer. She says it feels weird this day is finally here, and she's not sure when the full weight of her husband leaving will hit her. She plans to keep her mind occupied. MEGAN: Just keeping myself busy - I work full-time - and just trying to get involved in hobbies. MCDEVITT: She'll also be planning their honeymoon someplace far away from the Middle East. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) MCDEVITT: For NPR News, I'm Rachel McDevitt in Harrisburg. (SOUNDBITE OF AETHER'S "I.L.M.") LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: With 1 in 6 Americans now owning voice-activated assistance, many of you tuned into the show this morning by saying, Alexa or Google, play NPR. These smart devices can order dinner delivered to your door. They are chatty and can entertain your kids with lame jokes like this... COMPUTER-GENERATED VOICE: What was Bruce Wayne's favorite baby toy? The Batmobile. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Or help you live your Star Trek fantasy by firing photon torpedoes. (SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSION) GARCIA-NAVARRO: As the popularity of voice-activated assistance grow, so do concerns that Alexa and Google Home are doing more than just ordering takeout. Joining us from member station WBHM is Brian Barrett who writes for WIRED magazine. Good morning. BRIAN BARRETT: Good morning. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And also joining us is Echo. Echo, good morning. COMPUTER-GENERATED VOICE: Good morning. GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right, let's start with how these devices work. And this is for you, Brian. Are they always listening? BARRETT: The device itself is always listening. There are microphones on there that are picking up everything that you say. But it's not until you say a wake word, which you can set on the device - it can either be Alexa. It could be Echo, as we just showed. For Google Home, it's usually, OK, Google or, hey, Google. And only when you say that wake word, does the device actually send what you're saying back to those companies servers. So only then does it connect to the Internet, and that's an important distinction. I think a lot of the discomfort that people have is the idea that Google or Amazon themselves are collecting every single thing you say. That's not really true. It's sort of a passive listening until you say that word, and that's when they start actually collecting that data. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So let's give an example. Echo, are you listening? COMPUTER-GENERATED VOICE: Hi, I'm here. I start listening when I hear the wake word. GARCIA-NAVARRO: There you go. But these machines are also learning about us - aren't they? - our preferences, what we ask for. They're in our homes. That's how artificial intelligence works. And these devices are AI-based essentially. BARRETT: So that's true. And the more data that you give it after the wake word, the more these companies will know about you. I think, though, I would say in the same way that the more often you search on Google for things, the more Google knows what ads to serve you. I think that it's partly discomforting because it's a new kind of that data collection, not that it's a totally different thing than we've experienced before. And people could be right to be uncomfortable with that if they don't want the same sort of tracking that happens and the same sort of data mining that happens online to sort of bleed into their real life, as well. GARCIA-NAVARRO: But we've heard reports of people all of a sudden hearing Alexa suddenly start talking when the room was completely silent. It might flash a blue light, which means it's listening, but I may have not said anything. What's that about. BARRETT: When you ask these companies what is going on with that, they don't really have a great answer. The best that you can get out of them is, well... GARCIA-NAVARRO: It's alive. BARRETT: (Laughter) Exactly. GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter). BARRETT: The best you get out of them is that they are continually working to improve wake word technology, which is another way of saying that these machines aren't that smart yet, and they sometimes think they're hearing things even though they're not. The good news is, though, when that happens, you can go into your app, and you'll see a history of everything that it has heard. But they do give you an out if you really are uncomfortable with it, which a lot of people understandably might be because they do just sort of keep that information on their servers indefinitely. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. And prosecutors have subpoenaed Amazon and Google, looking for evidence that could help them prosecute crimes. BARRETT: It's true. And I would say that the kind of data that these devices collect is fairly limited. You would have to have a very specific scenario in which case that information would be useful in a criminal case. You would have to have said the wake word and then something incriminating. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm curious - let's see what Echo says. Echo, I'm going to rob a bank. COMPUTER-GENERATED VOICE: I'm not answering that. (LAUGHTER) BARRETT: So plausible deniability. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, plausible deniability. BARRETT: One good way to think about these devices - it's all just data. So in the same way that police often go to - or law enforcement often goes to Google or Amazon or Apple or anybody and says, I need to access what's on your cloud - I need to access this person's search history - those requests are often complied with. So it feels different because it's voice. But the fundamental principles are the same that you have in any other of these digital spheres. GARCIA-NAVARRO: But couldn't hackers or law enforcement use these devices to eavesdrop on us? BARRETT: Yes someone could hack eventually a Google Home or an Alexa device. But it seems like there are easier ways to get that information. And even if you want that information, I think we often sometimes think that what we're saying is of keen interest to a lot of people, where that's not often the case, at least in terms of the kinds of people who would be capable of accessing these devices. I think if the NSA is after you, you probably shouldn't keep a Google Home in your apartment. And you've also probably got a lot of other things to worry about too. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm going to end with Echo. Echo, can we trust you? COMPUTER-GENERATED VOICE: Sorry, I'm not sure. GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) And there you go. Brian Barrett - he writes for Wired. Thank you very much. BARRETT: Thanks so much. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Echo, thank you very much. COMPUTER-GENERATED VOICE: My pleasure. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Last week, the White House scuppered a bipartisan plan to resolve the immigration status of hundreds of thousands of so-called DREAMers. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program - or DACA - provides protection from deportation to those brought to the U.S. as children. Even though a federal court blocked President Trump's effort to end DACA outright, some DREAMers' work authorizations have already expired. And others will expire soon. One of those is Tolu Aleshinloye from Nigeria. Her DACA status ends on March 22. And she joins us now from Miami to talk about it. Welcome to the program. TOLU ALESHINLOYE: Thank you. Hi. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Hi. Tell me your story. How did you come to the United States? ALESHINLOYE: So my story is similar to many. At the age of 3, my parents brought me here. And they essentially overstayed their visas. And I actually found out as an adult that I was considered an illegal status. I was super fortunate that I was able to obtain academic scholarships. So I did attend Fordham University in the Bronx. I was able to start my career. We just basically slipped through the cracks. GARCIA-NAVARRO: When and how did you apply for DACA? Was it a difficult decision for you to sort of, as they say, come out of the shadows? ALESHINLOYE: It was the hardest decision I've ever had to make. And I was so relieved to be able to have an opportunity to sort of get right. I thought that this was going to be an opportunity for me to have a path to citizenship. And I quickly found out it wasn't. People have warned me that, you know, well, what if the next president decides to rescind it, and they now have all your information? And for me, I just felt like it was the best option. It was a way for me to be able to sleep at night. I don't think people realize the psychological impacts of just having to navigate being, quote, unquote, "undocumented status." GARCIA-NAVARRO: Tell me why your status is set to expire. There was a deadline in which you could've applied. Why is it expiring now? ALESHINLOYE: So on Sept. 5, the Trump administration ended DACA. Anybody whose DACA ended between Sept. 5 and March 5 were able to apply for an extension. Mine, unfortunately, expires on March 22. So I was basically two weeks shy of being able to apply for an extension. GARCIA-NAVARRO: What has been the advice that you've gotten in terms of what needs to happen next or what you can do? ALESHINLOYE: Well, what people don't really realize is my DACA has expired before. You know, it takes quite a while for all of these things to be processed. And so I filled everything out. And my DACA actually expired. And I had to - you know, my employer was not able to employ me. So I had to stop and go on a leave of absence. It was extremely humiliating. And obviously, that disruption to your life is, you know, pretty devastating when you're not getting paid. GARCIA-NAVARRO: On Thursday, President Trump also referred to African nations using a highly offensive term. You are originally from Nigeria. What's your reaction to that? ALESHINLOYE: I was - it was hurtful. That's what I'll definitely say. As much as I want to be a citizen of this country, I'm very proud of where I'm from. You know, my fellow Haitians, my fellow Africans - we've done so much to contribute to the United States. And we just know that what we bring to the country is so important. And I just won't even address those comments. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Just briefly, what do you do as a job? ALESHINLOYE: So I work in merchandising strategy at Tiffany jewelry company. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Have you spoken to your bosses about what may happen in March if your DACA authorization expires? And you're a manager, too. What are you telling your employees? ALESHINLOYE: So at this point, not everyone on the staff is familiar or knows what my status is just because we don't think it's necessary until we finally get to the point where I'll no longer be able to work here. So my management team - they're extremely supportive. And they're watching the news just like I am. So, you know, when it gets closer to March, I'll have to have a discussion with the team that I have out here. But at this point, we're all just hoping and praying that something changes, that we do get a DREAM Act, that we don't have to deal with this because, you know, there's a potential that I just won't have a job after March 22. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Tolu Aleshinloye is a DACA recipient in Miami. Thank you very much for joining us. ALESHINLOYE: Thank you. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Late last night, in response to a court order, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would once again accept renewal requests from DACA recipients. But lawmakers are still under intense pressure to come up with a deal on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Several times last week, they seemed to be close to an agreement. Then, on Thursday, President Trump rejected a bipartisan immigration bill and uttered the now-famous offensive language. Donald Trump tweeted this morning that DACA is probably dead because the Democrats don't really want it. Congressman Pete Aguilar, a Democrat from California, would disagree. For weeks, he's been working on a DACA and border security plan with Texas Republican Will Hurd. He joins us from his home in Redlands, Calif. Thank you for joining us. PETE AGUILAR: Thanks for having me. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So broadly, your bill provides for enforcement through money for border security and technology and also for more immigration judges to address the backlog. But it also provides a path to citizenship. You worked with a GOP rep on this. What did you learn about how to come to an agreement on a tough issue with a Republican? AGUILAR: What we learned is that there's a lot of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle who genuinely care about this issue and want to get this done. So, you know, we disagree with the president. I think there are - there is bipartisan support in order to get a deal done. And that's our focus. That's our charge. That's - what we want to do is build off of this bipartisan support to protect these young people. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Do you have any sense, though, that Republicans can get on board? You know, there's hardliners in this party - Bob Goodlatte, who introduced his own bill this past week, which is much tougher and may have more support in the House. AGUILAR: Well, look. And I think the key is which proposal has 218 votes in the House. I'm pretty confident that the Goodlatte-McSally bill doesn't have 218 votes in the House. I think the only way we do that is a bipartisan approach along the lines of what Congressman Hurd and I had been discussing. I think that's the only path in the house to get to 218. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Members of your own party - are they onboard with you bill? AGUILAR: Yes, absolutely. We have enough to continue to move this. We're going to need to build a broader base among our Republican colleagues, and we're going to continue to plan to have conversations with them about what this proposal means. But at the end of the day, we think a narrow DACA fix plus smart wall, you know, look at technology - those are the types of things, you know, from a border security standpoint we think makes sense. So border security and a DACA fix is exactly what we want to get done here. GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK. Smart wall. But President Trump has insisted on building a physical wall along the Mexican border. And, in fact, the proposed budget, the Department of Homeland Security - in the proposed budget rather, the Department of Homeland Security calls for cuts to video surveillance and no funding for new customs officers. So without a wall, how can you sell this plan to the president? AGUILAR: Well, we think this is exactly - what border security should look like is, you know, there should be a mile-by-mile analysis on what it takes to protect our southern border. That's exactly what this bill does.... GARCIA-NAVARRO: But he doesn't seem to agree. And he can - and he's obviously the one who gets final say on this. AGUILAR: Well, as we've seen, you know, the president's views are easily changed day to day. And sometimes, what he says or what he tweets or what the White House Legislative Affairs unit says or what Department of Homeland Security says are often very different things. So what we need to do is keep our eye on the ball, remember that we are a co-equal branch of government. And we'll present the best legislative solution to our country's problems to the president by the end of the week, hopefully. GARCIA-NAVARRO: After President Trump's most recent comments about some immigrants, do you think it's possible, though, to really do a deal? Many Democrats in the base don't want to help policies that they see as discriminatory. And just briefly - we have a few seconds. AGUILAR: Well, it clearly doesn't help get to a deal. The president's comments are - were not very helpful and were clearly racist. But what we want to do is to continue to forge ahead and build bipartisan consensus among Democrats and Republicans in the House in order to help these young people. That's our No. 1 focus. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And that was Congressman Pete Aguilar from California. Thank you. AGUILAR: Thank you. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: For seven months now, special counsel Robert Mueller has conducted a wide-ranging investigation into links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. Four former Trump associates have been charged with crimes. This past week, reports surfaced that Mueller may interview the president himself. President Bill Clinton was the last president to be investigated. The independent prosecutor who became famous for leading that inquiry is Kenneth Starr. Mr. Starr joins us now from his home in Waco, Texas. Good morning, sir. KENNETH STARR: Good morning. GARCIA-NAVARRO: You and Robert Mueller are part of a very small group - those who have investigated a sitting president. There have been very few leaks from the Mueller investigation. But given what we know, how do you think Mueller and his team are doing in your view? STARR: Well, I think they're proceeding step by step, which is exactly what they should do. And obviously, the fact that there has been scrupulous respect for confidentiality - and especially, of course, anything pending before the grand jury must, as a matter of law, remain secret. So I'm very impressed with the professionalism of what Bob has done. Let me quickly say that there are a number of issues that have been raised of late with respect to his staff - at least one lawyer, several of the FBI agents and so forth. And I assume we'll get into that. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, you've written that Mueller should've vetted his team better because, as you mention, of anti-Trump sentiment among a specific member of his staff. Isn't it impossible, though, to divorce these investigations from politics? STARR: No, it is absolutely not. And it's imperative that they be divorced from politics. During my Whitewater days, we had - and I never talked politics, never - I heard that there were folks on the staff who had voted for President Clinton. That's great. This is a country where we enjoy First Amendment rights. Everybody has them and so forth. But just some of the emails and the like that have been revealed suggest legitimate concerns about fairness and open-mindedness. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Mueller did immediately remove the offender from his team, though, we should say. STARR: Yes, I just want for there to be as much transparency as possible to assure an unbiased investigation. GARCIA-NAVARRO: You've written that you feel Congress is the best place to investigate a president and not necessarily a special investigator or special prosecutor. Why? STARR: I think we've had so many unhappy experiences with independent counsels or special counsels. The Republicans hated the Iran-Contra investigation. The Democrats hated Whitewater and Lewinsky that I conducted. The best way to address issues of misconduct other than the kind of criminality such as the president was bribed - those are the kinds of things that I think are entrusted to the criminal laws. I think when we're talking about the kinds of issues - was there collusion with the Russians and so forth? - to me, that's a political question. GARCIA-NAVARRO: But no criminal consequences? STARR: Perhaps, but that's not the primary as I see it. And this is one person's view. The American people deserve answers. And they deserve them sooner rather than later. Now, if there is criminal conduct that's identified, then you can face that at the time. You know, obviously, the Congress can refer matters to the Justice Department for prosecution. But I think we have built up this edifice of confidentiality and secrecy, which you have to do when you go down the road of a special counsel or independent prosecutor. And I think that's unfortunate. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Your contention, though, is that Robert Mueller shouldn't be the person to determine whether or not the president has done something wrong. Ultimately, though, won't he submit a report? It might take a little while. But it will be a report that will be available to everybody. STARR: Well, first of all, there's no clear provision for providing a report to the American people under the regulations under which Bob Mueller was appointed. Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, might see fit to direct the special counsel to prepare a comprehensive report. Then again, he might not. So we just don't know. And so that's why I think, again, we look to the people's representatives as the logical place. It's not ideal, but as Churchill said, democracy's the worst form of government, except for any other. And I think we should just say we want our representatives to stand up and to now really do their job. And obviously, if there's rank partisanship, it's going to be criticized. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Finally, I'd like to ask you about a different issue. You served as president of Baylor University in Texas from 2010 to 2016. And you resigned after an investigation found that the university had inadequately handled reports of sexual assault by members of the football team. As you know, claims like those are being taken much more seriously now in many of our institutions because of a lot of discussion about sexual harassment and sexual assault. Do you view the issue differently now after everything that has been revealed? STARR: I think as a society, as a culture - and I don't think any of us were turning a blind eye to anything. But more broadly, yes, I think it is very important for us to have a mechanism so that every human being - but especially now in this context of women - are treated with dignity and respect. And I think that was part of the issue, frankly, back in the 1990s that didn't seem to even enter into the conversation. Here's the president of the United States with a relationship with an intern. Did he commit perjury? Did he obstruct justice? Did he suborn perjury? Did he abuse his power? Those were the issues back then. But now I think as a culture, as a society, we are increasingly - and rightly so - sensitive to issues of mistreatment of people in the workplace, power roles and so forth. We're doing, I think, a better job now at saying we want to protect the dignity of all persons while at the same time having a fair adjudicatory system. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Ken Starr is the former solicitor general of the United States and was an independent counsel during President Clinton's investigation. Thank you very much for joining us, sir. STARR: My pleasure. Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF THE FOUR LIFES OF BOTTLENECK-BOB'S "SEELENLUFT") LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: We've been looking at the issue of immigration today and gathering reaction to President Trump's offensive comments about immigrants from Africa, Haiti and El Salvador. The remarks were made at a White House meeting on immigration where the president expressed his dislike of diversity visas and said, we should accept more immigrants from Norway rather than Haiti. Rich Lowry of the conservative magazine National Review has noted that while the president may have expressed himself crudely, he has a point. And he joins us now via Skype. Good morning. RICH LOWRY: Hi. How are you? GARCIA-NAVARRO: Very well. So what do you think President Trump was trying to say in his comments? LOWRY: Well, it was in the context of discussion of the fate of the visa lottery. And the president inciting Norway, I think, was just making the point - let's have immigration that emphasizes higher education levels and more skills. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So you've written that country of origin matters. Make your case briefly. LOWRY: Well, it really doesn't ultimately have to do with the country. They're coming from so much as the level of skills and education of the immigrants who are coming here. And I should preface my remarks by saying I have nothing against any immigrants that - who are coming here. And they all overwhelmingly come here to work hard and are good people. But you have a lot of immigrants from Mexico and Central American countries. And a lot of them don't even have high-school degrees. And it's just very hard in 21st century economy to thrive here. So they end up poor. They end up using welfare programs. And then you look at immigrants coming from countries that actually have quite high levels of education. You know, I believe, you know, majority of immigrants from India come here with a college degree, and their median income of their households is $105,000 a year. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So if it is about skills, then why restrict the H-1B visas, which are specifically for highly skilled individuals, many of whom go to highly skilled Indians, which this administration has done? LOWRY: Well, that's a different issue, but the argument is that those visas have been abused and are used to undercut American engineers and folks in various positions. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Sure. But it seems that the debate is constantly shifting to say, well, OK. Not these people. Maybe these people. But, you know, it - oh, it's being abused. But it seems that the people that are constantly targeted are people from browner nations, shall we say. LOWRY: But I think if you actually went to the kind of point system that Senator Tom Cotton is proposing, you would shift the composition of immigrants here. But you wouldn't shift it whiter or more European. You would shift it more to South and East Asia. And you should always have a humanitarian element to our immigration. And we still would with the refugee program. It's just you would - like, Canada and Australia, which aren't closed or racist societies - you would actually have a more deliberate immigration system where you're emphasizing those people who have that - who are best suited to thrive in this sort of economy that we have. It wouldn't compete for jobs with the people lowest down the income scale who are going to have - who have had the most trouble in our economy over the last 30 years. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So many people consider this, though, a question of sort of American identity. And this is a country that was built off the backs of immigrants. You know, generations ago, European Jews and Italians and Irish immigrants were considered undesirable by some. Now it's part of the narrative of American success. What's different about poor immigrants coming from potato famines versus earthquakes? LOWRY: Well, I think it's a different country and a different economy now. And the early 20th century - you could come here with very few skills and - I'm simplifying - but basically, just you plugged into any assembly line anywhere - and just be fine and have a relatively high-wage job. And that's just not the case now. We're not a overwhelmingly agricultural or industrial country. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Rich Lowry, editor of The National Review, thanks for joining us. LOWRY: Thanks so much for having me. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Leaders from across the African continent are angry about President Trump's vulgar comments about their citizens and countries. Governments issued official condemnation. Organizations registered alarm. Social media buzzed with shock and offense. Peter Granitz in Pretoria, South Africa, rounds up the reaction. PETER GRANITZ, BYLINE: Macky Sall, the president of Senegal, an American ally in West Africa, says Africa and the black race merit the respect and consideration of all. The government of Botswana, a stable, democratic ally of the U.S. summoned the American ambassador to explain what the government calls President Trump's reprehensible and racist remarks. And here in South Africa, Jessie Duarte, a leader in the African National Congress, called Trump's language extremely offensive. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JESSIE DUARTE: Developing countries do have difficulties, and those difficulties are not small matters. And it's not as if the United States doesn't have difficulties. GRANITZ: The African National Congress, the 106-year-old political party, has historically been seen as the moral authority on the continent, among its leaders and supporters, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. The ANC fought the apartheid system, which prevented black South Africans from owning property, getting a decent education or living where they chose. Somadoda Fikeni, an expert on South African heritage, calls Mr. Trump's comments isolating - that they offend people who normally hold the United States in high regard. SOMADODA FIKENI: A person who has gone through apartheid is particularly very sensitive to anything that may suggest, be it subconscious or conscious, racist remarks. So to me, I do think that I take it in the same manner. It's a dehumanizing comment. GRANITZ: James Abubakr stands outside a busy gas station where he works. He's from Malawi and moved here to South Africa in 2005. With its industrialized and diversified economy, South Africa offers Abubakr a chance to make a better living than he would back home. And he says he just cannot understand President Trump's sentiments. JAMES ABUBAKR: We can't agree that because we also - here in Africa, we got American people. GRANITZ: Abubakr wants to move to the U.S. He thinks it offers even more opportunity than South Africa, and he says the president's comments will not affect that. For NPR News, I'm Peter Granitz in Pretoria. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: With immigration discussions foundering on Capitol Hill, we wondered what the people on the frontlines of implementing those policies think. Chris Cabrera is a spokesperson for the National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents the nation's almost 20,000 border patrol agents. He joins us on the line from his office in McAllen, Texas, on the border. Welcome to the program. CHRIS CABRERA: Thank you. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So as Congress and the president negotiate over immigration policy, what do you and your colleagues want them to know? CABRERA: Our biggest concern is getting clear marching orders and, you know, getting this wall built in the strategic locations and just going forward and getting it done. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. I was on the border, and I talked to the head of the Border Patrol in the Rio Grande Valley. And he said that a literal wall is only needed in a very few places and that, actually, what is needed is more of a technological wall - cameras, infrared technology, drones. CABRERA: You have the need for a physical barrier. You have the need for technology with the infrared, with, you know, the ground sensors and cameras. And you have the personnel aspect of it, as well. The wall and the technology won't do you any good unless you have the manpower to actually physically apprehend somebody. GARCIA-NAVARRO: But the president talks about this sort of wall from sea to shining sea. CABRERA: Yeah. You know, I honestly - I don't think that's going to work. I mean, if you look at Big Bend, you'll have areas that are a 30-foot cliff down to the Rio Grande. And to put another 30-foot section on top of that - it seems kind of redundant. GARCIA-NAVARRO: What about Border Patrol agents? Brandon Judd, the president of the National Border Patrol Council, of which you belong, complained just this past week on Capitol Hill that the president has only proposed and Congress is slated on funding 500 new agents this year. At this rate, the agents we hire this year will be halfway to retirement before we meet the goal in 2028. Are you satisfied with the amount of support you're getting for hiring more agents? CABRERA: Well, you know, one of the problems we're having is not necessarily hiring more agents - is retaining the agents we do have. That is one of our biggest problems right now. You know, we have to pay our agents competitively. If not, they'll go to other agencies, which we've been seeing recently. GARCIA-NAVARRO: The National Border Patrol Council supported President Donald Trump for president when he was a candidate. How are they feeling now in terms of the support that they've gotten from this administration? CABRERA: Our support is still there 100 percent. It hasn't wavered. GARCIA-NAVARRO: But how are you feeling that the president is supporting you? CABRERA: I think he is supporting us. I haven't seen anything to show that he's not supporting us. Morale is at the highest point since I've been in. So that's a good thing. GARCIA-NAVARRO: There has been a lot of criticism, though, of some of the policies of not only ICE but the Border Patrol agents. We've seen cases of what people feel are sort of egregious actions against undocumented people. There was a case last fall of a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy. She had been brought over the border illegally when she was 3 months old. And then she was detained by immigration authorities in Texas. Can you speak to that? I mean, there is a concern that these expanded powers are being abused. CABRERA: She did come through a border checkpoint. She was in a private car. So everybody that comes to that checkpoint has to be inspected. Now, had they called ahead, or she had some documentation in order, they could've expedited the process. But that wasn't done. GARCIA-NAVARRO: But there is a broader concern. I'm sure you understand that there is a sense that, possibly, people are being targeted, and there is a climate of fear among the immigrant community. CABRERA: You know, I understand your concern, but I don't believe. I don't see it. The reality in which I live in down here on the border is I see border patrol agents that risk their lives to jump into a river to save someone who's drowning. I see agents that'll give their last bottle of water to someone we apprehend. You know, I know we like to get painted as a bunch of thugs walking the border, but that can be - couldn't be farther from the truth. You know, and if you come into the country illegally - the first act you did in this country was illegal - and you're worried about somebody enforcing the law because you're here illegally, I mean, who's in the right, and who's in the wrong? GARCIA-NAVARRO: Chris Cabrera of the National Border Patrol Council, thanks for speaking with us. CABRERA: All right. Thank you. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: In Oregon, the new year brings a new ability for gas stations in some parts of the state to offer self-service. That's something that's been mostly banned there since 1951. And it leaves New Jersey as the only state with a complete ban on pump-it-yourself gas. Chris Lehman reports. CHRIS LEHMAN, BYLINE: Here at The Heights Fuel Stop in Hood River, there are new signs telling drivers they can get out of their cars and pump their own gas if they want. MARK AZURE: Thank you so much. You have a good day. LEHMAN: But station attendant Mark Azure says most people aren't taking up the offer. AZURE: About 85 percent of the people still want their gas pumped. LEHMAN: For Mary Brenneman, the self-serve option was a surprise. She gave it a try, but... MARY BRENNEMAN: To be perfectly honest, I'm not thrilled about it. You know, it's cold. I'd rather have somebody else pump my gas, and I'm not ashamed to say that. LEHMAN: A new law took effect January 1. It only allows self-serve in rural counties defined as those with a population of less than 40,000 people. That's about half the state. But it means people in Portland or drivers on the heavily-traveled Interstate 5 freeway won't see any change. When Oregon and New Jersey lawmakers banned self-serve some 70 years ago, they cited safety. Gasoline is flammable after all. But when the new Oregon law to ease the self-serve ban passed, safety was also a concern. It turns out gas stations in smaller communities have a hard time employing attendants 24 hours a day, leaving people there with no way to fuel up in an emergency. Supporters say allowing self-serve means fewer stranded travelers. For lifelong Oregonians, it marks a significant change to what they're used to. Mattie Back says filling her own tank was a learning experience. MATTIE BACK: So I pulled up to the thing. And I was ready to hand him my card and tell him how much I needed. And he was like, yeah, so it's self-serve. And I was like, what does that mean? (Laughter) I did not know how to do it. He was like, my job is to teach you how to do it. And I was really awkward about it. But, I mean, it's not hard to learn. It was just really weird. LEHMAN: Not all Oregonians find the idea of pumping their own gas a novelty. Jeff Pulk moved to Hood River from Michigan four years ago. JEFF PULK: It's one of those things that if somebody wants to pump their own gas, they should be able to pump their own gas. LEHMAN: Pulk says he read with amusement some national news stories mocking Oregonians who seemed scared at the idea of having to fill up their tanks themselves. PULK: And I had a bunch of buddies text me also, you know - ha, ha, ha (ph). You get to pump your own gas now. How're you going to, you know, get by and stuff like that. LEHMAN: Pulk says his response - he's saving up for an electric car so he won't have to worry about it much longer. For NPR News, I'm Chris Lehman. (SOUNDBITE OF FAT JON'S "SOUNDGIRL PERSONAL") LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: There were 38 minutes of high anxiety in Hawaii yesterday when people there received an emergency alert that there was an incoming ballistic missile. Turns out, it was a false alarm issued by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, and Governor David Ige has apologized. But the event left a lot of people shaken, including our own White House correspondent Tamara Keith, who is on Oahu for vacation. And she joins us now. Hey, Tam. TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Aloha. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So I guess you weren't expecting this. Tell me where you were and what happened. KEITH: So I was in my hotel room trying to get my 5-year-old to leave the room. And all of the sudden, this alert came through. And I was like, all right, buddy, now we really have to go. And so we all went down to the lobby of the hotel. And people were standing around really truly concerned. And what I discovered as the morning went on and we found out that it was a false alarm, is that as concerned as the tourists were, the people who live here and work here were genuinely shaken even more than the tourists. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So explain what people told you. I mean, what was the atmosphere like? What were they saying? Were they actually thinking that a ballistic missile might sort of land on Hawaii? KEITH: Yeah. People just didn't know what to believe. And the alert that came through the phone said this is not a test; this is not a drill. So when you get an alert that says this is not a drill, you have to sort of take it at face value. And people really truly were taking it at face value, including my family. And people didn't know what to do. I've since spoken to people who live here in Hawaii who said that they had gotten some warning in the past that if you get an alert, you have 15 minutes to find shelter. But it was really truly unnerving. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I know between when the alert went out it - it was about over 30 minutes until they were told that it was actually a mistake. So during that period, there must've been a lot going through people's minds. KEITH: Yeah. I overheard one woman talking about feeling like maybe she should be calling her family on the mainland and telling them where her will was. And, you know, I called into the office. And... GARCIA-NAVARRO: And we're grateful. KEITH: Yes. And I was told that Representative Gabbard had tweeted out that it was a false alarm. And so I knew that before any new alerts came, before they came on the loudspeaker at the hotel and said everything's OK, this was a false alarm. And I had actually deleted Twitter for vacation. So I got my news by calling into NPR. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Tam, I know that you're on vacation, and so you're not actually out there reporting this story. But I am curious. After something like this, do you sense that people are in a heightened state of alert? Did it sort of make this situation slightly more real? Obviously, the idea being that this might have been a missile coming from North Korea, for example. KEITH: You know, I've overheard a lot of people. You know, I'm an eavesdropper by profession. And I've overheard a lot of people who are local to Hawaii who are sort of skeptical of this or skeptical that it really was just a mistake. They aren't sure what to believe. And I think that, you know, given this heightened sensitivity with North Korea and the bellicose language and the strong language on Twitter and in statements coming from the North Korean government - you know, here's the thing; it was plausible. And this is a unique time in our history where something like that, for the first time in both of our lifetimes, something like that is plausible. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Tam, I'm going to ask you - what did you tell your 5-year-old? KEITH: I have not quite figured out how to explain it. But I did explain that - once we knew that it was a test - that everything was OK and that someone probably just screwed up in a really big way. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Tamara Keith, normally our White House correspondent, please, enjoy the rest of your vacation and thanks for calling in. KEITH: You're welcome. Thank you. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Gerrymandering is in the news due to a ruling by federal judges in North Carolina, who said the congressional map there is unconstitutional because Republicans had drawn district lines to their own advantage. But redistricting rivals out of office isn't just the province of Republicans. In Maryland, the story is about Democrats who overwhelmingly represent the state in Annapolis and in Congress. Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican, is pushing for redistricting. Democrats like my guest, state Delegate Kirill Reznik, have not supported his proposals to change the process. Welcome to the program. KIRILL REZNIK: Thank you. GARCIA-NAVARRO: You introduced your own proposal based on an idea that you've called unilateral disarmament. Can you explain that? And I'm assuming it doesn't have anything to do with guns. REZNIK: No, absolutely not. Democrats have used the term unilateral disarmament when it comes to redistricting a number of times. It seems more often than not that it's Democrats taking the mantle of reform and Republicans not following suit. And so I have proposed a bill - and I will be proposing it again this year - for a two-state compact between us and Virginia. Maryland does have some issues with redistricting that we do need to solve, and we do want to put it to a truly independent commission to be able to draw those lines. But Virginia has the same problems in the opposite direction. And I think if you look across the map, I think there are more states that have a Republican redistricting problem than a Democratic one. And so my bill, in addition to creating an independent commission, also requires that before we implement, Virginia does, as well. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So basically, everyone has to drop their arms at the same time. I want to get to the crux of the matter, though. Let's talk about Maryland. Democrats have a huge advantage in the state, and they hold seven of the state's eight seats in Congress. Is that good for the people of your state? Can it really show their will? REZNIK: You know, the issue that I often bring up when people ask me that question is that the vote of a congressman, regardless of where they are from, affects Maryland equally. So the vote of a Pennsylvania congressman, a Texas congressman, California congressman has the same weight that the vote for a Maryland congressman has. And so when you look at the problems that Congress have, the problems of inability to work together, the problem of overstretching their political will and passing bills like this current tax plan that the Republicans just passed that hurts Marylanders disproportionately, the problem are not Maryland congressmen. Seven of the eight Maryland congressmen voted against that tax plan that directly hurts Maryland. GARCIA-NAVARRO: But if the problem isn't Maryland congressmen, you know, studies have shown that redistricting would probably only result in the party giving up one congressional seat. Why is that not worth it, you know, in the greater cause of trying to make these elections fair? REZNIK: If I had any confidence that another state would follow suit, I would agree with you. But we have watched as, really, only two states in the nation have done truly independent congressional redistricting. Neither of them are what I would call red states. And one of them is California, the state with the largest number of congressional seats in the country. And even though California moved forward with their independent redistricting, not one Republican state followed suit. So if what we're trying to do is have more Republicans in Congress, then I would say, yes, we back Governor Hogan's plan and just change it in Maryland. GARCIA-NAVARRO: But this sounds a little bit like a playground argument. Well, if they're not going to do it, I'm not going to do it, either, regardless of what may be right. REZNIK: Well, that's what my bill solves. It allows for two states to do it simultaneously. And hopefully, that then moves a process forward that other states can then join. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Is there buy-in from Virginia? REZNIK: My understanding is that there are a number of legislators in Virginia who are interested in a plan like this. I am working with Common Cause Maryland, League of Women Voters and other groups who are interested in my plan and who are working with counterparts in Virginia, as well. I'm actually very hopeful that we can do something between Maryland and Virginia. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Maryland Delegate Kirill Reznik, thank you so much. REZNIK: Thank you. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Amateur astronomer Thomas Bopp died earlier this month at the age of 68. He never achieved the fame of Britain's Edmond Halley, whose namesake comet comes to visit the Earth about every 75 years or so. But Bob did pretty well for an asphalt factory manager from Glendale, Ariz. In July of 1995, looking through a friend's telescope in the desert, he spotted what he described as a little, fuzzy glow. At first, he thought it might be a distant galaxy, but what Mr. Bopp discovered that night was a previously unknown comet. Coincidentally, at almost the exact same moment, another stargazer named Alan Hale also saw it. The two would go on to share naming rights to what became known as the Hale-Bopp comet. Two years after the men discovered the comet, it came within 122 million miles of Earth. With a tail a million miles long, Hale-Bopp was easy to spot in the night sky, and the two men briefly became famous. Mr. Bopp said about his discovery, I just hope it inspires people to go out and look at the stars. DAVID GREENE, HOST: And now we have an update on the fight against the heroin supply. Heroin is made from poppies. Some are grown in Mexico. And the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration recently criticized Mexico's effort to destroy them. The Mexican military says it is trying and invited NPR's Carrie Kahn to see. CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: The mountains of the southwestern state of Guerrero are ideal for growing crops. They get warm coastal humidity up here, says Lieutenant Colonel Juan Jose Orzua Padilla. And there's plenty of water, as evident by the network of rubber tubing crisscrossing the rugged dirt roads we're traveling on in the back of a military jeep. LIEUTENANT COLONEL JUAN JOSE ORZUA PADILLA: (Speaking Spanish). KAHN: You can't compare it with any other region in the Republic, says Orzua, the spokesman for the Mexican military's 35th zone. Guerrero is now Mexico's biggest opium poppy supplier. It's heroin, also increasingly made in a growing number of clandestine laboratories in the state, is some of the world's most potent after China or Afghanistan. But the lieutenant colonel adds solemnly this is nothing to be proud of. We stop the engine and look over a small canyon. It's everywhere. (Speaking Spanish). PADILLA: (Speaking Spanish). KAHN: Yes, says Orzua, as he points out one to two-acre patches of poppies in the distance on the steep hillsides. Closer to the road, the crops distinctive deep-red flowers can be spotted. Orzua sends his soldiers out quickly to secure a perimeter. (SOUNDBITE OF RIPPING OUT PLANTS) KAHN: Given the all-clear, the soldiers start ripping out the green plants from the roots then throw their bundles on a small fire in the middle of the field. (SOUNDBITE OF FIRE) KAHN: Lt. Col. Urzua says despite the farmer's hard work, he's not the one making the big money here. His take is about 750 dollars a harvest. PADILLA: (Speaking Spanish). KAHN: The farmers barely survive, says Lt. Col. Orzua. They are exploited by the criminal groups - at least 15 now operating in the state. The gangs are the ones who make the real profits, he adds - up to tens of thousands of dollars once the heroin gets across the border to the U.S. Orzua says this plot will probably be replanted with poppies once his soldiers move on. Critics say eradication isn't denting Mexico's opium poppy harvest mainly because local poor farmers aren't given incentives or help to plant anything else. Deborah Bonello is an investigator with Insight Crime, a nonprofit studying organized crime in the Americas. DEBORAH BONELLO: There haven't really been any genuinely successful efforts in terms of offering alternatives. KAHN: And she says if eradication efforts were working, street-level heroin prices would be rising. Clearly they're not, says Bonello. A cheap and plentiful heroin supply in the US has been blamed mostly for some 64,000 drug overdose deaths in 2016. The DEA says 93 percent of heroin used in the U.S. is now coming from Mexico. Eradication in Guerrero is also complicated by high levels of corruption and collusion among local police and politicians with the criminal gangs. Despite the challenges, Lt. Col. Orzua says he's confident his soldiers will destroy record amounts of poppies this year. UNIDENTIFIED SOLDIER: (Speaking Spanish). KAHN: A soldier sends an update on the eradication unit's progress back to headquarters from the mountain base camp. It's pretty bare bones, just a few tents and coolers. The men, 28 per unit, spend up to two months covering about five miles a day ripping out poppy plants. Orzua says he knows his small band of soldiers isn't going to end poppy production here. PADILLA: (Speaking Spanish). KAHN: We are eradicating more than ever, but it's still not enough. It takes all parts of the government working together, he says, stopping corruption, creating more jobs and providing better education if we are really going to solve drug trafficking here. Carrie Kahn, NPR News, high in the mountains in Guerrero, Mexico. (SOUNDBITE OF GOLDEN RETRIEVER'S "NEO TURF MASTERS") DAVID GREENE, HOST: Cancer patients are increasingly having the DNA of their tumors analyzed in a quest for better treatment. This is a prime example of what's known as precision medicine. That's where medical decisions are driven by data. NPR health correspondent Richard Harris reports that while there are high hopes about precision cancer treatment, the results often don't live up to the expectations. RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE: When you hear stories about the use of DNA sequencing as part of cancer treatment, chances are they are uplifting stories, like that of Ben Stern who showed up one day in October for a follow-up appointment at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore. BREE BYRD: We're going to the dark-blue chair. Of course, you know that. HARRIS: Medical technician Bree Byrd settles him in gently. BYRD: So they want to get a whole bunch more blood from you, so I have to take two today. HARRIS: In the spring of 2016, Ben Stern was diagnosed with a deadly brain cancer, glioblastoma. He was 45 at the time. Surgeons removed what they could of the tumor. Then over the months, he got chemotherapy and radiation. He even got on a clinical trial to see if a leading edge drug called a checkpoint inhibitor would work. But he says that didn't prevent a tumor-induced seizure. BEN STERN: My whole right side clenched up, and Tara had called my 911 in the middle of it. HARRIS: His wife Tara says another brain surgery led to yet more disappointment at a monthly follow-up appointment. TARA STERN: The tumor had already grown back, and it was already bigger than the original sized tumor that we found the previous May. So it - you know, he took this little nugget out in March, and it grew back to this full-scale tumor that was causing more damage. HARRIS: It did that in a month? T. STERN: It did that in five weeks, yes. HARRIS: Stern's doctor sent a genetic analysis of the cancer to what Hopkins calls its molecular tumor board. It's a small group of doctors who meet Mondays to review these genetic tests. They found an overactive gene that sometimes responds to a particular drug. So Ben went on it. T. STERN: He started his next round of chemotherapy that Monday. But he didn't seem to get weaker. Like he was getting stronger kind of almost every day. It was - (laughter) it was almost miraculous. HARRIS: Ben says the drug even reversed his deteriorating mental state brought on by the brain tumor. At the next monthly appointment, following a brain scan, Ben and Tara got more good news. T. STERN: The tumor was immeasurable on that next MRI. HARRIS: What do you mean? T. STERN: It wasn't there, (laughter) to put it bluntly. B. STERN: I was basically, as I am now, just in tears. HARRIS: That gave Ben and Tara a sense that maybe they could conquer this cancer. His doctor at Hopkins, Matthias Holdhoff, was guardedly optimistic when we spoke in October. MATTHIAS HOLDOFF: We have to use these results with caution because we do not know how long this effect might wear on. But for the time being, this is a clinically very meaningful benefit. HARRIS: It seemed like a success story in the making for precision medicine. But most stories like this don't have happy endings. BEN PARK: We're getting better. But like many things in life, there's kind of hope and hype. And I think that that's also the reality with precision medicine right now. HARRIS: Ben Park is an oncology professor at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. After noticing how much confusing genetic information was flooding into doctors at Hopkins, he founded the molecular tumor board. PARK: The reason I started this tumor board many years ago now - well, many being four - was simply because there was a patient - young woman who had metastatic breast cancer who had a mutation on one of these reports and decided to forego standard-of-care therapies, which have been proven to actually prolong life in this setting, and to get on a trial on a mutation that didn't really make sense. And she went on a trial. She almost died. She had real bad toxicity from the experimental drug. HARRIS: She was drawn, Park says, by the allure of precision medicine. The reality though is that most of the time the tests don't offer any suggestions for treatment. Only about a quarter of patients at Hopkins are steered toward particular drugs or toward ongoing clinical trials. And even that placement rate is far better than experience elsewhere. So far there's only been one randomized study to test this drug-targeting strategy. And it found no overall benefit for patients. PARK: If you have this knowledge, it's not enough. You have to prove that acting on that knowledge - some medical intervention will actually afford benefit for patients. That's the trickiest, toughest part about looking at all these types of genomic tests to really prove that this is making a difference in the lives of our patients. HARRIS: Park has since passed on leadership of the molecular tumor board to his colleague, oncologist Josh Lauring. Dr. Lauring says there are a few cancers where DNA analysis does make a clear difference - say in melanoma and certain types of lung cancer. JOSH LAURING: In other cancers, it's really kind of an open question. At the same time, this testing is available commercially, as well as in academic medical centers, and is being done. Patients want it. Providers want it. HARRIS: So what's happening, in effect, is a huge poorly constrained experiment involving real patients treated differently in all sorts of settings. Lauring and colleagues at Hopkins are trying to keep track of all their patients - what they got, how long the treatment was successful and how long the patients lived. LAURING: We think it's really important to capture that information as well to try to learn from it, because in many cases it's not going to be effective. But in some it is, and it's important for us to figure that out. HARRIS: Therapies that target specific genetic patterns are appealing because medical scientists have some sense of the biology underlying their drugs. They aren't just killing fast growing cells as conventional chemotherapy does. LAURING: Unfortunately in many cases, these responses - if they occur - are relatively brief. HARRIS: That unfortunately turned out to be the case for Ben Stern as well. Five months after his remarkable response, Ben started feeling weaker again. An MRI suggested the cancer might be on the move, so he went back to the hospital for another round of chemotherapy and radiation. They're hoping for the best. Richard Harris, NPR News. (SOUNDBITE OF RE:PLUS' "SUNRISE, SUNSET") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: We're nearing the first anniversary of President Trump's inauguration, which means he has spent a year as president while continuing to own business interests around the world. While refusing to divest or set up a blind trust as ethics experts suggested, the president did promise to avoid new overseas deals. So has he kept that narrow promise? Here's NPR's Jackie Northam. JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: When President Trump publicly declared at a press conference that he would do no new foreign business deals, he offered up a sign of good faith. He said he had just been offered a $2 billion deal to open a golf course in Dubai... (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And I turned it down. I didn't have to turn it down 'cause as you know I have a no-conflict situation because I'm president. NORTHAM: Trump didn't mention he already has two golf course deals in Dubai with the same developer. It's a simple omission of fact, much the same as President Trump seems to have kept his word and not personally signed any new foreign business deals over the past year. But his company is still involved with Trump-branded resorts, hotels and golf courses all over the world. His sons, Eric and Donald Jr, are working with local developers to expand some of those projects, says Carolyn Kenney with the Center for American Progress. CAROLYN KENNEY: As the Trump organization moves forward with some of its major unfinished developments such as those in Indonesia and India, they certainly seem to be stretching the spirit of the promise to not undertake any new deals. NORTHAM: Kenney says many of these unfinished projects do involve new contracts for infrastructure projects. KENNEY: There's a recent example of a Chinese state-owned construction company being contracted to develop a road for Trump's Dubai development, and then also the local government in Bali plans to construct a toll road to Trump's property on the island. NORTHAM: But foreign government involvement with Trump properties runs the risk of impacting the president's foreign-policy decision making, according to Noah Bookbinder with the government watchdog CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. NOAH BOOKBINDER: If foreign governments provide permits or easements or build roads that help the president's businesses, all of those are things that could send a signal to the president that these are foreign governments who want to get favor from him by helping his businesses. NORTHAM: Requests for comment to the Trump organization were not returned. Bookbinder says there's no telling if any of Trump's policy decisions have or could be swayed by his business concerns, but he says the perception can be as damning as the reality. He points to China, where Trump spent more than a decade unsuccessfully trying to register trademarks. When Trump became president, he endorsed China's policy concerning Taiwan. Bookbinder says, shortly after, Trump was awarded valuable trademarks. BOOKBINDER: We don't know if there was a link between the change in the president's policy choice and a benefit to his companies, but as long as he has those companies, we're going to have to question what his motivation was. NORTHAM: And questioned the motivation of some of the countries and people Trump does business with. Take the Philippines, where there is a Trump Tower Manila. Sarah Chayes with Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says a few months ago the Philippine government created a new position for Trump's local business partner in that project. SARAH CHAYES: Trump's business partner, Filipino business partner, is now the Philippines' trade representative to the United States. NORTHAM: Chayes says the only way to prevent conflicts would be for Trump to divest himself of all his business interests, something the president has repeatedly said he won't do. Jackie Northam, NPR News, Washington. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: A reporter asked President Trump once again on Sunday if he's a racist. The president gave an answer he's offered before. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No. No, I'm not a racist. I am the least racist person you have interviewed. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Now, this question grew out of a meeting with lawmakers on immigration. Some say the president used a vulgar term to describe African countries. Two Republicans in the room say he did not use the word. They have not, however, denied the general thrust of the president's remarks that he objected to immigrants from Haiti and Africa and wanted immigrants from countries like Norway. That meeting was supposed to be about extending DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The president was also asked last night if there would be a deal on DACA. And this is what he had to say. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) TRUMP: We're ready, willing and able to make a deal on DACA. But I don't think the Democrats want to make a deal. INSKEEP: So much to discuss here. So let's bring in NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley once again. Scott, good morning. SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve. INSKEEP: OK. So there does seem to be a lot of rephrasing going on about this meeting. The president insists in tweets and elsewhere and his supporters insist that what he meant was he wants immigrants coming on merit. What is the idea there? HORSLEY: That's right. The president backs a bill that would cut in half the number of legal immigrants admitted to the United States and would give priority to newcomers with in-demand skills rather than the relatives of those who are already here. Tom Cotton, the Arkansas senator who sponsors this bill, says the idea is to move to a system that treats people for who they are, not where they're from. I should say, though, in the comments that have drawn such scrutiny, the president seemed to be talking about admitting would-be immigrants precisely on the basis of where they come from - Norway, for example, not Africa. INSKEEP: Yeah. And a lot of studies have pointed out you can have plenty of individual immigrants who are highly skilled. Highly desirable by whatever standard you want to make, even from a troubled country. HORSLEY: Sure. INSKEEP: And that is what the president does not deny saying that he wanted in this meeting. Is that right? HORSLEY: The White House has not disputed the substance of the president's concerns there. INSKEEP: So what does this discussion mean for DACA itself, Scott? HORSLEY: DACA has been on life support ever since the fall, when the president announced he was pulling the plug on the plan but giving Congress six months to try to come up with a fix. There has been a bipartisan group working to reach some sort of compromise. They thought they had such a deal. That was what they were presenting to Trump at the White House last week when that controversial meeting took place. So we'll see what happens, as the president likes to say. Over the weekend, we might point out, the Homeland Security Department said they would begin accepting renewal applications from DACA recipients. That's in response to a lawsuit. INSKEEP: Scott, just to set up the week for us, isn't this the week when the president promised he was going to give out fake news awards, ways to mock news media stories he didn't like? HORSLEY: That's right, although that's been postponed once. So we'll see if it comes to pass this time. Jeff Flake the Arizona Republican is criticizing the president for using the term fake news and for calling the press the enemy of the people. That reminds me of the Ibsen play by that title with my favorite line - when a man goes out to fight for the truth, he should never wear his best pants. INSKEEP: (Laughter). HORSLEY: I don't know if the president is a fan of Ibsen, but he might be. The playwright, of course, was from Norway. INSKEEP: OK. OK. I just did not expect, really, Ibsen to make it into Up First - make it into NPR news coverage today. But I'm really glad to hear that's happened. Scott, thank you very much. HORSLEY: Good to be with you, Steve. INSKEEP: That's NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley. OK. Let's talk about an emergency missile alert in Hawaii that turned out to be a mistake. GREENE: This was extraordinary. It was shortly after 8 a.m. local time that residents received this emergency cell phone alert that read, ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill. We now know this was because of human error. The administrator for Hawaii's Emergency Management Agency has taken responsibility, saying the wrong button was pushed during a shift change. But it took 38 minutes before they issued a correction alert. This is Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard speaking on All Things Considered this weekend. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST) TULSI GABBARD: When you're dealing with a ballistic missile coming towards Hawaii, you know, there is less than 15 minutes that people have before potential impact. So when you're dealing with those minutes and seconds, what we don't want is for people to be spending that precious time wondering, is this for real, or is this just another mistake? INSKEEP: OK. NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman is in our studios. He's been following this. Tom, good morning. TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve. INSKEEP: So wow. I mean, we have stories of people, you know, crowding together in bathtubs, saying their last goodbyes, calling family members. BOWMAN: Right. INSKEEP: How does the government restore credibility after that? BOWMAN: Well, this is a situation where information moves at lightning speed, and bureaucracies take just a little bit longer. You're right. There's going to be an investigation by the FCC. Hawaii, of course, is doing an investigation, as well. What's remarkable here is you can send out this false missile alert basically saying, you know, seek shelter. This is not a drill. And it takes 38 minutes to send out another cell phone message basically saying, that was a false alert. The - apparently, the - Hawaii had to call FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency... INSKEEP: Yeah. BOWMAN: ...And work out a second message to send that, basically, it was false. INSKEEP: Oh. So they had to think about exactly how to phrase, this, actually, is a drill - whatever they were going to say. BOWMAN: Exactly. So it's remarkable that someone can send out a false message from a state agency and not immediately say, hang on a second. That was a wrong message. There is not a missile attack. INSKEEP: Tom, let me ask a bigger, scarier question here. You've got this confrontation between the United States and North Korea - a nuclear confrontation between these two countries. Do Pentagon officials think there's a risk of some miscommunication in a situation like this? Hawaii sends out this false message. People begin wondering what's going on. Maybe somebody on one side or the other thinks this is really it and launches a missile. BOWMAN: Absolutely. That's one of the big concerns in the Pentagon - is miscalculation, or someone just makes a mistake like this. It could be a military person. It could be a civilian person here in a situation like this. That's a real concern. But again, they're going to investigate exactly what happened here. And right now in Hawaii they're going to have two people to make sure the - a two-person activation... INSKEEP: Oh. BOWMAN: ...To make sure you're sending out the right message. INSKEEP: Oh, this is like... BOWMAN: So it's not just one person. INSKEEP: In the old missile silos... BOWMAN: Exactly. INSKEEP: ...Two guys had to turn the key to launch the missile. Maybe two people should turn the key to... BOWMAN: Absolutely. INSKEEP: ...Announce a warning. Tom, thanks very much. Appreciate it. BOWMAN: You're welcome. INSKEEP: That's NPR's Tom Bowman this morning. And let's go next to Tunisia. GREENE: Yeah. Yesterday, Tunisia marked the seventh anniversary of the day the country forced its dictator from power. That was the act that set the stage for the entire Arab Spring. Of all the countries in the Middle East that tried to throw off autocratic rule, Tunisia has really fared the best. It has not succumbed to war like Syria or Libya or a strongman-style president like in Egypt. But right now Tunisia is in crisis. The economy is so bad, it has sparked protests across the country. INSKEEP: So a moment to consider the past and also the present. And NPR's Ruth Sherlock is in Tunis. Hi there, Ruth. RUTH SHERLOCK, BYLINE: Hello. INSKEEP: What have you seen? SHERLOCK: Well, yesterday, we went to the anniversary celebrations, which were in downtown. And there was thousands of people gathered. And it was kind of quite a celebratory vibe. You know, you had belly dancers on stages. You had people singing revolutionary songs. But then there was another side to it, too. There were these angry marchers mostly led by young people, university graduates who can't find jobs. And that's really at the heart of the problem here. You've got people who've been protesting all week. And some of those protests have been violent. And people are hoping this peaceful anniversary gathering would mark the end of those protests. But then last night, we had more violent action. There were some people throwing rocks at police. Police responded with tear gas. So this probably isn't over. INSKEEP: You know, a lot of the Arab Spring was driven by university graduates who couldn't find jobs in different places. And now seven years have passed. I guess this is maybe another generation of university graduates who are just as dissatisfied. SHERLOCK: Well, exactly. You know, there's been nine governments in seven years here. And so there is a kind of emerging democracy, but none of those have been able to fix the economy. There's 15 percent unemployment, 25 percent in some areas. And now there's this new youth movement called Fech Nestannowi (ph) - Fech Nestannew, sorry - or in English, what are we waiting for? It's only a few weeks old. But it's the most coherent organization of young people since the revolution, people here say. And they're bitter. I spoke to Nowreh Dhausi (ph), who's a spokesman for the movement. She's just 21 and a college graduate who can't find a job. And I asked her how she defines these new austerity measures that the government's trying to put in place. NOWREH DHAUSI: When you have to be starving and poor enough in order to let the states have more money and the government have a lot of money. Yeah, classics (laughter). SHERLOCK: So I pointed out, you know, this is - the government is also under pressure to pay back international loans, and they feel they have to tighten the purse strings. This is how she responded. DHAUSI: I don't care what the World Bank said. I don't care what the government measures are. It's just me and the Tunisian people starving, and that's it, you know? SHERLOCK: So it shows the challenges that there are for the government here. People are not sympathetic. They're desperate. INSKEEP: Very briefly, do people want to overthrow the government the way that they succeeded in doing seven years ago? SHERLOCK: Not at this stage. People just won a repeal of these measures that are tightening the budget - this tightening of the budget. They want jobs, but they're not talking about regime - government change yet. INSKEEP: Ruth, always a pleasure talking with you. Thank you very much. SHERLOCK: Lovely to talk to you, too. Thank you. INSKEEP: That's NPR's Ruth Sherlock in Tunis. (SOUNDBITE OF BONOBO'S "RECURRING") DAVID GREENE, HOST: Good morning, I'm David Greene. This is the famous "Cantina" theme from Star Wars. (SOUNDBITE OF JOHN WILLIAMS' "CANTINA BAND") GREENE: And this - and I need you to listen closely here - is the song being played on a pencil. (SOUNDBITE OF PENCIL ON PAPER) GREENE: Yeah, a college student in Arizona posted video of herself writing an algebra equation, and her pencil movements recreate the song - sort of. A story in The Arizona Republic suggested she call her band Lead Zeppelin. It's MORNING EDITION. DAVID GREENE, HOST: And in Tunisia, people yesterday were celebrating the seventh anniversary of the day that country forced its dictator from power. That was an act that set the stage for the Arab Spring. Of all the countries in the Middle East that tried to throw off autocratic rule, Tunisia has really fared the best. It has not succumbed to war like Syria or Libya or a strongman-style president like in Egypt. But Tunisia right now appears in crisis. The economy is so bad, it has sparked protests and violence around the country. And NPR's Ruth Sherlock is in the capital, Tunis. Hi, Ruth. RUTH SHERLOCK, BYLINE: Hello. GREENE: So what do things feel like right now amid these protests? SHERLOCK: Well, pretty concerning. There has been nighttime protests in the capital in two districts, and police were firing tear gas. It seems some protesters threw rocks. And then near the Algerian border, there was protesters trying to cut off roads, and police fired gas bombs. More than 800 people have been arrested in the past week. I should say, though, that yesterday, there was also a peaceful gathering to mark the anniversary of the ouster of Zine Ben Ali, the former president. And that was - you know, that was kind of mass celebration with people saying, we have freedom of expression. So freedom of expression now in this - emerge in sort of this new democracy. But also huge problems with the country's economy. GREENE: Such competing emotions. Well, let's talk about the protests over the economy. What exactly are people angry about? SHERLOCK: Well, specifically, they're furious at a new budget that came in in January, and that's got tax hikes, which means that basic goods are costing more. And the broader picture here is that the government is struggling to pay back a loan by the International Monetary Fund. And to meet their requirements, they've imposed these austerity measures. That means they're not creating any more public sector jobs. So it has massive unemployment hit - 15 percent, 25 percent in some areas. And it's especially hitting the youth. And it's the educated youth. People with university degrees cannot find jobs. I spoke to one lady, Nowreh Dhausi (ph) from this new movement called What Are We Waiting For? - which is a young people's movement trying to fight against these austerity measures. I asked her how she defines the austerity measures. NOWREH DHAUSI: When you have to be starving and poor enough in order to let the states have more money and the government have a lot of money. Yeah, classics (laughter). SHERLOCK: So not very sympathetic there. I pointed out that the government is under pressure to pay back these loans. And so maybe this is something they have to do. This is how she responded. DHAUSI: I don't care what the World Bank said. I don't care what the government measures are. It is just me and the Tunisian people starving, and that's it, you know? SHERLOCK: That shows you what a tough challenge the government has. It's between a rock and a hard place. It has to kind of meet these constraints. But it also has to deal with the fact that many people are desperate, without jobs. GREENE: Desperate but also able to freely express their anger, which I would imagine creates a moment when some people are looking at these seven years, and they like where this country has gone. SHERLOCK: Yeah, exactly. You know, people I spoke to at the anniversary protests said there's a kind of celebration. People said they're no longer afraid of the knock on the door by the secret police for expressing their views. But now the challenge is, you know, they're going to express their views, but how do they - how does the government find a solution to kind of match what the people want now? GREENE: NPR's Ruth Sherlock speaking to us from the Tunisian capital, Tunis. Ruth, thanks. SHERLOCK: Thank you. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Let's explore an item on the White House's wish list for immigration policy. Here's President Trump in November. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I am today starting the process of terminating the diversity lottery program. GREENE: The president was speaking after an attack in New York City when a truck plowed through a bike lane and killed eight people. The suspect was an Uzbek immigrant, one of the 50,000 people a year who receive green cards through what is known as the visa lottery. This program started with the sweeping 1965 Immigration Reform Act. That law prioritized immigrants with close family ties and work skills. It put caps on how many people each country could send, and at the time those standards hurt one group in particular, the Irish. ANNA LAW: They had relatives in the United States, but the relationships were too far away. So a cousin or an aunt can't really petition you, and they didn't have the job skills, either. So there was a huge accumulation of illegal Irish. They had come in on a temporary tourist visa and overstayed. GREENE: That's the voice of Anna Law, a political scientist at Brooklyn College. She told our co-host Rachel Martin that a few members of Congress devised the diversity lottery in the late 1980s in large part to bring more Irish people to the United States. LAW: Yeah, it was called the Irish amnesty, and the Italians, also. It was to benefit those two groups. Italians had a slightly different problem. They had the family ties, but it was because we can only let in 20,000 Italians, it was taking years and years for people who were being petitioned by their U.S. brothers and sisters to get into the country. So there was this huge backlog. RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: So what ended up happening with this program? I mean, how has it evolved over time? LAW: The Irish and Italians eventually lose interest in using this lottery. The economic situation in their countries got better. And also, as EU nations, they had options to travel to other European Union nations to work. MARTIN: They weren't so desperate to get to America anymore. LAW: Right. But in recent years the big beneficiaries have been many African nations and Eastern Europe. MARTIN: What is the justification for this program today? LAW: It depends on who you ask. A lot of people don't believe it has a justification and that it's a very crazy way to run immigration policy. It is not what Trump suggests, that they're picking numbers out of a hat, but it is a random approach to selecting immigrants. MARTIN: I mean, we should note that even Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, has in the past voted to scrap the diversity visa lottery system. LAW: Right. That was in 2013. He and a bipartisan Senate passed an immigration reform bill. He voted against the lottery. But that bill died in the House. MARTIN: So do you think that this is where it's headed now? Do you think that in this debate, since President Trump wants this program cut, that there is an appetite at least among some Democrats to cut the program, that that could be a sacrifice that the Democrats would make to get a deal? LAW: This program has been on the chopping block many different times. The administration is not just interested in cutting undocumented immigration. They also want serious cuts to legal immigration, permanent immigration. So I think I would let this one go. We're talking 50,000 visas. It's not a large number. MARTIN: All right. Anna Law, thanks so much for helping us understand this. LAW: Thanks for having me on the show. GREENE: Anna Law teaches political science at Brooklyn College. She was speaking to Rachel Martin, our co-host on MORNING EDITION. DAVID GREENE, HOST: And let's begin with the unimaginable - the emergency missile alert that terrified people in Hawaii on Saturday morning. The warning read (reading) ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill. It turned out to be human error. The administrator for Hawaii's Emergency Management Agency has taken responsibility saying the wrong button was pushed during a shift change. It was a further 38 minutes though before they issued a correction alert. Officials are trying to make sure something like this never happens again. They're trying to reassure people that they have fixed the issue. Here is Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard speaking on All Things Considered yesterday. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST) TULSI GABBARD: When you're dealing with a ballistic missile coming towards Hawaii, there is less than 15 minutes that people have before potential impact. So when you're dealing with those minutes and seconds, what we don't want is for people to be spending that precious time wondering, is this for real? Or is this just another mistake? GREEN: I want to bring in NPR's Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman. Hey there, Tom. TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Hey, David. GREEN: So people were spending time believing this was real - it seemed like. I mean, they were huddling in bathrooms. They were saying final goodbyes. I mean, what happens now? How do federal officials restore credibility after putting people through this? BOWMAN: Well, both Hawaii and the federal government say there'll be investigations. But, again, if you live in Hawaii, you can imagine how angry people are - how angry you would be... GREEN: Yeah. BOWMAN: ...If you're there with your family in Hawaii. There were some people who jumped into bathtubs apparently to be safe from what they thought was an incoming missile. Now as we laid out, what happened was an employee pushed the wrong button. So rather than missile test, this person punched missile alert. But, again, it took 38... GREEN: That's a big mistake. BOWMAN: Well, it's a huge mistake. But the problem is it took 38 minutes to issue another message basically saying this was a mistake - no incoming missile. There was a false alert. And in the meantime, people like Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard was sending out tweets, Facebook messages. But, you know, that helped. But you really need that cellphone alert because, of course, we all carry our cellphones. GREEN: Right. BOWMAN: We've had weather alerts in the past - Amber Alerts. You needed that to - you know, to really make you feel safe. GREEN: You know, I mean, these tensions with North Korea here - you know, here in California, I mean, I've been at dinners with friends. And we've sort of just casually wondered, I mean, how long would it take for a missile to come from North Korea to, say, the West Coast of the United States. And I don't think I even know what procedures are in place in these kinds of moments. How do these alerts actually work? BOWMAN: Well, first of all, any incoming missile from either North Korea or anywhere else in the world would be picked up by U.S. military officials working out of Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado using satellites and sensors. And that information if there's an incoming missile would be sent quickly to FEMA and then on to state officials for that alert. And, of course, you get those alerts on TV, radio, and most importantly cellphones as well. That's how it's supposed to work. GREEN: OK, so the military could pick something up. This gets to officials - federal officials, state officials - to put out an alert. A lot of things are supposed to happen here. But in this case, one person pushing the wrong button was able to cause this. BOWMAN: That's right. And the fix now is they're going to have two people. So you know, if you're sending out any sort of alert - if it's a test alert or a real alert, you'll have a person next to you verifying that you're actually pushing the right button. That's one thing. And, again, a question - an obvious question is, in this case where the Hawaiian officials had to talk to FEMA to send out a new message, why did it take so long? GREEN: Yeah. BOWMAN: And why can't this be automatic? If a state official makes a mistake, why can't that person or that person's boss immediately say this was a mistake. Within three to five or ten seconds, we're going to send out another message saying false alert - no missile coming in. It shouldn't take 38 minutes. GREEN: No. And, I mean, a lot of people are furious about this, including a lot of public officials - including the chairman of the FCC, right? BOWMAN: That's right. FCC will also weigh-in on this. They'll do an investigation. And, again, how many other states have that two-person system that they've now institute in Hawaii. That's another question here. GREEN: Probably more soon if they don't. BOWMAN: I would think so. That's right. GREEN: Has this happened before? BOWMAN: You know, there have been incidents in the past involving nuclear power plants, false messages sent out that there's been an accident. Bill Perry, the former defense secretary, talked at one time about how someone put a training of - a messenger video into the system, and it said a couple of hundred missiles were heading toward the United States. GREEN: Oh, my God. BOWMAN: But these are thankfully quite rare. And hopefully something like this won't happen again, and they'll be able to fix these problems. GREEN: All right, speaking to NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman about that emergency missile alert that scared a lot of people in Hawaii on Saturday morning. It turned out to be a human error because the wrong button was pushed. Tom, thank you for updating on this. BOWMAN: You're welcome, David. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: One moment last week illustrated how America's present is touched by its past. On Friday, President Trump read out a proclamation honoring civil rights leader Martin Luther King. As he finished, a reporter asked, are you a racist? The president didn't answer then, but when asked again on Sunday, he said, no. He's under pressure for saying in a meeting that he wants fewer immigrants from Haiti and Africa and more from countries like Norway. Two Republicans in the meeting deny the president used a specific expletive but did not deny the general thrust of his remarks. So where's that leave African-American civil rights activists on this Martin Luther King holiday? We have two guests, African-Americans, who represent two traditions of activism. One of them is Joshua Dubois, who is a faith leader who led President Obama's White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Good morning, sir. JOSHUA DUBOIS: Good morning. Great to be with you. INSKEEP: And we're also joined in the studios here by DeRay McKesson, whose activism came through social media and the streets after the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. Thanks for coming by. DERAY MCKESSON: Good to be here. INSKEEP: Do you think you're making progress? DeRay, you can start. MCKESSON: Yeah. I think since the protests started in Ferguson three years ago - or four years ago now - you know, we've changed the conversations at the national level about criminal justice since civil rights. There's now a national conversation happening about it in a way it didn't happen before. We know, though, that the conversation is only the beginning of the change. The systems and structures have to change for change to be lasting. I think that's one of the lessons from the civil rights movement that changing the language is part of it but changing the systems and structures has to be the win. INSKEEP: Changing the language, meaning what people talk about and the way they talk about it. MCKESSON: And how they talk about it. You think about police violence - you know, a third of all the people killed by strangers in this country is actually killed by a police officer. And that data, that - those stories weren't being told at a national level until the protests started. And that is about storytelling and about what's acceptable to be done in public. You think about even identity, the trans community - we're talking about so many things in public, which is an entrance into changing systems. It is not in and of itself, though, the system change. INSKEEP: Joshua DuBois, do you feel like you're making progress? DUBOIS: You know what? There are a number of wonderful things about the Trump administration, in my view, but one thing that's important is at least the issues are now on the table. We cannot deny that we still have major challenges related to race in this country and the last year has shown us that. And so, I think the fact that we're finally able to see with clear eyes that we still have real challenges is progress in and of itself. INSKEEP: Are you suggesting it can be good even though you disagree with President Trump - can be good that he raises race and that he talks about ways that provoke racial discussions? DUBOIS: Well, I don't think the specific policies that he's advancing or the way that he's raising these issues is good at all. But I think it's good that, to some extent, the scales have fallen off our eyes and we see that although we've made certain progress in terms of policies and laws and in terms of where we are with the human heart, the gaps between different communities in this country, we still have a long ways to go. I think that, in and of itself, can be good because you can't fix something unless you know that you have a problem. INSKEEP: Do the techniques of Martin Luther King, which we can all see in the old black-and-white videos - peaceful protest, appealing to people's consciences - do those techniques still work? MCKESSON: Absolutely. I think that they do. You know, the question for now is what - how will technology change the way that information can spread? You think about in the past - so they went to public meetings. That is how everybody organized. You think about the Montgomery bus boycott. It was a professor, Jo Ann Robinson, who printed 35,000 pamphlets and passed them out. That's how the boycott started. INSKEEP: Had to have them printed and passed out - OK. MCKESSON: That's crazy, right? Now, you know, I can talk to a million people at the drop of a hat. We could organize all across the country and all across the world really quickly. So the question for me is, will technology allow us to do something different using those same sort of core principles knowing that nonviolent direct action sort of forces the state to respond in a specific type of way? You think about Rustin. Rustin wrote about the challenge with violent action... INSKEEP: Bayard Rustin, you're talking about. MCKESSON: Bayard Rustin. You know, the challenge with... INSKEEP: Martin Luther King ally. MCKESSON: ...With violent action was that the state always sort of takes violent action and uses it back on the people, which is one of the reasons why they thought (ph) about nonviolence as such an important strategy. So I think that so many of those things are important. I think that the economic focus of the civil rights movement has to be more centered today now than ever. INSKEEP: I want to ask you both if social media has been entirely positive, though. You're exactly right, DeRay McKesson, that you can organize tons of people in a way or you can get people's attention. But everybody gets on social media, everybody gets outraged about the latest outrage, and then something else happens and the attention flips to the next thing. Is this really working? DUBOIS: Yeah. I think there are some real challenges with social media, certainly, and particularly when we've lost some of the basic moral guardrails in our conversations. People can not only get on social media, but they can say absolutely anything as we see evidenced by our president almost every day, it seems. And so the sense that there are some basic principles of our discourse that we should all abide by, that seems to have fallen to the wayside and that's something that I think would be wise to return to. INSKEEP: Let me ask you about one other thing because this is a moment when President Trump has been fiercely criticized and he and his defenders have responded, in part, by blaming Democrats. And they have said, actually, Democrats will talk a game on DACA or whatever they want to talk about but they don't actually want to fix the problems of people of color. They just want to rile people up at election time. Do either of you have faith in the Democratic Party at this moment? Deray Mckesson, you can go first. MCKESSON: Yeah. I do have faith in the Democratic Party. I think that, you know, we know the party is not as strong as it should be. We know the party doesn't always do what's best for everybody, but it is certainly better than the Republicans. And we also know that there's a platform that is ready to be implemented when the Democrats take back Congress, which will be exciting, hopefully, in 2018, this year. So yeah, I have faith. You know, I was on the transition team for the DNC. I feel like there're things starting to change and I have a lot of faith in all the young people running across the country for office. INSKEEP: Joshua DuBois, you get the last word. We got about 40 seconds here. DUBOIS: I would absolutely agree. I have faith in the tremendous work of the last eight years of the Obama administration and a lot of hard-working folks in the Democratic Party today who want to make sure that immigrants are protected, that people people who are living in poverty who have the resources that they need (unintelligible)... INSKEEP: Although, let's remember, the Obama administration was a time of protest that gave rise to people like DeRay McKesson. DUBOIS: It was, and that's a good thing, ultimately. That tension has led to certain progress in this country and the - and platform for tremendous activists like my friends, like DeRay and others. But, you know, again, the Trump administration has brought these issues to the forefront, and that in and of itself is cause for optimism because at least we can do something about them now. INSKEEP: Joshua DuBois, faith leader who counseled President Obama, thank you very much. DUBOIS: Thank you. INSKEEP: And we're also joined in the studio by DeRay McKesson. Thanks to you for coming by. DeRay McKesson, among other things, is the host of the podcast Pod Save the People. (SOUNDBITE OF SMITH & MUDD'S "MR COATS") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep with a tradition in Virginia. Departing governors play pranks on their successors. Terry McAuliffe left behind pictures of himself on the pillows of the governor's mansion. New Governor Ralph Northam discovered the photos and advice - sleep when you're dead. If that sounds creepy, consider what was done to McAuliffe, whose predecessor left behind a stuffed bear. Not a teddy bear - a huge, actual bear borrowed from the state office of natural resources. It's MORNING EDITION. DAVID GREENE, HOST: President Trump last night responded to allegations of racism. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No. No. I'm not a racist. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed. GREEN: The president was answering a reporter's question after a weekend of back and forth about whether he used a vulgar word to describe African countries. While his reported word choice is still being debated, this is not the first time the president's words have stoked racial tensions. Conservative columnist Seth Mandel of the New York Post recently wrote about this kind of rhetoric as more than impolite but dangerous. And he joins me from our studio in New York. Good morning, Seth. SETH MANDEL: Good morning. GREEN: So you say language like this is dangerous. Who specifically is in danger? MANDEL: Well, I don't think that it's necessarily somebody is in danger from one statement or from - when the president makes the comment that he did about immigrants from certain countries. But I think, on the whole, it's dangerous to the political system because what the Republican Party has become is a kind of incubator for this kind of talk and this outrageousness. And the candidates that it's putting forth are going to get more extreme unless the incentives are changed in the primaries, which is what I was writing about - is that Republicans have to be - Republicans have to fight it out in the primaries and not nominate people who talk this way because this is the sort of thing that can change a party. And a party can change a country. GREEN: Well, let me ask you about some of the politics here because you've got some Republican senators coming out and defending the president at this moment. What do you feel like they stand to gain? MANDEL: That - you'd have to ask them. It's, perhaps, that there's some sort of policy that they think that they can get cooperation from the White House on. But it also could be just the mere fact that President Trump is a reality. And I think that Republicans in Congress are just trying to figure out how to navigate that reality. And some just feel like they cannot serve in the Republican Party in its current form, as somebody like Jeff Flake. A lot of the Republican senators have seemed to settle on, though, the idea that if you ignore the president's more extreme rhetoric and his crazy tweeting and all that, you can, at least, gain enough of his trust to work with him and hopefully pass things. So they passed tax reform. And they're going to be looking at some sort of infrastructure bill. And maybe they'll take another crack at health care. But I think that Republican senators are basically just saying we can't wish him away. And we can't... GREEN: They feel like they have no choice. They've got to support him in these moments and hope for the best. But let me ask you about the flip side. I mean, the Republicans like yourself, concerned about this from the very beginning - you were a part of the so-called Never Trump movement. So in this election year, with the risk of maybe alienating Trump's base, what do you do? What's your next move? MANDEL: I think that you have to show - you have to show the base that you are powerful enough and strong enough to nominate better candidates. I think that you have to - I think that the base is the most vocal group. And they are more organized in primaries. And they have really been at the forefront of this. And I think other Republicans have to fight it out in the primaries and find a way to not nominate the Roy Moore's of the party and show the base that you can - that, you know, they don't have final say. GREEN: Seth Mandel is an op-ed columnist for the New York Post. And he joined us from our New York studios. Seth, thanks for the time. MANDEL: Thank you. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: When France elected a new president, Emmanuel Macron received the most attention for what he was not. He was not the far-right nativist candidate he defeated. Now that he is president, there's more room to ask who Macron is, or more important, how he wants to change France. He ran on a pro-business platform in a country that's often criticized for hardly seeming pro-business at all. Here's NPR's Eleanor Beardsley. ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: A renovated 1920s train station in the middle of Paris is now a modern hub for startups. Rachel Vanier, communications director of Station F, gives me a tour of the cavernous 110,000-square-foot space that houses a thousand startups. RACHEL VANIER: Basically, we call ourselves a startup campus because we actually have 28 different incubators but also a ton of services. In a few months, we're going to have a housing extension. So entrepreneurs from everywhere in the world will be able to come, attend a startup program, live, eat, meet other entrepreneurs. BEARDSLEY: Station F is funded by a French telecom millionaire. Microsoft and Facebook are just a few of the multinationals sponsoring incubators here. Briton Tom Pullen is one of Station F's 3,000 entrepreneurs. He says Paris is booming these days. TOM PULLEN: I think within Europe at the moment, it's the place to be. Look at the amount of investment that's been raised over the last year, which has hit record levels. Look at the level of confidence for startups in France at the moment. I think what you see is a real wave of positivity, of optimism. BEARDSLEY: Pullen says even a few years ago, he would have never imagined London in such difficulty with Paris enjoying a business renaissance. CHRISTIAN NOYER: Ah, (unintelligible). BEARDSLEY: Christian Noyer was once head of the Banque de France and vice president of the European Central Bank. Since the Brexit vote, Noyer's been in charge of luring multinationals planning to leave London to Paris. The competition includes cities like Dublin, Frankfurt and Luxembourg. Noyer says Paris was a hard sell at first. NOYER: At the beginning, they were afraid to come to Paris or they were saying, well, we'll increase a little bit, but we don't want to take the risk to make the hub there. Now it's changing. BEARDSLEY: Noyer credits the election of Macron. The French president is quickly following through on his promise to transform France. He's overhauled the country's notoriously rigid labor code, making it easier to hire and fire. And his government is preparing a raft of pro-business laws. Noyer says France has the highest labor flexibility in continental Europe, and Paris is now an obvious destination. NOYER: It's the only big, comprehensive city where you find all sorts of activities. It's the only place, apart from London, where you have the whole financial ecosystem - the banks, the insurance, the asset management, the fintech. There is no other place where you find that. BEARDSLEY: Back at Station F, entrepreneur Karen Ko says she's raised a million euros in France for her startup. But she says being here is about more than business. KAREN KO: I actually spent 13 years of my life working in New York City before deciding I needed a change in lifestyle and came to France - and no regret whatsoever in doing that. (Laughter) From a quality-of-life standpoint, it is huge. BEARDSLEY: The appeal of Paris might best be summed up in a recent tweet by Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. After a recent visit, he tweeted, struck by the positive energy, and the food's good, too. Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: In the audio, as in a previous Web version, we say the Station F space covers 110,000 square feet. In fact, it's 366,000 square feet. ] DAVID GREENE, HOST: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is about to get a new leader. Ninety-three-year-old Russell Nelson is expected tomorrow to take over as president of the Mormon church, which is one of the fastest-growing faiths in the world. Our co-host Rachel Martin spoke with Kathleen Flake, a religious studies professor at the University of Virginia who focuses on the Mormon church. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: In the Catholic church, the transition between popes can signal big changes in the focus and the policies of the church moving forward. Is it true for the changes in the leadership in the Mormon church? How significant is the person at the top? KATHLEEN FLAKE: What they prize in their transition is continuity of the tradition. And they choose a man who is most experienced. I shouldn't even say choose. It's the - it's kind of the last man standing. So he's the most mature in terms of experience in the system. MARTIN: The previous president, Thomas Monson, drew some criticism over how the church was approaching same-sex marriage, especially from younger, more liberal contingencies (ph) in the church. Under his watch, The Church of Latter-day Saints reaffirmed its position against same-sex marriage, and it ruled that the children of same-sex Mormon couples cannot be baptized in the church or take part in other important religious rites of passage. Do you expect that Nelson will take any less hard of a line on this? FLAKE: I don't expect so. The difference between Mormonism and most other Christian churches is they have placed marriage at the heart of how they understand people go to heaven. And so they don't view marriage, say, in a Protestant light as a divine good. They see marriage as part of how you become saved. So it's harder for them. They have this gender binary - even this biological binary woven into the heart of their theological system. MARTIN: I want to talk more about women's issues in the church because the church is very specific about women's roles. They are not allowed to assume top leadership positions. A couple years ago, a woman named Kate Kelly who was speaking out for women to be ordained into the priesthood was excommunicated from the church. Is there any reconsideration of women's ability to access the priesthood in that way? FLAKE: Kate Kelly was using the typical ways we argue for social change. MARTIN: Public advocacy and agitating from the outside. FLAKE: That is viewed as rebellion, not political agitation. And that rebellion is usually handled as a family matter. And when it goes public, then the church, too, acts publicly with its means. That's not to say who's right here. It's just talking about a system. You can see Mormonism changing. But they're changing using their own frame. MARTIN: What does that mean in layman's terms? FLAKE: Well, in layman's terms, it means that religious power in Mormonism operates in homes. It operates in chapels. And it operates in temples. And what you can see in Mormonism right now is they are experiencing in each of those venues how to extend women's authority within the church. MARTIN: You think this is happening regardless of who sits at the top of the Mormon church? FLAKE: I think who sits at the top of the Mormon church operates less as a sole actor than people realize. He is always acting within a consular model that demands unanimity among 15 people. MARTIN: Kathleen Flake - she is a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia. Thank you so much for your time. FLAKE: Thanks. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: A long, long time ago, before President Trump had a meeting with lawmakers on immigration - you know, the meeting that sparked a global outcry when the president said he wanted to block immigrants from Haiti and Africa while taking them from places like Norway - before all of that, the president talked of a deal to restore Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I feel having the Democrats in with us is absolutely vital because it should be a bipartisan bill. It should be a bill of love. Truly, it should be a bill of love. And we can do that. INSKEEP: A bill of love. That was just a week ago - less than a week ago. But it seems like months have passed. And over the weekend, the president said a DACA deal is, quote, "probably dead." Our next guest is an immigrant who once was in the United States illegally, Congressman Adriano Espaillat, Democrat from New York. Congressman, welcome to the program. ADRIANO ESPAILLAT: Good morning. Good morning to all of you. INSKEEP: The Republican position now - the president's position essentially - is you guys, Democrats, embarrass the president by talking about his remarks about Africa. And apparently, that means Democrats are not serious about passing a DACA bill. Are you serious? ESPAILLAT: We're very serious. And, in fact, Republicans run government right now. Republicans run the House. They run the Senate. And, of course, it's in the White House. So if anything is not done, it's because they don't want it to be done. They have an absolute majority right now. INSKEEP: Do you sense any change in the will of Congress lawmakers in both parties to get a deal done? Of course, there's a deal on the table to try to keep the government open. But the idea is to include DACA in that. Do you sense any change in the will to do that? ESPAILLAT: Of course. I see rank-and-file members of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party who want this bill passed. The Dream Act, which is a bipartisan bill already put together by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen from Florida and Lucille Royball-Allard from California - a Republican and a Democrat. Eighty-four percent of Americans support that bill. And it has over 200 cosponsors in the House of Representatives. So if that bill was put on the floor today, it would pass. I think we have the support for it. So that's the bill that should be taken up. INSKEEP: You're correct that Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress, but it is a situation where it appears that they're going to need some Democratic support to pass a bill that keeps the government open. Will you, Congressman, and will your Democratic colleagues vote, in effect, to shut the government down if that bill does not include a fix for DACA recipients? ESPAILLAT: Well, in the last continuing resolution, I voted against it because it did not include a DACA bill. And I'm getting ready to vote against it again if it is not included on the 18. And so this is an issue that is very important to my constituents. It defines, in many ways, my district. And I will be voting against a continuing resolution that is not resolved for 800,000 young people. They're really - most Americans want them to stay and to really flourish here in the United States of America. INSKEEP: Congressman, I want people to know a little bit of your story. We mentioned you're an immigrant - Dominican Republic. You'll correct me if I get the details wrong. But we're told that when you were a kid, your family came to the United States. They overstayed a visa, which means that you are almost like a DREAMer, except of an earlier generation. How has that experience affected your views as a lawmaker? ESPAILLAT: Oh, it's very personal to me, and it defines who I am. And had I not been petitioned by my grandmother, who reunited our families - and I think that the Republicans have tried to change their lexicon, and they call it chain migration. But it's really family reunification. And I've been able to come to the United States with my brothers and sisters and my family. And we have now been able to succeed and make America a better place for all of us. So this is very personal to me, and it also defines me, as well. INSKEEP: It's a pretty dramatic story. I want people to know this, also. Your family was here without documents but then returned to the Dominican Republic and got in line. And you mentioned that you eventually got back because your grandmother in the United States said, I want these - family reunification - and got in that way. But part of your process was returning to your home country. And I'm thinking about that now because that is what immigration hardliners say they would rather have undocumented immigrants do. What is the case for not requiring that? ESPAILLAT: Well, it was a different time. When we returned, we returned right to the middle of a civil war in the Dominican Republic, when the Marines invaded the country. INSKEEP: Oh, in 1965. ESPAILLAT: 1965, yes. Had we not gotten our green card, would've been stuck there. We would've never come back here. Our grandparents were here since the '50s, before I was even born. And our family would've been continued to be divided. So we were very grateful that we got the green card. But, you know, times have changed and this is a different world, different planet. And the rules could be different. INSKEEP: And just a few seconds are left here, Congressman. But I'd like to ask, would you argue to keep family reunification, the principle for most immigration today? Would you argue to keep that as part of current law? ESPAILLAT: No question about it. Family reunification is critical. It keeps families whole. It strengthens America. It provides stability in the household. And I think it's better for the country. INSKEEP: Not more of a merit-based system, which is what the president is calling for. ESPAILLAT: The merit-based system will choose to look for folks from Norway, like he wants, as opposed to bringing people that want to bring their families together from all corners of the world. INSKEEP: Congressman, thanks very much for the time. Really appreciate it. ESPAILLAT: Thank you so much. INSKEEP: Adriano Espaillat is a Democratic congressman who represents New York. DAVID GREENE, HOST: After a decade of large-scale growth in overseas enrollment, the number of international students studying at American colleges and universities is dropping. That's leading some schools to make painful budget cuts. And Midwestern universities are among the hardest hit. Stan Jastrzebski of member station WBAA reports that some schools are trying some new strategies to stem these losses. STAN JASTRZEBSKI, BYLINE: About a year ago, Marie Hertzler, who heads Wright State University's modern languages department, knew some of her colleagues would be losing their jobs. The school in southwestern Ohio was dealing with a budget crisis. So it scrapped the Russian, Japanese and Italian language programs. Part of Wright State's money woes stem from declining international student enrollment. It's these students who frequently pay full tuition and fees at American schools, netting more revenue per student than from in-state or scholarship students. So when Wright State's overseas enrollment plunged by about a third from 2015 to 2017, Hertzler says some colleagues started to worry. MARIE HERTZLER: I have had faculty contact me and say, you know, I just want to make sure I understand. Am I at risk? And so I reassure them that I have heard nothing about them being at risk or their program. JASTRZEBSKI: Admissions officials say one of the reasons for the decline is a more skeptical view of the U.S. from prospective students. SUSAN HILLMANN DE CASTANEDA: I do remember one student saying to me as he was walking past my table with the table cloth on it - he goes, oh, you're in the United States, huh? I said, yes. He goes, nope. I can't go there. I'm going to go to Canada or the United Kingdom. JOHN WILKERSON: For the first time in 14 years in this field, last fall, I was asked by a student in Rome if Indiana was a red state or blue state. JASTRZEBSKI: That's Susan Hillmann de Castaneda, who works in admissions at Earlham College, and Indiana University director of international admissions John Wilkerson. Wilkerson says his school tries hard to reassure international students that they'll be welcome on campus, sending students and faculty on more trips overseas to meet with potential recruits one on one. Melanie Gottlieb is with the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admission Officers. She says all the America First rhetoric coming out of Washington is hindering recruiting efforts. MELANIE GOTTLIEB: It's a larger PR effort that's required on the part of an institution to answer those questions and allay those fears. JASTRZEBSKI: Schools are also now paying more to support their international clientele. Purdue University, which has doubled its enrollment from overseas in the last decade, faces criticism from faculty that the school admits too many students who aren't proficient in English. To help deal with that, Purdue established an English language learning center on campus and now requires international students to come to freshmen orientation a week early for immersion classes. Big Ten schools, including Purdue and Michigan State, whose East Lansing campus has weathered a 10-percent decline in international enrollment in the past couple years, may have seen overseas students as a cash cow in a time of declining state funding. Nathan Grawe, an economics professor at Carleton College, is the author of "Demographics And The Demand For Higher Education." Sure, he says, international students offer full tuition for schools, but their presence also helps underprivileged students. NATHAN GRAWE: As they think about international students, I can't help but believe that they recognize that there's an opportunity, then, to invest and subsidize the education of the lower-income students, which is part of their mission, by attracting more full-pay students from abroad. JASTRZEBSKI: Multiple admissions officials say the U.S. is no longer the education Mecca it once was, in part because of the perception that the welcome mat has been pulled by the Trump administration. Add to that better schools in countries like China and India and increased competition from those in countries like Australia. And combined, it likely adds up to fewer international students coming here. And if that continues, schools that have relied on those students' full-fare tuition will likely be facing even bigger budget gaps. For NPR News, I'm Stan Jastrzebksi. (SOUNDBITE OF ALBERT HAMMOND JR.'S "SPOOKY COUCH") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: What are the different ways that Americans protest? Our co-host Rachel Martin has been asking. RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: Here's Martin Luther King Jr. in 1955 in Montgomery, Ala. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest. UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: Yeah. (APPLAUSE) MARTIN: You hear that quote, and you may conjure up images of marches, sit-ins and boycotts. But protest also happens through language itself. Kwame Alexander joins us again to talk about the connection between poetry and protest. Hi, Kwame. KWAME ALEXANDER: How are you, Rachel? MARTIN: I'm well. Thanks. He is of course the New York Times best-selling author of "Solo," which received a 2018 NAACP Image Award nomination for outstanding youth literary work. Kwame, you have brought another voice to our poetry conversation. Do you want to introduce our special guest? ALEXANDER: I would be honored to. She's a professor at Virginia Tech, the author of the latest collection of poetry called "A Good Cry" - Nikki Giovanni. NIKKI GIOVANNI: Kwame is my literary son, so it's wonderful to hear his voice. MARTIN: (Laughter) Well, thanks so much for being part of our conversation today. GIOVANNI: Oh, thank you. MARTIN: I'm going to start off by asking Kwame to describe how you see the connection between poetry and protest. ALEXANDER: When I was 10 years old, I was living in Brooklyn. My father was the headmaster of my school. And one day, we woke up and he says we're going to march over the Brooklyn Bridge. He said, we're going to march against police brutality. But I was afraid that Mayor Koch was going to open up the bridge, and we were all going to fall in and die. This is what my 10-year-old mind thought. MARTIN: Right. ALEXANDER: But they dragged me to this march. We're facing off with police on horses, in riot gear. And I'm crying. And all of a sudden, we start singing. (Chanting) We're fired up. We can't take no more. We're fired up. We can't take no more. And this was sort of the first moment in my life where I realized that language could empower you. GIOVANNI: I'm of another generation. My generation grew up in segregation. So what I saw in language was colored only, white only. I saw a lot of bad language that had to be taken apart. What Kwame is doing - which I think is wonderful - his generation is having to try to help people take that next step, that you use language to make it just a little bit better. MARTIN: We asked you to bring a poem that signifies the connection between poetry and protest today. What did you bring us, Nikki? GIOVANNI: I brought "Black Lives Matter." (Reading) I'm not ashamed of our history because I know there is more to come. I'm not ashamed of slavery, neither bought nor sold, because I know there is another answer. I'm not ashamed of dark or light skin, straight or curly or nappy - let's call it that - hair. I'm not ashamed of thick or thin lips, nor of the time we waste singing and dancing. We taught the white folks to sing and dance, too. I'm proud of Simon the Cyrene. Nobody made him help Jesus. He did his part. I'm proud of the woman who moaned on the ship at the 10th day for admitting if not defeat then certainly change. I'm proud of the rappers who rap. And most especially, I'm proud that Black Lives Matter. We do. We honestly do. MARTIN: That poem, written by Nikki Giovanni, called "Black Lives Matter." Kwame, you also brought this amazing poem by Pablo Neruda that speaks to this conversation. Can you read this? ALEXANDER: Sure. And Neruda, as we all know, began his career writing love poems... MARTIN: Yeah. ALEXANDER: ...And as he matured, witnessed the Spanish Civil War, his poems became more political. (Reading) You are going to ask - and where are the lilacs? And the poppy-petalled metaphysics? And the rain repeatedly spattering its words and drilling them full of apertures and birds? I'll tell you all the news. Look at broken Spain. From every house burning metal flows instead of flowers, from every socket of Spain, Spain emerges and from every dead child a rifle with eyes, and from every crime bullets are born which will one day find the bull's-eye of your hearts. And you'll ask - why doesn't his poetry speak of dreams and leaves and the great volcanoes of his native land? Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see, the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood, in the streets. And that's an excerpt from Pablo Neruda's poem "I Explain A Few Things." MARTIN: Wow. GIOVANNI: Oh, my. MARTIN: Right. GIOVANNI: That was lovely (laughter). That was lovely. (Reciting) Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is stretched out against the sky like a patient etherized upon the table. Oh, do not say you're not able (ph). MARTIN: What's that from, Nikki? GIOVANNI: T.S. Eliot. ALEXANDER: You've got two poets in the room, Rachel. We're just - we just go... MARTIN: But I love - she just, like, sprinkles it around. This is like a... ALEXANDER: This is how we talk. MARTIN: ...Battle of the poets here. GIOVANNI: Oh, no - he'll beat me because I'm way dumber than he is on that (laughter). MARTIN: Nikki, where do you see poetry making change in this moment? GIOVANNI: I don't see anything other than poetry making change. Poetry is something that we all turn to. If you think about going into space - and I'm a big space fan - what are you going to take? You're going to have to take poems because - and excuse me, Kwame - you can take one or two novels. But you know... (LAUGHTER) MARTIN: Yours, of course. GIOVANNI: Of course. But you can't take but so many novels. But you can take a book of poetry because every day that you read it, it's going to be different. And it's going to bring another light to you. ALEXANDER: Rachel, I think we should take some of these young poets who are writing about protest, people like Aja Monet, who wrote an amazing poem about Black Lives Matter. It's a poem called "Word Warriors." This is her reading an excerpt of the poem. (SOUNDBITE OF POEM, "WORD WARRIORS") AJA MONET: Show me a man willing to fight beside me, my hand in his, the color of courage. There is no mountaintop worth seeing without us. Meet me in the trenches, where we lay our bodies down in the valley of a voice. Say her name. GIOVANNI: Oh. MARTIN: That's powerful. GIOVANNI: Absolutely. MARTIN: Nikki Giovanni is an author and a professor at Virginia Tech. Her most recent collection is "A Good Cry." Thank you so much. GIOVANNI: Thank you. ALEXANDER: Thank you, Nikki. We love you. GIOVANNI: Oh, we love you. I'll talk to you later on. MARTIN: (Laughter). ALEXANDER: All right. GIOVANNI: OK. Thanks, sweetheart. MARTIN: So the next time we talk to you, Kwame, it's going to be Valentine's Day. And what we want you all to do, dear listeners, we want you to share a specific moment in your life regarding love and relationships. And then we're going to find a poem for it. This is the whole range of experiences. Right? ALEXANDER: Yeah, we want specific moments. We want that loved one who's no longer here and what you were feeling that day. MARTIN: Right. ALEXANDER: We want, you know, that first look in someone's eyes when you saw them and you knew this is the person. MARTIN: Yeah. And then we're going to give you a poem about that. So go to npr.org/morningpoem to share your love anecdotes - again, npr.org/morning poem. And we look forward to hearing your submissions. (SOUNDBITE OF TAKENOBU'S "MOMOTARO") INSKEEP: Rachel Martin speaking with authors Kwame Alexander and Nikki Giovanni. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: President Trump doesn't sound very optimistic about an immigration deal. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: No. Yesterday, he tweeted, deals can't get made when there is no trust. He was referring, apparently, to Democratic Senator Dick Durbin. Durbin is the senator who publicly affirmed that the president in a meeting offered racist views of immigrants. Numerous reports say President Trump told friends he liked his dismissal of immigrants from Haiti and Africa until the reaction turned out to be worse than expected. Now the president blames Democrats for the failure to reach an immigration deal, although Republican Senator Lindsey Graham says it's on the president. (SOUNDBITE OF WIS TELEVISION BROADCAST) LINDSEY GRAHAM: Mr. President, close the deal. Eighty percent of Americans want to give the DACA kids a better life, and 80 percent of Americans want to secure our border and change a broken immigration system. It's going to take you, Mr. President, to get this done. INSKEEP: DACA - that's Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, and the quote there was from WIS Television. MARTIN: All right, NPR congressional reporter Kelsey Snell is with us in the studio this morning. Hey, Kelsey. KELSEY SNELL, BYLINE: Hi. MARTIN: All right, so just to recap, Congress has to pass a spending bill by Friday to avoid a government shutdown. Democrats won't sign a spending bill that doesn't include protections for DACA recipients. So let's focus on that. How likely is a solution to DACA right now? SNELL: A solution to DACA seemed very unlikely this week. One option that they have is they could - Congress could pass another short-term spending bill. We've been seeing them pass a lot of short-term spending bills, and the House is already preparing to pass something that would give them more time to keep working on a DACA deal and allow them to do a long-term spending bill perhaps sometime in February. So that seems to be the most likely path at this point. MARTIN: Just buy more time... SNELL: Yeah, buying time... MARTIN: ...Because this is so hard. Why is this so hard? I mean, what is the particular sticking point at this point in the negotiations? SNELL: Well, it's very hard to know exactly what the White House wants, and that's part of what the issue is here. So Democrats say that they came up with this bipartisan solution - it was worked out by a group of six senators - Republicans and Democrats - that would've addressed those four pillars that we heard the White House talking about last week - dealing with immigration, dealing with the DACA recipients and controlling some of the flow of people through other immigration programs. MARTIN: Right. SNELL: Now... MARTIN: This is the deal that they brought to the White House when these inflammatory remarks were made. SNELL: Right. And Republicans in the House have a separate plan. Bob Goodlatte from Virginia has come up with a plan for House Republicans that would go even further than that. It would crack down on sanctuary cities, and it would require companies to use what's known as E-Verify to check the legal status of the people that they employ. GRAHAM: So - but the president said he was on board with the plan - the bipartisan plan that was brought to him. And then he just changed his mind. SNELL: Well, he was on board with the idea of a bipartisan plan, but he hadn't signed off on this specifically. And then we saw him bring in people from the hard-line side of the right who got him very excited and reminded him that he had made promises to his base. INSKEEP: And Republicans are shifting here from what was seen as a bipartisan deal to something that they might have to pass with Republican votes only, which can be a tremendous challenge if it gets to that point, given their narrow majority. SNELL: And there's no clear sense that that would actually, A, pass the House, or B, ever pass the Senate. There is a good chance that they could cobble together enough conservative votes to get something like that through the House, but that is not likely to pass in the Senate. MARTIN: All right, NPR congressional reporter Kelsey Snell - I have a feeling we might be talking to you again this week, Kelsey. Thanks so much for your time this morning. SNELL: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) MARTIN: North Korea and South Korea are still talking to each other about the Winter Olympics. INSKEEP: At least they're talking. The North has sent an unusual delegate to this round of talks - a North Korean pop music star. And with that addition to the talks, the two sides reached a little breakthrough. The North will send an orchestra to the Winter Games next month. Across the Pacific, the United States and Canada are hosting a summit to talk about North Korea's nuclear threat, but notably absent from that meeting are Russia and China. MARTIN: All right, we are joined by The Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Cheng, who's been following all this. Hey, Jonathan. JONATHAN CHENG: Hi. Good morning. MARTIN: Let's start with this first meeting, the one on the Korean peninsula. So they're talking about a sporting event - right? - the Olympics, but there seems to be a lot of musical diplomacy happening. Explain the deal here. CHENG: Yeah, well, you're right. The Olympics are supposed to be about sports, and that's what South Korea thought they were getting when they had gotten a sort of agreement in principle from North Korea to send a delegation to Pyeongchang, where the Olympics are going to be held. But instead, Pyongyang says, no, we don't want to talk about the athletes just yet; we first want to talk about an art troupe, a propaganda band. And South Korea right now is not really in a position to want to say no. They are keen to get dialogue moving in any way, so I think they went along with it. And lo and behold, after a couple of hours of talks on Monday, there is a 140-member orchestra coming south to South Korea to perform. MARTIN: At the Olympics or in a different venue? I mean, who's going to be the audience? CHENG: Well, we don't have a lot of specifics yet, but one of the venues will definitely be Gangneung, which is a city where all of the ice events are going to be held - so the figure skating and the hockey. And then the other venue is going to be in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. And, you know, when we talk about an orchestra, there are indeed woodwinds, and strings and brass, but if you go and look on YouTube - and you can watch any of the performances - you'll see electric guitars. You'll see opera singers. You'll see drummers. You'll see all sorts of different things. And it's a different conception of music up there. And, of course, all of the songs are tributes to either the Kim dynasty or to missile launches and things like that. So that's what we're getting. MARTIN: All right, let's move to North America here. In Vancouver, the U.S. and Canada are hosting their own summit about North Korea's nuclear threat. What do we know about this meeting? In particular, what do we know about why Russia and China aren't going? CHENG: Well, clearly, this is something that the U.S. and Canada are trying to get together. And there was a sense among some of the experts who are watching this that the U.S. is really putting its stamp on this, even though it's being held in Vancouver. The U.S., of course, has a bigger stake, you could argue, in what happens with North Korea. And so if the U.S. stamp is going to be on this, then that's not the kind of discussion that China and Russia want to get into. I think Russia and China want to talk about talks, and the U.S. wants to talk about pressure, and that's where the divide is. MARTIN: Do we have any sense if this meeting on the Korean Peninsula is ever going to get to the substance of nuclear disarmament, or is it just, like, way too early for that? CHENG: Well, you know, South Korea raised it at the - yeah. They raised it at the first discussion last week, and North Korea said, we don't want to talk about that, and so it's not on the agenda anymore. INSKEEP: So what we know from the last year or so of confrontation, there are more sanctions on North Korea. There are more threats, plenty of talk of nuclear buttons, actual talk of music and the Olympics and so forth. What we don't know, though, is what the United States and other nations might find that would put sufficient pressure on North Korea to cause it to change its course. MARTIN: Right. OK - Jonathan Cheng of The Wall Street Journal for us this morning. Thanks so much, Jonathan. CHENG: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) MARTIN: All right, now to this very grim story out of Southern California may be disturbing to some listeners. This is something that happened, Steve, in Perris, Calif. INSKEEP: Perris, Calif., about an hour east of Los Angeles - a 17-year-old girl called 911. She said she had escaped her own home, where she and her 12 siblings were being held captive by their parents. Police went to the home, and they found that some of the brothers and sisters were chained, appeared to be starving. The victims are between 2 and 29 years old, although some looked to be much younger than their age because they were so malnourished. The parents have been arrested and charged with torture and other crimes. MARTIN: All right, Shane Newell is a reporter with The Press-Enterprise newspaper. He's been covering this. Shane, what can you tell us about these people, these parents who are now in custody? SHANE NEWELL: I spoke with the neighbors yesterday. I was there for about four hours. And most of the neighbors have expressed complete shock. A lot of them had limited interaction with the family and maybe seen three or four of them come out rather infrequently. But the entire neighborhood is in shock. The house, I guess, was purchased about three or four years ago. No one really knew them closely, and just no one that I spoke to had ever gotten to know these parents or these kids on a personal basis. MARTIN: I mean, just - it's crazy to think that these people were keeping their own children - 13 people - children - young people - in their basement. I mean, so no one - none of the neighbors you talked to had any suspect that there was something weird going on? NEWELL: No, and that's what's strange about the size, as well. I spoke with one neighbor who had a friend who had the same exact floor plan - a four-bedroom, three-bathroom home - and he expressed shock at the concept that 13 children and their two parents would even have the space to live there. But just like I said before, there's a neighborhood watch group. There's a Facebook group where all the residents and homeowners can get together, and talk and let each other know about what's going on. So the fact that this was going on in their backyards has really just shocked everyone in the community. MARTIN: Right. Do you have - do we have any idea how long these children were kept there? NEWELL: We don't at the moment. We do know that the house was purchased in August 2014, but it's unclear as to whether this abuse had continued before the family had moved into their home. MARTIN: Anything about the parents - what they did for a living, how they were perceived in the community? NEWELL: One of the interesting things that we've begin (ph) to uncover is that it looks like three times since 2011, they had renewed their vows at the Elvis chapel in Las Vegas. So we were actually able to obtain a video of one of their marriage renewals that had been posted publicly on the chapel's website - so a lot of questions, I guess, about the fact that they had done that so many times. I know that they had also filed bankruptcy in 2011 - so just trying to put all the pieces together and see who knew what when. MARTIN: Right, it's still very early in this investigation. Obviously, a lot of questions - we will keep asking them. Shane Newell - reporter with The Press-Enterprise newspaper. Thanks so much, Shane. NEWELL: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF ELUVIUM'S "REPOSE IN BLUE") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: When a false alarm spread across Hawaii last weekend, people were horrified. This is not a drill, the alarm said, warning of a missile attack. So people sought shelter, called their families and prayed. A former defense secretary, William Perry, knows the mistake was serious, but says it could have been worse. FORMER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE WILLIAM PERRY: A little silver lining around this dark cloud of the false alert in Hawaii is it may cause us to look more carefully at this issue - not just as it affects state alert systems but as it affects our military alert system where the consequences of a failure could be much, much greater. INSKEEP: William Perry is 90 years old. He was a top Pentagon official during the Cold War in the 1960s and '70s and then defense secretary in the '90s under President Bill Clinton. He has seen a lot, and he's thinking of what would go wrong if a false alarm affected the military early warning system that advises the president. He's seen false alarms before. PERRY: Well, in the United States, I know of three for sure. And I was personally involved actually in two of them. In one of them, the error was putting a training tape into the computer instead of an operating tape. What came through on the computer was a simulation of an actual attack. It looked very, very real. INSKEEP: What did the simulations say was happening? PERRY: It said there was 200 missiles on the way from the Soviet Union to the United States. This was during the Cold War. And it looked very real because it was designed to look real. INSKEEP: How did people respond? PERRY: Fortunately, that night the watch officer was a very intelligent and a very responsible person. He dug deeply. And instead of calling the president in the middle of the night, waking him up and giving him five to 10 minutes to make a decision to launch, he dug into it and concluded it was an error. I know about that because he called me in the middle of the night to tell me about it. So I'll never forget that night. INSKEEP: Was it the almost heroism - or at least the thoughtfulness of a single person that saved the planet in that instance? PERRY: Indeed, it was. In fact, in the Soviet Union, in 1982, they had a comparable false alarm. That's been documented in a movie called "The Man Who Saved The World," where the watch officer that night, like the American watch officer, sensed something was wrong. And he disobeyed his instructions and did not call up the president to let him know. Incidentally, in that case, the man was reprimanded for not having followed instructions. INSKEEP: Is, so far as you know, that still the case - that one person could make the right or wrong decision, and it could decide everything in the U.S. military early warning system? PERRY: One person makes the decision - the watch officer. That decision then - if there's time, there will be a conference of other people to give other judgments on it. But if there's not time, then it might go directly to the president. And then the president if he's woken in bed in the middle of the night, might have five to 10 minutes to decide whether he should launch our missiles in response to that. And if he launches them and if he then discovers a mistake, there's nothing he can do to recall them. There's nothing he can do to abort them in flight. He has mistakenly started World War III. INSKEEP: Well, let me ask about that. Is it really necessary for the president ever to have to decide in five minutes? I'm thinking there's only one other country on earth that conceivably has enough nuclear weapons to take out a lot of American nuclear weapons, and even they might not get them all. It's hard to imagine a situation where if you thought a North Korean missile was coming at the United States, that you would need to fire back within five minutes, isn't it? PERRY: The reason we have a launch-on-warning policy is because we don't want to take the risk of losing our ICBMs. But that has to be balanced against the risk that if the decision is made incorrectly, that we have started World War III by mistake. That's the way we have our system set up. And that's the way it's been set up for many decades. And in my judgment, that's a bad system because it solves the problem of saving - being able to launch the ICBMs before they're struck. But it creates this terrible problem if the decision is wrong, we have accidentally started the war. And therefore the alternative to that is to ride out the attack. And we have enough missiles in our submarines, and we could also launch our airplanes. But they don't - they can be called back. So the solution to the problem is to get away from the dependence on our ICBMs either by riding it out or by actually changing our deterrence forces, so that we only have submarine forces and airplanes. INSKEEP: Oh, because submarines and airplanes move around, and you wouldn't be much less assured to be able to target them with anything. PERRY: That's right. The problem with the ICBMs is they are on a fixed known location. And therefore, they would be targeted. INSKEEP: I'm thinking about Dean Acheson, who as you know, of course, was secretary of state after World War II. And I read the Dean Acheson said that the president of the United States, who makes the ultimate decision here, ought to sit quietly and think really hard about what his decision would be. Do you have any sense of how any particular president has thought about this possibility of launching a nuclear strike? And is there any president you can name who thought about it wisely? PERRY: I think the most relevant comment on that situation came from Henry Kissinger who said that he thought the most terrible decision any president would have to make is whether to launch his nuclear weapons, particularly in the situation where there might be some uncertainty. No person - no person no matter how wise he is should have to make that decision. We should change our process so that no person has to make that decision. And we should also change our process, so that the decision made is made by more than one person - that there's consultation of advisers and so on. The problem with the ICBM attack is that the president may not have time to have that consultation. INSKEEP: There have got to be people listening to us, Mr. Secretary, who have their hearts in their throats, shoulders are pulled up, their chests feel tight. This can be terrifying even to discuss. Does it terrify you? PERRY: It does terrify me. In fact, what really terrifies me is that people really don't understand this issue. They don't understand that the problem we have today - the problem of starting a war by mistake is probably more greater today than it was during the Cold War because the things that can cause that false alert are not just a single person making the wrong judgment. It's not just a machine here. Now we have the possibility of malicious hacking into the system either by a malevolent individual or by an unfriendly government. So the problem today is much greater than it was during the Cold War. INSKEEP: William Perry served as defense secretary under President Bill Clinton. Mr. Perry, thanks very much. PERRY: Thank you, Steve. (SOUNDBITE OF BAULTA'S "SYNCOPE") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep. Computer apps help you translate another language. And soon, artificial intelligence may help you speak dog. A researcher at Northern Arizona University is studying dog communication, wants to better understand what dogs say with tail wagging or growling. His efforts come after 30 years studying the language of prairie dogs. And someday, it's hoped we'll find out if dogs have anything to say beyond feed me, pet me, feed me again, time to go out. It's MORNING EDITION. Woof. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: President Trump doesn't sound very optimistic about an immigration deal. He tweeted yesterday that, quote, "deals can't get made when there is no trust." He was talking about the top Democrat in immigration negotiations. This is Senator Dick Durbin, who stands by his account of the president using vulgar language to describe African nations in a meeting last week about immigration. The president is blaming Democrats for the standoff on an immigration deal, but Republican Senator Lindsey Graham says it is on the president to make this happen. (SOUNDBITE OF WIS TELEVSION BROADCAST) LINDSEY GRAHAM: Mr. President, close the deal. Eighty percent of Americans want to give the DACA kids a better life, and 80 percent of Americans want to secure our border and change a broken immigration system. It's going to take you, Mr. President, to get this done. MARTIN: That was from WIS Television in South Carolina. So NPR congressional reporter Kelsey Snell is in the studio with us to talk about this. Hey, Kelsey. KELSEY SNELL, BYLINE: Hi there. MARTIN: Where do talks stand? I mean, the key to all of this - the government shutdown is contingent on a spending bill. And the spending bill's contingent on a DACA solution - so DACA solution coming? SNELL: We are in a point where people are just buying time. So the idea is that the House is preparing to pass some sort of short-term spending bill. That would give them about another month to keep negotiating. Democrats haven't said where they stand on a short-term spending bill, but they do say they don't want a government shutdown. Nobody wants a government shutdown. They want more time to reach a deal. Problem is, they don't know what a deal would look like at this point because there was one bipartisan negotiation happening, and that was the negotiation between six senators that happened last week, and that was rejected by the White House. MARTIN: So the president says this is tough because there's no trust, in his words, to get a deal done. But isn't he the one who said last week that he was going to sign whatever Congress came up with? And then he reneged on that promise. SNELL: Right. I have spoken with many Democrats who say they don't know what comes next because they don't know what to believe. We heard Senator Graham say that it was on the president. And that's in part because Trump said in that big televised event at the White House that he would take the heat, that he would sign anything. And they took him at his word on that. And then when this White House meeting happened on Thursday, that no longer seemed to be the case. And Democrats felt blindsided by the scenario they entered. MARTIN: Lay out first the strategic play by Democrats and Republicans in this moment. SNELL: Democrats think that there is reason to get a deal because both sides - Republicans, Democrats, the White House - all of them have said that they want an agreement for DREAMers. They don't want these 700,000, 800,000 people to be left in a situation where they don't know what happens in March. The - they hope that that is enough to get everybody on the same page. Republicans, on the other hand - there is a faction of the hard-line Republicans, particularly in the House, who view this as an opportunity to remind the president what he ran on and try to move the entire Congress further to the right. They think that if the House can pass a tougher immigration bill, it will put pressure on Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Senate to put that bill up for a vote in the Senate. MARTIN: But could they do that without Democratic support? SNELL: They can't get that passed in the Senate. There just simply aren't enough votes. This would require 60 votes, and there are not 60 Republicans in the Senate. MARTIN: So when you think about the fact that a DACA solution was something that it appeared that both parties were all in for - right? - like, everyone agreed this is untenable; we've got to fix this. If they can't make this happen, what does it portend for the future in what is already complicated because it's an election year? SNELL: It's very difficult to see how Congress does much of anything if they get this DACA deal done and they get a spending bill done that funds them through the end of the year. So they say they want to do infrastructure and these big-idea things that take time, and they take more agreement than they seem to have. MARTIN: NPR's Kelsey Snell for us this morning. Thanks so much, Kelsey. SNELL: Thank you. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Authorities in Venezuela say they have destroyed a plot against the president, Nicolas Maduro. In a bloody shootout, government forces attacked what they called a terror cell. Oscar Perez is believed to be among the casualties. He is a former police pilot and actor who urged Venezuelans to rise up against their government. Reporter John Otis has more. JOHN OTIS: Oscar Perez had been Venezuela's most wanted man. He made headlines last year when he commandeered a police helicopter, flew over Caracas and, in broad daylight, dropped grenades on the Supreme Court building and fired on the Interior Ministry. A video of the attack was posted on YouTube. (SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE) OTIS: Perez struck again in December. He led a group of armed men into a military barracks, where they tied up soldiers, stole rifles and smashed portraits of President Maduro. Perez's apparent goal was to spark a rebellion against Maduro. Besides cracking down on democratic freedoms, Maduro has led Venezuela into its worst economic crisis in modern history, marked by food shortages and hyperinflation. (SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO, "LLAMADO AL BRAVO PUEBLO DE VENEZUELA, A LA CALLE POR LA LIBERTAD") OSCAR PEREZ: (Speaking Spanish). OTIS: In a video released last month, Perez declared, "let's take to the streets to fight for our freedom." But while there have been outbreaks of looting and numerous anti-government protests, Venezuelans failed to rally behind Perez. Many simply didn't know what to make of him. Perez left the Venezuelan police force years ago to star in low-budget action films. He often portrayed himself in social media as a Rambo-like figure. Many considered his helicopter air raid a bizarre stunt. In fact, critics thought Perez might be working in cahoots with the government to justify a crackdown on the political opposition. RICARDO SUCRE: (Speaking Spanish). OTIS: Via Skype, Caracas military analyst Ricardo Sucre says that a majority of Venezuelans want to get rid of Maduro, but through elections, not violence. The Maduro government's inability to capture Perez had been a huge embarrassment. But on Monday, police and army troops surrounded Perez's group at a safe house on the outskirts of Caracas. (SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE) OTIS: During the ensuing shootout, Perez posted a video on Instagram in which he appeared to be bleeding from a head wound. (SOUNDBITE OF INSTAGRAM VIDEO) PEREZ: (Speaking Spanish). (SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE) OTIS: "We have injured people here, but they keep shooting at us," Perez says. He then screams, "we are going to surrender. Stop shooting." Hours later, the government said that numerous gunmen had been captured or killed. Several media outlets reported that Perez was among the dead, but there was no official confirmation. Human rights activists complained that the rebels were given no chance to turn themselves in. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) VENEZUELA NICOLAS MADURO: (Speaking Spanish). OTIS: However, President Maduro insisted that the police were negotiating surrender terms when Perez's men opened fire, leaving two officers dead and six wounded. In his televised speech, Maduro also issued a warning. (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) MADURO: Todo el que entre por el camino del terrorismo... OTIS: He said, "anyone who resorts to terrorism or takes up arms against the government and the people will be met by military force." For NPR News, I'm John Otis. (SOUNDBITE OF CATACOMBE'S "ZENITH") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Many analysts see the growth and the future of the Catholic Church in what's called the global south. Vast numbers of Christians live in places like Latin America and Africa, so it made sense that the church selected its pope from Argentina and that today, the pope is visiting Santiago, Chile. Thousands of people lined the streets to welcome the pope last night, although there is a cloud over the church in Chile. Dozens of priests there are accused of covering up sexual abuse. Piotr Kozak is following the pope's trip. We've reached him by Skype in Santiago. Welcome to the program. PIOTR KOZAK: Hi. Good morning, NPR. INSKEEP: How has the scandal affected the reception of the pope so far? KOZAK: Well, in different ways. There is the - there are a lot of groups out protesting. There was one group last night on the main highway into Santiago who come from the city of Osorno. That's in the south. And they are protesting about the nomination of a bishop two years ago, three years ago - Juan Barros, who was involved in covering up one of the most prolific pedophiles in the history of the Catholic Church in Chile, Fernando Karadima. INSKEEP: Oh, well, now you're touching on something that would connect the pope to this, in a way - right? - because, of course, there have been scandals for decades, but in this case, we have a bishop who was promoted by Pope Francis himself. KOZAK: As a bishop promoted by Pope Francis - although a letter has just been released - an email from Pope Francis to the Chilean bishops recognizing that there was a - this was an email that released around the - just before Barros was nominated as bishop, saying, yes, there's a problem; we should've - we did want to ask them to (unintelligible) Barros and two other bishops involved in the scandal of their taking a year's sabbatical and then disappearing off of the earth - disappearing from the scene, basically. But then there was a backlash, which appears to have come from the Chilean church - Chilean part of the Catholic Church, which is one of the most conservative of the whole Catholic world, and the... INSKEEP: Oh, the church - the local church stuck up for their guy, even if the pope raised questions. KOZAK: Well, indirectly - yeah, indirectly, they stuck up for the guy, yeah. INSKEEP: Although let's remember, the pope is the pope. He could have not promoted this bishop. KOZAK: The pope has the authority to promote or not to promote. The - in the end, he did promote him. And although he did, in the email, which the church hasn't denied its authenticity - he recognized that there was a huge problem in Chile. INSKEEP: So very briefly, has the pope in his early hours in Chile addressed this scandal in any way? KOZAK: No. They're completely ignoring it. I mean, they're - they are - he's addressing the issue of migrant, which is another major issue in Chile. There's something like 800,000 migrants in this country, 400,000 of which - possibly 200,000 to 400,000 are undocumented. There is an issue with the indigenous people in the south, with - and I've read there that he is going to meet the indigenous people who were - there's a huge conflict going on over land rights with - in - the indigenous lands in the south are almost a military zone, but that's not really reported in the international press. But in terms of the victims of the - of sex abuse, they are not addressing it. And he's - as far as I know, he's not going to meet any of the victims. INSKEEP: So much to discuss. Piotr Kozak - reporter in Chile. Thank you very much. KOZAK: You're very welcome. (SOUNDBITE OF RENE AUBRY'S "LA GRANDE CASCADE") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: The woman known as the mother of Somali music died over the weekend. She was 82 years old, and as NPR's Eyder Peralta reports, a musical revolutionary. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG) KHADIJA ABDULLAHI DALEYS: (Singing in Somali). EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: It's hard to find Somali recordings from the '50s, but this one from 1963 gives you a feel for what Khadija Abdullahi Daleys' voice might have sounded like coming out of a radio back then. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG) DALEYS: (Singing in Somali). PERALTA: As her friend and fellow artist Abdi Gab describes it, this was revolutionary in deeply conservative Mogadishu. ABDI GAB: At that time, no Somali women were singing radio. PERALTA: In fact, when she was done, people took to the streets in protest. And then they went to her father's house to snitch. According to Gab, Daleys' dad shrugged. Yes, she's singing, he said. But what's the problem? The whole world is singing. (SOUNDBITE OF KHADIJA ABDULLAHI DALEYS SONG) PERALTA: And that was it. From then on, Daleys inspired generations of Somali women to find their voice. She became not only one of the most beloved musicians in the country but also one of its most important political voices, advocating for independence and Pan-Africanism - and in this song, calling on Africans to love their blackness. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG) DALEYS: (Singing in Somali). HODAN NALAYEH: There's some people you meet in life, and you're just like, that is a real human being. And that's how she was. PERALTA: That's her friend, Hodan Nalayeh. She says Daleys was always full of life. And the biggest lesson she'll take from her is that as a woman, she should not seek rights. Instead, she should take them and never let anyone define who she should be. Eyder Peralta, NPR News, Nairobi. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Now the story of a modern-day love affair - one in which the couple doesn't even get to hug each other until nine months into the relationship because they had never met in person. ELIZABETH SCHUNCK: Being in love with someone that you've never touched before is scary and weird. MARTIN: That's Elizabeth Schunck. A couple of years ago, she was living outside Detroit. Her marriage was falling apart. And she says she was more lonely than she had ever been in her life. SCHUNCK: I think that had a lot to do with why I started seeking relationships online. I think that feeling of isolation made me so hungry for some kind of verbal interaction with someone on a deeper level that I was willing to put myself out there and say hi to someone on Omegle. MARTIN: Omegle is this chat app that pairs you with strangers to have conversations. And the second person that Elizabeth chatted with on this changed her life. His name is David Reese (ph). SCHUNCK: I remember being like, hi, there, stranger. (SOUNDBITE OF PARRONDO SONG "I'M LOST WHEN YOU SLEEP") SCHUNCK: First thing he asked was ASL. DAVID REESE: ASL stands for age, sex, location. SCHUNCK: Twenty-eight. RESSE: Twenty-two. SCHUNCK: Women. RESSE: Male from... SCHUNCK: Outside of Detroit. RESSE: South Wales. (SOUNDBITE OF PARRONDO SONG "I'M LOST WHEN YOU SLEEP") SCHUNCK: So yeah, I was like, OK, is that like England or something? RESSE: Yeah. (LAUGHTER) SCHUNCK: David and I talk to each other every single day. It was like a door opened, and light started coming through that door. And it was him there. And I just felt like a person again. I'm about to call David. I'm logging into my computer. (SOUNDBITE OF SKYPE RINGTONE) SCHUNCK: Well, hey, there. RESSE: Hey, cutie. The way we stayed in contact was very much a sequence of using Snapchat through the day. And then when the two of us were off work, we would call each other on Skype and just talk. And we would talk for hours and hours. I love your hair. SCHUNCK: My hair? Before I'd met him, I had only seen him in two dimensions. So there's just this energy that's lost. I would pine for him and miss him, and I love him. And I've never even touched his skin before. I don't even know what he smells like. And I was so worried that some biological sense inside me was going to be like this person does not smell like a good mate for you, you know? RESSE: It was around in the summer, I think, we just entertained the idea of wanting to meet. And Elizabeth took the first step and said, I want to meet you. Is that OK? I was like that's more than OK. I want to meet you too. SCHUNCK: So I was just going to go to Wales, and hopefully it worked out. And there's a long-distance subreddit, and I wanted to ask them, how do you get over the anxiety of meeting this person that you don't know but you do know? RESSE: So me being the detective that I am, I googled Reddit long-distance relationships. SCHUNCK: The headline was I've fallen in love from someone across the ocean. RESSE: I opened it up, and I read it out to her. SCHUNCK: And he looked up at me, and he said... RESSE: I love you too, Elizabeth. SCHUNCK: (Laughter). RESSE: And I think it took her a second to process that. SCHUNCK: And I said, I love you, too. I said this is crazy. I miss you, and I love you. And I've never even met you before. Hi. So I remember walking through the gate with my luggage... This is a tiny airport. ...And seeing him. He was sitting down in a chair. RESSE: And as soon as I saw her, I thought, oh, my gosh, she's here. SCHUNCK: He shot up out of the chair, and he came like bounding over to me. And we just had this like epic hug. RESSE: I actually said to her - I said you're here. SCHUNCK: I am here. And I remember smelling him for the first time. And I was like, ah, thank goodness. He smells good, OK, yay. All right, let's go. (SOUNDBITE OF PARRONDO SONG "I'M LOST WHEN YOU SLEEP") SCHUNCK: In olden times, when you'd have a long-distance relationship, you'd send romantic love letters back and forth. And then the couple has those love letters that they can reflect back on later in life. And I think that we'll look back on the way that we communicated now in the same romantic light - that this is the love letter of our time - Snapchat, iMessage, email. Emails are the love letters of our time period. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'M LOST WHEN YOU SLEEP") PARRONDO: (Singing) I've never seen this picture of you. RESSE: I love you. SCHUNCK: Love you. RESSE: Bye. SCHUNCK: Bye. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'M LOST WHEN YOU SLEEP") PARRONDO: (Singing) Who could recognize you? MARTIN: There's a blissful epilogue to this story. Elizabeth Schunck and David Reese are now engaged. David bought a house for them in Wales, and Elizabeth plans to move there later this year. For more on our dating series, What Makes Us Click, you can check out npr.org. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Let's track President Trump's shifting views and shifting story on immigration. The Washington Post offers the backstory to an explosive immigration meeting last week. The president said, as you may recall, in a televised meeting that he would sign any deal for people brought to the United States as children, and then conservatives persuaded him to take a harder line. In a later meeting, the president offered racist views about immigrants from Haiti and Africa, remarks that he liked until he saw the negative reaction. And then he tweeted his words had been twisted and that he really meant to promote immigration based on merit. So that's what we'll discuss with our next guest - merit immigration. Mark Krikorian has advised the president on immigration. He is director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which promotes tighter immigration rules. Thanks for coming by this morning. Really appreciate... MARK KRIKORIAN: Glad to be here. INSKEEP: OK. So some of the president's supporters have denied that he used a specific expletive in this meeting, but they haven't really at all denied that the president said he preferred immigrants from Norway, countries like that instead of Haiti and Africa. Is that a merit system? KRIKORIAN: Well, not if it's based on nationality, but... INSKEEP: That's something else entirely, OK. KRIKORIAN: Yeah, yeah, sure. But, I mean, the point is that if you're basing immigrant selection on skills and education - basically, ability to succeed in the first-world economy - then immigrants from Asia and Europe probably would, just by default, end up more likely to succeed, though that's obviously not the yardstick that we should be using to pick people. INSKEEP: Really? That's interesting. Why would immigrants from Asia and Europe be more likely to succeed than someone from Africa? KRIKORIAN: Well, literacy, level of education - this sort of thing - familiarity with modern life. I mean, again, it's not the way you would pick people. It's just that it would - it might well end up that way. INSKEEP: Yeah. Well, let me just ask about that because I think we probably could pick a country in Africa that has a much lower literacy rate for the total population than a country in Europe, say. But when people have studied the actual immigrants - and immigration is about individuals - the immigrants who come from Africa, they're found to be better educated than the average American. KRIKORIAN: Precisely because - that's actually true. But it's precisely because they're selected based on skill and education, not because of a merit system like the president is suggesting, but almost accidentally because immigrants from Africa have generally come - the initial sort of pioneer immigrants have come as foreign graduate students, very often. INSKEEP: Sure. KRIKORIAN: ...That sort of thing. So inevitably, you start at a relatively high level of education. INSKEEP: Well, you raise an interesting point. We're already getting, in some ways, the best of people from other countries, although the president has said countries "are not sending their best," quote, unquote. So merit immigration - what is it exactly? KRIKORIAN: Well, what - first, the important point to make is it's not a moral statement. I mean, people think of - when they hear merit immigration, they sort of think, well, people who don't qualify are somehow bad. You know, they're sort of morally deficient. That's - what we're talking about here is skills and education - people with, you know, higher levels of skills, English-language ability, that sort of thing. I mean, people, I think, kind of understand what the idea is here. INSKEEP: The president himself in a speech over the summer did lay out a vision for what kind of people he would like to allow to come into the country legally. Let's listen to just a little bit of that. (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: This competitive application process will favor applicants who can speak English, financially support themselves and their families and demonstrate skills that will contribute to our economy. INSKEEP: So is that the basic idea there that is being discussed by those legislators who want to go that direction? KRIKORIAN: Yeah, apparent - I mean, yes, it is. And - but it's important to remember that in any immigration system, you're going to have several streams. One is going to be family. One is going to be skills, education, merit, whatever you call it. Another would be humanitarian. So we're not so much talking about making immigration all one thing or the other, but rather de-emphasizing family, which now completely takes over our immigration flow, and having a greater emphasis on skills and education. INSKEEP: You know, I am kind of curious about this, though. Are you sure that better-educated, more competitive immigrants are what the president's political base really wants to see coming to this country? Do the president's supporters want to compete for jobs against better - let's put this in a brutal way - better-educated brown people? Because as we know, if you really are going to do a merit system, you're going to let in people from Africa. KRIKORIAN: Well, I mean, I can't read anybody's mind one way or the other. But the proposal that the president is pushing - something called the RAISE Act, which Senator Cotton from Arkansas has put together - actually leaves the level of skill-based education what it - where it is now. It just changes it to make it much more streamlined, less bureaucratic and less absurd while reducing the extended-family immigration. So in a sense, the proportion of skilled people in the flow would increase, but at least, within this legislation, the number doesn't. INSKEEP: Oh, that's really interesting. So you're saying the number of people who have skills, who've demonstrated skills, wouldn't really change. What really happens in some of these immigration proposals is just the total number of immigrants allowed into the United States goes down. KRIKORIAN: That's part of it. But the way our current skilled-immigration system works, it's such a Mickey Mouse system that it's actually not selecting the best people that we could select even within that format because there's all these subcategories. It's really just - it's the dream of an immigration lawyer to keep them all employed rather than a simple streamlined system, something like they have in Canada or Australia, that actually tries to take the most skilled people and then work your way down. INSKEEP: You're right. It's an extraordinarily complicated system. It's hard for people to do it legally. Let me just ask, in the few seconds we have, though, why is it important to reduce the number of immigrants coming to the United States? KRIKORIAN: In a few seconds... INSKEEP: (Laughter). KRIKORIAN: I wrote a whole book on this. My broad take on this is that mass immigration is not compatible with the goals and characteristics of a modern society in a whole variety of ways, whether it's economic, fiscal, assimilation, et cetera. INSKEEP: Isn't mass immigration America, full stop? KRIKORIAN: No, it isn't, unless America didn't exist in the '30s, and the '40s, and the '50s and the '60s. INSKEEP: When immigration was restricted after a period of mass immigration. KRIKORIAN: Right, exactly. INSKEEP: Mark Krikorian, thanks for coming by, really appreciate it. KRIKORIAN: Thank you. INSKEEP: He is director of the Center for Immigration Studies. And if you want to find that book, it's called "The New Case Against Immigration." STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Two past White House ethics lawyers - one Democrat, one Republicans - say they agree. They consider President Trump's first year in office to be the most unethical in modern history, and their group has put out a report saying so. Richard Painter served as the top ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, and he's on the line from Minnesota. Good morning, sir. RICHARD PAINTER: Good morning. INSKEEP: ...Where it's rumored to be well below zero. Norman Eisen had a top ethics role in the Obama administration, and he's just been on his phone tweeting out a link to the report we described. Mr. Eisen, good morning to you, once again. NORMAN EISEN: Good morning, Steve. INSKEEP: Let me be blunt here. What's so wrong? The president is continuing to own businesses around the world, true, but he's noted he's exempt from ethics laws. He hasn't broken any laws, according to him. EISEN: Well, Steve, Richard and I had the privilege to come on your program at the beginning of this administration, and we said with great regret and sadness that if the president insisted on that original sin of coming into office with crippling conflicts, every issue he decides on - domestic and foreign - relating to one of his business investments that he's retained, breaking a 40-year bipartisan tradition of giving up your businesses - that that was going to creep like a cancer through his presidency. And it's happened. INSKEEP: But let me just bring in Richard Painter because you said crippling conflicts. The president has noted he's exempted from ethics laws. The way he defines it is, I cannot have a conflict because I am president. Is he wrong, Richard Painter? PAINTER: He's exempted from one particular criminal statute - 18 United States Code 208, which prohibits government officials from participating in particular matters that have a direct, predictable effect on their financial interests. But that's just one particular statute. The real problem with President Trump, or the most serious, most dangerous problem, is he ignores the Constitution. And with respect to financial conflicts of interest, the Constitution has a provision that prohibits any person holding a position of trust in the United States government from receiving profits and benefits from foreign governments. It's called the Emoluments Clause. But it is very clear the founders did not want anybody, including the president, receiving profits of benefits from dealings with foreign governments. He's ignored that. He has refused to divest the businesses that are borrowing money from foreign governments and foreign-government-owned banks that are doing business with foreign governments. And that is one of many serious violations of the Constitution, so I think it's very important to view the ethics problem within the constitutional framework. INSKEEP: Got to note, though - your... PAINTER: ...Because that's the real danger. INSKEEP: Got to note, though - your group sued on that very basis - the Emoluments Clause - and the suit was thrown out. You didn't have standing to sue, regardless of the merits of the case. EISEN: Yeah, well... PAINTER: Yes, that was the basis of our particular standing and the opinion of the federal district judge in New York, and we're appealing that. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of whether the president is in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. INSKEEP: Norm Eisen... PAINTER: And there are two other lawsuits pending, as well. EISEN: Exactly. There - that first case will be appealed, and the next case is coming up in Maryland federal court. Steve, think about it this way. Say, well, CREW can't bring it. The court didn't reach... INSKEEP: That's the name of your group, right. EISEN: That's our group. CREW can't bring it. Well, OK, the next case is being brought by the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia. So if we don't have standing, then surely, a state and D.C. have standing to address these issues. And there's other - there's another case behind that involving Congress, so these matters are going to be heard. And that initial constitutional violation - if you start your administration with violating the Constitution, of course that's going to send a message that it's a free-for-all, and we've just seen a deterioration since then. INSKEEP: I want to ask about another aspect of this because as I understand the judge's ruling - throwing out your lawsuit - the judge said, really, this ought to be up to Congress to police, among other things. Congress, of course, is controlled by Republicans. They've said they want to hold the White House accountable. They've been accused of actually defending the White House. But, you know, we're just been discussing immigration, and it's an issue in which it appears the president was at one point ready to compromise with Democrats, and conservatives realized they needed to stay very close to the president and talk to him a lot or he was going to wander off and not support their policies. You have an example of why Republicans in Congress need, politically, to stay close to the president. What would you advise them to do when it comes to ethics and this president? EISEN: Well, the... PAINTER: Do their job. EISEN: Exactly. PAINTER: To do their job. And, you know, we spent Martin Luther King Day with senior members of leadership in Congress debating about the difference between a blank hole and a blank house. I mean, this is, you know, pathetic. It's not just particular ethics violations. It's the president's attitude, his language, his assault on the Constitution. And that's why it's so important to view these ethics problems within the framework of the Constitution. He has assaulted the First Amendment, the freedom of the press. And now he's going to have this sort of fake news awards. And yes, there's a particular government ethics violation that is violated there. White House staff participate. The important thing, though, is to view this against the background of the Constitution, and he does not respect the First Amendment, freedom of the press, freedom of the free exercise of religion when you talk about a Muslim ban repeatedly. It goes on and on, and we cannot have a president who does not respect the Constitution. That's the way you move toward a dictatorships. INSKEEP: Norm Eisen, you - I just want to ask one last question in the few seconds we have. Can't the president argue he's actually lost some money by being president? There's a hotel in SoHo that has to have the Trump name taken off. People won't stay there because people don't like his policies. He's pursuing policies that have made his businesses less popular. EISEN: How do we know if he's lost or gained? He won't give us his tax returns - another unprecedented act. And all of it has led to this. Contempt for ethics is what led to him making loyalty demands, trying to get Comey to drop the investigation, and it's led to a plethora of unethical conduct across the administration. That's why we've issued our new report at CREW. INSKEEP: OK. Norm Eisen was the top ethics lawyer for President Obama. Richard Painter was the top ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush. Thanks to both of you, gentlemen. EISEN: Thanks, Steve. PAINTER: Thank you, Steve. (SOUNDBITE OF STEV'S "DUNE") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. Now to the drama of this year's Australian Open over bananas - there was CoCo Vandeweghe, who was fined by a referee for refusing to take to the court before she had a chance to eat her banana. The best, though, is Denis Shapovalov. For whatever reason, he could not seem to peel a banana right during a break in his match. A video shows him getting exasperated, even throwing one of the bananas on the ground. Finally, one more go at it - and, yes, he gets the banana open, complete with an arm pump of victory. It's MORNING EDITION. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: North and South Korea are still talking to each other, which is presumably a good thing when you think about everything that's at stake. So far, though, these talks are not about their nuclear standoff. The two nations are talking about the Olympics with some help of musical diplomacy, which we will explain in a moment. Meanwhile, across the Pacific, the U.S. and Canada are hosting a summit to talk about North Korea's nuclear threat. We are joined now by The Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Cheng, who is covering all this. Hey, Jonathan. JONATHAN CHENG: Hi. Good morning. MARTIN: Let's start with this first meeting that's happening on the Korean Peninsula. We've been reporting the last couple of weeks, the North and South are in talks about how the North can participate in the upcoming Winter Olympics. They apparently sent this music pop star - this North Korean pop star - to these talks, and then, as a result, got this symbolic win that has to do with an orchestra. Explain what happened here. CHENG: Yeah. Well, certainly, you can imagine the South Korean delegates weren't expecting to see North Korea's perhaps most prominent pop star appear at the inter-Korean summit there on the DMZ. And her job there, basically, was to emphasize a priority of Kim Jong Un - that they want some cultural diplomacy. They know that the spotlight is going to be on the Korean Peninsula in a couple of weeks, and they've got a bad reputation, and they want to improve it. And I think they see music as a way of doing that. MARTIN: So they got permission to send this orchestra to the South for a performance or two. I want to switch gears and talk about this other important summit meeting happening about the North Korean nuclear threat - this one in Vancouver. The U.S. and Canada are hosting this. Who's going, and who's not? CHENG: Well, you got a lot of the allies of the West, so all the major countries should be there. The major notable absences, really, are China and Russia. And, of course, they're very important. They're two of North Korea's neighbors, and they're the ones that have Kim Jong Un's back, you could argue. And the fact that they're not there really illustrates that - you know, I think the U.S. and its allies could talk a lot about what they want to do, and I think we're going to hear a lot about sanctions and pressure. But as the president himself has noted, China does have a lot of sway here. They have 90 percent of North Korea's trade, and Russia has a lot of the rest of it. And they certainly have a lot of influence, so... MARTIN: Which makes you ask, what good are any conversations about leverage that the U.S. and its allies might have if China is not in the conversation? Because it is the one with the power to move North Korea's behavior. CHENG: Yeah, that's right. You know, even people who are skeptical of Donald Trump have pointed out that he has done a good job - Rex Tillerson, you could give the credit to - for having coordinated a global pressure campaign that has generally borne fruit. You've seen a lot of countries downgrade their relations with North Korea. You've seen them start to feel the pinch. But without China, you can't really close that circle. MARTIN: Any chance that these talks between North and South Korea at the DMZ that are about the Olympics - any chance that they're going to move to more substantive issues? CHENG: Yeah, they have another talk on Wednesday. And then there's another one on Saturday in Switzerland with the IOC. And there, they're going to really get down to brass tacks about which athletes are going to be coming or not, and we'll see what happens from there. MARTIN: But continued conversation about the Olympics - nothing about the nuclear standoff at this point. CHENG: Not at this point. North Korea's been pretty insistent about that. MARTIN: They don't want to go there. All right, Jonathan Cheng of The Wall Street Journal, reporting in Seoul this morning. Thanks so much. CHENG: Thank you. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Police made a gruesome discovery in Perris, Calif. Sheriff's deputies in Riverside County say they freed 13 siblings - freed the siblings from their own parents. The parents are accused of holding their children captive. And we should warn that we have descriptions of extreme child abuse in the next three minutes. Benjamin Purper of our member station KVCR has our report. BENJAMIN PURPER, BYLINE: Perris is home to about 70,000 people in the Inland Empire region of Southern California. It's mostly homes and cul-de-sacs, and it doesn't usually see a lot of news. But after the Riverside County Sheriff's Department announced that 13 siblings have been rescued in their own home, TV satellite trucks filled the block where the Turpin family has lived since 2014. The parents of those 13 siblings, David and Louise Turpin, are now jailed on charges of torture and child endangerment. Wendy Martinez lives a few houses down from the Turpins. She described a time she greeted some of the Turpin children who were in the front yard. WENDY MARTINEZ: And the mother was just in the archway, just there. And as I was walking by, I just said, hi. And the kids didn't even move, like, you know, like, not even, like, to look to who was saying hi or nothing, like they weren't allowed to speak with anybody. Now I'm seeing that that's why they acted the way they acted. PURPER: Deputies say that early Sunday morning, one of the Turpin children, a 17-year-old girl, found a cell phone in the house and called 911. She told deputies she'd escaped her family home and that her 12 brothers and sisters were being held captive there. Deputies searched the house and found the girl's 12 siblings in a horrific scene. According to the Riverside County sheriff, several children were chained and padlocked to their beds. Deputies described the four-bedroom home as dark and foul-smelling inside. Child Protective Services gave the siblings food and drink. They said they were starving. The Turpins had lived in the area since 2010, first in the nearby town of Murrieta. In each of the Riverside County homes, they had been approved by the state of California to run a private school. The school in their current home is a secular K-12 called the Sandcastle Day School. Last year, state records showed Sandcastle had six students in fifth through 12th grade. The principal was the father, David Turpin. Kimberley Mulligan lives across the street from the Turpin house. She said she once tried to talk to some of the children while they were putting up Christmas decorations. KIMBERLEY MULLIGAN: But when we walked across the street, we said to them, hey, you know, the decorations, they look really nice. And what was interesting that happened was, they went into a mode of, like, a child, a child whose only mechanism is, I'm invisible; you can't see me. They were terrified. PURPER: The Riverside County Sheriff's Office says the siblings were so malnourished that deputies were shocked to find out that several of them were adults, with the oldest being 29. Kimberley Mulligan was shocked to find that out, too. MULLIGAN: Physically, they don't look their age, and based on what we experienced with them, emotionally, they are not their age. PURPER: Mulligan says people in the neighborhood felt something was strange, but not enough to do anything like intervene. MULLIGAN: Going forward, I think I'm going to be a lot more in tune to surroundings - you know, try to break that cycle of, we all just go into our own little houses and just disconnect from the whole world. PURPER: David and Louise Turpin's bail is set at $9 million each. They're scheduled to appear in court Thursday morning. And the Turpin's children have been transferred to local hospitals, where they're receiving treatment. For NPR News, I'm Benjamin Purper in Perris, Calif. (SOUNDBITE OF DAIGO HANADA'S "SOLITUDE") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: In the mid-1990s, the Irish rock band The Cranberries was everywhere. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LINGER") THE CRANBERRIES: (Singing) But I'm in so deep. You know I'm such a fool for you. You... MARTIN: That's the song "Linger," which stayed on the Billboard charts for more than 20 weeks. At the front of the band was the singer Dolores O'Riordan. She died yesterday at the age of 46 in London. We still don't know the cause of her death. NPR's Andrew Limbong has this appreciation. ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: In 1993, the IRA set off a bomb in an English suburb, killing two children and injuring dozens more. Dolores O'Riordan was on tour in the UK when she heard about it and took the violence to heart. Back in her home, she put feelings to words and chords, and what resulted was one of the loudest, heaviest and more well-known songs The Cranberries had ever written. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ZOMBIE") THE CRANBERRIES: (Singing) In your head, in your head, zombie, zombie, zombie. What's in your head... LIMBONG: She told a French TV music reporter in 1999 that even though it was a political song, it wasn't necessarily politics she was interested in writing about. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LE MAG") DOLORES O'RIORDAN: To me, I just wrote that song basically about a child's life being taken because of troubles, which in any country is not just, you know? And I'm afraid I'm a bit anal. If I think something, I have to say it. And I really don't care what anybody thinks, you know? Just... EVELYN MCDONNELL: There was a certain naivete to her and also a real toughness. LIMBONG: That's Evelyn McDonnell, a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University who also writes about music. MCDONNELL: There is a lot of anguish in her voice and in The Cranberries' music and a lot of sense of her trying to rise out of coming from a big Catholic family and being, like, the tomboy rebel girl. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DREAMS") THE CRANBERRIES: (Singing) Then I open up and see the person falling here is me, a different way to be. (Vocalizing). LIMBONG: Dolores O'Riordan was born and raised outside Limerick, Ireland, the youngest of seven siblings. She grew up on a healthy dose of The Smiths, The Cure, Depeche Mode and joined The Cranberries when she was 18. Their first album "Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?," which included this song, "Dreams," was a hit. McDonnell says part of the appeal was that in O'Riordan's singing, she didn't try to mask her accent. But the sudden rise to fame didn't sit well with O'Riordan. Here's what she told WXPN's World Cafe in 2007. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST) O'RIORDAN: I actually found my teens to be the most difficult time ever because, you know, you're kind of insecure. You're self-aware. And then, you know, you're growing up - also growing up in the public eye. It's a little bit harder. Everything is kind of underneath the microscope. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DREAMS") THE CRANBERRIES: (Singing) Oh, my life is changing every day in every possible way. LIMBONG: The band overworked themselves into a hiatus by the mid-2000s. But O'Riordan stayed active with projects, including a couple of solo albums. In the later years, O'Riordan came out about many issues that afflicted her, including sexual abuse when she was a child and bipolar disorder. The Cranberries eventually reunited. Just last year, they put out an album that included orchestral versions of their old hits. A cynic might see that as a group trying to relive a past era, but she told The Irish Times, quote, "now we're older, we have kids, and I know we'll never get those earlier moments back again, not that I want them." Andrew Limbong, NPR News. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ODE TO MY FAMILY") THE CRANBERRIES: (Singing) Unhappiness where's when I was... RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: A prominent Buddhist scholar in Thailand has been charged with insulting the monarchy over comments he made about a battle that occurred over 400 years ago. On Wednesday, the scholar will find out if the military-led government intends to prosecute. He could face 15 years in jail. Michael Sullivan reports from Bangkok on the Thai government's increasing use of lese majeste - laws to silence critics. MICHAEL SULLIVAN, BYLINE: The battle in question is a popular story in Thai history, especially with the military, immortalized in print and in film like this one - a story of a Thai king slaying a Burmese crown prince in a duel, riding elephants. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE LEGEND OF KING NARESUAN 5," ELEPHANT TRUMPETING) SULLIVAN: The problem, says Sulak Sivaraksa and many other scholars, is that it may not have happened that way, that the prince may have been felled by a bullet or killed some other way - maybe not by the king. And Sulak said so at his seminar, and that was enough to get him charged. SULAK SIVARAKSA: In this country, myths become truth. And I question the myths, so I may be punished 15 years in prison. SULLIVAN: Ironically, the world-renowned scholar considers himself a staunch royalist, but that hasn't kept him from getting in trouble before. SULAK: This not the first case. They charged me so many cases already. The Buddha said we should speak the truth, and in this country full of half-truths, I denounced the half-truths openly all my life. SULLIVAN: The 85-year-old says if he has to go to prison and spend his hundredth birthday in jail, he'll do so joyfully. That's humor, he says, not sarcasm. He's about the only one finding any humor here. JAMES GOMEZ: To prosecute a scholar for comments he made about a battle that took place more than four centuries ago is patently absurd. SULLIVAN: James Gomez is Amnesty International's director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific. GOMEZ: This case reminds us how ugly it is in Thailand where Thai authorities increasingly are using the lese majeste law as a tool for suppression. DAVID STRECKFUSS: This reflects a change that's happened over the last 10 years in Thailand. SULLIVAN: David Streckfuss literally wrote the book on lese majeste. It's called "Truth On Trial In Thailand." STRECKFUSS: Ever since the coup in 2006, the number of cases has skyrocketed. And so there's been hundreds charged - hundreds, or maybe even thousands charged - or investigated, at least - and hundreds jailed for this, with a very high conviction rate. SULLIVAN: Streckfuss says this is probably the No. 1 human rights issue facing Thailand today. STRECKFUSS: It creates such a chilling effect on the entire society and locks down any sort of movement or discussion about political institutions and the future of Thailand. And it has been used more, to greater effect, with greater coverage until it really locked down any hope of democracy being able to grow in Thailand in the near future. SULLIVAN: As for Sulak Sivaraksa, it seems unlikely he'll go to prison. He's too well-known, too well-respected in Thai society and abroad, unlike many others who've been convicted of lese majeste, like the 31-year-old sight-impaired woman jailed earlier this month for reposting an article critical of the monarchy on her Facebook page. Still, Sulak will show up at military court on Wednesday at 10 a.m. to hear his fate. SULAK: I am pretty certain in my heart and my head that they will drop my case. But if they ask me to apologize, I will never do that. SULLIVAN: For NPR News, I'm Michael Sullivan in Bangkok. (SOUNDBITE OF EDAMAME FEAT. EMANCIPATOR'S "PASSIM") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Some big players from Donald Trump's campaign are expected to appear before congressional investigators this week. One of them is Steve Bannon, former campaign manager and later White House chief strategist who recently had a very public falling out with the president. The other is Corey Lewandowski, who ran the Trump campaign in its early stages. Over the weekend he told WABC Radio that he's ready to answer any of the investigators' questions. (SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "THE RITA COSBY SHOW") COREY LEWANDOWSKI: I didn't collude or cooperate or coordinate with any Russian, Russian agency, Russian government or anybody else to try and impact this election. So they asked me to come in. I said I would. It's going to take place sometime next week. I'm not exactly sure when, but I'll be happy to come out and set the record straight about my lack of involvement with any type of foreign entity. MARTIN: NPR's justice reporter Ryan Lucas is in our studios this morning. Hey, Ryan. RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Good morning. MARTIN: All right. So who exactly are Lewandowski and Bannon talking to? 'Cause there are several congressional investigations going on, right? LUCAS: That's right. That's right. They are meeting with the House Intelligence Committee, which is - you noted that there are several. There are three in total that are investigating Russian interference. Bannon is expected this morning. Lewandowski, in that interview from WABC, said probably Wednesday or Thursday is when he would appear. And one last thing. These are behind closed doors so we're not going to have some sort of public spectacle to be able to watch this. MARTIN: Let's start with Steve Bannon. He lost his job at Breitbart because of comments that he made in that new Michael Wolff book. He called this meeting that happened between Don Jr. and a Russian lawyer, quote, "treasonous." So presumably Steve Bannon is going to be asked about that remark? LUCAS: Presumably, yes. Now, that Trump Tower meeting was in June of 2016 when the Russian lawyer was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. Bannon was not with the campaign at the time, but of course he played a significant role later on and may have inside knowledge from his time with the Trump campaign about possible Russia contacts. Now, in the Michael Wolff book, he also talked about money laundering and how that would be a focus of the special counsel's investigation, a possible line to Trump, said that Trump Jr. would crack like an egg. And Bannon may also be asked about phone calls. This isn't from the book, but phone calls that Michael Flynn was making to a senior transition official in late December after Flynn was talking to the Russian ambassador. Flynn spoke with someone at Mar a Lago where transition folks were meeting to discuss national security. We know this because this was in court papers. Bannon was at Mar a Lago at the time so he may be able to provide some sort of insight as to whether that came up at all in those discussions. MARTIN: OK. So that's Steve Bannon and a possible line of questioning to him. What about Corey Lewandowski? LUCAS: Now, Lewandowski of course ran the campaign early in the presidential race, left in late June of 2016. But there's a good chunk of time there for investigators to ask him about. In his WABC interview, that bit where he's saying quite clearly, I didn't collude, I didn't coordinate with the Russians, I didn't do anything wrong - you can say that, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing to ask about, right? MARTIN: Sure. LUCAS: So Lewandowski is believed to be the high-ranking campaign official mentioned in other court papers. These would be the court papers from George Papadopoulos, the former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. Papadopoulos reportedly told Lewandowski about his outreach to the Russian government where he also heard about dirt that the Russians might have on Hillary Clinton. And Papadopoulos, of course has been - he's pled guilty to lying to the FBI. MARTIN: Hope Hicks, also reportedly going to be talking with the House Intelligence Committee this week. She's of course the White House communications director, a longtime confidant and aide to Donald Trump. A line of questioning to her. What would that be? LUCAS: Well, Hicks, as you mentioned, has been with Trump for a while. She doesn't like the spotlight, very much prefers to remain behind the scenes. But she played an important role during the campaign, has been in key meetings, key discussions over the course of Trump's run for the White House and then once he was in the White House itself. Lawmakers clearly interested in hearing anything she might know about contacts between Trump associates and Russians, but also she's likely to be asked about the White House and the president's role in drafting the public statement about Trump Junior's meeting at Trump Tower... MARTIN: 'Cause it would've been her job to help craft that. LUCAS: Exactly. And Trump Jr. reportedly has said that that's who she talked to. MARTIN: And in that the president said that he wasn't around, didn't meet with these people when they came to Trump Tower. There's been a lot of focus on when we talk about the Russia investigation, we usually mean the one being conducted by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, but where do the Russia investigations that are happening on the Hill, where do they stand at this point? LUCAS: Well, the House Intelligence and Senate Judiciary Committees are mired in kind of partisan battles right now, but the Senate Intelligence Committee is moving forward proceeding with what remains a fairly bipartisan effort. MARTIN: All right. NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas. Thanks so much, Ryan. LUCAS: Thank you. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: A government born in protest is facing widespread protest. Tunisians overthrew a dictator in 2011, an event that brought on the wider Arab Spring. The seventh anniversary of that moment has arrived with a more democratic government that has left many citizens dissatisfied. (SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST) UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting in foreign language). INSKEEP: In recent days, protests swept the capital, Tunis, and authorities arrested hundreds of protesters. So what's driving them into the streets? We asked Tunisia's ambassador to the United States, Faycal Gouia. FAYCAL GOUIA: Of course, we lived a transition. It's a huge transition politically, socially, economically. People have very high expectations beyond the capabilities of the country and the government. Actually, the government has many limitations. INSKEEP: What are the things that people want that the government is unable to deliver? GOUIA: Mostly jobs. More than 60 percent of the population's under 30, and the government is providing these young men and women with education. Education in Tunisia is free from the kindergarten to university. And once they graduate, they are seeking, also, jobs from the government, and the government, because of the economic situation not only in the country, but also in the region, is not able to provide all these young people with jobs. INSKEEP: This has been a problem in Egypt, other Arab countries, we could mention. GOUIA: So many countries are suffering from the same problem, but I think this is a very good asset. It's an opportunity for Tunisia because once the economy is back to normal, we have a real human capital that we can use for Tunisia's development. INSKEEP: We're told that there is also a very specific objection to specific government decisions, that Tunisia owes money to the International Monetary Fund, and to help pay that, the taxes have been raised. GOUIA: Not really. This is not the truth. Of course, we have some commitments with the IMF, but the government is adjusting its economy and its finance. The increase is very slight. I'll give you an example. There were some increases in gasoline. INSKEEP: I'll tell you, when gas prices go up in the United States, many people complain. GOUIA: But it's slightly... INSKEEP: I'm sure it's true there, as well. GOUIA: It's only 5 cents. But, of course, the impact could be felt later on. But in reality, it will not change, you know, the life of the people in the country but... INSKEEP: But it becomes politically explosive, doesn't it? GOUIA: Exactly. INSKEEP: ...When you say, we're raising taxes, however slightly, to pay foreign creditors, people can - you can get up a crowd to protest that. GOUIA: The reason is not that, exactly, but the reason is to balance our finance. INSKEEP: Let's just say, hypothetically, that some of these protesters came to your door, came to your residence here in Washington, D.C., and just said, you know, we're very unhappy; it's been seven years since the revolution in Tunisia; tell me what's better. How would you answer them? What's better? GOUIA: This government is doing very well when it comes to economic reforms, when it comes to creation of jobs. And, of course, the expectations of the people are very high, and sometimes, they are impatient. Seven years, remember, in a life of a nation is not that long, and... INSKEEP: Is the economy growing in Tunisia even if the job market is not quite catching up? GOUIA: The economy for the first time is growing. For this first years after the revolution, it was a problem for the growth, but now the growth is back. We are expecting 3 percent for 2018 and 4 percent for 2020. INSKEEP: As of early this week, as I understand it, the United Nations reported about 800 arrests of protesters. Has the government been using, in your view, the correct amount of force and coercion? GOUIA: Eight hundred - I think it's a bit high. The last numbers given by the Ministry of Interior is about less than 500. INSKEEP: OK. GOUIA: And these people are arrested because they were using violent way to protest. And people who want to protest - they are free to do it in Tunisia. It is a constitutional right. But if you want to protest, you do it during the day, not at night, and you never aggress people or destruct public and private properties. So these people are arrested, and they will have a fair trial. And believe me, the number of the police and security agents that were injured in these events is much higher than the people who were protesting, so that means that the violence is coming from the protesters, not from the security agents. INSKEEP: Ambassador, thanks for coming by. I've enjoyed this. GOUIA: Thank you very much for the invitation, and I wish you Happy New Year. (SOUNDBITE OF ELUVIUM'S "REPOSE IN BLUE") INSKEEP: That was Tunisia's ambassador to the United States, Faycal Gouia. DAVID GREENE, HOST: OK. Today the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments in a case that involves a pretty surprising plot twist. The lawyer for the defendant in a brutal triple-murder case told the jurors that the accused, his client, was guilty. The defense attorney said he did this in an effort to avoid the death penalty despite his client's insistence he was innocent. And the question before the justices today is whether that lawyer violated his client's constitutional right to counsel. Here's NPR's Nina Totenberg. NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: In 2008, Robert McCoy's wife, Yolanda, took her infant daughter and fled Louisiana. She went into protective custody in Dallas after her husband held her at knifepoint and threatened to kill her. She left her son with her parents, so he could finish high school and graduate. A month later, McCoy was arrested and charged with killing his wife's parents and her son. A 911 tape recorded Yolanda's mother screaming, she ain't here, Robert. I don't know where she is. The detectives have her. A gunshot is heard and then the line goes dead. From that day to this, although the evidence against him was overwhelming, McCoy has proclaimed his innocence, alleging that the killings were the product of a drug deal gone bad and that police conspired to frame him because he supposedly revealed their involvement in drug trafficking. Five months after McCoy's arrest, state psychiatric experts found him mentally competent to stand trial. But he was continually at odds with his public defenders, eventually firing them for refusing to file subpoenas he prepared for a dozen witnesses he said could support his alibi defense and other claims. He briefly acted as his own lawyer until his parents hired Larry English to defend him. And even then, the defendant continued to file motions in his own defense. Lawyer English repeatedly advised McCoy to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison or to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. But McCoy refused, insisting that he was innocent. Finally, English embarked on a strategy of conceding his client's guilt in hopes of avoiding the death penalty. Directly contradicting his client's instructions, he suggested that McCoy suffered from diminished mental capacity and should, therefore, only be convicted of second degree murder. But as the prosecutor would soon explain to the jury, that defense was legally unavailable to McCoy because Louisiana only allows a diminished capacity argument if the defendant has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. It was one of many mistakes English appears to have made during the trial. Throughout, McCoy kept interrupting his lawyer's concessions of guilt, even trying to fire him. The jury ultimately sentenced McCoy to death. And the question today is whether he was denied his constitutional right to counsel. On one side is McCoy's new lawyer who will tell the Supreme Court that when a criminal defendant refuses to plead guilty, the lawyer is not free to disregard that decision. On the other side, the state of Louisiana argues that when a lawyer and his client have irreconcilable differences, the client has a choice represent himself or cede the strategy for the trial to his lawyer. Because McCoy did not try to fire his lawyer until just days before the trial, the state contends he had to let the lawyer dictate legal strategy. Ten leading legal ethics experts have filed a brief in the case siding with McCoy. Lawrence Fox, a Yale Law School ethics lecturer, says these cases occur more often than you might expect, especially in capital cases where defendants are only rarely found incompetent to stand trial. LAWRENCE FOX: This is a very difficult issue, obviously. Most of us would think that the lawyers should just do what's in the best interest of the client in the view of the lawyer. TOTENBERG: But the Constitution and the legal profession have drawn the line differently, he says. FOX: The client should get to decide because the client is the person who's going to suffer whatever the result is. And we can imagine many situations where a lawyer might be overbearing. TOTENBERG: So overbearing that the lawyer's will can sometimes trump his client's ability to be master of his own fate. A decision in the case is expected by summer. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington. (SOUNDBITE OF BRONTIDE'S "TONITRO") DAVID GREENE, HOST: You remember that White House meeting last week where President Trump used some choice words? RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: I vaguely recall some news coverage of this. But... GREENE: But we're famous on Twitter for using a word we never expected to say on the air... MARTIN: Right. GREENE: ...I would say. MARTIN: All right. So let's take a step back and remember why this meeting was called in the first place. A bipartisan group of senators thought that they had an immigration deal. It included a fix for young immigrants who were protected by DACA - this is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program - and it expires in March. And it seemed like President Trump was open to this deal, and then he nixed the whole thing. GREENE: And then there hasn't been much progress at all since then, despite this big deadline coming on Friday. Congress needs to pass a spending bill by then or the federal government will shut down. MARTIN: All right. So that can - can that be avoided? Late last night, Republicans in the House proposed a plan, a short-term spending bill that essentially kicks the immigration can down the road. And the bill, though, might have some appeal for Democrats. GREENE: All right, let's get some details of this from NPR's Mara Liasson. Hi, Mara. MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, there. GREENE: OK. So what is in this short-term spending bill that may be the key to preventing a shutdown? LIASSON: Right. Well, here we are, just a couple days away from a shutdown. And this bill would extend government funding until February 16. So it's just a very short-term bill to buy Congress some time to work out the most difficult issue, which is the immigration issue - which is not included in this funding bill. What it would do - it would extend the reauthorization of the Children's Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, for six years. It would extend some delays of Obamacare-related taxes. And it would include a provision to provide more money for missile defense, which should appeal to conservatives. GREENE: OK. But you hear about CHIP there. This is Republicans saying we're going to give Democrats some things that they want. But they're not going to deal with immigration at this point. So this goes to the House floor - when? - Thursday, right? Could this pass? LIASSON: Yes, that's what we're - it's expected to go to the House floor on Thursday. The question is - would Democrats vote for this, and do Republicans have 218 votes on their own - without Democrats - to pass it? They did pass the last short-term funding bill all on their own. They didn't need Democratic votes. But the Freedom Caucus, the conservative group of House members, hasn't signed on to this yet. And then of course the question is - what happens when it goes to the Senate? - because there, they do need 60 votes. They would have to have Democrats supporting it because, unlike the tax bill or judges, this bill will take compromise. GREENE: So it sounds like a lot of this is Democrats having to decide if they want to put down the marker now and say, we would hold up the government and shut it down over immigration, or whether they feel like they could wait and have that debate sometime soon. LIASSON: That's right because the deadline for the immigration portion of this is March 5. The president - remember - revoked the protection from deportation for the DREAMers. He gave Congress six months to come up with an alternative. That six-month time frame runs out in the beginning of March. And - you're right. Democrats have to decide - will they have more leverage in March, or do they have more leverage now? There is an internal debate. But most Democrats say let's just buy ourselves some more time and see if we can get a deal a couple weeks down the road. GREENE: Is this the last chance, this bill that would go to the House floor Thursday, to avoid a shutdown? Or could there be more last-second maneuvering to... LIASSON: Well, there could always be more last-second maneuvering. GREENE: That's always, yeah. LIASSON: But the clock is ticking, and the government shuts down on Friday if it doesn't have a - if Congress can't make a deal. GREENE: All right, clock is ticking. NPR's Mara Liasson. Mara, thanks. LIASSON: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GREENE: All right, some news this morning that is related to a pair of deadly U.S. Navy crashes that we remember from last summer. MARTIN: Yeah. The first crash happened back in June. This is when a U.S. warship collided with a commercial ship off the coast of Japan. And then the other incident was in August. This is when a destroyer hit an oil tanker near Singapore. And now we know the two commanding officers could actually face charges, including negligent homicide. So the question - what do these charges say about what actually went wrong in these two events? GREENE: Yeah. NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman is here. Hey there, Tom. TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Hey, David. GREENE: So I remember we were asking these questions back over the summer like, could anyone be blamed for this? It sounds like that might be happening. So - I mean, who is exactly being charged here? BOWMAN: Well, in the case of the Fitzgerald, it's the former commanding officer, Commander Bryce Benson, along with three of Fitzgerald junior officers. And they're being charged with a mix of charges - dereliction of duty, hazarding a vessel and negligent homicide. Seven sailors were killed in this accident off Japan. And in the second case with the McCain, they're charging - or looking at charging Commander Alfredo Sanchez. He faces, also, similar dereliction of duty charges, hazarding a vessel and also negligent homicide. And in that case of Singapore, 10 sailors were killed in that accident. GREENE: So we're talking about two different cases. I mean, just so we understand why these people may have been to blame, can you remind us exactly what went wrong in each? BOWMAN: Well, in the case of the Fitzgerald, I was talking with a retired officer. He said there was a breakdown in ship-driving 101. The officers on the deck misjudged the distance between their ship and the cargo ship. They didn't contact the captain when they were clearly in trouble. And here's the other thing, David, which is remarkable. Investigators said there was a lack of basic knowledge of radar and the fundamental rules of the nautical road. In the case of the McCain, this is even more startling. There was confusion about who was driving the ship and who was operating the engines. And that resulted in, you know, uncertainty. And then the ship - the McCain actually turned into a cargo ship. And in that case, 10 sailors were killed. GREENE: Tom, am I crazy? It feels like it is insane to think that the U.S. Navy might not have basic navigating skills to run ships out on the water. I mean, this is a huge moment for the Navy. I mean, did they have to do a lot here to improve operational safety? BOWMAN: You know, first of all, David, you are not crazy. And there are serious questions raised about, can the Navy sail its ships? The top naval officer Admiral John Richardson met was reporters last fall. And we asked him these questions. He said, we're sending out review teams to the fleet to make sure they have the basic knowledge of how to drive a ship and navigation and the fundamentals of just operating a ship. And Admiral Richardson will appear on Thursday before the House Armed Services Committee to talk about this review and what his investigators have found about, again, sailors being able to sail ships. GREENE: My God. The Navy having to appear in Congress to answer basic questions about navigating. I mean, that's not going to be a good moment for them. BOWMAN: No, it's not. GREENE: NPR's Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman. Tom, we appreciate it. BOWMAN: You're welcome, David. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GREENE: All right, now to the striking testimony of some of the victims of Larry Nassar. MARTIN: Yeah, Nassar was the doctor who, for decades, used his position as the primary doctor for the U.S. Olympics gymnastics team and Michigan State University to assault more than a hundred young female athletes. Yesterday in court, one of those victims, Jade Capua, confronted Nassar. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JADE CAPUA: We can walk free and radiate the strength that we have gained from your horrific acts, something you will never be able to do. MARTIN: Nassar's now serving 60 years in jail on federal charges of child pornography. This week, he's in a Michigan courtroom being sentenced on state charges. GREENE: And one of the reporters following that is Mark Alesia. He is with The Indianapolis Star, part of a team of journalists who broke the original story here. Mark, welcome. MARK ALESIA: Thank you. GREENE: So yesterday, this was just the first day of Nassar's sentencing. I just - listening to the tape there, this is just - this is stunning, hearing from all these victims. I mean, can you just paint us a picture of what's happening? ALESIA: Yeah. It's unlike anything I've ever seen. I certainly interviewed more than a few victims for the stories. But it's one thing to read some details about what happened to these women and girls in court documents. It's quite another to see person after person after person come up to confront Nassar in a courtroom with just profoundly human stories of really deep pain. GREENE: We now have, in addition to all of these other women, we have the gymnast Simone Biles who, you know, is such a familiar name. She tweeted this week that she, too, was sexually abused by Larry Nassar. She's not going to be testifying. But I mean, could that have a big impact here? ALESIA: Well, certainly it has had a big impact just on the public. Simone Biles won four gold medals at the Rio Olympics. And it - she is one of the top Olympic gymnasts of all time. And it seemed like a big deal - and it was a big deal when Aly Raisman, another Olympic gymnast, came out and said she, too, had been abused by Nassar. But now Simone Biles - my goodness. People are wondering when it's going to end. GREENE: Yeah. And so USA Gymnastics - I mean, they're going to have a lot to answer for as these hearings on the sentencing of Larry Nassar go forward in Michigan. Talking to Mark Alesia on Skype - he's an investigative reporter for The Indianapolis Star and part of the team that broke the original story about this former doctor a couple years ago. Mark, thanks. ALESIA: You're welcome. (SOUNDBITE OF BRONTIDE'S "TONITRO") DAVID GREENE, HOST: The war in Syria may be reaching a decisive chapter. There was of course the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. There was the fight against ISIS. Now we're into what could be a final stage. Hundreds of thousands of people who oppose the government are holed up in the northwest of the country, hemmed in by pro-Assad forces. One of them is Abdul Kafi Alhamdo. He's an English teacher who lives in a rural village in northwest Syria, in one of the last rebel-held regions of this country. He moved there in 2016 with his wife and infant daughter after they evacuated from the city of Aleppo. For now, his life is safer than it was in Aleppo. He told me that his daughter likes to join him on these trips to a local market. ABDUL KAFI ALHAMDO: That place, it's the most favorite place for my daughter. I mean, she sees a lot of people walking, laughing, speaking and noise. So my daughter - whenever I want to go to market, she wanted always to go with me. GREENE: But now government forces have been getting closer and closer. And earlier this month, the market where Abdul Kafi's daughter likes to go was bombed. ALHAMDO: When I arrived there, I couldn't know that place because everything - every shop was destroyed. People are under the rubble crying. People are running, asking about their relatives. Did you see my son? Did you see my daughter? Did you see my father? And I was just shocked. I was looking at those people without knowing what to say. GREENE: That was in November. Where - have you moved to a different place since then? ALHAMDO: No, I couldn't. Here in the countryside of Aleppo and Idlib and (unintelligible), it's crowded places now. I mean, you meet all people displaced from other towns and cities came to this area - from Darayya, from Damascus, from Wadi Barada, Homs, Hama, Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor, and Aleppo city like me. All those people came here. And here - when you have house, you are lucky man, I mean, because not enough houses for all those people. GREENE: How did you get a house for your family? ALHAMDO: Just you ask people. Here - I mean, you ask your friends, your students, your teachers, your colleagues. You ask them, they will tell you if there is a house. I mean, I dont know about the houses in America, of course. But just imagine that in Syria, in war and in this situation, some houses might be $300. Of course, here, people cannot get - most people, I mean, cannot get $50 at most. Just imagine that some houses are $300 a month. GREENE: Is that - was that your daughter in the background? ALHAMDO: Yes. She just got up, and she's crying. She wants to eat something - I don't know - maybe just some biscuits. GREENE: How old is she? ALHAMDO: In February, she will be 2 years. GREENE: OK. So it's almost birthday time. ALHAMDO: Yeah, exactly. I hope that I can make birthday for her. I hope that we will be here in our house. I hope that we don't have to move to another place because the bombing is now closer. GREENE: How often do you hear the bombing? ALHAMDO: Here in Syria, when there is a day without bombing, this is unusual day. The usual day, it's that everything - always, they are bombing. Today, just - there was a bomb maybe 1 kilometer away. But now, in comparison with Aleppo, this is paradise. GREENE: Oh, it's paradise compared to what you went through in Aleppo. ALHAMDO: I mean, when you - when you hear just one bombing or two bombings a day, it's paradise. GREENE: You said that you're hoping that you don't have to leave before your daughter's birthday. What are you worried about? ALHAMDO: Here, just - you have to know this - that people are tired financially, are tired psychologically, are tired mentally, are tired even physically. People in the liberated areas, most of them - as I told you - are refugees. So people are worried of more, now, displacement, more fear in the future because they don't know where they might go if the Syrian regime advanced more. No other place to go - you know that Idlib city now and Idlib countryside and Aleppo countryside is the last place people can go to. Every time my wife asks me, where should we go, Abdul Kafi? What should we do? How can we have some money if we have to move away? These questions are repeated by everyone in this area. Just imagine - about 3.5 million living in this area are worried about this issue, about displacement. But where? Really, we don't know. Most people cannot go to the Syrian regime. For me, it's a favor for me if I am killed than to go to the Syrian regime area. GREENE: Did you say it's a favor for you if you're killed? ALHAMDO: Yeah. I mean, in comparison with being arrested by Syrian regime because what happens in Syrian regime prisons cannot be stood, cannot be endured by anyone. The Syrian regime prison is worse than hell, is worse than death itself. GREENE: What is your best hope right now? ALHAMDO: We need something to stop the bombing, something to get Assad away of his position and living as a free people. I want - we want to live in peace. We're tired. People are tired. Every now and then, yeah, Syrian regime might advance more to my village. I will flee with my family to save my family's lives. I will go to the border. I don't know what I might do next. But of course, we have to save our families' lives. And we hope that something can be done to - yeah, to keep them alive because, really, it's tiring. It's tiring to think a lot about their safety. I mean, this is a heavy burden. I mean, you might pass away, but thinking about your family is difficult. This is not only me but all families here. GREENE: Well, thank you for telling us your story. We'll be thinking about you and your family. ALHAMDO: Thank you. Thank you very much. GREENE: Take care. I hope we get to talk to you again. ALHAMDO: Hope that. In a better situation, hope that. GREENE: Yes, I agree with that. ALHAMDO: Thank you. Goodbye. (SOUNDBITE OF BERSARIN QUARTETT'S "VERFLOSSEN IST DIS GOLD DER TAGE") GREENE: That was Abdul Kafi Alhamdo. He is an English teacher in northwest Syria. (SOUNDBITE OF ALEXANDER COURAGE'S "THEME FROM 'STAR TREK'") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin with a suggestion for your summer vacation. The Klingon tourist center opens in Stockholm next month. The center will introduce visitors to the culture and customs of the "Star Trek" warrior race. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "STAR TREK") UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character, speaking Klingon). MARTIN: Fans will also get to tour a replica of the Klingon capitol city. There will be singalongs, dancing and a battle reenactment - and when it's all over, a traditional glass of blood wine. It's MORNING EDITION. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: House Republicans met last night and proposed a temporary measure that keeps the government funded at least until the middle of February. This whole thing buys time for lawmakers to work out their differences on protecting the young undocumented immigrants who call the United States home. The House is expected to vote on this spending measure tomorrow. NPR's Mara Liasson is here to talk through the latest. Hey, Mara. MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Rachel. MARTIN: What's in this short-term spending bill? LIASSON: Well, it's important to say what's not in this short-term spending bill is anything to do with immigration, which is the biggest issue that Congress is grappling with right now. But what's in it is a short-term spending extension through February 16. That buys the Congress a couple of more weeks to deal with immigration. It would reauthorize the CHIP program - that's the Children's Health Insurance Program - for six years. And it would extend the delay on a couple of Obamacare-related taxes and also include a provision to provide more money for missile defense, purportedly to appeal to conservatives. MARTIN: So Democrats are not going to be happy that this doesn't have a fix for DACA in it. But Republicans, I guess, are trying to lure them into voting for this because it would be tough for Democrats to vote against CHIP funding? LIASSON: Yes. That's possible, although CHIP does have bipartisan support. The big question now is - if it does go to the floor tomorrow in the House, will the Freedom Caucus support it? They are the conservative group of House members who, in the past, have not wanted to vote for short-term spending bills. But the last time Congress passed one of these, they did pass it with just Republican votes. They had enough votes to pass it by themselves. They didn't need Democratic votes. That's not going to be true in the Senate, where this bill will need 60 votes. MARTIN: Yeah. LIASSON: Unlike tax cuts or judges, you can't just pass it with 50. So that means compromise. MARTIN: So meanwhile, Mara, explain this. The Justice Department is now asking the Supreme Court to get involved with the DACA debate. What's happening here? LIASSON: Right. Well, the president removed the protection from deportation that President Obama had given to the DREAMers, young people brought here, in many cases illegally, by their parents. MARTIN: Right. LIASSON: That was challenged in court. The court put a stay on the end of the DACA program. And now the Justice Department wants to appeal that because they want to go ahead and get rid of the program - if Congress doesn't do anything about it by March 5. That's the deadline that President Trump gave Congress. He said, I'm going to get rid of the DACA protections unless you legislate something. MARTIN: All right. We will keep following this. Just in seconds remaining, though, Mara, we should note the president had a - he went to the doctor. He had his... LIASSON: He went to the doctor. MARTIN: ...Physician's appointment LIASSON: And he got a clean bill of health. Doctor said the president's overall health is excellent. He gave him a cognitive test. He tested all sorts of other things. We know that, according to the doctor, the president is 6'3", weighs 239 pounds - just a little shy of obese. MARTIN: And so the doctor recommended that he might think about exercise. LIASSON: Yes, exercise and diet. And apparently, the president wants to do that. MARTIN: All right, NPR's Mara Liasson this morning - thanks so much, Mara. LIASSON: Thank you. DAVID GREENE, HOST: All right, the Trump administration surprised a lot of people last week when it excluded Florida from a plan to dramatically expand offshore drilling. And now other states are saying - hey, we'd love to be excluded as well. And they're getting a chance to make their case in a series of public meetings. NPR's Jeff Brady went to one of those meetings yesterday in Annapolis, Md. JEFF BRADY, BYLINE: At the harbor in downtown Annapolis, it's cold. And there's little sign of the tourists and people heading out to fish that are common when the weather is warmer. (SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS SQUAWKING) BRADY: But things are buzzing a few miles away at a hotel conference center. This is where the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is collecting comments on the Trump administration's plan to offer up just about all of the country's offshore areas to drillers. This is the normal process with information booths and laptops set up to type in comments. Last week, Florida went outside that process and got itself removed. MARK BELTON: Well, that caught us a little bit by surprise, quite frankly, when we saw that Governor Scott in Florida had spoken to Secretary Zinke of the Department of the Interior. BRADY: Mark Belton is Maryland's secretary of natural resources. He's here to deliver a letter from his boss, Republican Governor Larry Hogan, asking that Maryland also be removed. Belton says the big concern is for the state's economically important fishing and tourism industries. BELTON: The accident that happened with Deepwater Horizon down in the Gulf of Mexico is a vivid example of what could happen here off the shore of the mid-Atlantic. And with that example in mind, we believe that it's just not the right thing to happen off our shores. BRADY: Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has reportedly spent this week meeting with coastal governors in the wake of the Florida announcement. Some environmentalists saw politics at play, claiming the evening tweets from Zinke and a meeting at the Tallahassee airport were designed to help Governor Rick Scott in an upcoming race for the U.S. Senate. What's clear is that announcing this decision with a tweet is unusual. SIERRA WEAVER: I can't imagine how it wouldn't raise legal complications. BRADY: Sierra Weaver is an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. For groups like hers that likely will challenge in court any plan that could expand offshore drilling, a big legal question is whether the administration acted arbitrarily and capriciously. WEAVER: Were they reasonable, or did they just do something based on politics or whim? And a tweet at 6:30 at night after a 20-minute meeting at an airport certainly looks like the definition of arbitrariness. BRADY: The oil industry also is not happy with Secretary Zinke's decision to exclude Florida. Companies have wanted to drill off the state's west coast in the Gulf of Mexico for years, says Randall Luthi, president of the National Ocean Industries Association. RANDALL LUTHI: You already have infrastructure such as underwater pipes. You already have companies that might have drilling rigs and seismic equipment. So the eastern Gulf is the easiest and most logical area to move into. BRADY: And Luthi advises his members not to give up on Florida yet. Both sides plan to turn out in force at a Florida hearing next month. A final plan to open more areas for offshore drilling likely won't be finished for another two years. Jeff Brady, NPR News, Annapolis, Md. (SOUNDBITE OF GABRIEL GARZON-MONTANO'S "THE GAME (INSTRUMENTAL)") DAVID GREENE, HOST: On February 14, yes, you'll be able to celebrate Valentine's Day. You will also be able to book a room at the luxurious Ritz-Carlton hotel in Saudi Arabia's capital city, Riyadh. It has been full since November when some 200 wealthy influential Saudis, including at least 17 princes, were placed under house arrest as part of an anti-corruption crackdown. So what do the upcoming vacancies mean? Let's ask NPR's Jackie Northam who has been following this story. Hi, Jackie. JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: Morning, David. GREENE: So what can we learn from the fact that there are going to be rooms available now? What about the people who have been held there? NORTHAM: Well, you know, I did check with the Ritz-Carlton, and they confirmed that these will be open - these rooms again starting at about $650 a night. And that's being seen as the Saudi government may be moving into a new phase of this anti-corruption campaign that was launched in early November and is getting ready to move some of these wealthy people out of the Ritz and into a high-security prison. The Saudi government says it's owed about $100 billion and has reached a settlement with many of the detainees who are in this very plush jail, and they've already been released. But others have not paid up. So now they will head to prison and presumably have their day in court. And, you know, David, the people I spoke with felt the Saudi government would've preferred an informal settlement - a payment - because a court case could bring a lot of dirty laundry out into the open. GREENE: When you say out in the open, I'm just amazed, if we step back, that the way to report on Saudi Arabia is sometimes to call up a hotel and ask if there are rooms available. I mean, it's hard to actually get information from the government because they want to keep stuff so secret. So how are you - how do you report this story? NORTHAM: Well, yeah. And this issue in particular has been a challenge. You know, the government hasn't made public any names - provide very, very few details. But I've been speaking with a lot of my international business contacts who are well-placed to follow these sorts of developments, including who's being held. And one of those is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. He's an entrepreneur. He's worth about $18 billion and has connections to many major Western corporations. And, David, he's not being seen or heard of since November, nor has Bakr bin Laden. And he's the chairman of the powerful Bin Laden construction company. He was also Osama bin Laden's half brother. But Bakr bin Laden has not been seen either. And the bin Laden group issued a statement on its website saying some of its shareholders have handed over their stakes in the company to the government. GREENE: And I guess the important thing to do here is try and understand what this says about the country. So can you sort of remind us why the government launched this crackdown in the first place? NORTHAM: Yeah. It was launched really by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. And he's trying to overhaul the economy and, as part of that, wants to get rid of corruption because it can deter any sort of much needed foreign investment. You know, having said that, rounding up rich people and holding them without due process until they pay a settlement probably doesn't instill much confidence in any foreign investor either. But the crown prince's detractors say the crackdown is really a power grab and has sent a reminder about who's in charge. At the same time, there are many people supporting the move and glad someone is finally tackling the endemic corruption. And the crown prince is seen by many as modernizing, you know, this traditional conservative kingdom. GREENE: And how is that going? I mean, is this country liberalizing? NORTHAM: Yeah, there's a lot of moves lately. You know, women will be allowed to drive later this year. There are now concerts they can go to. Women, for the first time this past weekend, were allowed into a soccer game. They still had to sit in the family section and that, but they were allowed. And then the kingdom held its first movie in 35 years this past weekend as well. For screening, it was "The Emoji Movie," David. So there you go. So there are movements underfoot. GREENE: Things seem to be changing to some extent. NPR's Jackie Northam talking to us about a moment in Saudi Arabia. Jackie, thanks. NORTHAM: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF PLAID'S "DO MATTER") DAVID GREENE, HOST: You know, if you ever needed a reason not to bet on sports, there's a lesson from one of the producers of this show. Our very own Phil Harrell was in Las Vegas for Sunday's playoff game between the Minnesota Vikings and the New Orleans Saints. And I'm going to keep this simple so even non-gamblers will get it. Phil bet on the Vikings. And for him to cash in, they had to win by 6 points or more. The Vikings - they did win. They won in spectacular fashion - this incredible pass caught by receiver Stefon Diggs. He sprinted for a touchdown as the clock hit zero - doesn't get any more dramatic than this. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Touchdown. Are you kidding me? UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: What a miracle finish. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: It's a Minneapolis miracle. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: No way. GREENE: Yeah, as you can hear, it was total insanity in that stadium. That's how it sounded on the Vikings Radio Network. Now, that touchdown put the Vikings up by 5 points. All they had to do was kick the extra point. They would win by 6, and Phil and a lot of other bettors would make a nice chunk of change. Well, we asked Phil what happened next. PHIL HARRELL, BYLINE: They [expletive] me. That's what happened. It's [expletive] standard, man. Trot out the [expletive] kicker and let him [expletive] do his job. GREENE: Oh, my god. Take it down. Take it down. I'm sorry for all those bleeps. My God, yeah, Phil was probably not in any position to be trusted anywhere near a microphone. Luckily, I also talked to Charles Curtis of USA Today about this. He wrote about this game, and he told me about the pandemonium just after that touchdown. CHARLES CURTIS: There's all these people all over the field. There's photographers. There's all the teams. They figured the game is over, but no. By NFL rule, they have to kick an extra point or 2-point conversion. And so what the Vikings did is, after all the pandemonium calmed down and all the teams and the photographers went back to the sidelines - the Vikings took a knee because it was the sportsmanlike thing to do. And it ended up costing bettors a lot of money. GREENE: OK. We should say some people have heard a lot about taking a knee in the political sense during this NFL season. In this case, taking a knee was just sort of ending the play and deciding not to kick this extra point. CURTIS: Right. And that's basically telling the referees, like, we're not running this play. The play is over, and we're not going to do anything with it. GREENE: So Vikings fans who aren't bettors - they don't care about this. I mean, the Vikings win the game. They're going to the NFC championship game. They're ecstatic. But for bettors, this was absolutely crucial. CURTIS: This happens regularly during an NFL season, I - also college football. You see what you think is a meaningless play or a last-second score that is meaningless to the actual game. And then you see bettors in Las Vegas either ripping up their tickets or cheering or jumping up and down or slamming their heads on the tables. GREENE: I mean, is this an evil side of sports to have so much riding on something that might seem so meaningless? Or is this actually, on the flipside, make sports more fun for gamblers? I mean, if it's, like, a 19-point spread, you have what seems like a blowout of a game. But everyone can keep watching until the very end to see if it's like a 19-point win or a 20-point win. CURTIS: I mean, some people think that gambling is evil. So if you believe that, then, yeah, it's evil. But I see it and I think a lot of people who bet on sports see it as enhancing the game and making it way more fun because now in a game - and playoff games are different because everybody's invested in that because they want to see who goes to the next round. But in a regular season game, if there's a meaningless two teams that, you know, you don't want to watch - suddenly, you have money riding on it. Like, that's a game you want to watch. So it definitely is an enhancer. And I think that's why people bet on sports all the time. GREENE: But was this game particularly crazy because it came down to an extra point, which is so routine in the NFL after a touchdown, and a team just decides to not kick it? CURTIS: Oh, absolutely, 100 percent. Teams have to kick an extra point. This is just what they do. So to see that kind of end that way is extra heartbreaking, I think, for gamblers. GREENE: Well, I know you're a Giants fan. I'm a Steelers fan. Neither of our teams are still in it, so try to enjoy the rest of the playoffs as much as you can. CURTIS: I certainly will. You, too. GREENE: That was Charles Curtis, a sportswriter for USA Today. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: A new TV crime series debuts tonight on FX. It is called "The Assassination Of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story." NPR TV critic Eric Deggans says the show tackles a whole lot more than the untimely death of a fashion icon. ERIC DEGGANS, BYLINE: Instead of calling it "The Assassination Of Gianni Versace," FX probably should have named this show The Disintegration Of Andrew Cunanan. That's because it's most compelling moments focus on Cunanan, the man who murdered Versace and four other people. Played by "Glee" alum Darren Criss, Cunanan is a smart, glib social climber. He's also an occasional male escort with a habit of inventing stories about his life. When he claims to have arranged a date with Versace, a friend, who has a huge crush on him, confronts Cunanan who rationalizes his lying. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE ASSASSINATION OF GIANNI VERSACE: AMERICAN CRIME STORY") DARREN CRISS: (As Andrew Cunanan) I thought you'd be happy about it. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) About what? CRISS: (As Andrew Cunanan) About Versace. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) That you'd brag about a date with Versace? CRISS: (As Andrew Cunanan) It's not a brag. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) You can't even tell people you're gay. CRISS: (As Cunanan) I tell people all the time. I've told people for years. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) You tell gay people you're gay and straight people you're straight. CRISS: (As Andrew Cunanan) I tell people what they need to hear. DEGGANS: Viewers hoping for a ringside seat to Versace's glittering star-studded career may be disappointed. The series starts with his death and works backwards in time. We see flashes of runway shows and dress fittings, but the scenes are predictable and not particularly revelatory. Instead, executive producer Ryan Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith explore the pressures, discrimination and dangers gay men faced 20 years ago. In one scene, after Cunanan guns down Versace on the steps of his Miami mansion, Versace's longtime romantic partner Antonio D'Amico speaks to police. D'Amico, played by Ricky Martin, struggles to endure insulting questions while explaining that they would sometimes bring other men into their bed. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE ASSASSINATION OF GIANNI VERSACE: AMERICAN CRIME STORY") RICKY MARTIN: (As Antonio D'Amico) It was whatever he wanted. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) These other men - did they consider themselves to be Versace's partner, too? MARTIN: (As Antonio D'Amico) No. Of course... UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) You see why I'm confused? What's the difference? MARTIN: (As Antonio D'Amico) I lived with Gianni for 15 years. That is the difference. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) OK. Were they paid? MARTIN: (As Antonio D'Amico) Most of the time, they just fell for him. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Were you paid? MARTIN: (As Antonio D'Amico) Was I paid? To love him - was I paid to love him? DEGGANS: Martin's character fights with Versace's sister Donatella played by Penelope Cruz. But at times, the fights seem more like an excuse to give these two stars something meaty to do given the show's focus on Cunanan. Ryan Murphy has said he wanted Criss' performance as Cunanan to make the same splash that Sarah Paulson made playing Marcia Clark in the 2016 installment of "American Crime Story: People v. O.J. Simpson." So the focus is often on Cunanan who cultivated relationships with wealthy older gay men. But when he's dropped by a millionaire boyfriend and rejected by another man he loves, Cunanan goes on a killing spree. He visits Lee Miglin, a renowned Chicago developer, who is infatuated with him. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE ASSASSINATION OF GIANNI VERSACE: AMERICAN CRIME STORY") CRISS: (As Andrew Cunanan) You're trying to impress me, trying to pretend that this isn't merely about money - that this is merely a business transaction - that there's a genuine attraction between us. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As Lee Miglin) You can pretend too, Andrew. CRISS: (As Andrew Cunanan) No, I am not like most escorts. I'm not like most anybody. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As Lee Miglin) I know it's not real, Andrew. I'm not a fool. You make it seem so real. DEGGANS: Cunanan kills Miglin and another man before heading to Miami to stalk and kill Versace. It's hard to know where facts stop and fiction starts in this story. Miglin's family has denied he knew Cunanan. Versace's family released a statement last week criticizing the series calling it, quote, "a work of fiction," which FX and Murphy deny. Ultimately, this "American Crime Story" is an uneven and unsatisfying account of a damaged young man who sought immortality through infamy. I'm Eric Deggans. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon appeared before the House Intelligence Committee yesterday. But there were no bombshells. There were no big revelations about possible interactions between the Trump campaign and Russia because Steve Bannon refused to answer questions. He cited a request from White House attorneys not to talk to the committee, something that White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended later in the day. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS: Look, we've been completely cooperative throughout this entire process. We're going to continue to be cooperative, but we're also going to maintain some of the executive privileges here at the White House that have been practiced for decades and that need to be maintained. MARTIN: Congressman Adam Schiff was among those asking questions of Steve Bannon - or at least trying to - during 10 hours of testimony yesterday. He's the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Congressman, thanks so much for being with us. ADAM SCHIFF: It's great to be with you. MARTIN: What happened for 10 hours if Steve Bannon wasn't answering questions? SCHIFF: Well, he was largely consulting with the White House - at least his lawyer was - to give us shifting rationales for why they couldn't answer questions. And I have to say, I'm very amused by Sarah Huckabee Sanders' response that they're fully cooperative. That's true if you consider fully cooperative instructing key witnesses not to answer questions before Congress. Otherwise, they're not cooperative at all. There's no broad privilege that prevents Steve Bannon or anyone else from having to answer questions before Congress. This wasn't asserted merely with respect to a specific conversation with the president but rather for any meetings, any conversations with anyone during the transition or during his time in administration. And that simply is unsustainable. MARTIN: And that's what the White House has argued - that executive privilege somehow extends to the transition OF when the Trump administration wasn't actually yet the Trump administration. What did you want to know from Steve Bannon? SCHIFF: Well, first of all, that claim of executive privilege really doesn't apply here because they didn't claim executive privilege. No privilege has been asserted. So that really doesn't square either. But there are a great many things we wanted to know from Steve Bannon, and we're going to have to bring him back in and take it to court if necessary. We want to know, for example, about the formation of the misleading statement following revelations that there was a Trump Tower meeting between the president's son, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and a delegation of Russians. What was the president's role? Were there any acts of obstruction of justice? Were there any instructions given to Mr. Bannon or others to take any steps to hinder the Russian investigation? MARTIN: This was a meeting that Steve Bannon had called, quote, "treasonous" in this book by Michael Wolff that was out a couple weeks ago. SCHIFF: Exactly. But as well, whatever light can be shed on interactions between the Trump campaign and the Russians that Steve Bannon came to learn about while he was part of the transition, while he was part of administration - for example, any of the communications between Mike Flynn and the Russians that were designed to undermine the bipartisan policy of the administration at the time, during the transition, which was to sanction Russia over their interference in the election on Mr. Trump's behalf. MARTIN: So had you - had the committee not been pursuing Steve Bannon for testimony before the Michael Wolff book? SCHIFF: Well, we had requested Mr. Bannon come before the committee for a long time. But as is the case with a great many other witnesses, the majority had sat on that request until very recently. Now, we're not sure why they suddenly were willing to bring him in. And it certainly wasn't known to us, although it was known to one of the majority staff who'd made the arrangements with the counsel for Mr. Bannon. It wasn't known to us that he was going to come and refuse to answer questions about these two very significant periods of time. MARTIN: So your committee has - subpoenaed him yesterday for not answering questions. So you're hoping to bring him back to compel him to answer those questions. Meanwhile, there was another subpoena last week. Steve Bannon was subpoenaed by the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller. He is the first in the inner Trump circle to be subpoenaed to testify in front of a grand jury. What's the significance of that? SCHIFF: Well, the significance is, if this is necessary to get him to cooperate before special counsel - that he's not willing to do so voluntarily and the special counsel needs to subpoena him, that says something about Mr. Bannon - and the White House potentially - their willingness to cooperate with special counsel but also is meaningful to us in Congress because there's no way he can maintain a different position in the special counsel than he can in Congress. If the executive privilege is going to be asserted, it needs to be asserted uniformly. It can't be selectively asserted. So this, I think, may help us get answers. I don't think the administration can maintain the position that they'll accept it with one but not the other. MARTIN: We understand there are other current and former administration officials expected to testify to your committee this week. I understand that you can't confirm who those people are. But do you expect them to be governed by the same restrictions from the White House? SCHIFF: I expect the White House to try. But again, we don't have to allow this. What will be the limit in terms of congressional ability to get testimony from these witnesses is only our will because we can insist by taking this to court if necessary. And we can also insist by using funding prohibitions with the administration as probably the biggest lever that we have. MARTIN: Just quickly - funding prohibitions on what? SCHIFF: Well, in other words, if you don't make these witnesses available to Congress, Congress isn't going to fund priorities of the administration. MARTIN: Got it. SCHIFF: So we have considerable leverage if we're willing to use it. MARTIN: Representative Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, thanks for your time. SCHIFF: Thank you. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Let's turn now to Lansing, Mich., for a sentencing hearing of Larry Nassar that's continuing. Nearly 90 women who allege they were sexually assaulted by the disgraced former team doctor for the U.S. gymnastics team are expected to testify this week. The first accuser in the court room yesterday was Kyle Stephens, a family friend, who told the court room she was assaulted by Nassar for six years. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) KYLE STEPHENS: I testified to let the world know that you are a repulsive liar and that those treatments were pathetically veiled sexual abuse. Perhaps you have you figured it out by now, but little girls don't stay little forever. They grow into strong women that return to destroy your world. GREENE: All right. And on Twitter this week, Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles added her name to the list of accusers, which already includes fellow Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney, Gabby Douglas, Aly Raisman. Nassar's already serving a 60-year sentence for possession of child pornography. And for more, we turn to Mark Alesia. He's a reporter with The Indianapolis Star. And he was part of the investigative team that broke the story of Larry Nassar two years ago. Hi there, Mark. MARK ALESIA: Good morning. GREENE: I just listened to - I mean, that tape there - little girls don't stay little forever. They turn into strong women who return to destroy your world. I mean, can you just paint a picture of what's happening in this courtroom? ALESIA: Yeah. It really is extraordinary, certainly by my experience. It's one thing to read court documents that have some details about the allegations. But it was quite another to see person after person after person - 29 in all yesterday - expressing just profoundly personal emotions and showing such strength and resolve - with Larry Nassar sitting on the witness stand having to listen to it all. GREENE: The fact now that we have Simone Biles, such a familiar name in this sport, coming forward with her own accusations - how big of an impact is that? ALESIA: It's huge. Simone Biles won four gold medals at the Rio Olympics. She is one of the most successful Olympic gymnasts ever. And adding her name to the Olympians who had already come forward makes people think - well, when is this going to end? Who's next? GREENE: Well - and before we even get to when it's going to end, we should remind people, you reported on this that this went on for years. Right? ALESIA: It did. My colleagues Marisa Kwiatkowski and Tim Evans and I wrote in August 2016 - actually on the eve of the Rio Olympics - that USA Gymnastics, for years, had a policy of not investigating sexual abuse complaints unless there was a signed complaint by the athlete or a parent... GREENE: Wow. ALESIA: ...Which experts told us is exactly the wrong way to handle things. GREENE: And so meanwhile, you had this team doctor for USA Gymnastics who was accused of doing all of this for years. So how is the governing body of the sport, USA Gymnastics, responding now about how this should and needs to end? ALESIA: They have come under a lot of criticism for their statements, which some people have said have been rather tepid. They talk about supporting the athletes who have come forward. And they talk about their bravery. But there haven't been any apologies. And the chairman of the board of USA Gymnastics is still in his position. He's been in a position of oversight for 18 years. And the chairman of the board, Paul Parilla, is still in his job. GREENE: All right, Mark Alesia is an investigative reporter for The Indianapolis Star joining us this morning. Mark, thank you very much. ALESIA: You're welcome. (SOUNDBITE OF BOCHUM WELT'S "SUDDENLY SPRING") DAVID GREENE, HOST: We're learning new details about the arrest of a former CIA officer whose alleged actions had a deadly ripple effect across the agency. Jerry Chun Shing Lee was a case officer with the CIA for more than 20 years, and late yesterday the Justice Department said it's charged him for illegally keeping national defense secrets. And those secrets reportedly ended up in the hands of the Chinese government and led to the deaths of CIA informants. Adam Goldman of The New York Times broke this story, and he joins us on Skype this morning. Hi, Adam. ADAM GOLDMAN: Hey. Thanks for having me. GREENE: Well, thanks for coming on and talking about this story. Can you just - I mean, what exactly is this former officer accused of doing, and how did U.S. investigators figure out what they were going to charge him with? GOLDMAN: Well, the straight charge is he was in possession of classified information that FBI agents had found in a pair of notebooks he had. And in those notebooks were the details of CIA assets in China, the names of covert agency employees, details about meetings. And that information reflected what was in CIA cables, the same cables that Jerry Lee wrote when he was in the agency. GREENE: And so your reporting suggests that there were deadly consequences here, that this is information that he had, got to the Chinese government and led to the deaths of informants who were basically helping the CIA. Is that right? GOLDMAN: Yeah. Let's just back up for a moment. So in about 2010, late 2010, the CIA started losing informants in China. And it's gained momentum, and they started losing more and more. And then the agency and the FBI realized there might be a mole, and they started focusing on Jerry Lee and he fit what they would say the matrix. And Jerry Lee was living in Hong Kong so he came under intense suspicion. GREENE: You also wrote that this arrest has intelligence officials particularly concerned because it might be a pattern here of the Chinese targeting former CIA operatives to really crack the U.S. intelligence network? Is that a new thing, and how big a concern would that be? GOLDMAN: I don't - I think they are more concerned now than they were maybe several years ago. But, you know, the way we - what we've been told is that, look, it's easier to recruit a former CIA officer than a current one. In June of last year, a former CIA officer was charged in Virginia, and there are also been other instances, not necessarily with the CIA, but, a State Department worker was charged last year and a former FBI employee in New York was sentenced to two years in prison last year for his ties with the Chinese. So I mean certainly the Chinese are running an aggressive intelligence program. GREENE: And what does that mean overall for our national security, would you say? GOLDMAN: It means we're going to have to get better and we're going to have to figure out ways to outsmart the Chinese, who can throw an enormous amount of resources at this issue. You know, one of the things we don't really hear about are the intelligence failures, and that means when the agency actually loses informants. GREENE: Which is one reason why your reporting here is so important in letting us know about all of this. Adam Goldman covers national security for The New York Times. He joined us on Skype this morning. Adam, we appreciate it. Thanks a lot. GOLDMAN: Thank you. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: We're going to turn now to some news related to a pair of deadly U.S. Navy crashes last summer. One involved a U.S. warship that collided with a commercial ship off the coast of Japan. The other involved a U.S. warship hitting an oil tanker near Singapore. Now we know the two commanding officers could face charges including negligent homicide. We are joined now by NPR's Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman for more on this. Hey, Tom. TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Hey, Rachel. MARTIN: Who exactly is being charged in these cases? BOWMAN: Well, in the case of the Fitzgerald, it's the commanding officer Bryce Benson along with three junior officers, and they face a number of charges including dereliction of duty, hazarding a vessel and negligent homicide in this June 17 incident, led to the deaths of seven sailors off Japan. MARTIN: Off Japan. That's the one off Japan. OK. BOWMAN: And then we have with the McCain, it's the Commander Alfredo Sanchez. He's facing similar charges of dereliction of duty, hazarding a vessel and also negligent homicide. This was on August 21. Ten sailors were killed in that accident. MARTIN: Wow. That was the one near Singapore. All right. So both deadly accidents. Let's take these one by one. What happened in the first incident? What exactly went wrong? BOWMAN: Well, with the Fitzgerald, one officer I spoke with who has a lot of experience said this was a breakdown in ship driving 101. He said first of all the officers aboard the Fitzgerald misjudged the distance between their ship and the cargo ship which they ran into, and also they didn't contact the captain of the ship when they were clearly in trouble. And also, remarkably, Rachel, they said these officers lacked the basic knowledge of radar and the fundamental rules of the nautical road. It's remarkable. And in the case of the McCain, this is even more stunning. There was confusion about who was actually driving the ship and who was operating the engines. There was sort of split duty here. And as a result, one of the engines was going faster than the other and the ship actually turned into a cargo ship. And, again, that led to the deaths of 10 sailors. MARTIN: I mean, this has got to be a moment of severe reckoning for the Navy. What are they doing in this moment to make sure this never happens again? BOWMAN: Well, the top Naval officer Admiral John Richardson met with reporters last fall. We were pressing him on this. Can the Navy drive its own ships? MARTIN: Right. BOWMAN: Why don't they have the basic knowledge of seamanship here? And he said, well, we're sending out review teams out to the fleet to make sure they have the basic knowledge of navigation, of ship driving. And, Rachel, Admiral Richardson's going to appear tomorrow before the House Armed Services Committee, and he's going to get a lot of serious questions about whether the Navy can actually drive its ships. MARTIN: NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman. Thanks, Tom. BOWMAN: You're welcome, Rachel. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Good morning. I'm David Greene. Here's a sign of the times, right? New Jersey now has a law against drunk droning. Governor Chris Christie signed it just before leaving office. This may be a good idea. I did a quick search and found a story about a Canadian woman hit in the head when a 3-pound drone fell from the sky. A drone crashed on the White House lawn. In Washington state, one almost hit a news helicopter. And it looks like all those drone operators may have been sober. You're listening to MORNING EDITION. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: As the #MeToo movement continues to bring forth new revelations, Congress is grappling with its own history with sexual harassment. Remember, two members, Al Franken and John Conyers, resigned over allegations of sexual misconduct, and at least two more members have been accused publicly. On top of that, in November, a group of 1,500 former Hill staffers sent a letter to congressional leaders saying that not enough is happening to prevent harassment or to address complaints of sexual misconduct. Today Congressman Bradley Byrne is one of the members introducing a bipartisan bill aimed at tackling these problems. He's a Republican from Alabama, and he joins me now. Congressman, thanks so much for being with us. BRADLEY BYRNE: It's great to be with you this morning. MARTIN: You're a former employment attorney, I understand. So with that vantage point, what are the biggest flaws with how the House in particular addresses misconduct right now? BYRNE: Well, the process that somebody has to go through to file a claim is really kind of stacked against the claimant. It's way too complex, requires the claimant to go through counseling and all this sort of thing. And it's very different from what I'm used to in the private sector under what we know as Title VII, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which is the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. Thirty years ago, the Supreme Court said that the type of sex discrimination can be sexual harassment. So we've been dealing with this - we in the private sector have been dealing with this for 30 years. MARTIN: Right. BYRNE: And it looks like Congress tried to deal with it 20 years ago, but I don't think that they did a very good job. And so with what we know has happened in the private sector, what we're now learning has been happening in Congress, it was time for us to take a review of that statue that applies to Congress and, I think, make the process a lot better for everybody but particularly the claimant. MARTIN: Can you give us a couple specific items that would change under your bill? BYRNE: Right. We're going to establish an office that's going to be an advocate for the victims. They can go there and get counseling if that's what they want or they can get free legal advice and legal representation in a proceeding that will give them a true investigation. And at the end of that investigation, there would be a finding that there is good cause to go forward or there's not. If there is, they would go forward to an administrative law judge process. Now, they can circumvent that at the very beginning and go straight to federal court if that's what they want. But we're actually going to give them an attorney. And that balances out the imbalance we have right now because the members' offices have public paid-for attorneys, but the people with the claims do not. So this evens out that playing field. And we've gone further than that. We are going to hold every member of Congress who has found to have discriminated against somebody in one of these sexual harassment lawsuits, we're going to hold them personally liable. We'll be able to go and get it out of their paycheck or, if they've retired, get it out their retirement. So that puts maximum accountability on every member of Congress for their own personal conduct. MARTIN: I understand you're also proposing changes like mandatory harassment training - which is remarkable that that doesn't already exist - and a ban on sexual relationships between superiors and staff again. These have been standard practice in the private sector for decades. I mean, are you likely to get this stuff through? I mean, have you... BYRNE: Yes. MARTIN: Are you getting any pushback? BYRNE: No, no. No, no, no - we're not getting any pushback. We're getting lots of questions, which is appropriate, because members need to understand what this statute is going to say and how it's going to apply to them. But it's my anticipation we're going to file this bill today. It will be voted on by the end of the month. I do not even anticipate that it's going to be a roll call vote. I think it will be a voice vote. I think it's going to be that popular among members. I do not anticipate any sort of pushback. MARTIN: People who work in Congress - many say sexual misconduct is such a big problem. And they point to the fact that there are two congressmen still in office, despite misconduct allegations against them. We're talking about Democrat Ruben Kihuen and Republican Blake Farenthold. Does your bill address concerns about the process by which lawmakers are held to account? BYRNE: Yes, there's going to be complete transparency. And you're not going to be able to use your members account, the account that runs your office, to pay off a claim. And this is not going to be something you can sweep under the rug. So this is going to cause a culture change, and that's what we really want. At the end of the day, we want the culture to change. And I'm confident with this new bill that that's going to happen. MARTIN: Congressman Bradley Byrne, Republican who represents Alabama's Gulf Coast. Thanks for your time. BYRNE: Good to be with you. [POST-BROADCAST CLARIFICATION: In this story, we say that two members of Congress, Sen. Al Franken and Rep. John Conyers, have resigned over allegations of sexual misconduct. In fact, Rep. Trent Franks also resigned, for a total of three.] DAVID GREENE, HOST: Now lawmakers in Washington, D.C., are trying to hammer out a new immigration policy that comes even as immigrant groups are continuing to protest the president's insulting comments about African nations and Haiti. Haitian-Americans protested this week in Times Square, also outside Trump's Mar-a-Lago property in Florida. In Philadelphia, community groups are planning their next steps as we hear from Laura Benshoff of member station WHYY. LAURA BENSHOFF, BYLINE: In a grand room on the fourth floor of Philadelphia's City Hall, about 70 people crowd around a podium. Many hold up cellphones, streaming the remarks by local elected officials and immigrant leaders to their social media. Michel Francois, the president of the Haitian Coalition of Philadelphia, says the president's remarks made him more sad than mad. MICHEL FRANCOIS: Because I still cannot understand or imagine that citizens from this great nation have chosen such a low-class person. BENSHOFF: Members of the African and Caribbean community take turns condemning the words attributed to President Trump and the message behind them. They also repeat a point - that black immigrants to the U.S. have more than quadrupled since 1980. Most African immigrants who can become U.S. citizens and potential voters according to the Pew Research Center. DARRELL CLARKE: It's all about politics. BENSHOFF: That's Philadelphia City Council President Darrell Clarke, who strikes out at officials who defend Trump. CLARKE: 'Cause you got a bunch of people sitting in a room. One day, they hear something. The next day, they don't hear nothing. Now they changed their story. Oh, now I did hear it. He didn't say that. That's crazy. BENSHOFF: That political response is still taking shape. A few days earlier, about two dozen leaders from across African and Caribbean organizations in Philadelphia huddled in a windowless conference room coming up with a plan of action. The group included scientists, pastors, engineers, lawyers, entrepreneurs and professors. African immigrants are more likely to have a college degree than native-born Americans and most other immigrant groups according to the Migration Policy Institute. The leaders asked me not to record the meeting but allowed me to watch as they expressed frustration that they had to educate the president about who they are. Afterwards, Eric Edi, who is with a local coalition of African and Caribbean immigrants, told me what they decided. He said the plan is to mobilize the group's large number of naturalized citizens. ERIC EDI: We need to capitalize on that to continue aggressively the voter's registration in such a way that, you know, we can have a stronger voice when it comes to political decision-making. BENSHOFF: They also voted to show their contributions to the U.S. economy by withholding their work for a day. For NPR News, I'm Laura Benshoff in Philadelphia. (SOUNDBITE OF CHROMATICS' "IN THE CITY") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: This week the House Rules Committee holds hearings on earmarks. That's the now banned congressional practice of adding money to spending bills for pet projects. Some of those projects have been ridiculed over the years, as President George H.W. Bush noted in a State of the Union message. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) GEORGE H.W. BUSH: Every year the press has a field day making fun of outrageous examples. Lawrence Welk Museum, research grants for Belgian endive. We all know how these things get into the budget, and maybe you need someone to help you say no. MARTIN: So now President Trump is raising the possibility of bringing back earmarks, suggesting that members of Congress need someone to help them say yes in order to grease the skids of legislation. And we are putting our questions about earmarks to Cokie Roberts. She joins us now. Hey, Cokie. COKIE ROBERTS, BYLINE: Hi, Rachel. MARTIN: All right. ROBERTS: (Laughter) Belgian endives. MARTIN: Yeah. We're going to get back to that. I'm not going to let that go. But let's get to the first question, which gets right at this issue of greasing the skids so to speak. It comes via Twitter from Adam Soloman, who writes as follows (reading) Cokie, do you think bringing back earmarks could put a tool that encourages bipartisanship back in the hands of congressional leaders? In service of transparency did we inadvertently weaken party leaders and make it harder to cut deals? Good question. ROBERTS: Well, that's what the proponents of earmarks would say, that the leaders are now left with only sticks and no carrots. They can say to a member whose vote they want, you can't have a committee pose. But they can't say, you can have the Lawrence Welk Museum. And those kinds of earmarks did make it much easier for members to go home to their districts and explain a tough vote. They could say, but look what I got for you. MARTIN: This isn't a partisan debate. So what are the arguments here? ROBERTS: Well, the people want to bring back what they call congressionally directed spending say that it not only makes legislating easier, but right now the executive branch gets to call the shots. It gets to allocate where money in a spending bill on something like highways, for instance, gets spent. And they say that's a congressional prerogative. Opponents of earmarks say they cost too much money, they make Congress look awful. They cite Congressman Duke Cunningham who went to jail for bribes related to defense earmarks. And they say it's just the opposite of draining the swamp. MARTIN: Several listeners have been thinking about the idea that excess comes along with earmarks. This is something Josh Gronemeyer was thinking about. He writes, (reading) how much of an effect has the earmark ban had on wasteful spending? Seems like trading the possibility of breaking Congress's gridlock isn't worth bringing back shady, pork barrel spending. ROBERTS: Well, you could be more transparent so it wouldn't be so shady so we would know exactly how much money and who's asking for it. And the bottom line is it really didn't add that much to spending. These were often small amounts in great, big bills. That Lawrence Welk Museum, for instance, was a half a million dollars. And one person's wasteful spending, Rachel, is another person's economic development grant. And in the words of conservative Republican Steve King - I'm quoting here - "there will always be earmarks. It's just that the administration runs the earmarks today." MARTIN: All right. So we can't let you go without settling the fate of the Lawrence Welk Museum, which we have referenced now numerous times. This was a real thing. ROBERTS: Yes. It's now a museum in his childhood home in Strasburg, N.D. But Belgian endives... MARTIN: Yeah. Let's - what about the Belgian endives? ROBERTS: The research shows that it could be very, very helpful in medicinal purposes. So Belgian endive turned out to be a worthy research project. MARTIN: Good thing we did that research. All right. Endives, please. Commentator Cokie Roberts. You can ask Cokie your questions about how politics and government works by emailing us at askcokie@npr.org, or you can tweet us your question with the hashtag #AskCokie. Thanks so much, Cokie. ROBERTS: Thank you, Rachel. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: If he really goes through with it, President Trump presents what he calls Fake News Awards today, naming news stories or reporters he dislikes. Fake news is a phrase the president and his supporters have used often. It first gained currency as a description of propaganda promoting the president. But this was one of many cases in which his critics accused the president of doing something so the president accused them of doing it. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING MONTAGE) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They have been fake news for a long time. That was fake news. We don't want fake news. And by the way, not everybody is fake news. INSKEEP: OK. We do not know if the president of the United States will really go through with his promise to present awards today. His spokesperson called it a potential event. But Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake took the opportunity to offer a differing view. He spoke this morning from the floor of the U.S. Senate on the role of the news media in safeguarding democracy. And he criticized President Trump's attacks on the media. A little bit earlier, Senator Flake got on the line with us. Senator, good morning. JEFF FLAKE: Hey. Thanks for having me on. INSKEEP: What makes this an issue on which to speak out, Senator? FLAKE: Well, I think it's important when there's talk about fake news, it has real consequences when you look around the world at the number of authoritarians using that phrase now and justifying crackdowns on opposition because they call something fake news, borrowing that language from the president. And that has real consequences to our standing in the world and in terms of what happens to the opposition in countries where they need to speak up. INSKEEP: Have some media organizations earned the title from time to time going after the president a little too enthusiastically, perhaps? FLAKE: Sure. Sure. I mean, that's always the case. The media is never unbiased. And as conservatives, we always feel that the media goes after us. That's probably the case. But it is what it is. And the worst thing to do is to simply label things fake news that aren't. And then I mean, you know, if you don't have shared facts as a country, you have nothing. And so that's a real problem. INSKEEP: Senator, did you decide not to seek re-election in Arizona - as some people will know, you've announced - because in part, some big part of your state's electorate was just not going to be in touch with reality as you saw it? FLAKE: Well, I am certainly out of step with many in my party. That is true. This has become very much the president's party, and for someone who stands up and does not agree with the president on many things... INSKEEP: But I'm not talking about disagreement. I just mean simply do you feel a large part of the electorate is out of touch with reality, so to speak, with facts because they're following the president where he leads them? FLAKE: I'm not going to say that. I'm just saying it's our responsibility as elected officials to speak the truth, and I haven't seen that much. INSKEEP: Senator, some people will know also that you criticized President Trump's remarks the other day about African countries in a private meeting. And, we should be clear, the president has denied using this or that word, but nobody's really denied that the president said he preferred Norwegian immigrants, who he described apparently as hardworking and industrious to Africans or Haitians. And that has led some people to a bottom line question, is the president a racist? FLAKE: That's for others to determine. All I can say was those words, they are hurtful. I happen to chair of the Africa subcommittee. We deal with 54 countries in Africa. We have to have agreements, security arrangements, intelligence sharing. This makes it doubly difficult to do so. I've spent a good deal of my life in Africa, as well, and I just don't agree with those characterizations. Those immigrants who come from Africa and elsewhere are coming for a better life and usually contribute to a better future here. INSKEEP: Senator, can I get you to address a common, I guess, social media complaint people will make about you? They'll say, well, Senator Flake criticizes the president a lot - and that is certainly true - but votes with him. And I looked it up. You have voted against the president. You voted for Russia sanctions, which the president opposed, for example. But on health care, on taxes, you have sided with the president. FLAKE: Right. If things like NAFTA come up for a vote, I'll support it. The president won't. The travel ban, I don't support it. The president does. But on some things that have come to the Congress, frankly, we've voted on, like repealing and replacing Obamacare. I voted to do that 30 or 40 times before the president came along. Should I change my vote just because I disagree with certain matters with the president? I don't think so. I don't want to do it out of spite. I'm a conservative, and I vote conservative. INSKEEP: James Fallows of The Atlantic wrote the other day that it would just take two Senate Republicans - this is his thought - it would just take two Senate Republicans to side with Democrats, and they would make a majority in the Senate, and you could seriously confront the president, vote to censure him, for example, or call for his tax returns or conduct a more serious ethics investigation. If Democrats approached you to do that effectively, to take over the Senate, would you vote with them? FLAKE: (Laughter). Obviously it depends on an issue. If there's something that I feel the president has not stood up for his constitutional obligations, I'll vote, I think, with a number of my Republican colleagues to do so. But I'm not going to vote out of spite against things like tax reform or health care reform just because I disagree with the president. INSKEEP: Well, let's just say voting to demand the president's tax returns. Would you cast that vote with Democrats? FLAKE: Well, we'll see if it comes up. But I don't think that that should be an obligation. I think that the president should, but I don't think that's something the Congress ought to demand. INSKEEP: Senator Flake, it's always a pleasure talking with you. Thank you very much. FLAKE: Thanks for having me on. INSKEEP: Jeff Flake is a Republican senator from the state of Arizona. DAVID GREENE, HOST: We have news of a breakthrough in relations between North and South Korea - at least a breakthrough of a sort. The two governments have agreed to terms that will have their respective Olympic teams marching together in next month's opening ceremonies at the Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. NPR's Elise Hu is in Seoul and is on the line. Hey, Elise. ELISE HU, BYLINE: Hey, there. GREENE: So what have they agreed to here? HU: Well, the two Koreas are going to form their first joint Olympic team. It's going to be the women's ice hockey team that plays in Pyeongchang, which is a South Korean resort city that's going to be hosting the games next month. Their athletes are also going to be marching together during the opening ceremony. That hasn't happened since the year 2000 in Sydney when the two Koreas marched together. So a couple items here hammered out in the third talks in ten days between North and South Korea that has really sort of cooled down some tensions that had really been ratcheting all of last year. GREENE: Now it's an interesting reminder that there is some precedent for this, at least within the last two decades. This is not, you know, the first time ever. But you say cooling down the tensions. So is it an exaggeration to call this a breakthrough in relations? HU: The fact that they're talking at all is considered significant considering the two Koreas hadn't. There had been a freeze for two years prior to about last week when the inter-Korean talks began again in earnest in order to make these agreements about the Olympics. But critically, the two Koreas are not talking about security issues - that is this question of North Korea's increasing nuclear and missile capabilities. And so there's no breakthroughs on that front. But generally, it is seen as something of a positive when the two countries are talking because - and then they're also reopening some hotlines and some ways to communicate because this always helps sort of sort out any miscommunication or misreading of things when things are tense. GREENE: So it's been so cool that just opening lines of communication and just having a way to avoid some sort of miscommunication leading to something catastrophic - I mean, that is seen as progress. We just don't know how far this is going to go. HU: That's right. I mean, South Korea has been committed to trying to get to denuclearization eventually but is using this Olympic level of conversation and show of unity as an entree to that. North Korea, on the other hand, says it doesn't want to talk about its nuclear capabilities at all, and that's off the table. So that's going to be the hard part of this relationship. But this is what South Korea considers an opening - a beginning. GREENE: Do South Koreans - people you talk to in Seoul, on the streets - do they want their athletes to be marching side by side with the North Korean team? HU: Well, as I mentioned, this isn't the first time. GREENE: Right. HU: The two Koreas have done this during the Asian Games previously. The last time the two Koreas have marched together was during the 2007 Asian Games - and then, you know, prior to that, another Olympics event. So the South Koreans are generally happy to see that. Older Koreans that remember the peninsula unified tend to be very supportive of this notion in general. But there are going to be some mixed opinions about this especially when it comes to this hockey team because, here in local media, there's already talk that the South Koreans think it's unfair that suddenly the North Koreans are joining with the South's players that have been training for so long. GREENE: Yeah, I mean, you change a team totally just within such a short period of time before the Olympics. It has to make a difference. HU: Exactly. GREENE: NPR's Elise Hu speaking to us from Seoul, South Korea. Elise, thanks. HU: You're welcome. (SOUNDBITE OF ODDISEE SONG "AFTER THOUGHTS) RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Health insurer Aetna has agreed to pay $17 million in a settlement over a major medical privacy breach. The breach itself was low tech, but it exposed HIV information about thousands of Aetna members nationwide. Elana Gordon from member station WHYY in Philadelphia reports. And we should note, Aetna was previously an NPR funder. ELANA GORDON, BYLINE: Sam's jaw dropped when he got the letter from his insurer, Aetna, this summer. SAM: I was shocked. You know, imagine it had gone to the wrong address. GORDON: The envelope window was so big that he could see a reference to his prescriptions for HIV. He was in his apartment building in New Jersey and looked around feeling paranoid. SAM: To be perfectly honest, I haven't disclosed my HIV status to my parents. Let's just say that letter had gotten forwarded to their house and, you know, someone happened to open the mail. Those are the types of things that were going through my mind. GORDON: NPR agreed to not use Sam's full name because he worries about how going public with his HIV status might affect his work. Upwards of 12,000 of Aetna's members who take HIV meds received similar letters. Ronda Goldfein is director of the Aids Law Project of Pennsylvania. RONDA GOLDFEIN: This isn't your nosy neighbor held your letter up to the light so they could read the text. If you look at the face of the envelope, it's clear that the first three or four lines of text are visible. GORDON: In August, her office and other legal aid groups started getting complaints from hundreds of people who had received the letter. Goldfein says despite improvements in HIV treatment and reduction in stigma, people still experience serious discrimination. GOLDFEIN: We often hear that people don't get tested and treated because they are fearful that their private information will get out and that they will be at risk of harm. GORDON: Aetna set up a relief fund early on, but when Goldfein's group and others realized the scale of the problem, they filed suit last summer. On Wednesday, Aetna agreed to settle for $17 million. It's still pending a judge's approval, but in a statement, the insurers said it's worked to address the potential impact of the mailers. And it's establishing measures to ensure something like this doesn't happen again. To privacy expert Bill McGeveran, the settlement really stands out. BILL MCGEVERAN: It's a much bigger settlement than ordinary identity theft scenarios where an online database has been breached. GORDON: McGeveran teaches law at the University of Minnesota. He says companies may be so focused on IT security that they overlook basic privacy violations. MCGEVERAN: They're about things being overheard. They're about paper records. And in this case, it's about a paper mailing. GORDON: As part of the settlement, each person who received a letter will get an automatic payment of $500. And there's a separate fund to file for additional damages of up to $20,000. For NPR News, I'm Elana Gordon in Philadelphia. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) MARTIN: That story is part of a partnership between NPR, Kaiser Health News and WHYY's The Pulse. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Over the past week and a half, we've been airing an NPR investigation that shows people with intellectual disabilities are sexually assaulted at rates seven times that of everyone else. In our series, we have heard from experts and prosecutors, families and people with intellectual disabilities themselves. Today we bring you the voices of two therapists who treat them. First, just a warning here, their stories could be disturbing to some of you. Here's NPR's Joseph Shapiro. JOSEPH SHAPIRO, BYLINE: Recently I sat down at a table with two women, both psychologists. They're good friends, in part because they share a rare specialty. They're among the very few therapists who counsel people with intellectual or developmental disabilities who've been victims of sexual violence. And what they were saying about the violence and their clients' lives was disturbing, really stunning. KARYN HARVEY: Was abused by a van driver - raped, it was a rape. And he changed the route so she would be the last one. SHAPIRO: That's Karyn Harvey, a therapist from Baltimore. She's sharing stories with Nora Baladerian, a therapist from Los Angeles. NORA BALADERIAN: He was being sexually abused by his coach, and he was told that if he ever told anyone, he and his parents would be killed. SHAPIRO: They see a lot of women and men with intellectual or developmental disabilities who've been the victims of sexual assault. BALADERIAN: The young woman was being taken by her taxi driver, paid by Medicaid to take people to their medical appointments, people with developmental disabilities... SHAPIRO: For people with intellectual disabilities across America, there's a hidden epidemic of sexual assault. BALADERIAN: So they were driving home and he turned right and she said, no, no, no. You're supposed to turn left. And he said, we're taking a shortcut. You know? How many times have we heard that? So he took her into the forest where he raped her, and then he started to go back to the car and she said, wait a minute. I've got to get home. My mom's going to be really mad that I'm late. SHAPIRO: People with intellectual disabilities can be easy to manipulate because they've been taught to be trusting. Here's Karyn Harvey. HARVEY: Yeah. I've seen - something that I've seen that happens in residential situations, I've seen a number of people where the staff have said, I'm your boyfriend and we're in a relationship. SHAPIRO: They need to rely upon other adults - the parents, teachers, staff who help them. HARVEY: Say OK, well, we're going to be boyfriend and girlfriend so this is what we do every night. And so there was ongoing sexual abuse. SHAPIRO: Women and men with intellectual disabilities do have romances, relationships. Sometimes they marry. They can have consensual sex. But Harvey's talking about how for predators they can be some of the easiest prey. HARVEY: And the most shattering piece - 'cause I've done the crisis counseling afterwards. This is five or six situations - finding out that that person was not their boyfriend. Because the woman is usually proud about it - this is my boyfriend. And then we report, and then the devastation is that, I was raped? That's not rape. That was my boyfriend. I was deceived. He said he loved me. SHAPIRO: We found multiple recent cases where a victim can't talk at all. The abuse gets discovered only when the woman gets a sexually transmitted disease or pregnant. HARVEY: And that's actually very common in institutions, pregnancy where you don't know what happened. I actually was called in on a case where somebody was pregnant during a long-term hospitalization. SHAPIRO: Most rapes, of anyone, are committed by someone the victim knows. For women without disabilities, the rapist is a stranger 24 percent of the time, but less than 14 percent of the time for people with intellectual disabilities. That's what our analysis shows from numbers provided by the U.S. Department of Justice. Most of the time, the perpetrators are people they've learned to count on the most, sometimes their own family. Therapist Karyn Harvey had a client who was HIV positive but he never revealed how that happened, until one day. HARVEY: And then his sister moved into his mother and stepfather's home because she was getting divorced, and she brought her two young children. And so he went to his therapist and said, I have something to tell you. I'm very worried about my niece and nephew because of what my stepfather did to me all those years, and I don't want him to do it to them. SHAPIRO: Harvey and her staff encouraged the man and helped him report the abuse to police. The man was very close to his mother, but the case split the family, especially after the stepfather was charged, brought to trial and convicted of abuse. HARVEY: This guy was sentenced. I was standing with him and his mother came up to him and said, you just ruined our lives. I will never speak with you again. And she stopped talking to him, and he lost his family. And I've seen this happen multiple times. SHAPIRO: Prosecutions are rare. Convictions, even more rare, partly because people with intellectual disabilities often have difficulty testifying or they're easily confused on a witness stand, or they're just not believed. Nora Baladerian had a client who said she was sexually assault by men in the family. But at trial, the men were acquitted. The young woman had been the main witness, but her testimony didn't go over well with the jury. BALADERIAN: The jury said, found him not guilty. When polled afterwards they said, why? And they said, she was too weird. Well, they just could not believe her because she was too weird. SHAPIRO: Baladerian thinks flat out prejudice gets in the way throughout the criminal justice system. BALADERIAN: For people with developmental disabilities who speak perhaps more slowly or use a vocabulary that's not equal to their age or expected educational level, they're seen as dumb, worthless, less than. And there is just a bias that they're not worth it or they must have been complicit. More than anything, they're not worth the effort. SHAPIRO: There's one more thing that really troubles these two therapists, the trauma of all this sexual violence almost never gets treated. Sometimes a victim with an intellectual disability acts out. If they have difficulty using words, that's a way of communicating distress. Maybe they destroy property or they cut themselves or bang their head against the wall. Karyn Harvey. HARVEY: Also, the other thing that goes unrecognized are their repeated suicide attempts because they're not shooting themselves or hanging themselves. They're running into traffic. SHAPIRO: Harvey says she's seen five cases like that. What's most common is that the person is medicated on powerful anti-psychotic drugs. HARVEY: They're looked at as somebody who just needs more and more medication, and the medications interact. They create all kinds of problems, and death occurs as a result of that, as well. SHAPIRO: It's a spiral of bad outcomes, an unrecognized mental health crisis that's created from an unrecognized epidemic of sexual assault against people with intellectual disabilities. Joseph Shapiro, NPR News. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Let's talk about a new movie. It's called "Hostiles," and it tells the story of a U.S. Army captain. It's the Old West, 1892. The captain has spent decades fighting Indians and seeing his friends killed and then is ordered to commit an act of humanitarian relief. His commander tells him to escort an old Cheyenne chief back to his home valley to die. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "HOSTILES") CHRISTIAN BALE: (As Captain Joseph J. Blocker) I hate him. I've got a war bag of reasons to hate him. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Captain, I just don't give a damn how you personally feel about Yellow Hawk. I don't. GREENE: The bitter veteran played by Christian Bale starts a journey with the chief named Yellow Hawk. And our colleague Steve Inskeep has the story of the actor who took on the chief's role. STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: His name is Wes Studi. And in the movie, he speaks only a few words of English. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "HOSTILES") WES STUDI: (As Chief Yellow Hawk) Hello (unintelligible). INSKEEP: He mostly speaks the Cheyenne language, softly, when he speaks at all. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "HOSTILES") STUDI: (As Chief Yellow Hawk, Native American language spoken). INSKEEP: His character's most powerful moments come when he conveys meaning simply with a gesture or with his deeply expressive face. Wes Studi is Cherokee. He's 70 years old - 70 busy years. He was a Vietnam veteran and an Indian rights activist before he found roles - usually playing Indians - in many big films. Studi grew up in eastern Oklahoma in the Cherokee Nation, land where Cherokees have lived since their ancestors walked there on the Trail of Tears in 1838. Just over a century later, Wes Studi was born in a valley called Nofire Hollow. STUDI: In the beginning, we were pretty much subsistence farmers and hunters. There was an extended family area that we lived in - grandmother's home and one of the son's homes over here and another one further away and then cousins up and down Nofire Hollow. As a child, I remember going into town by wagon one time - and it was an all-day journey... INSKEEP: By wagon - horse and wagon. STUDI: By mule and wagon, yes. And we didn't have electricity, but we did have relatives who lived above and beyond the hollow that we lived in. They were one of the first families in the area in Cherokee Nation to have electricity. And I think that was the first time I ever saw television was when I was maybe 4 years old or thereabouts. And what we did was we trekked up five, six miles up from our home to our cousins' home to watch Saturday night wrestling. INSKEEP: Ah. STUDI: Yeah, that was the first that we ever encountered electricity and television and what we consider, you know, part of the modern world these days. INSKEEP: How'd you get into acting? STUDI: (Laughter) I couldn't do anything else. INSKEEP: (Laughter) I don't believe that. STUDI: Well, it was kind of a combination of the after effect of Vietnam in a way in that - I won't say I was addicted or a junkie of adrenaline, but, you know, I tried a number of fairly dangerous things just to kick that off in my brain again. You know, it's something that - I'm afraid I got too used to it perhaps but... INSKEEP: What sort of dangerous things? STUDI: You know, I tried bull riding and just physical things that were challenging. INSKEEP: How were you at bull riding, by the way? STUDI: I wasn't good at all. I don't think I ever got eight seconds anywhere (laughter). But then after that, I discovered acting through community theater. And what I saw in community theater was you could learn your lines and do rehearsals and all of that, but finally opening night shows up and you're in the wings and I rediscovered that huge wall of fear. And to me, that provided that amount of excitement and adrenaline rush, if you will. And if it's working right, everything is smooth. It's a beautiful thing. INSKEEP: You got going in Hollywood relatively late as actors go, then. STUDI: Late in life, yeah. INSKEEP: Late in life - around 40 or something like that. STUDI: Yeah. INSKEEP: What is it like particularly to be a Native American and show up in Hollywood looking for work? STUDI: Well, at times you can be - you're welcome, depending on what's being cast. "Dances With Wolves," they wanted authentic-looking Indians in the film, and so they got it. The same was true with "Last Of The Mohicans" and "Geronimo." And I think audiences have begun to wonder more about these characters than just the antagonist part of most Indian films. We were the threat. We were the da da-da da-da da (ph) kind of thing that happened in many movies. But that time, filmmakers were beginning to think that, wow, well maybe we can find some real Indians to do this rather than, like, brown-facing actors. And so it formed a curiosity by the public to see - so they're really here still, yet, huh? So the genocide we tried on them didn't work. They're still around and trying to get into the movie business. (LAUGHTER) INSKEEP: I want to ask one other thing in "Hostiles." This is a movie that's been praised widely for its authentic depiction of Native Americans and just complex characterizations of different kinds of people. But when I think about the story that's told, it still is the experience of a white U.S. Army captain who is learning about the Indians he's fought against all these years in perhaps a different or deeper way. Does it bother you at all that it still is, in many ways, a story from a white perspective? STUDI: No. No. It doesn't bother me because I understand that that's what it is. Now, it would be nice - yes - that - if I were the lead. Of course, I mean, every actor is going to say that if they're honest about it. It'd be better to - if I were playing the lead rather than Christian. But on the other hand, that's not what's in the script. The script is our Bible. As an actor, that's what you do. You tell this particular story. Now, as time goes on, I hope to find one where I can be in the lead. You know, I think that's every actor's dream actually - to play lead parts. But no, it doesn't bother me because I've realized from the get-go that this is not a story about my character. My character adds to the story and is an integral part of it all, but it is not about my character. INSKEEP: Wes Studi, thanks very much. I've enjoyed this. STUDI: Ah, me too. INSKEEP: He plays Chief Yellow Hawk in the western movie "Hostiles" which is out in some cities and has a wider release this month. (SOUNDBITE OF RYAN BINGHAM'S "HOW SHALL A SPARROW FLY") DAVID GREENE, HOST: We have a report card this morning for President Trump as we approach the one-year anniversary of his inauguration. It comes from a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll fresh out this morning, and it is not good news for the president. A majority of Americans, 53 percent, say his first year in office has been a failure. NPR's lead political editor Domenico Montanaro is here with more details. Hi, Domenico. DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Hey there, David. GREENE: So we've heard all year that President Trump's approval ratings have been, you know, at record lows. So I guess this isn't too surprising, but can you dig into why exactly Americans have been unhappy with his performance? MONTANARO: Yeah. If you look at the issues, I mean, look at foreign policy. Fifty-four percent of Americans say American foreign policy has deteriorated in the last year under this president. Most pressing for a lot of people is North Korea. Fifty-eight percent disapprove of this president's handling of North Korea, and more than 70 percent say they're worried about war breaking out with the country. GREENE: Wow. That's striking that that people would think a war could be happening soon. MONTANARO: Absolutely. And it's a huge number, and it's why so many people you can see were so scared when that false alarm went out in Hawaii over the weekend. You know, more than 60 percent say that he's done more to divide the nation than unite it. That's a huge number, 2 to 1. And, not surprising perhaps, given that he's largely played to his base as the president, but, you know, that has helped him keep his base. Among the base, 91 percent say that his year has been a success, but he hasn't played much to the middle. GREENE: OK. So if he can look at his base as really being behind him, as one positive, are there any other positives in these numbers that the president could look at? MONTANARO: Yeah, and they shouldn't be overlooked because they're big things - the economy and his handling of ISIS. You know, they're OK numbers for him. You know, by a margin of 48 to 40, people say that they approve of the way he's handled going after the terrorist organization ISIS. And the economy, most people say, is pretty good. So, you know, those are big things, obviously, especially in an election year. But his signature legislative achievement, the tax bill, still unpopular. And he's going to try to sell that today. He's underwater with that. You know, only 36 percent of the country approves of it, and most people, 6 in 10, think that his policies are aimed at helping the rich. Just a quarter say that he's trying to help the middle class. GREENE: You know, we've been talking about setting up this election year, and there seem to be some competing narratives. I mean, the Republican National Committee seems to have more money than the Democratic Party but the Democrats have won some races that suggest that maybe they could be looking for a good year. Are you learning anything in this poll that might help you predict where these congressional elections might go? MONTANARO: We always like to have the pollsters test what I call the generic ballot - who do you want to control Congress? And right now Democrats are ahead on that score by six points, but that's not a comfortable lead for Democrats and those hoping that Democrats will take back the House or Senate this fall. You know, I asked our pollster about this, and he said that there largely seems to be a change depending on how Trump comports himself. You know, whether or not he's embroiled in controversy. And we should say that this poll was taken before Trump's disparaging remarks about African countries relating to immigration. And the point was that if he stays cool then it looks like he's plus - you know, that Democrats are plus five or six points as opposed to 17 like we've seen in other polls. That could be worrying for Democrats and also a lesson for President Trump. GREENE: Domenico, I mean, tell me if I'm wrong, but I think both people who support this president and oppose him would agree that that this first year has been sort of a defining moment in this country. I mean, is there a way to step back and get a sense for where people see this country in, you know, a year into the Trump era? MONTANARO: So again, this president's got a 37 percent approval rating right now, and 42 percent of the country think the country's changing for the worse. Thirty-six percent think it's changed for the better. So again, we see that mid-30s number for the president on a lot of these scores for his positive marks. Nearly 6 in 10 think the country's going in the wrong direction. And what's fascinating about that is that it's been exactly almost the same number since Barack Obama was in office, but if you look below those numbers, it's been a complete partisan flip. We've seen three-quarters to, you know, 8 in 10 Democrats think that the country's is going in the wrong direction when about that exact same number said they thought it was going pretty well under President Obama. GREENE: Amazing. OK. A new poll we're seeing this morning as we hit the one-year mark in President Trump's presidency. Speaking about that poll with NPR lead political editor Domenico Montanaro. Domenico, thanks. MONTANARO: All right. You're welcome. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: President Trump has frequently promised to protect religious freedom in this country. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Yeah, and his administration believes action it will take today will do just that. This morning, the Department of Health and Human Services is set to announce a new division for conscience and religious freedom. It's going to aim to protect medical professionals who object to participating in procedures that go against their beliefs. MARTIN: All right, to better understand the implications of this, we are joined in our studio by NPR's health policy correspondent, Alison Kodjak. Hey, Alison. ALISON KODJAK, BYLINE: Hey, Rachel. MARTIN: What's this new division all about? KODJAK: Well, so the division's being created as part of the Office of Civil Rights (ph), and we're going to learn a lot more details later this morning. But what it appears to be is a broad and - a broad new division aimed at protecting anyone who cites moral or religious reasons for refusing to take part in, say, abortions or to treat transgender patients or perhaps participate in other kind of types of health care. MARTIN: Things that they would claim are antithetical to their morals or set of ethics or religion. KODJAK: Right. MARTIN: So I thought that Health and Human Services already had protections for - in those cases. KODJAK: They have some. So the protections right now - last year, they issued new rules that allow employers who offer insurance coverage to refuse to pay for birth control if they cite a religious or moral objection. And, you know, the - this is actually sort of a reversal of an Obama-administration policy that said everyone - they have to treat transgender patients, and they have to participate in health care if they're going to work in health care. But when HHS offered those new guidelines last year, the head of the Office of Civil Rights made it clear that in his mind, the right to, as he put it, live out your religious identity, really needs to be protected just as much as any other civil right. MARTIN: So this is just going to expand the religious exemptions when it comes to doctors and physicians and what they can treat and what they can't. KODJAK: It is. It's a whole new division that will review issues and things like that. So they're going to expand what people can object to, and the idea that they can do a moral or religious exemption... MARTIN: Ah, that's a difference. KODJAK: That's something that has brought - had made a lot of critics worried because you don't have to have a specific religion. MARTIN: Religious doctrine to point to. KODJAK: Exactly, exactly. MARTIN: So what else are critics saying? I imagine there's a lot criticism out there. KODJAK: Yeah, a lot of groups are weighing in - everybody from the ACLU to physicians' groups to, of course, Planned Parenthood. The doctors' groups say they're worried this could hurt patient care. Say you're a transgender person who comes in to an emergency room, and maybe it's a Catholic hospital. And, you know, what if people in that emergency room decide they're not going to treat you? You know, it's unclear how much this will actually play out. But I talked to Senator Jim Lankford, who's been pushing for something like this. His office yesterday - they cited nurses in Texas who did not want to participate in abortions but were required to because it was an emergent situation. MARTIN: And they would find that to be a big problem. KODJAK: Right, exactly. MARTIN: ...Because it stands in the face of their religion. KODJAK: So it's unclear how much this happens, but it could. MARTIN: All right, NPR health policy correspondent Alison Kodjak for us this morning about these imminent changes to religious exemptions at Health and Human Services agency. Thanks, Alison. KODJAK: Thanks, Rachel. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) MARTIN: All right, David, day in, day out, we cover big institutions, right? We're talking about corporations, Congress, the president, the media. GREENE: And here's something all of those institutions have in common. Americans have lost faith in them. That is one of the takeaways from this NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll that is out now. The poll also asked about President Trump's popularity as we approach the one-year anniversary of his inauguration. MARTIN: OK. NPR lead political editor Domenico Montanaro is here to break down the numbers with us. Hey, Domenico. DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel. MARTIN: Americans don't trust institutions. We knew this. I mean, this was something that Donald Trump tried to capitalize on the campaign trail, right? What exactly are the numbers pointing out? MONTANARO: Well, political institutions that have served, really, as the cornerstone of American democracy - they're in real trouble - I mean, from Congress to the political parties and the presidency itself. You know, Trump may have campaigned on that, but the office of the president doesn't do very well, either. Americans have very little confidence in any of those. Just 8 percent have a great deal of confidence in Congress, for example. Only about 1 in 3 have much confidence in the Republican or Democratic parties. And right in there with them, Rachel, is us in the media. MARTIN: It's disheartening. So let's talk about the president specifically. We know that his poll numbers have not been great over the past year as taken in snapshots. But when you look back at the entire year, how's he doing? MONTANARO: Not very well. His approval numbers largely remain the same. About 57 percent don't approve of the job he's currently doing. We also asked, though, about how he's done in his first year as we approach the one-year anniversary this weekend of him being sworn in as president, and here's where the numbers are really striking. Fifty-three percent of Americans say the president's first year was a failure, and by a 2-to-1 margin, people say that he has divided the country. Now, they do give Trump, I should say, relatively positive marks on his handling of ISIS and the state of the economy. And those aren't small things, especially in an election year, right? But on just about every other issue, they don't think he's done a very good job at all. And by the way, that includes foreign policy and, you know, that alert that went out over the weekend in Hawaii that shook the island. It's not surprising to see why people were so scared because more than 7 in 10 Americans are concerned about the possibility of war breaking out with North Korea. MARTIN: So 53 percent of Americans think that the - his first year was a, quote, "failure." How does that stack up to other presidents at this time in their tenure? MONTANARO: Well, for Barack Obama, for example, we were in the middle of the Great Recession. Numbers weren't great for him, either. Almost half the country said that he had fallen below their expectations. But he did have a majority on his side when people were asked about the direction Obama was taking the country, and that's not the case for Trump. MARTIN: It's an election year, of course - midterms coming up this fall. Anything in this poll that could help us as we anticipate those votes? MONTANARO: Well, certainly, it's never good when the president has this kind of - these kinds of numbers and his party rates so badly. Democrats, like I noted, don't do much better, but Americans do say they prefer Democrats to control Congress by about 6 points. But that's actually lower than a lot of other polls that have that have been out there. And I asked our pollster about this, and he said that what kind of happens is that when the president is tweeting things that are embroiled in controversy, then the number widens out. And that could be a - actually, a bad sign for Democrats because if he controls things during the - during October, that could be a bad sign for Democrats. MARTIN: NPR's Domenico Montanaro. Thanks. MONTANARO: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) MARTIN: All right, we know Apple makes a lot of stuff that we use a lot - the iPod, the iPhone, the i-everything (ph). GREENE: I-everything. (LAUGHTER) GREENE: The i-radio (ph) program. MARTIN: They're around. They make a lot of things. GREENE: Yeah, they also get criticized, though, for making a lot of those products in China and also holding a lot of their cash overseas. Yesterday, though, that company announced a huge investment in the United States. Apple plans to build a new campus and bring on 20,000 jobs over the next five years, and this led President Trump to take some credit for this. He tweeted last night, quote, "I promised that my policies would allow companies like Apple to bring massive amounts of money back to the United States." MARTIN: All right, we are going to bring in Kif Leswig (ph) - he - Leswing, rather. He's a senior reporter at Business Insider. Hey, Kif. KIF LESWING: Hey, how you doing? MARTIN: Doing well. What more can you tell us about Apple's plans here? LESWING: So, you know, yesterday, there was a variety of announcements, but one of the biggest ones is that it's going to make a one-time, mandatory tax payment of $38 billion, and that's a really huge number in taxes. MARTIN: Wow. LESWING: And it sounds like a huge number in taxes. MARTIN: Yeah. LESWING: But it's actual - it - yeah, yeah. It - I mean, and it is. But it's actually much less than it would've been before the new U.S. tax law that was passed in December. So, you know, the fact that Apple is paying this now signifies that they've saved a lot of money on their taxes. MARTIN: And so this is a voluntary thing. They're, like, doing this out of the goodness of their own heart now. LESWING: No, it's mandatory, and, you know, it's under the new U.S. tax law. Under the new U.S. tax law, they could pay over a period of time or they could pay all at once, so they decided to go with the all-at-once approach. So no, they're not doing this out of the goodness of the heart. This... MARTIN: So this money - presumably, this is going to come back into the U.S. economy in some way, and President Trump has - wants credit for this. Should he get it? LESWING: Yeah, he does want to credit for this. And, you know, he - and he tweeted about last night, calling it a huge win. Yet, I think he deserves credit for, you know, collecting these taxes, but maybe not necessarily for the new 20,000 employees in the campus that they were also speaking about yesterday. MARTIN: Do we know where this new Apple campus is going to be? LESWING: No. And, you know, the rumors haven't really started yet. It's not like Amazon. Amazon basically put out, you know... MARTIN: Bids. LESWING: ...A request... MARTIN: Requests, yeah. LESWING: ...For all these cities. Apple's not doing that, Apple's doing it more quietly. But no, we don't really have any idea. Apple does have a big campus - Austin - already, so... MARTIN: We'll see where campus No. 3 might be. Stay tuned for that. Kif Leswing of Business Insider talking about these new investment moves by Apple. Thanks so much, Kif. LESWING: Thank you very much. (SOUNDBITE OF STRFKR SONG, "GOLDEN LIGHT") DAVID GREENE, HOST: The Syrian government is warning this morning that the United States' military presence in that country is illegitimate and represents an aggression against Syrian sovereignty. This came after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signaled that U.S. forces would stay in parts of the country indefinitely. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) REX TILLERSON: The United States will maintain a military presence in Syria focused on ensuring ISIS cannot re-emerge. GREENE: Tillerson made that announcement yesterday at Stanford University. Now, there are currently some 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria providing support to anti-government rebels, but there are questions about if and when the U.S. might be violating international law. And law professor Milena Sterio of Cleveland State University has been writing about this, and she joins us. Professor, welcome. MILENA STERIO: Thank you. It's good to be on the show. GREENE: Well, it's good to have you. You've suggested that the U.S. presence in Syria might be on shaky ground. And I just want to really understand this because I thought there was a U.N. resolution saying that the United States could be there to fight terrorism. So what do you see as shaky here? STERIO: What's shaky here is that international law is clear in that it bans the use of force of one state against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state. And the only two exceptions in international law to this general ban are if there's a clear Security Council resolution or in self-defense. The Security Council resolution has to specifically authorize a country to use force against another country, and doing things like fighting terrorism is not carte blanche to stage an indefinite military intervention on the territory of another foreign nation. GREENE: OK, so you use the word indefinite there. It's - you're saying this resolution might have given the U.S. some limited authority to go after terrorist groups, but especially if ISIS is beginning to fade away, that that becomes much less clear here that the U.S. has a role. STERIO: Sure because the problem here is that basically, Secretary Tillerson announced several goals that the United States right now has in Syria, and one of those goals is ensuring that ISIS or al-Qaida never re-emerge. But there are other goals stated that include, for example, supporting the United Nations-led political process, diminishing Iran's influence, making sure the country doesn't have weapons of mass destruction and helping refugees. And it - when - comes to those other goals, it is unclear, you know, what kind of a military operation might be needed, and it seems like a broader military operation might be needed to support those other goals and that some of those military operations could potentially continue for a very long time. And that is not what Security Council resolution here had in mind. GREENE: If you don't mind, let me just play a little more of what Tillerson had to say yesterday. STERIO: Sure. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) TILLERSON: We cannot make the same mistakes that were made in 2011 when our premature departure from Iraq allowed al-Qaida in Iraq to survive and eventually morph into ISIS. It was that vacuum that allowed ISIS and other terrorist organizations to wreak havoc on the country. GREENE: So Professor, if the argument remains that - that they - the United States will not allow a terrorist group to re-emerge, and they don't focus on some of the other things like weapons of mass destruction, is the U.S. argument more solid? STERIO: It is not more solid in the sense that right now, there simply isn't Security Council authorization for the United States to launch a military operation on the territory of a foreign state such as Syria of such a broad, you know, open-ended nature. So it might be on slightly more solid ground, but really, international law today does not authorize the United States to use military force against Syria. GREENE: And what about the civil war that's, you know, killed hundreds of thousands of people, set off a massive refugee crisis that sounds like could get worse at some point soon in the northwest part of the country? Is there a humanitarian argument? I mean, I know the principle of responsibility to protect came out and was talked about around the Rwanda genocide. Could that be something the U.S. could use? STERIO: Sure. So humanitarian intervention is, at best, an emerging norm of international law. Right now, it is not a well-established exception to the overall ban on the use of force. It's an emerging norm. It is sort of a moral justification, if you will, for the use of force. But right now, international law doesn't support the use of force against a foreign, you know, sovereign nation on humanitarian grounds. And some might say that that is unfortunate. Some might say that there should be a humanitarian intervention exception. But right now, there simply isn't one. GREENE: Talking to law professor Milena Sterio at Cleveland State University about some of the legal issues that will arise if, as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said, the United States tries to stay indefinitely in Syria. Professor, thanks. STERIO: Thank you. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Tech giant Apple made a big announcement yesterday - not about a new phone or some i-gadget (ph). Instead, the company announced that it's going to increase investment in the U.S., building a new campus here and paying tens of billions of dollars in taxes because of money that it's bringing back into the country. So how much of this move has to do with the new tax law? NPR's Laura Sydell reports. LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE: Apple's faced a lot of criticism for being an American company that isn't giving enough back to America. The announcement seems tailored to show the company is patriotic. It plans to bring back billions of dollars it's kept in tax havens overseas and pay about 38 billion in U.S. taxes. It's also announcing it will create 20,000 new jobs and build a new campus. Financial analyst Patrick Moorhead follows Apple. PATRICK MOORHEAD: Here, Apple is just reinforcing all the taxes they pay, all the investments they are making in the United States to just balance out the conversation. SYDELL: Apple has kept some $250 billion outside the U.S. CEO Tim Cook has been a critic of American tax laws. But under the new tax law, it can bring back the money at a reduced rate. Financial analyst Gene Munster thinks most of what Apple announced doesn't have to do with the tax break. For example, the company's new campus in the U.S. will house the technical support staff who speak with customers in the U.S. GENE MUNSTER: They're testing and found that people really want to talk to somebody for support that's based in the country that they're calling from. And so Apple - U.S. is their biggest base, so they want to accommodate that. SYDELL: Apple's announcement of a new campus also comes after Amazon made a big splash by promising to build a second headquarters somewhere in the country, and cities have been competing for it. Apple, too, has not announced where it will build its new campus. The latest announcement does coincide with political pressure and the new tax law. But analysts say in the end, Apple is the most valuable company in the world, and it can do what it wants when it wants. Laura Sydell, NPR News, San Francisco. (SOUNDBITE OF PAUL KALKBRENNER'S "AARON") (SOUNDBITE OF ANDREW W.K. SONG, "MUSIC IS WORTH LIVING FOR") DAVID GREENE, HOST: Good morning. I'm David Greene. Luke Mitchell was on a highway in Britain rocking out to this song. It's called "Music's Worth Living For." Apparently it's also worth speeding for. Luke got a ticket. He tweeted about it, and the musician, rocker Andrew W.K., took note. He offered to pay the ticket, saying he was responsible for the sonic party power that made Luke speed, which led the police department to tweet drive safely, dudes, and party on responsibly. It's MORNING EDITION. DAVID GREENE, HOST: President Trump has frequently promised to protect religious freedom in this country... (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We will not allow people of faith to be targeted, bullied or silenced anymore. GREENE: ...Which brings us to the Trump administration's action today. This morning, the Department of Health and Human Services is set to announce a new division for conscience and religious freedom. It will aim to protect medical professionals who object to participating in procedures that go against their beliefs. And let's talk about the implications of this with NPR's health policy correspondent, Alison Kodjak. Hi, Alison. ALISON KODJAK, BYLINE: Hi, David. GREENE: All right, so what is this new division exactly? KODJAK: So it's a division that's being created within the Office of Civil Rights, which is actually an office that has enforcement authority, so they can actually, you know, fine companies or health care institutions. They can order them to change their behavior. And what it will do is essentially allow health care workers to refuse to participate in procedures, to perhaps not treat people who are transgender if they think that goes against their moral or religious rights or participate in abortions that are needed and allow them to refuse based on their conscience. And it's a real reversal from what was in place in the - under the Obama administration. GREENE: You say real reversal. I was wondering - I know there are some protections in some parts of the government for people and their religious beliefs. I mean, how much of a change is this? KODJAK: Well, there are some protections out there, but under the Obama administration, there was a new regulation issued that specifically said that in the health care setting workers have to give people the health care they need, and that specifically meant that they would have to treat transgender patients and they would have to, if necessary in an emergent situation, participate in performing abortions. And so this is a bit of a change in philosophy and focus because the new head of the Office of Civil Rights has said that he believes that the right - to put it as he says - live out your religious identity has to be protected. Whereas under the Obama administration, it was more they were protecting the patient. So it's a change in the focus of this tension between religious freedom and nondiscrimination. GREENE: OK. So if we're talking about medical professionals being able to refuse to take part in abortions, to be able to refuse to treat transgender patients, I mean, I can imagine the criticism is probably already building even before this announcement. KODJAK: Sure is. You know, there are a lot of critics, a lot of groups weighing in already, even though this hasn't even been formally announced. Some are physician groups, and they're worried about patient care. They're saying, like, what if somebody comes into an emergency room, they happen to be transgender and they need care and someone decides they don't want to help them? It's unclear how often this might happen, but it's a real concern. There are other groups like the ACLU who essentially say this is just against the law, and they are already threatening to sue. GREENE: So threatening to sue - I mean, could they mount a legitimate legal challenge here? KODJAK: Well, they're - again, it's an issue of whether or not the rights of, say, a woman who is a protected class needs an abortion in an emergent situation versus the right of a health care worker not to participate in that. So there are real legal issues here. It's just unclear on what - how that will come out if it were challenged in court. GREENE: Haven't we talked about some of this same topic in the Affordable Care Act and some recent religion-based changes in that law? KODJAK: Yeah, exactly. In the fall, the Trump administration put out a new rule allowing employers to refuse to pay for birth control. Also if they offer up a moral or conscience objection, the Affordable Care Act required birth control coverage, and this allowed an out. GREENE: NPR health policy correspondent Alison Kodjak talking about changes and a new division we're going to see at the Department of Health and Human Services announced this morning. Thanks, Alison. KODJAK: Thanks, David. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: This week is the Feast of San Anton. He's the patron saint of domestic animals. And in Spain, the festivities culminate in a Catholic Mass where people bring their pets to church - dogs, cats, even lizards in the church pews. NPR's Lauren Frayer managed to find herself a seat among that motley crew. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: The streets of downtown Madrid are closed to traffic, and everyone is streaming down with their pets in their arms. There are dogs in sweaters, there's a cat here in a baby sling, and there's a man trailing two sheep on a leash - a ferret, a parakeet. They're all in line waiting to be blessed by the priests, anointed with holy water, at the Church of San Anton. (SOUNDBITE OF DOG BARKING) FRAYER: Federico Espanolo was pushing a stroller filled with his babies. FEDERICO ESPANOLO: I'm here with my son and my four dogs and my wife. FRAYER: So this is a double stroller, and you have how many living beings in there (laughter)? ESPANOLO: Four of them - four of them are in the stroller and then my son in this one. FRAYER: Four dogs and one human. ESPANOLO: Yeah (laughter). FRAYER: And are they all being blessed today? ESPANOLO: Yes, they're being blessed all together, yeah. And we have been blessed having all of them in our family. FRAYER: This festival celebrates San Anton, or Saint Anthony the Abbott, a Christian monk born in the third century who befriended animals in the Egyptian desert. Here, it's a week of concerts, animal rights workshops and vegan restaurant deals, attracting both hipsters and little old ladies with lap dogs. (SOUNDBITE OF DOGS BARKING) FRAYER: Julian Munoz is carrying a bird cage with a green-and-yellow parakeet inside. JULIAN MUNOZ: This is Horacio. Horacio is a bird. This Christmas, he was sick. We didn't know what to do. We started praying to San Anton. He had a photo of San Anton in the cage. Finally, he's better now. He has singing again. FRAYER: So does Julian really believe that San Anton interceded and healed his pet parakeet, Horacio? MUNOZ: Yes. Also the vet has done her work in this case, but, yes, I think that San Anton has made a little miracle with Horacio, and now he's happy again. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) FRAYER: For NPR News, I'm Lauren Frayer at the Church of San Anton in downtown Madrid. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Some Republicans in Congress have identified a new factor contributing to the opioid epidemic. They blame Medicaid expansion funded by the Affordable Care Act for giving people greater access to prescription drugs. Republican Senator Ron Johnson held a hearing about this yesterday. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) RON JOHNSON: I'm not saying this is the primary cause. I think what we are certainly saying is this is an unintended consequence. It's, you know, certainly a contributing factor. It maybe enables something that maybe shouldn't be enabled, and it's a very serious problem that has to be taken a look at. MARTIN: Based on that reasoning, a handful of Republicans across the country have opposed funding or expanding Medicaid. One of them is Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry. And on the line now, a reporter who's been covering this story in Louisiana - her name is Julia O'Donoghue. She is a reporter with The Times-Picayune based in Baton Rouge. Julia, thanks for being with us. JULIA O'DONOGHUE: Thanks for having me. MARTIN: Could you just start off by explaining more about Jeff Landry's argument? How does he say Medicaid fuels the opioid epidemic? O'DONOGHUE: So Attorney General Landry's argument is that there has been a rise in prescriptions in general. He hasn't actually identified a rise in opioid prescriptions per se, and we can get to that later. But there have been more prescriptions issued through Medicaid in general since our governor expanded or adopted Medicaid expansion. And I guess he presumes because there are more prescriptions for prescription drugs, you know, circulating in Louisiana that that is exacerbating the opioid crisis. MARTIN: It would seem to me, though, that that is an important data point, whether or not opioid prescriptions have gone up. O'DONOGHUE: Correct. And actually, the Louisiana Department of Health can point to data that shows that opioid prescriptions in the state have actually dropped by about 2 percent and the number of opioid pills being prescribed has dropped as well since Medicaid expansion went into effect in July of 2016. Now, Louisiana adopted some new restrictions on opioid prescriptions around the same time that Medicaid expansion came into play, and it may be that because of those new restrictions that we're seeing fewer opioid pills prescribed and fewer prescriptions. But the data seems to suggest that what Attorney Jeff Landry is implying is not correct (laughter). MARTIN: So the data just doesn't back up his claims according to your reporting. O'DONOGHUE: Correct, yeah. MARTIN: So in Louisiana, what is next for Medicaid? Will the attorney general there be able to roll it back? O'DONOGHUE: No. In Louisiana, Medicaid expansion was something the governor could do without either the legislature or someone like the attorney general calling the shots. So he was able to kind of do it unilaterally. And I think once it's in place, it's kind of hard to roll back. Louisiana has a high Medicaid population. One in 3 of our residents is covered by Medicaid. MARTIN: All right. Julia O'Donoghue - she's a reporter with The Times-Picayune. Thanks so much for being with us this morning. O'DONOGHUE: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF MARK MCGUIRE'S "I: TO ALL PRESENT IN THE HALL OF LEARNING: IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: As the digital currency bitcoin has skyrocketed in value, many of the early adopters have become millionaires - only if, that is, they can find their bitcoins. Kenny Malone from our Planet Money team went on a virtual treasure hunt. KENNY MALONE, BYLINE: Syl Turner heard about bitcoin about 10 years ago, and he figured, what the heck, got a couple of coins and then saved them to what's known as a digital wallet on his hard drive. SYL TURNER: You know, at the time I didn't think bitcoin was worth anything so I didn't (laughter), back anything up. MALONE: To be fair, it wasn't worth anything at the time. Turner had digital pennies and then let them fall between the digital couch cushions. And a decade later, those pennies were worth $25,000. And so Turner is standing in his attic, staring at a waist-high layer of junk, looking for a 10-year-old hard drive. So let's dig in. Let's do this. TURNER: Yeah. Yeah, we can start digging in. MALONE: I think... TURNER: All right. There's, like, a broken fog machine. MALONE: Some kind of table saw thing, paper shredder, Game Boy Advance. TURNER: Baby seat. MALONE: Two TVs that are identical, Goldfish crackers box. While Turner rummages, we found an expert specifically in lost bitcoin. What do people actually say? Bitcoin? Bitcoins? JONATHAN LEVIN: You can have bitcoins, and bitcoin is, like, the currency unit. MALONE: OK. Jonathan Levin is co-founder of Chainalysis, a company that makes bitcoin analysis software, and the company did a study that found around 20 percent of all bitcoin is lost, out of circulation. By today's valuation, that's more than $25 billion. And Levin says the confusing thing is that, technically speaking, bitcoin can't be lost. LEVIN: Yeah. So if I send you bitcoin, I send bitcoin to your account on the bitcoin blockchain. MALONE: Blockchain - big word, sure, but here's a very non-technical way of understanding what it means. Imagine with me, if you will, a massive auditorium filled with bitcoin bookkeepers. Now, Jonathan wants to send me one bitcoin. He walks on stage in front of all these bookkeepers, steps up to a microphone, and he's like... LEVIN: (Clearing throat). Hello, entire bitcoin universe. As all of your books show, I, Jonathan, have three bitcoins to my name. MALONE: Of course, it would not be a name. It would be an anonymized account number. LEVIN: I would like everyone here to know that I am giving one bitcoin to Kenny. MALONE: After Jonathan says this, all of these virtual ledger keepers sort of scribble this transaction down, deduct one bitcoin from Jonathan's account, increase Kenny's account by one, and that is a bitcoin transaction. Nothing is really transferred. It's more like an instantaneous adjustment across a whole bunch of ledgers. When people talk about the blockchain, they're talking about this system where there is no central bookkeeper. TURNER: Let's see. Stepped on something. MALONE: Syl Turner, still digging through his attic. TURNER: Here's a frisbee. MALONE: Whatever bitcoins Syl Turner has, they're still there sitting in a kind of virtual vault, but he has lost the key. He's looking for an old hard drive with a super complicated password, and it's not up here. TURNER: I don't think I put it in this one. MALONE: Bitcoin was created to be this decentralized currency. There's no federal reserve tweaking interest rates, there's no treasury department printing new money and there's no customer service line to call if you are Syl Turner. But that lost bitcoin expert Jonathan Levin, he does have a phone number. (SOUNDBITE OF PHONE LINE RINGING) MALONE: Can you guys all hear each other OK? TURNER: Yup. LEVIN: Yeah. MALONE: So we have gathered here today to try and resurrect Syl's lost bitcoin. And I put Jonathan Levin on the phone with Syl Turner to see if there was any way to salvage Turner's bitcoin. TURNER: All right. So probably 2009 or 2010, somewhere around there... MALONE: Turner explained how he knows he's got tens of thousands of dollars of bitcoins locked away, he just cannot find that hard drive with the digital wallet with the private key. TURNER: So that's where I'm at. LEVIN: OK. Well, what we need to find the needle in the haystack is even, like, a little bit of a key. MALONE: What Levin is saying is that bitcoin private keys are designed to be un-guessable even by the most powerful computers we have right now. But if Turner happened to write down part of this key at some point, there are companies that will use that information to help him break into his account. TURNER: So there are bitcoin bounty hunters out there. LEVIN: There are bitcoin bounty hunters out there. MALONE: But, like lots and lots of other early bitcoin enthusiasts, Syl Turner did not write down any part of the key and has nothing to go on. LEVIN: Yeah. Unfortunately - unfortunately we can't actually help you out. MALONE: I don't know. What kind of things do you say to somebody in Syl's position? LEVIN: For the people that have lost their bitcoins, I say tough luck. (Laughter). TURNER: I know this is going to be, like, my deathbed regret. I'm like, I should have backed up that wallet. MALONE: Kenny Malone, NPR News. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. Japan often uses cutting-edge technology to solve problems, though in this case, they're going back to nature. It seems that too often animals are jumping onto train tracks, posing obvious safety hazards. So train researchers there have developed this new system to keep the animals away. Trains will blare out recordings of deer snorts and dog barks like this one from our own Steve Inskeep. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: (Imitating dog bark). MARTIN: I mean, if a speeding train isn't enough to scare the animals off the tracks, I guess that is? It's MORNING EDITION. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Congress is once again staring down a major deadline to avoid a government shutdown. Republican leaders are pushing a short-term funding bill, basically a patch to keep the government funded through mid-February. But do they have the votes? Here's White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS: The president certainly doesn't want a shutdown. And if one happens, I think you only have one place to look, and that's to the Democrats. GREENE: Many Democrats do say they want a deal on immigration before passing a spending bill. But there are some more conservative Republicans in the House who could stand in the way as well. Congressman Scott Perry of Pennsylvania is one of them. He's a Republican and member of the House Freedom Caucus, and he joins me on the line. Hey, Congressman. SCOTT PERRY: Hey, good morning, glad to be here. GREENE: So I know you were the - you were opposed to the last short-term funding measure. Are you going to oppose this one as well? PERRY: Well, something's got to change. I've got to tell you that. We - if anybody is keeping track and paying attention, I think this is the third or fourth one we've done. We just do them every about four weeks at a time - three weeks, four weeks at a time. And my question becomes what is going to change to break this stalemate, this cycle? Because as far as I can tell, we're just going to keep on doing three or four-week continuing resolutions. And there's a reason for all this, but somebody's got to have the courage to just say enough is enough, and we're going to fund the government to the end of the fiscal year. And so far, none of our leadership has been able to tell me or anybody else quite honestly how that's going to happen. They just keep on saying we've got to do this, this funding package, and of course, this one goes from February 6 - to February 16. So we're looking at another four weeks. GREENE: Yeah. It's not very long. It's sort of another patch. Well, that's sort of - that seems like a longer term question, whether you should keep doing these patchwork bills or not. But in terms of getting you on board with this one - I mean, we're talking about hours now. What would you need to vote for this? PERRY: Well, I will tell you, I'd like to see us just do the - the House has done the 12 appropriations bills. We did those last September. That's what the Senate's supposed to do. And then we figure out our differences and send that to the Senate - or to the president. That aside - because the Senate's certainly not going to get their appropriations done in the next two days or something like that - but we at least ought to fund the military till the end of the year. These continuing resolutions are particularly hard on the military. And if you think about things like the - you know, in the Marine Corps, fatalities and flying accidents have increased twofold in the last 10 years. Five of 58 brigade combat teams are ready to fight in the Army. The Navy's - half their aircraft can't fly due to maintenance. The Air Force is 50 percent sufficient and ready to fly. This is the circumstance for our military, and it's particularly hard on them because they can't - under continuing resolutions, no policies change. So they must continue to fund programs that don't work, and they're disallowed from funding programs that they've asked for to modernize and to move forward. And so they just remain in a status quo circumstance month by month by month. And it seems to me that at a minimum, House members, Senate members, Democrats and Republicans, ought to agree to fund the folks that are trying to keep our nation safe, that are out on the front lines, and at least do that to the end of the fiscal year so they have some predictability and they can move forward. But it's being held hostage. It's being held hostage, and I just think it's inappropriate. GREENE: If I could ask you, Congressman - I mean, you have some things you're standing on principle, like military funding. Democrats standing on principle on immigration, some saying they want a deal on that. I just wonder - don't we seem to be approaching maybe a moment of bipartisanship? I mean, the president's chief of staff, John Kelly, met with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, suggesting a border wall doesn't necessarily have to be this imposing presence on the border. I mean, Democrats are open to talking about the military. Why not fund the government one more time and let these negotiations really play out? PERRY: I'm all - look, I agree with funding it one more time and letting the negotiations play out, but I have no reason - no reasonable expectation whatsoever - that funding it for another 30 days is going to produce - we've been having this immigration discussion for decades quite honestly. GREENE: But just - we only have a couple seconds, though. You will vote for this one, you agree with one more to let the negotiations play out? PERRY: Well (laughter) I think we need a little more tighter terms than just letting negotiations play out. We need some assurances that things are going to be different in the next - you know, four weeks later. GREENE: Congressman Scott Perry, I appreciate it. PERRY: Thank you. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: There has been a mass resignation at the National Park Service. Nearly every member of the Park Service Advisory Board, nine in all, quit in protest. They say Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has ignored them and that he's rolling back protections for public lands. Zinke's office quickly countered, saying the board members are lying and that they have ignored sexual harassment at the Park Service. To untangle all these threads, we have reached journalist Elliott Woods at his home in Montana. It happens to be Ryan Zinke's home state. Woods recently profiled the interior secretary for Outside magazine. Hey Elliott, thanks for being with us. ELLIOTT WOODS: Thanks for having me. MARTIN: There's been this long-brewing insurgency at the National Park Service during the Trump administration over the course of the past year. So was this mass resignation expected in some way? WOODS: You know, I can't say if it was expected or not, but I think it fits the pattern of senior-level officials in the Interior Department and the National Park Service and other agencies in the Trump administration who are reacting to a very clear and firm anti-science stance among the senior officials and - the senior Cabinet officials in the Trump administration. So we've seen whistleblower claims from people like Joel Clement in the Interior Department who was reassigned to an accounting job away from a job advising on climate policy and things like that. And I think this fits that pattern of people in those positions saying enough is enough. We're not being consulted. We're not being used for our intended purpose. And it would be better for us to make this very public statement of disgust and protest than to continue functioning in kind of a Potemkin position. MARTIN: So then Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary, combats this mass resignation by lambasting these board members, saying that they have ignored sexual harassment at the Park Service. What can you tell us about that? WOODS: Well, to me, that just seems like a pivot to distract attention from the merits of the claims that these National Parks Advisory Board members are making. So it is definitely a fact that sexual harassment has been a pervasive problem, not just in the National Park Service but in the Department of the Interior in general. There was a survey that came out last autumn that showed that 38 percent of the agency's employees had been harassed or discriminated against. And Secretary Zinke made a very public statement through a YouTube video in December to all Department of Interior employees that he was really going to crackdown on this. He very publicly fired four senior officials and said, I'll fire 400 more if necessary. So it's definitely true that he is prosecuting this issue, but to pivot from the very legitimate criticisms of the advisory board to the harassment issue seems like a bit of a red herring to me. MARTIN: Right. You spent a fair amount of time with Zinke. You followed him for a couple days in Alaska, had a one on one, even went fly fishing with him in Glacier Park in Montana. What is your impression of him? WOODS: My impression is that Ryan Zinke is ready to adapt in whatever ways are necessary in order to please whatever - the boss in whatever position he's in. MARTIN: That's journalist Elliott Woods. He wrote a profile recently for Outside magazine of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: We are now hearing about two signs that a compromise could be on the horizon when it comes to immigration - an issue that is holding up a crucial spending bill needed to keep the government open. First, there are these remarks that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly made yesterday to a group of Hispanic lawmakers. He said the president's thinking has, quote, "evolved" on the border wall with Mexico and that the White House is fully committed to finding a fix for DACA. And then there's news that a bipartisan group of senators, led by South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham and Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, has put together a new immigration proposal and put it on the table late Wednesday. The bill would be - would up the budget for border security, make the DACA program permanent and address the policy of family-based migration. It's come to be called chain migration. Joining us in the studio is Senator Michael Bennet. He's a Democrat from Colorado. He is a member of that bipartisan group. Thanks so much for being in the studio this morning. MICHAEL BENNET: Thank you for having me. MARTIN: First, I want to talk about John Kelly's comments. He was on the Hill talking with members of the Hispanic Caucus, and he later did an interview on Fox News. In both appearances, he said the president is no longer demanding an actual physical wall along the entirety of the U.S. border. And he also, as we noted, promised a solution for the DREAMers. He said it was essentially a done deal. What difference do you think his remarks will make in the debate over immigration that's playing out right now? BENNET: Well, I hope it's an indication that, as we get to the end of this week, people will take a serious look at the proposal that we've put together. The four parts that you mentioned are creating a pathway to citizenship for the DREAMers, spending $2.7 billion on the border, which includes $1.6 billion, which was the president's request this year for the wall, dealing with what they call chain migration by preventing DREAMers from sponsoring their parents to become citizens and also ending the diversity lottery program - all of which the president said he wanted to do as aspects of the deal when we were at the White House a week ago. So I think we're in the ballpark of being able to get something done here. MARTIN: So you're talking about what is now included in this new bipartisan plan that has been put on the table. But how does this differ from the plan that was put to the president last week when a similar group of bipartisan lawmakers went and said, how about this, and he said no? BENNET: Yeah. It's not different. But I don't think that the White House allowed the details of our plan to sink in before they objected to it. We now have - and one way it's different is that we now have seven Republican co-sponsors, including my colleague Cory Gardner, who's a Republican from Colorado. There is broad bipartisan support for this idea, and I think we should pursue it. MARTIN: When it comes to the president's evolution on the wall, as articulated by John Kelly - we should note, the president has been tweeting this morning, saying that he hasn't changed his mind on the wall. But do you think that will convince some Democrats who have been reticent to get on board with any spending bill because of the administration's position on immigration, do you think that will move the needle for them? BENNET: I think that we - what we try to do in our proposal is not waste money. We believe in border security. Democrats believe in border security. Building a 2,000-mile wall on the southern border is not the most efficient way to protect ourselves. So we have proposals that relate to fencing. We have proposals that relate to technology. We have some proposals, as I said, including the president's, his $1.6 billion that he asked for this year, that would be used to prototype his wall and to build some of that wall. So I don't think the place where there's a lot of dispute here is on the wall. Again, I think that if we were in a place where people were actually trying to get to yes instead of get to no, this proposal, which has been negotiated over four months by a group of senators who were at the heart of the last immigration discussion we had, I think reflects a thoughtful consensus. I don't like everything in the bill. I wouldn't have written the bill this way if I were writing it by myself. MARTIN: Right. BENNET: But if I were thinking about what do Democrats and Republicans need to resolve this together in a bipartisan way, I think it's this bill. MARTIN: But as you noted, the president rejected a similar bill last week. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he just doesn't even know what the president wants at this point. So there's no guarantee that this will go through. And at the same time, Republicans, their plan is to pass a short-term spending mechanism that would keep the government open and would make funding for the CHIP program, Children's Health Insurance, permanent. That's got to be attractive to Democrats. BENNET: I don't think so. I think people are so tired - Democrats and Republicans - so tired of running this government by continuing resolution. It is ridiculous. I was in business for a while and then I was a school superintendent. There's not a city council and there's not a school board in Colorado that would ever suggest they're going to run that enterprise based on two-week CR's. And here we're running the federal government that way. I am very sympathetic, for example, to Lindsey Graham's view of what this is doing to our military readiness. We have airplanes that cannot fly because of the budget ridiculousness in Washington - not the levels but the fact that we can't fund the government more than two weeks at a time. And when you have airplanes that can't fly, it means you have pilots that can't learn how to fly, and that affects our military preparedness. MARTIN: Even so, does that mean that you will risk a government shutdown in order to get an immigration plan through (ph)? BENNET: I don't think it should come to that. I think that these politicians, including me, in Washington should stay here until we get our work done, including dealing with a crisis that was provoked by the president stripping the DREAMers of their status in September. This is not - this was - this - we need to deal with it, Rachel. MARTIN: And just briefly, does that mean that you will not vote for a short-term spending bill - yes or no? BENNET: I am extremely unlikely to vote for the bill that's been put forward in the House, and I think that the House is going to have trouble getting Republican votes with that bill. MARTIN: Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, thank you so much for your time. BENNET: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. DAVID GREENE, HOST: All right. An extraordinary scene is playing out in a Michigan courtroom this week. Scores of women are confronting the man who abused them. He's Larry Nassar, a former doctor for the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team. He's pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting patients. Many of the women were girls when the abuse happened. And now, as Kate Wells of Michigan Radio reports, they are taking control of their own stories. And just to warn you here, over the next few minutes, you could hear some language that disturbs you. KATE WELLS, BYLINE: Larry Nassar sits in the witness stand wearing a blue jail jumpsuit and orange Crocs. He looks thin and shrunken after months behind bars. The judge placed him so he is forced to look at the more than 100 women and girls who, one after another, say he abused them. Many of them are like Jennifer Rood-Bedford, athletes who went to Dr. Nassar's sports medicine clinic at Michigan State University. But the treatments she received there were not medical. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JENNIFER ROOD-BEDFORD: I remember laying there wondering, is this OK? This doesn't seem right. Should I say something? What's happening? I didn't know what to do. WELLS: Nassar was seen as a miracle worker. His walls were plastered with pictures of his patients on the Olympic gymnastics team. Rood-Bedford's teammates told her he was a little touchy, but in reality, he was inappropriately touching their genitals without wearing gloves or getting consent. Laying on that table, Rood-Bedford told herself, it must be OK. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) ROOD-BEDFORD: He's a world-renowned doctor who's treated so many athletes. Everyone knows he treats down there and they don't complain. So just stop being a baby. WELLS: Nassar often performed this procedure with parents in the room. He positioned his body or a towel so they couldn't see. Christy Lemke-Akeo was a neighbor of Nassar's and their families were close. Her daughter Lindsay is a gymnast and saw Nassar for treatment starting at age 9. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) CHRISTY LEMKE-AKEO: We have many sleepless nights over the guilt we feel for missing this. It truly has been gut-wrenching and will be embedded in our minds forever. WELLS: Another mom, Donna Markham, says before her daughter Chelsea was abused, she was this fun kid who loved gymnastics and going to the movies. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) DONNA MARKHAM: I hate to admit it, but on a rainy day, we went to see four movies and only paid for one (laughter). WELLS: But after the abuse, Markham says, Chelsea changed. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MARKHAM: For my daughter, it just became a serious, serious bout of depression. And so in 2009, she took her own life. WELLS: Several of these women and girls initially wanted to remain anonymous, but after seeing so many others come forward, they did too. Gwen Anderson is a middle school teacher who says, at first, she did not want to go public with her story. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) GWEN ANDERSON: Because I was scared that my students would see me at my weakest moment. They would see me as a victim. But I've come to realize that this is my moment of strength and that standing here today facing the man who molested me as a child is my time. WELLS: And Amanda Thomashow told Larry Nassar that now she is ready to go from being a victim to a survivor. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) AMANDA THOMASHOW: And, Larry, the thing you didn't realize while you were sexually assaulting me and all of these young girls and breaking our lives is that you were also building an army of survivors who would ultimately expose you for what you truly are - a sexual predator. WELLS: Nassar is expected to be sentenced tomorrow, but already, the judge has assured these women - Larry Nassar will die behind bars. For NPR News, I'm Kate Wells in Lansing. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Tomorrow marks one year since Donald Trump was sworn in as president. Just three days later, the president was sued for allegedly violating two anti-corruption clauses in the Constitution. NPR's Peter Overby has this update. PETER OVERBY, BYLINE: Now there are three lawsuits, and one of them gets a hearing next week in federal district court. Like the other two suits, it alleges that people seeking to influence the Trump administration are pumping money into Trump's hotels and golf courses. KARL RACINE: That could result in the president caring more about where his bread is being buttered than about the policy implications for the country. OVERBY: Karl Racine is attorney general of the District of Columbia. In the Constitution, these enticements to sway a public official are called emoluments. The District of Columbia and Maryland are suing Trump under the clause against taking foreign emoluments... RACINE: The country's first anti-corruption law... OVERBY: ...And the clause against domestic emoluments. RACINE: ...That makes sure that states don't have to compete for the favor of the president by providing the president with things of value. OVERBY: The plaintiffs say Trump's luxury hotel near the White House unfairly takes business away from other venues in Washington and nearby Maryland. Trump officially opened the hotel just 13 days before he was elected president. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We have the finest location, and we have the finest building. OVERBY: The place quickly became a magnet for lobbyists, foreign diplomats and others. In fact, all of the lawsuits focus on that hotel. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) SHERRI DILLON: These people are wrong. This is not what the Constitution says. OVERBY: Trump lawyer Sherri Dillon at a press conference a year ago before Trump took office. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) DILLON: Paying for a hotel room is not a gift or a present. And it has nothing to do with an office. It's not an emolument. OVERBY: Now the Justice Department uses that line of defense. It's new territory, legally speaking. SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: This has never been adjudicated in any court of record in the United States in our history. OVERBY: Constitutional law scholar Seth Barrett Tillman said the plaintiffs are all misinterpreting the Constitution. He was speaking via Skype. TILLMAN: You and I both know the Foreign Emoluments Clause has never been used for a purpose like this. This is politics by other means. OVERBY: In October, a federal judge in Manhattan held the first ever court hearing on a presidential emoluments case. It was on the first lawsuit, the one filed just as Trump was settling into the Oval Office. The plaintiffs are from the hospitality industry, plus the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW. The judge dismissed their case just before the holidays. He said they don't have legal grounds to sue. But CREW chief Noah Bookbinder said they're working on an appeal. NOAH BOOKBINDER: So I don't consider that a done deal in any sense. OVERBY: In the most recent lawsuit, some 200 congressional Democrats say that Trump has violated the Foreign Emoluments Clause by failing to ask Congress for consent. Elizabeth Wydra is president of the Constitutional Accountability Center representing the lawmakers. ELIZABETH WYDRA: Congress can't approve what it doesn't know, and this president has been notoriously secret about his financial dealings. OVERBY: There's no court date yet, but a year from now, the legal landscape could look much different. The three lawsuits will have progressed or run aground, and it's possible they could be less significant. If Democrats win control of the House or Senate, they'll have the power to investigate Trump's potential conflicts of interest. Peter Overby, NPR News, Washington. (SOUNDBITE OF JOEY PECARARO'S "CURL UP INTO A BALL") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: It can be hard to remember back to the first days of the Afghan war now that it's entering its 17th year. A new movie about the early moments of the war, when victory seemed possible, is out today. It is called "12 Strong." It's the story of the dozen Green Berets dropped into Afghanistan barely a month after 9/11. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "12 STRONG") CHRIS HEMSWORTH: (As Captain Mitch Nelson) Chances are we aren't all going to make it out of this one. MARTIN: NPR's Greg Myre spoke with the actual soldiers who made it out. GREG MYRE, BYLINE: When Army Capt. Mark Nutsch and his men jumped off their helicopter into the swirling dust of northern Afghanistan, their Afghan partner informed them they would be battling the Taliban on horseback. MARK NUTSCH: In that situation, they're certainly not going to give you their very best horses. MYRE: Fortunately for Nutsch, this wasn't his first rodeo, literally. He's from Kansas, grew up on horses and, yes, competing in rodeos. Then there's Chief Warrant Officer Bob Pennington, an inexperienced rider weighing in at 225, plus 50 pounds of gear, all atop a small cranky horse. BOB PENNINGTON: Oh, my god. I crushed him. I mean, I absolutely crushed him. He was so aggravated with me. He reached back several times to try to bite my leg - he did once - and, basically, trying to pull me off. MYRE: This early fighting, just a month after 9/11, was unconventional warfare in the extreme. A few tiny units - altogether just a couple hundred American troops and CIA operatives - linked up with Afghan rebels and coordinated with U.S. airpower to take on the Taliban. Nutsch explains. NUTSCH: You had, basically, 19th century warfare horseback mixed with 20th century weaponry - AK-47 and rocket launchers - with our 21st century technology - global positioning devices and satellite radios. And so we just had to figure out how to blend all that together. MYRE: "Horse Soldiers," a 2009 book by author Doug Stanton, is the basis for the movie. Next to where the World Trade Center towers once stood in New York there's now a statue of a soldier on horseback, a tribute to these fighters. And Nutsch can revel in his big screen portrayal by a chiseled Chris Hemsworth, star of the Thor movies. NUTSCH: My kids think it's quite humorous that Chris Hemsworth is portraying me in this film. MYRE: All this makes for a stirring patriotic movie as long as you conveniently end it in 2001 and don't dwell on the grinding years of warfare that have followed. Nutsch and Pennington are helping promote the Warner Brothers film which focuses entirely on the early success against the Taliban. They say the filmmakers got the spirit right, but it is Hollywood. In the movie, Pennington is wounded for dramatic effect. In real life, he wasn't injured. Though, he still suffers back pain from all the horse riding. He vividly remembers the adrenaline rush of that first charge into Afghanistan. PENNINGTON: We looked at this mission and thought this is the Super Bowl. This is the World Series, the national championship. Man, we can't wait to get in there. And we looked at it as, hey, we could be here for three to five months, three to five years, who knows? MYRE: That was more than 16 years ago. Did he ever think the U.S. would still be fighting in Afghanistan today? PENNINGTON: No, no, not at all - not this long. We never thought that we would be bogged down for this long a period, to be honest with you. MYRE: Pennington and Nutsch are both retired from the military. But they're still working together preparing to launch a distillery this spring in St. Petersburg, Fla. The featured products will include Horse Soldier bourbon and T-shirts that read, make whiskey, not war. Greg Myre, NPR News, Washington. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IT GOES ON") ZAC BROWN: (Singing) It goes on. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: It's Friday, which is when we hear from Story Corps. Thirty-three-year-old April Gibson and her teenage son, Gregory Bess, love talking with each other. GREGORY BESS: We could talk about things for, like, hours. I think I learn more from those conversations than school. INSKEEP: But April, the mother, knew there was one subject they had not really explored. So when a Story Corps mobile booth traveled recently to St. Paul, Minn., she invited her son to sit down with her. He asked about his grandparents and her childhood. But April knew her 16-year-old had something more that he wanted to talk about. APRIL GIBSON: Now you can ask me the hard question. BESS: What did you feel like when I was born? GIBSON: When you were born, I actually didn't feel anything. I was 16, and I was a kid. I didn't know what I was doing. So when I took you home, I didn't know how to feel. I made a bad choice according to everybody. I was just like all the rest of them. I don't know what the rest of them means, but I know what it felt like. Like, I didn't deserve to feel the way women who do the right things do because why would you celebrate someone making such a poor choice? So I didn't know what do feel, so I felt nothing. And I just took care of you. I did what I was supposed to do until one day I realized that I couldn't believe what people told me about myself or about those people like me. This is my baby, and I love him. And I can feel something. It's not a fairy tale. It's not a failure. It's just a process. And now we're here 16 years later. BESS: What are your dreams for me? GIBSON: My dream for you, Gregory, is that you become a good person and not a nice person. That's not a deep quality to me. Niceness is mediocrity. I want you to not be afraid to be afraid. But mostly, I want you to be better than me. BESS: When I was little, I was always looking for someone to look up to, but it's always been right in front of me. You're just the greatest person that I ever know. And I just want to be like you. (SOUNDBITE OF WEINLAND SONG, "SUNKEN EYES") INSKEEP: April Gibson and her son, Gregory Bess, in St. Paul, Minn. Their story will be archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and featured on the Story Corps podcast. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Two websites known for creative writing close at the end of the month. One is The Awl - that's A-W-L like the hand tool. A sister site is The Hairpin. Both are much admired. So what went wrong? NPR's Glen Weldon reports. GLEN WELDON, BYLINE: It's easiest to say what The Awl and The Hairpin were by describing what they weren't. They weren't places you went for lazy listicles or click-bait quizzes. No, you kept The Awl and The Hairpin bookmarked for the writing - smart, vigorous writing on subjects that were personal and idiosyncratic. Best-selling author Mallory Ortberg got some of her first bylines at The Awl and The Hairpin as a young writer. Before that, she'd been a fan for years. For her, it represented... MALLORY ORTBERG: An absolute beacon of everything I kind of wanted for my life. And so I started reading it pretty obsessively in between, like, applying to jobs on Craigslist and crying. WELDON: Ortberg and scores of others made their bones writing about things like what McDonald's McRib sandwich says about society or crafting a set of acerbic fairy tales for the modern-day woman or doing a deep dive into the world of online product reviews with the headline, "Why Does This One Couch From West Elm Suck So Much?" ORTBERG: There was an editorial vision and a sense of responsibility. Like, they weren't going to just unleash you saying something really stupid at 21 years old without kind of doing any sort of editorial work or reining in some of your worst impulses. There was a sense of, like, editorial care. But there was, within that, a ton of freedom in terms of topic and scope and voice. WELDON: Voice especially - that was the key. The Awl and The Hairpin were breeding grounds for new writers, like the National Lampoon in the '70s, Spy magazine in the '80s, Sassy in the '90s and McSweeney's in the '00s. They were places someone could take their emerging writerly voice out for a test drive. Both sites stayed true to that sensibility over the years, but the Internet changed around them. Revenue from online ads declined sharply. And though they spent the last few years scrambling to make it up, this media landscape just isn't a friendly one to independent general interest publishers - which is probably why two of The Awl's sister sites, The Billfold and Splitsider, which focused more narrowly on the worlds of finance and comedy, will remain for now. It's still unclear if you'll be able to access the nine-year archive of Awl and Hairpin content after they close down at the end of the month. But whether you can or you can't, here's hoping the Awl's organizing principle, summed up in its tagline, will continue to inspire writers and readers alike. That tagline - be less stupid. Glen Weldon, NPR News. (SOUNDBITE OF JOAKIM KARUD'S "LOVE MODE") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: If President Trump's first year in office seemed chaotic from a staffing perspective, there's a reason for that. According to a new Brookings Institution report, turnover among top-level staff in the Trump White House set records, and it is not even close when it comes to those records. NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith has the details, and you're hearing them first on NPR. TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Thirty-four percent - that's the share of top White House aides who either resigned, were fired or moved into different positions in the first year of the Trump presidency. Now, for some perspective, that's nearly three times President Obama's first year turnover and double President Reagan's. KATHRYN DUNN TENPAS: It's staggeringly high. KEITH: Kathryn Dunn Tenpas is a researcher at the Brookings Institution, a think tank, and White House staff turnover is her specialty. TENPAS: President Trump has lost half of his most senior-level staff members, and that's in contrast to President Obama, whose single departure at that level was Greg Craig, his White House counsel. And under George W. Bush, there were no departures in that highest tier. KEITH: The turnover in the Trump White House has at times been head-spinning. First, there was former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who resigned under pressure after just 24 days on the job. His was the shortest tenure ever for a national security adviser. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) SEAN SPICER: We got to a point not based on a legal issue but based on a trust issue where the level of trust between the president and General Flynn had eroded to the point where he felt he had to make a change. KEITH: That voice you just heard is now former press secretary Sean Spicer. He resigned July 21 at the start of a remarkable month-long streak of staffing chaos that also saw the arrival and departure of communications director Anthony Scaramucci and the resignations of chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump's original chief of staff, Reince Priebus. He gave an exit interview to CNN. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE SITUATION ROOM WITH WOLF BLITZER") REINCE PRIEBUS: I think it's a good time to hit the reset button. I think he was right to hit the reset button, and I think that it was something that I think the White House needs. I think it's healthy. KEITH: His tenure was uncommonly short for a first chief of staff. So why has the Trump White House had so very much turnover? Tenpas attributes it to a small, unconventional campaign, meaning fewer staff to bring into the White House and an emphasis on loyalty over experience. Many Republicans who had served in past administrations either weren't welcome or weren't interested. TENPAS: I think that sort of can create a situation where there's a lot of missteps, and in order to seem as though a president is taking charge and trying to improve the situation, many times they fire people. KEITH: Firing, resigning under pressure - whatever you want to call it, Tenpas argues it does have consequences. TENPAS: Turnover creates disruption. It creates inefficiencies. It affects the morale. If you see people around you getting fired at a very high level, there's a lot of angst about that. KEITH: In an interview on Fox News this week, current Chief of Staff John Kelly was asked to explain all the turnover. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SPECIAL REPORT") JOHN KELLY: Campaigning is very, very different than governing. It's really, really hard work to govern at this level. And some people that were perhaps involved in the campaign didn't make that transition. KEITH: Kelly insists he's brought more stability to the staff, but the departures have continued under his leadership. As for Kelly, he says he's in it for the long haul. But typically, the second year of an administration has much more turnover than the first. As President Trump says, we'll see what happens. Tamara Keith, NPR News. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: This story takes us back to 1938, the days before World War II. We say now it was before the war. But, of course, people were not sure the war was coming then. In September 1938, German leader Adolf Hitler demanded to take over parts of neighboring Czechoslovakia. He threatened to invade. But at a meeting in Munich, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain negotiated what Chamberlain called peace for our time. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN: The settlement of the Czechoslovakian problem, which has now been achieved, is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace. INSKEEP: History was not kind to Chamberlain. He avoided war only through appeasement, allowing Hitler to dismember Czechoslovakia. And in truth, he only delayed war since Hitler kept seizing territory. The Munich negotiations formed the backdrop for a new work of fiction. The British novelist Robert Harris wants us to rethink those talks between Hitler and Chamberlain. ROBERT HARRIS: You couldn't get two figures in history more unalike. And yet, contrary to popular myth, I think it's Chamberlain that got the better of Hitler at Munich. Hitler did not want to be there. He wanted to be at the head of his army advancing on Prague. INSKEEP: Robert Harris is a journalist as well as a novelist. And his historical fiction often seems to comment on current events. His novel, "Munich," tells the story of September 1938 through two young men at the Munich negotiations. One is a low-level German official, and the other is a British aid to Chamberlain. Both are trying to find a way to do right in a time of rising fascism. And we see the leaders through their eyes. HARRIS: Chamberlain was a man of peace as much as Hitler was a man of war. He was determined to try and avoid it. And I have sympathy for him. The British had lost three-quarters of a million men only 20 years before in the First World War. And you've really got to think yourself back to how that felt. And we were still rearming in Britain. It was to be another couple of years before we had a sufficient air force to take on the Germans. We only had 20 operational Spitfires in September 1938. INSKEEP: Oh, the most modern British fighter planes - there were hardly any of them working, you're saying? HARRIS: Yeah, no. We were armed with biplanes. So, you know, this was the backdrop to the novel. INSKEEP: So I'm just thinking of the popular image of this - the references to it in political culture even today. Appeasement is considered really bad. Chamberlain is considered really bad. What more is out there that you think people are missing? HARRIS: Well, I think people are missing almost everything, to be perfectly honest, in particular, for some reason, in America, where Munich is even a dirtier word - and appeasement and Chamberlain - than they are in Britain. And the best witness for my view, which is - I admit, challenges the popular conception, the best witness is Adolf Hitler. And one of the reasons I wanted to write the novel was I came across a diary kept by Joachim Fest, the German historian who ghost-wrote Albert Speer's memoir. Speer was Hitler's armaments minister. And he asked Speer about Munich. And Speer Hitler was in a foul mood for weeks after Munich. And at a dinner party, it all came pouring out. He said the German people have been duped and by Chamberlain of all people. And even at the end of his life, in 1945, Hitler was saying we should have gone to war in 1938. September 1938 would have been the perfect time. And I think if the British and the French had gone to war in September 1938, Hitler might well have survived a lot longer and be much more triumphant. INSKEEP: You describe Hitler in this novel - in this fictional work very much as you say that he is found in the historical source there. He's super grumpy all the way through. He's being dragged to the peace table. How much time did you spend with the authentic historical sources on this? HARRIS: Well, I've spent a lot of time on its stage, to be honest, perhaps, more than is healthy. I made a documentary for the BBC 30 years ago to mark the 50th anniversary of Munich. And right back then, I wanted to write a novel about it even before I had written my first novel. I researched everything that I could about that momentous four days when the world seemed to be on the edge of war. And to sense - to live it hour by hour, not looking back, not seeing it through the filter of Winston Churchill in the finest hour and the Holocaust... INSKEEP: All the things that came afterwards, yeah. HARRIS: Yes. To say this is what it would've felt like at that moment before hindsight. INSKEEP: You have each of your main characters - these young men in their late 20s - recognize that they are in dark times, turbulent times, that things may get far worse before they get better. And each in his own way is asking, how can I measure up to the age? How can I do something that is large enough for the terrible moment that I'm in? Do you ask yourself that question sometimes in this period, which many people do consider to be a difficult time? HARRIS: Yes, very much so. As I said, I'd been thinking of writing a novel about Munich for 30 years. And it was only in the last year that I found the story and found the resonance that it suddenly seemed this was the right moment at which to embark upon it. And you're right that for a young man - these two young men - my - the protagonist in my novel - they're at Oxford in 1930 - one English, one German, young men - and yet, they are doomed. They are trapped on opposing sides, and there is nothing they feel that they can do about it - that there are forces at work in the world driving it towards an abyss. And even though a lot of people can clearly see where everything's going, no one seems able to stop it. And I think that there is a sense in the world now that something is going on and that it's very hard for any of us to stand up against it. And I feel, therefore, a great deal of empathy with these two young men who are doomed to fight. And it's like a kind of madness, a sickness that's going to work itself through. And there's a scene in the novel where Hartman (ph), my German character, finds himself alone with Hitler on Hitler's train as they're heading towards Munich. And he realizes if he had a gun, if he brought it up and pointed it at Hitler, he still wouldn't be able to pull the trigger. And I think that was how a lot of people felt in Germany. You know, there was - something was playing through, and it couldn't be stopped. INSKEEP: Robert Harris' latest novel is called "Munich." Mr. Harris, thanks very much. HARRIS: Thank you, been a pleasure. (SOUNDBITE OF YOU MAY DIE IN THE DESERT'S "TRUE NORTH") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: One year ago, tens of thousands of women in Washington, D.C., put on these pink knitted hats of solidarity, and they marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. Similar marches happened around the world in dozens of other countries. It was dubbed the Women's March, and it was about a lot of things. It was a rally against sexual violence. It was for reproductive rights and against gender discrimination of all kinds. But it was also decidedly a rally against the new president, Donald Trump. Now, a year later, the march is happening again. The marquee event this time, though, is in Las Vegas. It will happen this Sunday. NPR national correspondent Leila Fadel will be there, and she joins us now. Hey, Leila. LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: Hi. MARTIN: Presumably, this is still a political march against the Trump administration. So why is this happening in Las Vegas and not D.C.? FADEL: Well, I think they wanted to leave the D.C. area and go out into the country. And local and national organizers that I spoke to called Nevada really a bright spot when it comes to national organizing. They said this is a purple state. They said in 2016 it went blue. It went to Hillary Clinton. The first Latina senator was elected here - Catherine Cortez Masto. Also there's a Republican governor, Republican incumbents. They want to highlight that type of work. They call it a bright spot - that type of political organizing. And they're also calling it a launch - that this will be the first on a tour around the country. Take a listen to Kelley Robinson of Planned Parenthood, a partner in the organizing of these marches. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) KELLEY ROBINSON: The same people that were rallying in airports across the country and marching in streets, they're now sitting in state legislatures all across the country making decisions on policy. FADEL: She's referring to people like Ashley Bennett in New Jersey, who was a first-time candidate last year and ran against an opponent who mocked the Women's March, and Danica Roem in Virginia, who became the first openly transgender person to be elected to the Virginia General Assembly. MARTIN: So they're saying that this march sparked a movement, which then has put women into positions of power - into governing positions. I want to ask, though, about diversity of the movement because the march last year got a lot of flak for being pretty homogenous - being predominantly a group of white, liberal women. Has the movement diversified? FADEL: Well, definitely when you look at the organizing that's going on in Nevada - for example, I was at a sign-making event for Indigenous women who will be participating on Sunday. And there is an attempt to reach out to different faiths, to different races, to different classes, to different ages. But there isn't an attempt to reach across the aisle to the right side. The national organizers, a diverse group of women, say that they're resistance to the president. And so women who are on the right side of the political spectrum, who support this president, who maybe rally on issues of anti-abortion, they don't necessarily feel welcome at these marches. MARTIN: You have been talking with some of the marchers who plan to attend the event - the march on Sunday in Vegas. What have you heard from them? FADEL: Well, I asked listeners to send me notes about why they're marching. And we got hundreds of responses from women across the country - from Tulsa, Okla., to Kent, Ohio, to Anchorage, Alaska. And they say they're marching to be a visible force on everything from women's rights to the gender gap to the #MeToo movement to immigrant rights and rights of people of color. But the most common response was about making themselves into a powerful voice that elected officials will have to listen to. And I'll read you one response from Julie Albert of Anchorage, Alaska. She says, quote, "protections for the environment have been undermined. Racist and xenophobic policies have been proposed. This is an election year, and we have the chance to truly let our voices be heard." MARTIN: NPR's Leila Fadel, she will be covering the Women's March - the marquee event happening in Las Vegas this Sunday. Leila, thanks. FADEL: Thank you. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Today is a day for a game of governmental chicken. Lawmakers have to pass a routine measure to keep the government open - just because they have to, doesn't mean they will. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Last night, the House approved a bill funding the government through February 16. Next, this bill goes to the Senate, but its fate there is uncertain to say the least. Republicans say only Democrats are standing in the way and that an agreement on immigration policy isn't urgent at this time. So what should we watch for today? INSKEEP: Well, let's ask NPR's Susan Davis, who's with us once again. Good morning, Sue. SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve. INSKEEP: Let's work through the situation, the basics here. Republicans control Congress - both houses. They control the White House. Can they just pass something? DAVIS: No. And if we do have a government shutdown today or tonight at midnight, it will be the first time ever that when one party controlled Congress and the White House, the government has shut down. But this is a good opportunity to remind some people of some basic civics. You only need a simple majority to pass that bill in the House, which the House Republicans did yesterday, but you need 60 votes in the Senate, and that is where Senate Democrats come into play. And Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is saying we're not going to give you the votes you need. INSKEEP: Oh, yeah, because Republicans only have 51, they're not even assured of getting the 51 in this situation. They need help from Democrats, so Democrats have some leverage, as they say. What do Democrats want? DAVIS: Democrats want to achieve some agreement on this stalled immigration talks. There was a bipartisan agreement presented to the president. He rejected it. And right now, it's in limbo. There is - they're no closer to an agreement. Democrats are under a lot of pressure from their base to get a deal done, and because they have this leverage moment, they want to use it. INSKEEP: And I know that CHIP has been thrown in here, the Children's Health Insurance Program, which Congress allowed to expire. There's an effort to restore it. But here's my question, Sue Davis. CHIP, DACA - don't Republicans also want these things - or lots of Republicans also want a deal on these things? DAVIS: They do, but they don't have a deal yet that - on immigration specifically - that Republicans feel like they can support. So they're trying to buy more time. They want a deal, and they want a final immigration bill that Republicans can look at and extract more wins. The problem that they're going to consistently have on this is that any final bipartisan immigration bill is probably going to need more Democrats than Republicans to pass it. So as long as you need more Democrats than Republicans, it's harder to make a bill more conservative. INSKEEP: Well, how has President Trump affected all of this? DAVIS: He has thrown elements of confusion into this at every turn. He first embraced a bipartisan deal on immigration. Then he rejected it. INSKEEP: Right. DAVIS: In a series of tweets yesterday, he also seemed to be undermining what Republicans thought was a deal amongst themselves to keep the government open. The White House later retracted that. The president is on board for it. He's just been a really unreliable negotiator, not only from Democrats' perspective but from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's perspective as well. INSKEEP: OK. So let me put a - let me put one other question on the table here. Assuming that each side acts in its own interests, we'd only have a shutdown if one party or the other thought, hey, it's in our interest, it's in our best interest to let the government shut down. So work through Democrats and Republicans for me. Does either party think that a shutdown would be in their political interest? DAVIS: I think they're - I think they're both trying to game the system right now. Republicans are framing this as Democrats are voting down - voting to shut down the government to protect illegal immigrants. That's their argument. INSKEEP: That's the way they said it could happen. DAVIS: Right. That's the case they'll make. This is Democrats' fault. And Democrats are going to say, you're in the majority, you run Washington. It's your job to govern. Figure it out. INSKEEP: Each side is positioning itself to threaten the other with possible blame. DAVIS: A typical day in Washington. INSKEEP: OK. Sue, we'll be here for tomorrow and the day after and the day after and the day after - you will, anyway. DAVIS: (Laughter). INSKEEP: NPR's Susan Davis, thanks very much. DAVIS: You're welcome. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) INSKEEP: Let's move on to another news story swirling around Washington. MARTIN: And at the center of this story - an adult film star who goes by the name Stormy Daniels. In 2006, she met Donald Trump at a golf tournament. According to The Wall Street Journal, the two had an affair, which the newspaper says Daniels can't speak about publicly because Trump's lawyer paid her - paid her $130,000 to keep quiet. INSKEEP: OK. So why is this story coming out just now? Paul Farhi of The Washington Post covers the media. He's been looking into this. Good morning once again, Paul. PAUL FARHI: Good morning, Steve. INSKEEP: How long have journalists had some kind of information about this, so far as you know? FARHI: Well, I think the first surfacing of this is back in 2011. In Touch, a celebrity magazine, actually interviewed Stormy Daniels, and they never published anything. Fast-forward to 2016 - word gets around somehow that Stormy Daniels is talking about this, and a number of publications and media organizations get involved - Slate, Fox, ABC, Daily Beast - but no one publishes anything in 2016, during the campaign. INSKEEP: OK. So give me an idea of why people would not publish this information. FARHI: Well, they had various reasons, but mainly it comes down to that they couldn't corroborate her story to their satisfaction and to their standard. There wasn't enough proof. There wasn't anything but her say-so. And then, mysteriously, when they were getting close to publication and moving ahead, nearing publication, Stormy Daniels herself disappeared on them. She stopped talking. And that's because we believe the hush money, the $130,000, was paid. INSKEEP: OK. So you say there are various reasons for various publications. When you hear that Fox News had some information it decided not to publish, you think about some of the things that Fox News was willing to broadcast about Hillary Clinton that turned out not to be true, and you wonder why Fox News wouldn't. But let me just ask - was this actually an act of responsible journalism, that multiple news organizations had this allegation and checked it out and decided they just weren't going to publish things that didn't seem verified? FARHI: Yes, I think it was. You know, we get lots of criticism from the man at the center of this, Donald Trump, all the time. But in this case, Fox News, who might have been very favorable to candidate Donald Trump - and was - decided that it wasn't up to their standard either. You could say that The Fix was in, but Slate, no friend necessarily of Donald Trump, had information; it didn't go with it. ABC was talking with Stormy Daniels; they didn't go with it. And The Daily Beast, also no necessarily friend of Donald Trump's, didn't go with it. It just was a matter of feeling comfortable that the story checked out. INSKEEP: And now it's been published by The Wall Street Journal in a form - The Journal owned by the same company as Fox News. FARHI: That's right. And they're the ones who really broke this open. And so far, no one from the Trump administration - no one has been able to explain why $130,000 changed hands. INSKEEP: Paul Farhi, always a pleasure. Thanks very much. FARHI: Thank you, Steve. INSKEEP: He's with The Washington Post. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) INSKEEP: Vice President Mike Pence goes to the Middle East tomorrow. MARTIN: Yeah, and his first stop is going to be Cairo. That's where he will meet with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. They're expected to talk about everything, from fighting terrorism to protecting religious minorities. INSKEEP: And NPR's Jane Arraf is in Cairo for the visit. Hi, Jane. JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: Hi, Steve. INSKEEP: So what are Egyptians - this huge, important Arab country - what are Egyptians thinking of the Trump administration as Pence arrives? ARRAF: Well, as you probably know, there's kind of a big difference between what Egyptians say that they think and what they're actually thinking. And there's also that difference between Egyptian officials and the Egyptians on the street. So you'll remember that this relationship started off wonderfully. Trump thought that Sissi was a great guy. Sissi was the first to congratulate him as president. INSKEEP: Oh, the strongman who's ruling Egypt at the moment. ARRAF: Yeah, that guy. So they've been a little bit disappointed in what they've actually seen from the U.S., which includes possible budget cuts. They're moderating their expectations quite a lot. And one official has said that they believe the U.S. no longer is interested in a strategic relationship. Instead, they're interested in a transactional relationship, which is basically, what have you done for me lately? And they're trying to adjust. INSKEEP: I guess I should mention that this visit by Vice President Pence comes after the Trump administration declared - President Trump himself recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a move that I guess would be seen as very unpopular in Arab countries. Is it unpopular really in Egypt? ARRAF: It's hugely unpopular, partly because it's not just Jerusalem that's a symbol for what a lot of Arabs see as the unfair position of a very strong superpower, the U.S. But having said that, it's probably not going to take a lot of actual effect because there's very little that Egypt or other Arab countries feel that they can do. It is definitely affecting the visit of the vice president. The Coptic pope here who leads - sorry - who leads Egypt's Coptic Christians has refused to meet with him, as has the chief Sunni Muslim leader here. And so it's casting a shadow over pretty much everything. INSKEEP: But you mentioned there's a difference between what the people at large might think and what the government thinks. Does the government, the military-led government, particularly care about Jerusalem and what Trump says about Jerusalem? ARRAF: They say they care. And one has to believe that they do care in a sense. It's part of the consciousness here. But one of the things that they care more about, obviously, is what happens to Egypt. So they're going to be looking very much at the economic impact of what happens with the U.S. They're going to be talking about continued cooperation in the military fight against ISIS. And that basically tops whatever considerations there are about Jerusalem, to be perfectly honest. INSKEEP: Jane, thanks very much. ARRAF: Thank you. INSKEEP: That's NPR's Jane Arraf in Cairo. (SOUNDBITE OF SUPERPOZE'S "UNLIVE") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: America's biggest anti-abortion rally, the March for Life, takes place today in Washington, D.C. Donald Trump is set to become the first sitting president to address the annual event. Trump appealed to anti-abortion supporters in the lead-up to the election, to activists like Kristan Hawkins, who heads Students for Life America (ph). Hers is a group that spreads anti-abortion messages on college campuses. I talked with Hawkins recently and asked her what she wants to hear from President Trump today. KRISTAN HAWKINS: I would like to hear him reiterate some of the promises he made in the campaign of signing into law a bill to defund Planned Parenthood, signing into law a bill that will ban taxpayer dollars from funding abortions. He's already upheld his promises in appointing pro-life, anti-abortion judges - and Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court was a huge victory for our movement. So it'd be nice to hear him recommit to that, say he's going to push the Senate to actually get these votes done. There's been several pieces of legislation that have been passed by the House that are really just waiting for the Senate to take action on. MARTIN: So you're pleased with his first year because, as you note, he made several campaign promises that have not come to fruition. And even the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the court - he's known to be a conservative, but he has no voting record on abortion. So it's not a done deal as to whether or not he would uphold Roe v. Wade or not, if that were to come up. HAWKINS: The pro-life movement is very pleased by the appointment of Neil Gorsuch. The judges that have been, you know, announced by President Trump as on his short list for future Supreme Court appointments have been vetted. Everyone has said it's a good list for this movement. Personnel is policy. You can't walk, you know, 5 feet within the Department of Health and Human Services without running into a pro-lifer. That's a big deal. For someone who really wasn't pro-life before he ran for office - and for a lot of us in the pro-life movement who were unsure whether or not he would actually live up to his promises, I've been pleasantly surprised by what he's done. MARTIN: But the specific campaign promises - permanently banning federal money for abortion, overturning Roe v. Wade, defunding Planned Parenthood... HAWKINS: Sure. MARTIN: ...None of this has transpired. HAWKINS: That's right - and because everything's being held up in the Senate. And that's really where the focus... MARTIN: So you blame Congress, not the president. HAWKINS: Oh, yes. I think especially those in the Senate, you know, who were elected with President Trump in the 2016 election - they knew what they were promising to the pro-life community. And we've been very disappointed with the actions of the Senate. Defunding Planned Parenthood should have happened the first month of a Trump presidency. MARTIN: Who specifically on the Hill - what lawmakers should be moving your issue and are not? HAWKINS: Well, we need Leader McConnell to schedule votes. That's a huge issue. We also need the Senate to work more than two days a week. That would be helpful because we should be advancing pro-life legislation every single month because we have the majority. Senators Collins and Murkowski - they continuously are the holdup when we talk about Obamacare repeal and replace, which is a significant piece of legislation for the pro-life movement because of all the funding Obamacare has in it for Planned Parenthood. MARTIN: You are a religious person. You're a Catholic now. That means - I assume - that your position on abortion is a direct outgrowth from your faith. So by that count, how do you, as a Christian, reconcile your support and praise for Donald Trump and his position on abortion with his own moral failings? I mean... HAWKINS: Sure. MARTIN: ...How he talked about grabbing women by the genitals, recent allegations of infidelity with a porn star - how do you reconcile these two things? HAWKINS: This is a question that a lot of us grappled with during the election. But I think that when we think about voting for candidates and, you know - we're never gonna have a perfect candidate. I mean, we are all sinners. And the way I look at it is President Trump's a sinner. I'm a sinner. Every politician is a sinner. And when I'm voting for a politician, I'm not voting to endorse what they've done in their life or the sins that they've committed. I pray that they've, you know, sought forgiveness for those sins. I'm voting for my issue. I'm voting to advance that issue. MARTIN: Kristan Hawkins is the president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life America. She joined us in our studios here in Washington. Kristan, thanks so much. HAWKINS: Thanks for having me. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. Pope Francis was flying out of Santiago, Chile. And as usual, he took time to meet all of the flight attendants. When he met a couple named Carlos and Paula, he asked if they were married. The couple said they had planned to tie the knot next month but their Catholic church was destroyed in a massive earthquake. The pontiff asked if they'd like him to marry them right then and there. They said yes and got married by the pope on a plane. Sort of beats your story about getting a free upgrade, right? It's MORNING EDITION. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: No matter if the United States government shuts down this weekend, Vice President Mike Pence will be at work - counts as an essential employee, you know. And he'll be in Cairo, the first stop on his trip to the Middle East. Pence will meet with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, the general who's been running Egypt for a few years. NPR's Jane Arraf is in Cairo. Hi, Jane. JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: Hey, Steve. INSKEEP: Well, now, what does the Trump administration think of this military-backed ruler? ARRAF: Well, you'll remember they started off on a great footing. Trump thought that Sissi was just terrific, and Sissi was the first foreign leader to congratulate Trump. And here they thought all would be rosy. Now, their expectations have moderated a little bit, but what they still have in common is they see fighting what they call terrorism - fighting ISIS as a priority. Human rights, while important, definitely take a back seat. So it's an evolving relationship. INSKEEP: Human rights take a back seat, you say. I guess we should remind people. Sissi is a coup leader. His military overturned an elected president. He's been ruling ever since. There have been many people in the opposition and NGOs and the media who've been arrested. Has the administration had nothing to say about that? ARRAF: Well, what Sissi would say first - we do have to point out - he was, after being a coup leader, he was actually elected. Now, you can question whether those were free and fair elections - and probably not... INSKEEP: OK. ARRAF: ...But he was an elected president - now running again. But one of the things that has come back to haunt Egypt is basically the effect of the fact that it has all of those political prisoners in jail, that it's shut down aid organizations, including U.S. ones. And so all of this money it had been counting on, some of that has been held up by the administration, by Congress. That's one of the things they're going to be talking about because it has really turned into what officials here call a transactional relationship rather than a strategic relationship, and they think that's U.S. driven. INSKEEP: Well, you mentioned Congress. I just did a little Google search here, and the two words I typed in were Rubio Egypt. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is one of a number of senators who've highlighted Egypt's human rights record. And you get articles with names like "Rubio Statement on Egyptian President Enacting Repressive NGO Law," "Rubio, Cardin, Colleagues Urge Administration to Press the Egyptian Government," "Amendment on Aid to Egypt" - restricting that aid to Egypt. How worried are Egyptian authorities that this relationship could crack at some point? ARRAF: You know, the bedrock of this relationship - we have to remember - is that Egypt signed a historic peace treaty with Israel. The U.S. has provided it with more than a billion dollars in military aid almost every year. And despite those possible cuts, it's not a relationship that's going to be dissolved. And at the end of the day, the president here believes that his friendship, the common goals, the common ties, will outweigh all of that. INSKEEP: And there's a president of the United States who has de-emphasized human rights. ARRAF: That is, we have to be honest, one of the things that they were relatively happy about here - not that they say that they don't care about human rights. But they say it's much more important to have security. INSKEEP: NPR's Jane Arraf in Cairo, thanks very much. ARRAF: Thank you. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: The deadline is here. The U.S. government will shut down tonight at midnight if Congress doesn't fund it. Specifically, today the Senate needs to pass this stop gap funding bill that the House passed last night. Senate Democrats are blaming the president for taking negotiations right up to the deadline. Here's Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on the Senate floor yesterday. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) CHUCK SCHUMER: The one thing standing in our way is the unrelenting flow of chaos from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. It has reduced the Republicans to shambles. We barely know who to negotiate with. MARTIN: In the House, Republicans from the Freedom Caucus, who were initially opposed to the spending bill, are getting some credit for pushing through this short-term fix. So what tipped the scales? We're going to ask Congressman Tom Garrett. He's a Republican from Virginia and a member of the Freedom Caucus. He joins me now on Skype. Congressman, thanks so much for being with us. TOM GARRETT JR.: It's my pleasure. First of all, though, I was never opposed to this spending agreement. It includes funding for health care for 9 million vulnerable children that we voted for four times - that Chuck Schumer, like a gluttonous child, sits at a table and says he cares about. But then he and Leader Pelosi have repeatedly avoided opportunities to fund. This guy's like a kid having his cake and trying to eat it, too. Ultimately, last night, 186 Democrats voted to shut down the government. Eleven voted not to. Two-hundred-and-twenty some odd Republicans voted to keep it open and fund children's health care. MARTIN: There's a lot in there. GARRETT JR.: Yeah, there sure is. There sure is. MARTIN: So let's back up and walk through all this. So you're talking about the Children's Health Insurance Program. This is... GARRETT JR.: That's exactly what I'm talking about. MARTIN: ...Is something that Republicans have attached to this idea of a short-term spending bill in order to get Democrats on board. GARRETT JR.: Oh, well, it certainly didn't work if that's the case. I voted for the thing four times. Ms. Pelosi says, oh, I care about children's health insurance - repeatedly votes against it. Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe asked us to do something about it after we'd already voted to fix it. Well, if the Democrats would get out of the way, we could help these children. MARTIN: Well, I think what they want to see is a long-term permanent fix to the Children's Health Insurance Program. GARRETT JR.: Yeah, this is a long-term fix - 2023. So that's pretty good, right? 2023 - that's pretty long term. MARTIN: They also want to see a long-term fix to immigration, in particular a solution for the so-called DREAMers. GARRETT JR.: Well, then tell the truth. Tell the truth. They've put 9 million vulnerable American children behind 800,000 immigrants, some of whom were brought here as children and some of whom came here themselves because we haven't yet defined what a child is. If you're 17 years and 364 days old and you, of your own accord, cross the border, are you a child? I suppose by the definition of a law. But if we want to help these children, let's help them. There will be another C.R. in four weeks, and we can talk about DACA. MARTIN: But you yourself have said that governing by continuing resolution isn't a good idea. You said you hate governing this way. GARRETT JR.: Yeah. I do. I can't stand it. But I've also said that we need to do something about children's health insurance. And here's the opportunity to do it. So I invite Senator Schumer to join us, avoid this Schumer shutdown and bring this health insurance to these children who, by no actions of their own, are the most vulnerable among us. MARTIN: So this is just about... GARRETT JR.: Do the Democrats care about this, or is this about showmanship and political grandstanding? I mean... MARTIN: They would say - with all due respect, Congressman, they would say... GARRETT JR.: With all due respect... MARTIN: ...The same about... GARRETT JR.: ...We should count who voted against the government staying open. MARTIN: ...Republicans in this moment. GARRETT JR.: Well, yeah. But they had a chance to fund children's health insurance. They will have it in the Senate when they take this vote. And if they choose not to, then the American people should count the votes, see how many Democrats voted to shut down versus how many Republicans voted to shut down... MARTIN: There seems to be a real effort to figure out... GARRETT JR.: And then we can figure out who's at fault. MARTIN: I'm sorry to interrupt you. There seems to be a real effort, though, on the part of Republicans to frame this as a Democratic failure - if the shutdown happens, it's on Democrats. At the same time... GARRETT JR.: Well, when 186 Democrats vote to shut down... MARTIN: ...Democrats point to Republicans and say - you are in control of the White House. You are in control of both houses of Congress. This would be the first time that government would shut down under one-party rule. Wouldn't that be a problem politically for the GOP? GARRETT JR.: Well, here's the problem. The Republican Party is not comprised of people who think monolithically and do as they're told. It's comprised of freethinkers. And if your listeners would think for themselves and ask the second question and not the first question - that is, why do we want to fund children's health insurance? Why is it important to do it now? Are 9 million vulnerable children more important than 800,000 people who the Democrats are using as a political football? Then we would fund children's health insurance, come back to the table and try to address these poor young people who were brought here - in many cases, but not all - by no decision of their own. MARTIN: Well, then what... GARRETT JR.: We have a chance to fix CHIP through 2023. MARTIN: ...Did you make of the president's tweet? When the president tweeted out that the short-term spending bill should not include CHIP funding, what did you make of that? Was that not confusing? GARRETT JR.: I just pointed out that I don't think monolithically. And I'm not a sycophant, so I disagree. If we can fix children's health care right now through 2023, we should do it. MARTIN: So you disagreed with the president? GARRETT JR.: A hundred - yes, absolutely on that - 186 Democrats want to shut the government down and not fund children's health insurance. That's what was voted on last night. Look at the vote count. MARTIN: Do you think you're going to get what you need to pass it in the Senate? GARRETT JR.: You know what? I'm going to worry about the 5th District of Virginia. I'm going to worry about the vulnerable children therein. We have a chance to fix this problem through 2023. A hundred and eighty-six Democrats voted against doing that last night and for shutting down the government. They can say whose fault it is all they want. If the American people can count - and I think they can - then they'll know that the Democrats are the ones who are voting in vast majorities to shut down the government. And Republicans are trying to keep it open and solve this CHIP problem. MARTIN: Again, Republicans are in control of all branches of power. We'll have to leave the conversation there. Republican representative Tom Garrett of Virginia, thank you. GARRETT JR.: Just do the math. You have a great day. God bless y'all. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: On one of the last days of his first year in office, President Trump traveled to southwest Pennsylvania, a mountainous region that voted big for Trump in a swing state that helped to give him the White House. NPR's Don Gonyea is in that region in Monroeville, Pa. Don, good morning. DON GONYEA, BYLINE: Good morning. INSKEEP: Why'd the president go there? GONYEA: Well, we're in an election year for starters. This congressional district, Pennsylvania 18, has a special election coming up on March 13. And it's seen as one of those early indicators as to maybe how the midterms could go this year, how Trump's playing. It's an area where Trump did very, very well in 2016. He won the district by almost 20 points. The special is to fill a seat that's been held by a Republican. Republicans do have an advantage here. But Democrats have won in some unlikely places since Trump took office and hope this is another. INSKEEP: Won in Alabama not so long ago, as a matter of fact. GONYEA: Exactly. INSKEEP: So what did the president say as he visited a factory in Pennsylvania? GONYEA: Well, he was here promoting what he sees as his successes as president, things he often complains that he doesn't get enough credit for - things like an unemployment rate that's down to 4.1 percent and a stock market that's at a record high. Just give a listen. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Pensions and retirement accounts are surging in value as the stock market smashes one record high after another. How many people have 401(k)s here? (APPLAUSE) TRUMP: You're brilliant investors. INSKEEP: OK. So that's what the president is saying. What are Pennsylvania voters saying? GONYEA: I've been in places like Washington, Pa., and Waynesburg and Monroeville here. And I've been talking to Trump voters to see if they are as pro-Trump as they once were after, you know, a year in. Mostly the answer is yes, but you do hear some complaints. A lot of it's about his Twitter habits or complaints about things like the vulgarity he's alleged to have used during that White House immigration meeting last week. But still, support for him appears to be strong here, especially from those who work in coal mining. This is coal country. 48-year-old Paul Walker is a good example of that. He was headed to the mine when he called my cell phone. PAUL WALKER: Yeah. We're all pretty pumped up about what's been going on with Trump and all the support. GONYEA: Some coal mines are seeing increased production now - more shifts, more hours. There are a lot of reasons for that, notably that the rising price of natural gas helps coal compete. But overwhelmingly, these workers also credit Trump, who has cut some Obama-era environmental regulations on mines. But they also just like the guy. Walker says the more unpolished Trump is, the better. WALKER: Trump was not a politician. He did not come up through all the bullcrap and the handshakes and the elbow-rubbing. He came in. And I think it's a direct approach. I like his twitters (ph). If you watch my Twitter account, I retweet just about everything that he puts out. GONYEA: Now let's meet Republican state senator Camera Bartolotta. She offers some perspective on the politics of this place. She says this part of the country has changed. It's still full of Democrats, lots of union members. But Democratic candidates can't just count on those votes anymore. And much of it is over environmental policies, what Trump and a lot of Republicans like to call the war on coal. Here's Senator Bartolotta. CAMERA BARTOLOTTA: I think it's because people really got a message of, look, we have to fight for our jobs. We have to fight for the energy industry. Of course coal mining is different now. Of course you're not going to need 2,000 coal miners in a coal mine. We've got automation. We've got machines. We've got, you know, better technology. But you know what? We still need coal. INSKEEP: Some Pennsylvanians who've been talking with NPR's Don Gonyea who's in southwestern Pennsylvania. And Don, I want to invite you to cross the divide here a little bit because we get a question from Democrats, people on the left, on Twitter and elsewhere anytime we put Trump voters on the air. They ask - why keep interviewing Trump voters? They never change. They're out of touch. Why? Why? Why? This is a question that gets asked a lot. So let me just ask you, Don Gonyea. Why talk to Trump voters? GONYEA: Well, first, we talk to voters of all kinds - of all stripes. It's important to hear from all of them. As for the Trump voters, it's important to know, A, if they're still with him. But it's good to hear how they talk about him and how that may change over time, if there are shifts. Is there strong support suddenly? I back him. I like him - but. It's important to hear that. Also, in states where the vote's very close, any movement among any voter group can make the difference. INSKEEP: And the president's approval rating is down. It's gone down since the beginning of his term, but core supporters seem still with him. Don Gonyea, thanks very much. GONYEA: My pleasure. INSKEEP: That's NPR's Don Gonyea reporting today from Monroeville, Pa. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep with a deal for you. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DON'T BE CRUEL") ELVIS PRESLEY: (Singing) You know I can be found... INSKEEP: If you like Elvis, North Carolina resident Wade Jones is selling a reputed Elvis artifact - a paper cup, a Dixie cup, allegedly used by Elvis Presley. It touched the lips of the king. A fan claimed to have retrieved the cup one day after a performance in 1956, and bidding for the paper cup has now reached $1,200. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DON'T BE CRUEL") PRESLEY: (Singing) Please, let's forget my past. INSKEEP: It's MORNING EDITION. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Let's ask how a news story became a news story and why it wasn't one sooner. The story is President Trump's alleged affair in 2006 with an adult film actress. The Wall Street Journal reports that the president - or the president to be, we should say - paid Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, $130,000 not to tell her story before the 2016 election. Daniels and the White House deny they had any relationship. It turns out that numerous news organizations pursued this story long before The Wall Street Journal reported. So why would it surface now? Paul Farhi has been covering this for The Washington Post. Good morning, Paul. PAUL FARHI: Good morning, Steve. INSKEEP: Just remind us, when did reporters first get word of this allegation so far as you know? FARHI: Well, the earliest we know of is 2011. A magazine called In Touch interviewed Stormy Daniels. This had appeared on a couple of blogs at that point. But then the story disappears and doesn't resurface until about 2016. And when I say resurface, reporters were aware of Stormy Daniels, but they never published anything. INSKEEP: Reporters from where? FARHI: There were four news organizations. Slate, Fox News, ABC and The Daily Beast were all circling around this story. None quite had it, none quite nailed it down, but all we're trying to do so, and they never quite got there. INSKEEP: You said none quite nailed it down. Are you saying - I mean, we're talking about news organizations. Fox has been very supportive of Trump. Some of the others have been more independent or even hostile. But none of them felt that they had enough to go with the story? FARHI: Yeah. I mean, this is the blind man feeling the elephant. You know, they all felt one part of it but never quite put the whole picture together. Fox News never really had it. Their former head of digital news said that they had a source saying that it was true, but they didn't have Stormy herself. She was no commenting. Their sourcing was thin. Slate got very close, but she kind of bailed on them when she got - apparently got paid off to not talk. INSKEEP: OK. Well, that raises another question then because The Wall Street Journal, the other day, went ahead and published a story about this - about the alleged $130,000 payment. But as I understand it, neither party to the alleged affair is admitting having done anything at the moment. So what made this a strong enough story, finally, for The Journal to publish? FARHI: Well, first of all, we don't know the sources on that. The Journal cited three sources, I believe. But what's interesting about The Journal's reporting is that no one has really denied the fact that $130,000 changed hands from Trump through his lawyer to Stormy Daniels through her lawyer. The Journal further reported, yesterday, that Trump's campaign, or at least his lawyer, set up an LLC in Delaware to affect these payments. INSKEEP: A limited liability company just to make the payment? FARHI: That is correct. And that is what The Journal has reported. None of that has been denied. So we - there's certainly a lot of questions being raised by this. INSKEEP: So what The Journal has is a trail of money, regardless of what the truth of the original acts might have been. FARHI: Yes. Although, Stormy at various points has confirmed it and - has confirmed it, but news organizations have not been able to nail it down substantially. INSKEEP: Paul, thanks very much. FARHI: Thank you, Steve. INSKEEP: Paul Farhi of The Washington Post. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: I'll tell you right now, some people will find the next four minutes disturbing. In 2010, a Tunisian fruit seller set himself on fire in an act of rage against the country's dictatorship. His actions shocked Tunisians into mass demonstrations and sparked the Arab Spring. Since then, self-immolation has become a common form of suicide among Tunisians. NPR's Ruth Sherlock went to Tunisia to find out why. RUTH SHERLOCK, BYLINE: Life in the rural town of Sidi Bouzid revolves around the main square. And in the center of that square is a huge sculpture of a fruit cart carved out of rock and clay. It's a monument to Mohamed Bouazizi, the fruit seller who set himself on fire in 2010 after police from Tunisia's harsh regime confiscated his cart. The whole Middle East knows about Mohamed Bouazizi, but they don't know about Touti Farid (ph). TOUTI FARID: (Foreign language spoken). SHERLOCK: I meet Farid at a town less than an hour from Sidi Bouzid, on the steps of the city hall where he set himself on fire in December of 2016. FARID: (Through interpreter) I poured the gas all over myself, and my shirt caught fire. My jeans stuck to my burnt flesh. SHERLOCK: Farid spent seven months in the hospital, but many others like him died. In fact, seven years since Bouazizi's famous self-immolation, the practice has become grimly commonplace. It's now one of the main methods of suicide in Tunisia, says Mehdi Ben Khelil, a doctor at the Charles Nicolle Hospital in Tunis who studies the phenomenon. MEHDI BEN KHELIL: I can tell you that we still have more than three times more self-immolation than before the revolution. SHERLOCK: Khelil says that in the months immediately after the 2011 revolution, the spike in cases could have been explained by what's known as the copycat effect - imitations of a widely publicized act. But it's continued. And in 2016, the main hospital burn unit in Tunisia admitted 104 people who had set themselves on fire. This is now also about poverty, says Khelil. KHELIL: People were expecting a lot just after the revolution. They were waiting to improve themselves, to improve their economic capacities. And slowly, they were losing hope. SHERLOCK: Today unemployment is at 15 percent. Often, says Khelil, people set themselves on fire to get the attention of government officials who control jobs. FARID: (Foreign language spoken). SHERLOCK: That's like the case of Touti Farid, the 38-year-old immolation survivor who we spoke with. He graduated in computer science but couldn't find work despite years of trips to the city hall for a public sector job. He says the local government promised him some, but they never came through. And private sector jobs are even more scarce. FARID: (Through interpreter) November came and left. December came, and my situation didn't change, and my mother fell sick. They cut off my electricity, and I couldn't pay the bill. SHERLOCK: Something snapped inside Farid. FARID: (Through interpreter) I was helpless. I couldn't afford my mother's health care, I couldn't pay my electricity bill, and I have no work. And the local government humiliated me. SHERLOCK: So he went to the city hall and set himself on fire in the lobby. FARID: (Through interpreter) I wanted them to know I did this to myself so they would feel responsible. SHERLOCK: Both his legs are covered in painful skin grafts and scars. Many Tunisians who set themselves on fire and survive say they regret the act. But Farid says he still feels so hopeless that he can't promise he won't do it again. Ruth Sherlock, NPR News, Sidi Bouzid. (SOUNDBITE OF SOULAR ORDER'S "THEY'LL LIE TO YOU") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: One day before a deadline to fund the government, midnight tonight, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was in a tough spot. Republicans control Congress and the White House, so they take the lead in a basic bill to fund the government. But with a narrow Senate majority, McConnell needs at least some Democrats. And Democrats are demanding that this spending bill include help for people brought illegally to the United States as children, whose legal protections soon expire - the DREAMers, as they're called. Mitch McConnell was not happy last night. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MITCH MCCONNELL: So it's appropriate to ask the question, why are we are where we are - only one reason, the continued interjection of an issue about which there is no urgency into a discussion about how to deal with a potpourri of issues that do need to be urgently met. And that's the issue of illegal immigration. INSKEEP: One of the Democrats who face a confrontation today with McConnell's Republicans is Senator Chris Van Hollen - Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. Senator, welcome back to the program. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: Steve, great to be with you. INSKEEP: OK, so the House passed a measure, funds the government for a month - also a big extension in there for a children's health program. Will you vote for that? VAN HOLLEN: I will not vote for that. Look. There are lots of issues that need to be resolved. First and foremost, we need to get a budget for the U.S. government. We've been operating under these short-term CRs. We're four months into the fiscal year. And we do not have a budget for the U.S. government. And so in addition to the DACA issue, there are issues of funding community health centers, of funding the fight against the opioid epidemic, funding for veterans and all sorts of other issues which is why, Steve, Republican senators agree with us that we need to get together and get a final deal on the budget. In fact, just last night, the Pentagon spokeswoman said that the CRs are wasteful and destructive and were beginning to hurt the military and called upon us to get a budget. INSKEEP: Well, let's stipulate that short-term spending when you'd rather be thinking long term is ridiculous. Let's stipulate that. But if the choice is short-term extension or the government shutdown, are you going to vote for the government shutdown? VAN HOLLEN: I'm not voting for a government shutdown. I'm voting to get an agreement to move forward. As you heard Mitch McConnell say last night in part of that same speech, the problem, from his perspective, is that the president of the United States doesn't know what he wants with respect to DACA even though the president called upon Republicans and Democrats to come up with a bipartisan agreement. They followed his request. They came up with a bipartisan agreement. And so we actually have the votes in the Senate to pass an agreement. And as Jeff Flake, the Republican senator from Arizona, said last night, let's get it done. Why are we waiting on the president? Let's send him a bill. He said he would sign what we send him. INSKEEP: Now the House passed a measure that does not include DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, but does include an extension for Children's Health Insurance, another thing that Democrats and Republicans say they want. Tom Garrett of Virginia, a Republican in the House, was talking about this earlier in the program. And he essentially said if you guys don't pick that up and do it, it's going to be your fault because you're going to miss a chance to do a lot of good. Let's listen to a bit of that. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST) TOM GARRETT JR.: So I invite Senator Schumer to join us, avoid this Schumer shutdown and bring this health insurance to these children, who by know no actions of their own are the most vulnerable among us. INSKEEP: Isn't it true if the game of chicken doesn't work out - if the government shuts down, Democrats will be blamed? VAN HOLLEN: Well, the government's not going to shut down and if so long as Republicans agree, of course, to fund the Children's Health Insurance Program. We've been pushing for that since September, but we've also been pushing to keep the community health centers open. We've been pushing to make sure there's funding for veterans. We've been funding to make sure we have a budget for the Defense Department so that we don't have this situation that Defense Department itself is now saying is very destructive to our military readiness. So what Republicans in the Senate proposed yesterday was let's just have a very short-term CR - three or four days over the weekend. Let's stay in. Let's iron these things out. And Senator Schumer of the Democrats said, yeah, let's do that. That was a Senate Republican proposal. We don't have to shut down the government, but we shouldn't keep kicking the can down the road. Let's stay in. Let's get it done. President should stay in town. He shouldn't go to Mar-A-Lago. Let's get it done. INSKEEP: OK, three or four days - so now we've gotten down to a difference between a one-month, short-term continuing resolution and a three or four-day continuing resolution. Is that really an unbridgeable difference? VAN HOLLEN: Well, the issue is that the underlying issue should not be unbridgeable. And we all know in the Senate what the solution is. In fact, there's a majority in the Senate, Steve, for an agreement, including an agreement on DACA. You have seven Republican senators supporting the bipartisan agreement reached between Lindsey Graham, Dick Durbin and others. You had the president of the United States say that he would sign a bipartisan agreement before he backed off with his repulsive racist comments in the Oval Office. So the only thing that's holding us up in the Senate is that Mitch McConnell wants to sit back and wait for the president. So if the president the United States whether by design or incompetence is going to shut down the government, that is a big problem. After all, he's the only one that's tweeted about, quote, "good government shutdown." I hope he will show some leadership. He said he's the great negotiator. Let's get it done. INSKEEP: Senator, thanks very much - pleasure talking with you. VAN HOLLEN: Good to be with you. INSKEEP: Chris Van Hollen is a Democratic senator from Maryland and one of the lawmakers under pressure today. NPR's Susan Davis covers Congress, and she's in our studios once again. She's been listening along. Hi, Sue. SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: How're you doing? INSKEEP: What do you make of what you hear there? DAVIS: It's so interesting because I think you heard, both between Congressman Garrett and Senator Van Hollen, the two arguments the parties are making here over who's going to take ownership if the government does shut down. Republicans are going to make the argument - as they're calling it, the Schumer shutdown in terms of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Democrats are the ones that really do have power here. Their votes were always going to be necessary to keep the government open. They're saying, we're not going to give them to you. The risk Democrats may run in this is do they overplay their hand. In these previous iterations we've had in shutdown fights, and most recently in 2013, Democrats always made the argument that they were the party of responsible government. They don't shut down governments. They run governments. If they are seen as being the party that drives this, is there a political blowback? Republicans think there may be although Democrats are looking at this argument right now. They see a 38-percent-approval-rating president and a majority of Americans who agree with them on the issue of DACA and Dreamers. INSKEEP: So suppose it comes to a shutdown. I think we can presume it's not going to come to a shutdown unless one party or both thinks to themselves, this is in our political interest. We can win this on the politics if there is a shutdown. So based on your reporting, Sue, does either party right now think a shutdown could work for them? DAVIS: What we know, as of this morning, is they don't have the votes to pass the House-passed bill. The bill on the table does not have the votes in the Senate. The question that remains is will Republicans accept Democrats counteroffer - this idea of a three, four, five-day CR to keep negotiations going. Or do Republicans call their bluff? And we head into a weekend shutdown situation. INSKEEP: But are Republicans - or Democrats, either one - saying to you, you know, if they shut down the government, they're going to be destroyed - I mean, that the other side will be destroyed is what I'm saying. DAVIS: You know, it's really hard to say because, again, if you go back to that 2013 shutdown, that was really driven by Texas Senator Ted Cruz. And Republicans were seen as maybe taking the blame for that. INSKEEP: Yeah. DAVIS: And then in the 2014 midterms, they had a very good year. So I'm not sure that the most recent political lessons of shutdowns are that if you're the one driving it, you're the one that gets blamed for it. INSKEEP: And we're in a new circumstance - a news cycle where every epic, unbelievable, unforgettable story is forgotten by three days later because so much more has happened. Sue, thanks very much. DAVIS: You're welcome. INSKEEP: That's NPR's congressional correspondent Susan Davis. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: We are learning new details about the case of 13 children allegedly held captive by their parents in Southern California. And a warning - this report you're about to hear includes descriptions of child abuse. From member station KVCR, Benjamin Purper reports. BENJAMIN PURPER, BYLINE: Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin held a press conference where he detailed the condition that the siblings had been living in for years. He alleged that David and Louise Turpin would punish their children by keeping them chained to their beds for weeks or months at a time. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MIKE HESTRIN: One victim at one point was tied up and hogtied. And then when that victim was able to escape the ropes, these defendants eventually began using chains and padlocks. PURPER: Hestrin said that the children weren't allowed to use the restroom while they were chained up. They were fed so rarely that several children have cognitive impairment and nerve damage. The malnutrition was so severe that the district attorney said the 12-year-old child is the weight of an average 7-year-old and that the 29-year-old daughter weighs only 82 pounds. Hestrin said that the Turpin parents would only let the children shower once a year, and if they washed their hands above the wrist, they would be punished for, quote, "playing in the water." The press conference also provided an updated account of how the children escaped the house. The D.A. said that some of the children had been formulating an escape plan for two years. The 17-year-old girl who called 911 escaped out of a window with one of her siblings. But the sibling quickly turned back out of fear and re-entered the house. Hestrin says when officers arrived and knocked on the door, three children were chained to their beds inside the house. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) HESTRIN: The defendants were able to get two of the victims unchained before the police actually entered. An 11 and 14-year-old were unchained as the police stood at the door while a 22-year-old remained chained to a bed when the police entered the home. PURPER: The siblings are recovering in local hospitals, and the parents have pled not guilty to all charges. Their next court appearance is scheduled for February. For NPR News, I'm Benjamin Purper in Riverside, Calif. (SOUNDBITE OF EXIST STRATEGY'S "MIDNIGHT WALKS") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: The House of Representatives has done its part, passing another short-term spending bill that would avert a government shutdown. That deadline for that shutdown is tonight. The Senate will vote today, but the outcome on that side is a whole less certain. Democrats and Republicans are at odds, and in fact, Republicans are having trouble finding unity. Immigration policy and the Children's Health Insurance Program known as CHIP are key sticking points. It feels like a moment when a Republican president steps in and gets his party in line, but Democrats and some Republicans are saying President Trump is part of the problem. Our next guest is right in the middle of this story. Marc Short is White House director of legislative affairs, the president's point person with Congress, and he joins us on the line. Marc, thanks for being back on the show. MARC SHORT: Rachel, thanks for having me again. MARTIN: Donald Trump campaigned on being the ultimate dealmaker. Why can't he seal this deal? SHORT: Well, Rachel, look at what happened yesterday. The president reached out to the Freedom Caucus and secured the votes necessary. So the vote yesterday was 230, and most of those Republican. Your opening talked about a sense that there's a division inside the Republican Party. The reality is there's maybe three or four senators on the Republican side who are reluctant for a CR, but everyone else... MARTIN: Yeah, but they're big senators. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the other day earlier this week that he doesn't even understand what the White House wants, what President Trump wants to do on immigration and spending. Let's listen to this clip. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MITCH MCCONNELL: I'm looking for something that President Trump supports, and he's not yet indicated what measure he's willing to sign. MARTIN: Can you clarify exactly what it is the president wants? SHORT: I think actually Leader McConnell clarified his remarks the next day on the Senate floor and said that the White House has been clear on this. We, in fact, have had Senator McConnell's staff in every conversation every day about what we want to do on immigration. So I think there is confusion over his remarks. The reality is Republicans are united in keeping the government open. Democrats are united in trying to shut it down. MARTIN: Democrats say that this is actually on Republicans. I mean, after all, Republicans control the executive branch in the White House. Republicans control the Senate. Republicans control Congress. So if there's a government shutdown, why wouldn't it be on Republicans? SHORT: Well, Rachel, you know better than that. The reality is, yes, Republicans have a majority in the House, the Senate and the White House. But we need 60 votes in the United States Senate to get anything passed. So we look at the United States Senate right now. They have the ability to shut this down. Chuck Schumer in 2013 said no matter how strongly someone feels about an issue, you shouldn't hold millions of people hostage by shutting down the government. It's exactly what he and his colleagues are going to do today. MARTIN: Although last May, it was the president himself who said this country needs a good shutdown. And the president has been accused of confusing things. I mean, hours after the Republican congressional leaders came up with this stopgap bill to fund the government, the president tweeted that the Children's Health Insurance Program should not be part of this. So why did he undercut his own party? SHORT: The president was looking to have CHIP on a separate legislative vehicle. He's not opposed to the actual legislation. He conveyed his support for the bill yesterday throughout the day in conversations with Speaker Ryan, Leader McCarthy, again, members of the House Freedom Caucus. It's why they ended up having 230 votes in favor of the bill because of the president's support in it (ph). MARTIN: But if Republicans and if the president really wanted CHIP funding, why wouldn't they just support a clean bill on CHIP funding today instead of attaching it to the spending measure? SHORT: We're the ones putting forward the CHIP legislation. We're reauthorizing it for six years. Why would people have opposition to that program? MARTIN: Democrats say that this is - to use a phrase that is now tired - kicking the can down the road, that governing by short-term continuing resolution is no way to govern. SHORT: A hundred percent agree. In February, we submitted our budget to the United States Congress. The appropriations process is supposed to be completed in the end of September. Here we are in mid-January with four continual CR's. It is no way to govern. It's incredibly dysfunctional. And it actually hurts our military. Secretary Mattis will tell you the continued push for continuing resolutions means that he is basically reinvesting in faltering equipment as opposed to investing in new equipment. That hurts our military. It hurts our troops. It's no way to run the government. But, Rachel... MARTIN: Right. So that's what Democrats are saying, that... SHORT: Because, Rachel, here's the reality. We need 60 votes in the United States Senate to take up the appropriations bill. We have 51 Republicans, of which one or two are physically unable to be here. Therefore we need 10 or 11 Senate Democrats just to move to the bill, and they have not let us move to any other (ph) appropriations bills. MARTIN: Well, now is the time when Democrats feel like they have leverage. Is it not a time for Republicans to compromise then? SHORT: Rachel, we have been compromising. The reality is that we - as we continue the negotiations on DACA, we don't feel it's appropriate to shut down the government over illegal immigration. MARTIN: Where has the compromise been? Where has the compromise been? What have Republicans given in this? SHORT: What we have given - on immigration in particular, there are several things that we've taken off the table in the conversation. The Democrats are the ones who have said we want to shut down the government until you solve the DACA issue. We've come forward with a proposal. We came forward with our priorities. We sent it to Congress back in October. We've continued to talk to them. The reality is where are the Democrats giving? MARTIN: If what the Democrats want in this moment is an even shorter term chance to keep negotiating over the weekend, will the president support that idea? Would he sign that? SHORT: We've been negotiating each and every day. I don't understand. If they're essentially saying, no, we won't do 30 days, but maybe we'll do five days, then the reality they're saying is they don't really want to shut down the government. So let's just keep it open, allow us to continue our negotiations. I think we're making progress on DACA, but I think it's unrealistic to think there's going to be a solution in the next five days. MARTIN: Marc Short is the White House director of legislative affairs and assistant to the president. Thanks for your time, Marc. SHORT: Thanks for having me. MARTIN: I'm joined in studio by NPR congressional correspondent Susan Davis, who was listening to our conversation. Sue, what struck you about what Marc Short said? He said there has been a lot of compromise by the White House and Republicans. SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: I still think there is a great amount of confusion on Capitol Hill among Republicans and Democrats alike in what President Trump wants in an immigration bill and will sign. MARTIN: Because he changed his mind. DAVIS: He changed his mind - he has rejected one bipartisan offer that was put before him. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did make clear this week that Republicans are still trying to figure out where the president is precisely and what his negotiating position is. And I think they're further away from a deal than Mr. Short might suggest. Republicans that we talked to, including Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, who is leading fresh negotiations, said he did not think it was possible to get a deal on immigration by the midnight deadline tonight or even over the weekend. I'm not sure what a bill looks like that people like Dick Durbin, the Senate minority whip from Illinois, can sign that people like White House aide Steve Miller and Chief of Staff John Kelly can tell President Trump is a good idea to sign. MARTIN: Well, the votes, they are coming this day and night. We will watch. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Here we go into the final 12 hours before a government shutdown. And the House of Representatives is leaving town. House leaders already passed a four-week extension of government funding but have no indication that the Senate will pass the same thing or anything. Republicans control Congress and the presidency but are moving to blame Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer for any shutdown. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney spoke moments ago. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MICK MULVANEY: We don't want this. We do not want a shutdown. But if Mr. Schumer insists on it, he is in a position to force this on the American people. INSKEEP: Kelsey Snell is congressional reporter for NPR News. She's at the Capitol. Hi there, Kelsey. KELSEY SNELL, BYLINE: Hi there. INSKEEP: OK. So talk us through this. What exactly have House members been told? SNELL: House members have been told that they can leave shortly here. They are finishing up their last vote series of the week. And they're scheduled next week to be in a district work period. So they're scheduled to be back in their home states, doing work. And that means they would be - theoretically be getting on planes very shortly and leaving. If that happens, though, it's important to remember that leaders could call them back if they needed to. And we're advised that there could be additional procedural votes sometime in the next couple of days, in the next couple of hours. Things are supposed to remain flexible. INSKEEP: Oh. So it's not like they're just leaving - everybody's heading for the airport now. There's a few hours yet. SNELL: Well, some people, I am told, are heading to the airport immediately. So there - things are - people are scattering to the wind, and they're hoping that the Senate will get this figured out before the next 12 hours run out. INSKEEP: OK. Wow. Talk about a hardball tactic. This is what House Republican leaders - because it's Republicans who control the House, of course - have done. What options are left to the U.S. Senate then? SNELL: The Senate could decide that they have enough votes to pass what passed the House yesterday, and that would be a short-term continuing resolution to keep the government open at current spending levels until Feb. 16. That includes the six-year extension of the Children's Health Insurance Program. The thing is that most everybody agrees of this - on the substance of what is in that bill. The problem is the politics surrounding it. And Democrats say that they don't really trust Republicans and particularly President Trump to actually get a deal on the broader picture of spending and immigration. INSKEEP: Oh, because this is just for a few weeks. And it does not include any relief for people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. SNELL: Right. They caved on this issue in December. And I think they feel like - and, actually, in my conversations with Democrats, they tell me they feel like they can't just keep letting the White House get month-long extensions because there's no guarantee that they will ever get a deal. So what they're calling for instead are very, very, very short extensions of spending - maybe one day, two day, three days. It actually started as a Republican idea, and Democrats have seized on it. But Republican leaders are not at all friendly to the idea of very short-term spending bills. INSKEEP: Just to remember, didn't large numbers of Republicans, as well as Democrats, say they wanted to fix DACA? SNELL: Yes, absolutely. And that was up until last week. The conversation and the message was that Republicans and Democrats agree that there needs to be a DACA solution. And the White House agreed with that. But things fell apart during that profanity-laced meeting last week in the White House. And now Republicans are saying there is no immediate deadline, and they have time to work this out. And they're saying they have until March. INSKEEP: OK. And they have until midnight to come up with some kind of agreement, however short term. Kelsey, thanks very much. SNELL: Thank you. INSKEEP: NPR's Kelsey Snell. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: New York City, 1896 - young boys are being brutally murdered. A team of outsiders assembles to hunt down the killer - a doctor with some unconventional views, a newspaper illustrator haunted by his past and a police secretary who upsets the normalcy. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE ALIENIST") DAKOTA FANNING: (As Sara Howard) What are you doing here? DANIEL BRUHL: (As Dr. Laszlo Kreizler) We've come to see the commissioner. LUKE EVANS: (As John Moore) Sara and I... FANNING: (As Sara Howard) I am Miss Howard, an employee of the New York Police Department. You will please accord me the respect that my position demands. EVANS: (As John Moore) Miss Howard is the first woman to hold a position with the police department. BRUHL: (As Dr. Laszlo Kreizler) Excellent. Perhaps Miss Howard can help arrange an impromptu meeting with the commissioner. FANNING: (As Sara Howard) And how should I help do that? With my especially rosy mouth or my sparkling blue eyes? EVANS: (As John Moore) Sara, I did not... FANNING: (As Sara Howard) Miss Howard. SIMON: Miss Sara Howard is played by Dakota Fanning in the new TV series on TNT, "The Alienist." And she joins us now from New York. Thanks so much for being with us. FANNING: Thanks for having me. SIMON: Alienist is what they used to call psychiatrists. Right? FANNING: Yeah. It's an old-fashioned term for a psychologist. And your description of the show - I think I'm going to steal it. It was perfect (laughter). SIMON: Well, with our compliments. And what attracted you to playing Sara? FANNING: Well, I am fascinated by this time period and fascinated to play a character who aspires to have a career and pushes the boundaries of what women were allowed to do. And at the same time, she's a young woman who is finding the balance of this strong, tough exterior that she has to put on to survive in this man's world and also the vulnerability that she feels in her private life when that mask can kind of come off. SIMON: Strong exterior, but there's also a scene when she's home and her maid helps her get out of a corset, which is a pretty strong not-quite interior. FANNING: (Laughter) It's another exterior, right? SIMON: We can learn something by taking a look at the corset these days - about how women were once viewed and how they had to live. Can't we? FANNING: I think so. We know that women were restricted in what they could and could not do and say. But they were also literally restricted by the clothing that they had to wear. We were filming the series for six months, and I was wearing a corset and those clothes every single day. And someone has to help you get dressed in the morning. Someone has to help you undress. Even those simple tasks and those intimate moments that usually we have with ourselves, a woman had to sort of have someone to help her - to chaperone that experience. And so for me, it kind of - it helped put me in the mindset of that time period and gave me a window into, you know, the experience of being a woman back then. SIMON: And did you notice, playing the character - obviously, there are more women in the workforce in 2018, including police forces around the country. But a lot of the attitudes and problems sound familiar, don't they? FANNING: Well, they do. And that's something - I struggle sometimes to find the right words to talk about that because, on one hand, you know, it's great when the show that you're making is relevant to the times that you're living in. But some of the relevance is kind of unfortunate because - there's a scene in the first episode with my character and another police officer, and you see sexual harassment and abuses of power in the workplace. And the stories do parallel stories that are being told right now. So I think it is important, especially for my generation, to see those similarities between now and so long ago. SIMON: Yeah. I love the look the series gives young that Theodore Roosevelt... FANNING: Yes, my boss. SIMON: ...When he was New York City's police commissioner. Is it hard not to turn to that character and say, you know, Teddy, I don't know - somehow, I forsee great things for you? FANNING: (Laughter) Yeah. It's a different version of Roosevelt than I think people are used to seeing. It's early Teddy Roosevelt and the beginning of him changing New York. And then my character is very close to Commissioner Roosevelt because I'm his secretary, and we have a great relationship on the show that gets explored. And you sort of get to see how Roosevelt's hands are tied at times with the corruption that's going on within his department. SIMON: You've been acting professionally since you were a child. And I don't have to tell you, there are notable success stories. There are a lot of sad stories, too. What have you learned? FANNING: I think, for me, what's always been the thing that has grounded me is my genuine love of what I do. And I still check in with myself to make sure that I still am enjoying what I'm doing. You know, when I was younger, my mom was with me at all times - traveling with me and on set with me - and she always made it very clear that if I didn't want to do it anymore, that I didn't have to. If I was coming to her with sort of a tough moment that had happened that was, you know, a professional situation, she would say - well, you know, do you want to stop? Does it make you want to not do this anymore? And I would always say, no, Mom. Of course not (laughter). And so, yeah, I still check in with myself and make sure that I'm still - sounds so simple - but still having fun. SIMON: Dakota Fanning in the new TV series on TNT "The Alienist." Thanks so much for being with us. FANNING: Oh, thanks for having me. (SOUNDBITE OF LUDOVICO EINAUDI'S "EXPERIENCE") SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Take a touch of Hitchcock and of "Gone Girl." Add a mysterious author and rumors of a huge price tag, and you come up with that rare bird, a debut novel that hit No. 1 on The New York Times' best-seller list in its first week on the market. It's called "The Woman In The Window." NPR's Lynn Neary has the story. LYNN NEARY, BYLINE: Brand-name authors like James Patterson or Stephen King hit the top of The New York Times' best-seller list in the first week all the time. Unknowns - not so often. GREG COWLES: It is very unusual. NEARY: Greg Cowles is the longtime writer of the "Inside The List" column at the Times. He says the buzz around "The Woman In The Window" has been building since a hotly contested auction for the novel by an unknown author named A. J. Finn. Turns out, that's a pseudonym for Daniel Mallory, an executive editor at William Morrow, the publishing company that bought the book. But Cowles says, even with all that interest, no book is a sure bet. COWLES: You really never know. Despite the buzz, despite the huge advance sales, the publishers themselves never know - will this book hit? You can't manufacture a best-seller. NEARY: Daniel Mallory, aka A. J. Finn, probably would know how to manufacture one. He has spent a lifetime reading, studying and editing mysteries and thrillers. And when "Gone Girl" sparked a trend in psychological thrillers with an unreliable female narrator, he was tempted to jump on the bandwagon. DANIEL MALLORY: When Gillian Flynn published "Gone Girl," I thought, aha - this is the sort of book I've loved and could possibly try to write. The trouble was, I didn't have a story. NEARY: Mallory didn't want to put a mystery together like a jigsaw puzzle. He wanted the book to have substance. He was also suffering from depression, which he later discovered was misdiagnosed. MALLORY: For days or weeks or even months at a stretch during the 15 years in which I struggled with misdiagnosed bipolar disorder, there were times when I could not prize myself from bed, let alone leave the house. NEARY: While adjusting to new medication, Mallory took some time off from work. He watched a lot of old movies - his other great passion. And one day, as Hitchcock's "Rear Window" played in the background, he looked out his own window and noticed his neighbor across the street. MALLORY: In accordance with fine Manhattan tradition, I watch her for a couple moments. She is settling herself in an armchair, aiming a remote at her TV. And behind me on screen, Thelma Ritter is chiding Jimmy Stewart for peering across the courtyard into Raymond Burr's apartment. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "REAR WINDOW") THELMA RITTER: (As Stella) I can smell trouble right here in this apartment. First you smash your leg, then you get to looking out the window, see things you shouldn't see - trouble. MALLORY: And I thought to myself, how funny that in 1954 Jimmy Stewart is spying on his neighbors, and I'm doing the exact same thing 60 years later. And just like that, an idea for a story presented itself. And striding towards that story from another corner of my brain was this character who had struggled, as I had struggled, with mental health issues and whose grief seemed comparable to mine in intensity, although the circumstances were very different from my own. NEARY: That character is Anna Fox. She suffers from agoraphobia - gets panicked if she even feels the air outside her front door. MALLORY: She was once a respected child psychologist, but she has withdrawn from her profession and, indeed, from the world in the wake of some sort of trauma. And we don't learn the details of that trauma until about two thirds of the way through the book. She does try to occupy herself as best she can. She learns French, she counsels fellow agoraphobes through a digital forum, and she watches old films. They form a sort of soundtrack to her life. NEARY: She also drinks a lot of red wine, which she mixes recklessly with her meds. And she spends a great deal of time spying on her neighbors with a long lens camera. One day, when her mind is especially foggy, she's watching "Dark Passage" as Humphrey Bogart is going under anesthesia. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "DARK PASSAGE") HOUSELEY STEVENSON: (As Dr. Walter Coley) I'm going to give you some shots that'll freeze your face. Now, just close your eyes. Got a fine aesthetic - used it in the last war. It's in your bloodstream now. NEARY: As the film plays, Anna looks in her neighbor's window and thinks she sees a murder. STEVENSON: (As Dr. Walter Coley) It'll be all right. It'll be all right. NEARY: The victim is a woman who has befriended Anna. But no one believes Anna ever met her, much less saw her get stabbed to death. The murder is only one of the mysteries that will keep readers guessing. Mallory takes his time revealing why Anna is so traumatized that she cannot leave her house. MALLORY: What I can say about this particular dimension of the book is that I consider it the heart of the story. And whether you anticipate its details or parameters or not is sort of by the by. It's really incidental. It's not about surprise. It's not about a jack-in-the-box effect. It's about how such an event would impact someone, how they would cope with it and how they would struggle to move past it. NEARY: In the tradition of many mysteries, Mallory set his story in a confined space. His next book, which he's already working on, is set in a big city - San Francisco - and he says it feels great to get a breath of fresh air. Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: We turn now to Brazil and its modern capital Brasilia. That city was conceived and planned as a kind of utopia, yet its mastermind, the world-renowned architect Oscar Niemeyer, and his fellow planners forgot something critical, which left the city with a dirty secret. NPR's Philip Reeves reports. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) PHILIP REEVES, BYLINE: It's 1960. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Speaking Portuguese). REEVES: Brazil's capital, Brasilia, is celebrating its inauguration in a blaze of optimism. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) REEVES: The world watches on TV, dazzled by the modernist architecture and plans for stately parks and promenades. The new city seemed so orderly. No one expected back then that today, there'd be this. (SOUNDBITE OF SIFTING THROUGH GARBAGE) REEVES: This is the second-largest open garbage dump in the world. Brasilia was created without a purpose-built landfill. Its trash wound up being tossed here, on open ground some 20 minutes' drive from the presidential palace. The dump now occupies as much space as 250 football fields and is as close to resembling hell as anywhere you'll likely find. (SOUNDBITE OF SIFTING THROUGH GARBAGE) REEVES: There are vultures everywhere. There are swarms of flies. There are piles and piles of black garbage bags which are broken open and are spewing their contents out into the sea of mud. There are people all over this, picking through it, looking for bottles, looking for bits of plastic, bits of metal, anything that they can sell to a middleman. (SOUNDBITE OF TRUCK ENGINE) REEVES: A garbage truck arrives... (SOUNDBITE OF TRUCK BACKUP BEEP) REEVES: ...And disgorges a load of dripping trash bags. (SOUNDBITE OF GARBAGE DROPPING) REEVES: The trash-pickers start punching holes in the bags even before they hit the ground and pulling out plastic bottles for recycling. There are kids in their early teens. Quite a few of the pickers are women, including many single moms who struggle to get regular jobs because they've been in trouble with the authorities. Sometimes, they find corpses. (SOUNDBITE OF GARBAGE DUMP AMBIENCE) REEVES: Miriam Ribeiro Araujo has been in and out of prison. MIRIAM RIBEIRO ARAUJO: (Speaking Portuguese). REEVES: She says she comes here to earn cash to buy food for her son. The garbage and the methane gas it creates damages the skin, eyes and lungs. Yet some trash-pickers - catadores, as they're called here - wade around the mud in flip-flops. ARAUJO: (Speaking Portuguese). REEVES: Araujo shows her hands crisscrossed with cuts. (SOUNDBITE OF GARBAGE DUMP AMBIENCE) REEVES: Trash-pickers work day and night. After dark, they're sometimes hit and killed by trucks and bulldozers. PAULO CELSO DOS REIS: We have to close it. It's not possible to stay in the 21st century with that open. It's an environmental problem, a social problem, an economic problem. REEVES: Paulo Celso dos Reis heads a team recruited by Brasilia's federal district government to shut the dump. Dos Reis says for decades, the city didn't care what happened to the garbage so long as it was out of sight. Even now, a lot of people don't know about the dump and, it seems, don't want to know. DOS REIS: It's unbelievable. I can tell you the majority of people who lives in Brazil does not know it exists. I have friends of mine that do not believe. No, it's not true. I have to show pictures and films of dirt that - that they can believe. REEVES: In 2011, a Brazilian court declared the dump illegal and ordered it closed. The shutdown was delayed by arguments over where to locate a new landfill to take the city's trash. That landfill is now open out of town. The dump is closing. Yet the authorities haven't decided what to do with the dump's 44-million-ton mountain of toxic garbage that's polluting the ground water. Nor is there a plan for this place, a shanty town that's grown up over the years near the dump. Forty thousand people live here. One way or another, at least half make a living from trash. JOSE MARIA VASCONCELOS: (Speaking Portuguese). REEVES: Jose Maria Vasconcelos is in the recycling business. VASCONCELOS: (Speaking Portuguese). REEVES: He's worried he'll be destitute. VASCONCELOS: (Speaking Portuguese). REEVES: Inside the dump, trash-pickers are also worried. They're being offered jobs at new recycling depots, working in collectives, sorting garbage on conveyor belts. They'll earn quite a bit less than their $620 monthly average. But they'll have a roof, protective equipment and health insurance. GILBERTO FERREIRA ALVES: (Speaking Portuguese). REEVES: Gilberto Ferreira Alves has been picking trash out dumped for a quarter of a century. He says he's used to the awful conditions. ALVES: (Speaking Portuguese). REEVES: The vultures are like work mates, he says. Yet a lifetime on this Brazilian dump has given Alves a profound distrust of government and its promises. ALVES: (Speaking Portuguese). REEVES: "We're all very suspicious," he says. Until he's sure his life will improve, he'd rather stay here in hell. Philip Reeves, NPR News, Brasilia. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Violent crime is down in America's big cities. It may not seem so if you watch any "CSI," "NCIS," "Laws & Orders" (ph) or "Chicago P.D." crime dramas. But homicide, assaults and rapes are down a lot in big cities since the 1970s. Even Chicago, which has seen so many murders in the past few years, had a 16 percent decline last year to 650 homicides. The city had 970 killings in 1974. What's been the reason for such progress? What should we learn? And have there been unforeseen consequences? Patrick Sharkey, chair of the sociology department at NYU and scientific director of Crime Lab New York has looked into the statistics and programs of the last 40 years. His new book - "Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life and The Next War on Violence." He joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us. PATRICK SHARKEY: Sure. Thanks for having me. SIMON: So as you might want to list them, what are some of the reasons big city violent crime has gone down? SHARKEY: Well, when I look at what happened in the 1990s, which is when crime started falling, what I see is that the entire country really kind of, for the first time in a while, saw violence as a national crisis and mobilized to deal with it. And so that took many forms. It took the form of more police on the street, more aggressive policing, more aggressive prosecution, shutting down open-air drug markets. But another piece of this that I kind of draw attention to in the book is there was also a mobilization in the communities hit hardest. Residents organized and really started to fight against violence, started to fight to take back public parks, playgrounds, public streets. And I think all of these things together explain why violence started to fall. SIMON: More police on the streets and tougher sentences had an effect, though. SHARKEY: It did have an effect. If we're having an honest conversation, then those factors are part of the conversation. They also brought great costs as well. So we have millions of Americans who are under the surveillance of the criminal justice system. We've all seen the instances of aggressive or violent policing. So these are part of the reason why crime fell, but they've also brought some of the worst costs of the crime decline as well. SIMON: A tricky question - is that force we call gentrification an effector or cause of the dip in crime? SHARKEY: Well, probably both. But we've looked at how the crime drop has affected changes in the population of low-income neighborhoods. And what we've found is that as violence declines, new populations enter into very poor neighborhoods. It's a drop in the degree to which the poor are kind of isolated, separated from the rest of the city. Now, nationally, we found no evidence that this leads to displacement of the poor. What it means is that residents with more education, higher income are moving into neighborhoods where poverty was concentrated. SIMON: But does this mean that in, let's say, inner city neighborhoods in Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore - become safer? Poor families are pushed out by increased rents before they have a chance to finally live in a safer neighborhood. SHARKEY: Well, they're not pushed out to a large extent. That's one of the findings that we have. Now, in some cities - in New York and San Francisco - there are very visible examples where this happens, so I certainly don't want to dismiss it. But over the... SIMON: What about Washington, D.C.? Would you add it to that list? SHARKEY: D.C., yes. Of course, yeah. So there - in those cities, it's crucial that we have policies in place that preserve affordable housing, make sure people are not displaced - not just physically but also culturally, politically. You know, 25 years ago the biggest problem in cities, beyond the problem of violence, was the issue of concentrated poverty, a lack of demand, people leaving central cities. Now we have this problem of too much demand and the problems that come with that. I don't want to dismiss them, but it's a much better problem to have than we had 20 years ago. SIMON: In times when, I believe, all the polls say a lot of Americans are in despair, what have the gains been by having a lower homicide rate in so many big cities? Obviously, more people are alive but beyond that. SHARKEY: Yeah. Beyond the lives that have been preserved, we have found gains in things like economic mobility. So in places that have become safer, we found a causal effect on the chance that children from low-income families will move upward out of poverty as they reach adulthood. We found impacts on academic performance. So in the places that have become safest, academic achievement has improved the most. And actually, racial achievement gaps have narrowed the most in the places that have become safest. And beyond all that, I think the most profound change is just in the experience of urban poverty. So across the country for several decades, living in poverty used to mean living with the constant threat of violence. That hasn't gone away. There are certain cities that are still intensively violent, but it's no longer true in most of the country. SIMON: Patrick Sharkey of NYU and Crime Lab New York - his book, "Uneasy Peace." Thanks so much for being with us. SHARKEY: Thanks for having me. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Helen Grace James won her honorable discharge from the U.S. Air Force this week at the age of 90. It's a battle she fought for 60 years. Helen Grace James grew up in Pennsylvania where she worked her family's farm and asked her mother to call her Jim. She played with toy trucks and boats and gave the doll she was given to her sister. Helen Grace James' father served in World War I. She saw her cousin ship off to serve during World War II. The military was something I thought was really important, she told The Washington Post. She enlisted in the Air Force in 1952 and had a fine service record. She was promoted to Airman Second Class. But when she was stationed at Roslyn Air Force Base on Long Island, Airman James came under investigation by the Office of Special Investigation. One night in the winter of 1955, she sat with a friend in her car to eat sandwiches when an officer shined a blinding light into her eyes and took her into custody. She was interrogated for hours. Investigators told Helen Grace James that if she didn't sign a statement they put in front of her, they would tell her family she was gay. Gay might not have been the word military investigators used in 1955. Helen Grace James signed. She was discharged as undesirable. America was then in the midst of what would become known as a Lavender Scare, parallel to the Red Scare directed at suspected or rumored communists. Gays were also considered subversive and susceptible to blackmail, so therefore a security risk in government or military service. Soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen were ordered to inform on those with whom they served if they suspected they might be gay. Yale law professor William Eskridge Jr. estimates in his book "Dishonorable Passions" that between 2,000 and 5,000 people who may have been gay were dismissed from the military during those years. Helen Grace James, who served her country with distinction, received no severance pay or veterans' health care coverage. She had no assistance from the G.I. Bill to go to college but worked her way to advanced degrees in physical therapy from the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford and went on to a distinguished career. She had worked through channels for decades to try to upgrade her discharge and finally sued the Air Force this month at the age of 90. The Air Force recognizes me as a full person in the military, she said this week of her honorable discharge, having done my job helping to take care of the country I love. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: The U.S. government is partly shut. The stroke of midnight came but no deal from Congress to keep the government open, prompting a shutdown on the first anniversary of the inauguration of President Donald Trump. The Senate is meeting to try again to reach a deal. The House met at 9. Before he headed to the Hill, Congressman Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, joined us. Congressman, thanks so much for being with us. TOM COLE: Hey, Scott. Thanks for having me. SIMON: I won't ask how you are, sir. COLE: (Laughter) Good. Let's keep it on a pleasant tone. SIMON: Well - but I have to say, the Republican Party controls the presidency and both houses of Congress. Why couldn't your party get a spending bill done? COLE: Because you need Democrats in the Senate. The Senate rules require 60 votes. There's 51 Republicans. And we put a deal in front of the Democrats that would have kept the government running while negotiations went on. There was nothing objectionable in the bill in the least - nothing they opposed. And they decided they wanted to shut down the government. So that's - we hope they'll come to their senses this morning. SIMON: Well, since you acknowledge you're going to need some Democratic votes, what are you willing to give up to get a deal? COLE: Well, first of all, I don't think anybody's going to negotiate very seriously with a gun to their head. And the history of these things is that presidents win and the party in Congress that causes a shutdown tends to lose. So I think the president's made it clear he's not negotiating until funding is restored to the government. I think in Congress there's certainly, around the edges, some places that we can make some arrangements, shorten the amount of time - although I thought 30 days was short enough, all things considered - and, you know, perhaps, you know, begin negotiations elsewhere. But you literally cannot complete legislation this fast. It's not as if the Democrats, you know, have a proposal that's been drafted into legislation that I'm aware of. So sooner or later, we're going to have to reopen the government, and I hope sooner. SIMON: Didn't your party get a tax bill done pretty quickly? COLE: No. It took months and months and months and months of - here, I mean, that lasted over a year. SIMON: I mean, they were scrawling in the document up until the last second. COLE: Well, that's a point. You worked on it all the way to the last second, but it took over - you know, close to a year to get it done. I mean, we started that process in January. We ended it in the December of the same year. SIMON: Senator Lindsey Graham - your colleague on your side of the aisle, respected senator from South Carolina - says, quote, "we don't have a reliable partner at the White House to negotiate with." COLE: Well, I would say we don't have a reliable partner in the Senate - particularly Senate Democrats - to negotiate. Look, they haven't passed a single appropriations bill this year. The House has completed all of them on time - all 12 of them. They didn't do a real budget this year. The House did. We've been waiting for 140 days to sit down with the Senate. But Democrats, using the Senate rule of 60, have made the Senate, frankly, dysfunctional. And that's affecting the entire body. SIMON: Are you eager to reach a deal to protect DREAMers in this country? COLE: I am. But I think it's got to be more than just that. Look, the DACA problem is a problem of a porous border. I mean, we wouldn't have the problem if you had the border. So border security is a huge component of this. And there are other immigration policies that would have to be addressed. So it's complex, but there's been negotiations going on for several months. And the two sides have actually inched closer. This, I think, will actually halt that progress and make it more difficult. SIMON: Well - I mean, I believe on Friday, certainly a lot of people thought that they had a deal in hand. Senator Schumer left the White House thinking that it was very close. And he says it got undone somewhere in the White House. It's not clear... COLE: Well, I can't speak to that. I wasn't a part of that. But I don't think it was probably quite as imminent as they thought. Look, I think the president's actually been very clear about the things that he wants. He wants to address border security, he wants to deal with chain migration, and he wants to deal with the lottery. And he's certainly willing to provide legal status for DREAMers. So if those are your four principle points and they've been known for months, there ought to be a way to reach an agreement. SIMON: Border security means a wall? COLE: It means border security. The president's acknowledged he's not talking about a wall from sea to shining sea. But it does require physical structures in a lot of places. Back in 2006, Congress actually voted for about twice the amount of physical barriers that we have today - so finishing that off, rebuilding parts of it. But again, as both General Kelly and the president acknowledged, we're not talking about a wall across the entire length of the border. But we are calling for much more intense border security. SIMON: Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, thanks for joining us. COLE: Thank you. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: And our congressional correspondent Susan Davis joins us in the studio. Sue, thanks for being with us. SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: Good morning, Scott. SIMON: How'd we get here? DAVIS: Last night, Senate Democrats who, yes, are in the minority denied the Republican majority the votes they need - the 60 votes they need on legislation that would have kept the government running for four more weeks. Congressman Tom Cole has a point. There was nothing in the underlying legislation that Democrats opposed. Their votes in opposition were a bit of a leverage play to try and extract an agreement from President Trump and congressional Republicans on a bipartisan immigration deal. SIMON: Leverage play is what I think the congressman called a gun to our heads. Right? DAVIS: That would certainly be how Republicans view it right now. SIMON: Yeah. What happens next? DAVIS: Well, the government is partially shut down, but Congress will be in session. Late last night, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said his next move would essentially be to offer this same legislation but instead of a four-week stopgap measure, it would be a three-week stopgap measure. What is the difference? - you might be thinking. I can't... SIMON: Well, five weeks. But yeah. DAVIS: (Laughter) Seven days. SIMON: Yeah. DAVIS: I don't know if that is going to be what Democrats will agree to. This is the tricky thing about shutdowns. They're pretty easy to get yourselves into. They're kind of hard to get yourselves out of. If Senate Democrats are saying they won't vote to reopen the government until they have an immigration deal, this could be a while. SIMON: Yeah. I heard Senator Cole kind of backing off from the whole wall from sea to shining sea idea. But I got to tell you, I still don't know what President Trump feels about that because he seems to have been all over the ballpark on that. DAVIS: He has been all over the ballpark. The president has, without question, injected certain amounts of confusion into the negotiations over this immigration bill as it's played out over the last week and a half. Democrats certainly don't feel like they know where they are. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was clear this week that Republicans were waiting for some clarity from their president on what he needs in a bill for him to sign it. Chuck Schumer, who is the top Senate Democrat, last night on the floor said that in final negotiations ahead of the shutdown, he did offer the president more money for the wall in order to try and extract a deal. The White House rejected that. We are now in a situation where Democrats are saying, we won't vote to open the government until we have an immigration deal. And the administration is telling Congress, we won't talk to you on immigration until you reopen the government. SIMON: So... (LAUGHTER) DAVIS: So the question is, what are the politics of this, right? You know, who gets... SIMON: Well, I - and I was going to - in this day and age, Sue - correct me if I'm wrong - both sides are talking to pollsters and advisers trying to figure out, look, when do I feel a public crunch that I have to make some kind of deal? Aren't they? DAVIS: Yes. You know, you will talk to Republicans and Democrats who will make very passionate cases that the other party will be to blame in this shutdown. I think shutdown politics are tricky. For one, we have a recent one in memory. The 2013 shutdown was largely driven by Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a member of the Republican Party. Republicans were seen as responsible for that shutdown. They went on to win big in the following midterm elections. So the idea that being seen as the party that shuts down government will have electoral consequences, I'm not so sure Democrats view it that way. SIMON: Yeah. And the last shutdown lasted 16 days. DAVIS: It lasted 16 days. If this one lasts as long as that, we will also be in a very interesting situation because President Trump's State of the Union address is 10 days from now. And I - my mind... SIMON: Oh, my word. Can they have a State of the Union address if the government is shut down? I mean, there's no one to say (in affected voice) Mr. Speaker, the - right? DAVIS: There's a question of who's an essential employee and who's a non-essential federal employee in a shutdown. I'm going to wager that your members of Congress are essential employees and they will be reporting to work as long as the government is shut down. SIMON: Some citizens might wonder about the essential part this week (laughter)... DAVIS: They will indeed. SIMON: ...If they're asked. OK. NPR's Sue Davis, thanks so much for being with us. DAVIS: You're welcome. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: As a candidate and now as president, Donald Trump has aligned himself with anti-abortion rights activists. In his first year in office, he handed several victories to that movement. Yesterday, Trump addressed the abortion rights opponents at the rally known as the March for Life. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Under my administration, we will always defend the very first right in the Declaration of Independence, and that is the right to life. (APPLAUSE) SIMON: Trump was the very first sitting president to address the annual march live via satellite from the White House. NPR's Sarah McCammon covered the Trump campaign. She now covers the abortion debate and joins us now. Sarah, thanks for being with us. SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: Hi, Scott. SIMON: What else did he tell the group? MCCAMMON: So he invoked a lot of religious language, which seemed sure to appeal to many people in the crowd. It's not an exclusively religious event but draws a lot of Catholics and evangelicals. He called life a gift from God and a miracle. And the president highlighted some of his actions over the past year, including a ban on federal funding for groups overseas that provide or refer patients for abortions also the recent creation of a conscience and religious freedom division, as it's called, at the federal Department of Health and Human Services, designed to protect health workers who have moral or religious objections to procedures like abortion - to being involved. SIMON: And Sarah, Donald Trump was not always such a champion of this movement, was he? MCCAMMON: Right. Remember that before he was a candidate for president, Trump described himself as pro-choice. Now that shifted at some point, certainly by the time he ran for the GOP nomination. Then and as president, he's courted religious conservatives and abortion rights opponents. And of course, Scott, that's not unique. You know, past Republican presidents have generally toed the line on opposing abortion rights. Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush both phoned in to the March for Life in the past. But in the eyes of many social and religious conservatives I talked to, Trump has gone further. He was introduced at the event by his vice president, Mike Pence, who called him the most pro-life president in American history. SIMON: And abortion rights opponents have gotten a lot of support from the president on some issues that are very important to them. Do they have other things they would like President Trump to do? MCCAMMON: Right. They feel - many - that he has delivered on his campaign promises - choosing a vice president like Mike Pence who's very popular with abortion rights opponents, some of his Cabinet appointments, judicial nominations like Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. But many tell me they're frustrated with Congress, especially the Senate, which they'd like to do more to, for instance, approve some of Trump's lower court judicial nominees and move along legislation restricting abortion rights. We should also note, Scott, that some abortion opponents in the crowd yesterday told our colleagues they didn't really like President Trump and didn't really like him being there even if they do appreciate his opposition to abortion rights. And they saw his video appearance at the March for Life as a distraction. SIMON: NPR's Sarah McCammon, thanks so much for being with us. MCCAMMON: Thank you. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Voters exercised their judgment this week in several special elections held around the country. To learn more, we asked our member station partners to send in audio postcards. We'll start with Wisconsin Public Radio's Rich Kremer. RICH KREMER, BYLINE: Before negotiations over a federal shutdown stole headlines, pundits had their eyes on a race in northwestern Wisconsin. The 10th state Senate district runs along the border with Minnesota and features a blend of rural farmland and sprawling Twin Cities suburbs. In the village of Baldwin, Laurie Malyuk voted for Democrat Patty Schachtner, a relative novice, over Republican State Representative Adam Jarchow. Malyuk said she was responding to a sense of chaos in Madison and Washington, and she sees her vote as part of something stretching far beyond the 10th state senate district - a Democratic wave. LAURIE MALYUK: Based on all of the special elections that we've had since the presidential election, I see it happening, and I hope that it continues. LEE PARKS: I don't see any wave coming. KREMER: That's Pastor Lee Parks of the Village of Somerset. PARKS: All that is media hype. I'll call it fake news. President Trump is doing everything he said he was going to do, but the media is saying that he's only gotten one thing done. He's gotten dozens of things done in this last year. KREMER: In 2016, Trump won this part of Wisconsin by 17 percentage points. Duane Russet of Baldwin voted GOP in Tuesday's race, just as he did in 2016. DUANE RUSSET: You know, I voted for Trump, but I think he's an idiot. You know, and the thing he says - you know, I think he's probably really smart, but he just - he should keep his mouth shut. Will I vote for him again the next time? I don't know. We've got a couple more years to see. KREMER: In the end, Democrat Patty Schachtner won by nine. Governor Scott Walker called it a wake-up call for Republicans in Wisconsin. For NPR News, I'm Rich Kremer. VICTORIA HANSEN, BYLINE: And I'm Victoria Hansen in Charleston, S.C., where there was another election this Tuesday and national politics played a role. Forty-year-old Nancy Mace is now a state House representative and the first woman to lead her district. But firsts for her are nothing new. She was also the first woman to graduate from The Citadel, a once all-male military school. NANCY MACE: I think people are sick and tired of politicians. I know I certainly am. HANSEN: The commercial real estate agent is not new to politics. She took a swing at Senator Lindsey Graham's seat in 2014 and worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign. MACE: People are really angry in this country. Whether you're on the Republican side or the Democrat side, we're all passionate and angry about the same issues but for different reasons. HANSEN: A year after Trump's election and during her own race, Mace found people still anxious for change. Her Facebook campaign featured a picture with the president, but did that photo op win her any votes? MACE: I'm sure that it did in some part, that connection there, but I also ran on my own ideas, and I worked really hard. HANSEN: Much of Mace's district is affluent, like her community on Daniel Island, adorned with egret-laced tidal creeks and marshes. (SOUNDBITE OF EGRET CALLS) HANSEN: That's where Bob Houghton scouts for dolphins. He voted for Mace and Trump. BOB HOUGHTON: I don't necessarily approve of his ways, but I certainly was anti the person he ran against. HANSEN: Nancy Benjamin is out for a walk and out of patience with Trump. NANCY BENJAMIN: It's just a gridlock because he flip-flops all the time. HANSEN: Tim Touchberry combs the beach, bucket in hand, for bottles and sharks' teeth. The low country native voted for Trump, hoping he'd shake up Washington. He's still hopeful. TIM TOUCHBERRY: I still have to give him a fair mark but not a real high mark. He gets after it. And I’m not sure it’s always in the ways that everybody feels like he should. HANSEN: For NPR News, I'm Victoria Hansen. DAVE MISTICH, BYLINE: And I'm Dave Mistich in Morgantown, W.Va. President Trump's support remains high here in the state, and Republican candidates are using his popularity to boost their own campaigns. Former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship is one of them. He announced his run for U.S. Senate in November after being released from federal prison in May. He was convicted of conspiring to violate federal mine safety standards at the Upper Big Branch Mine where 29 men died in 2010. Thursday, he put on a town hall meeting in Logan where he shared his own rags-to-riches story, bringing his audience up to the most recent chapter. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) DON BLANKENSHIP: Eventually, after the poorhouse, the outhouse and the bathhouse, I was invited and ate at the private dining table at the White House. And just last year, I lived in California in the big house. MISTICH: Blankenship says his experience in federal prison taught him a lot about the issues facing the country. In turn, he's now campaigning on hard-line conservative positions, many of which are at the heart of the shutdown negotiations in D.C. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) BLANKENSHIP: Illegal immigration - another issue. Illegal means illegal, and that's not complicated. A wall or something similar does need to be built. MISTICH: Despite being such a controversial figure, Blankenship's first public campaign appearance was met with no visible or audible opposition. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: I think the reason you're not getting a lot of questions - you gave us a lot of answers, and we appreciate what you have told us tonight. (APPLAUSE) MISTICH: Blankenship hopes to take on Democrat Joe Manchin this November. And he seems to be looking back to the 2016 election as a source of momentum, especially among voters in West Virginia. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: If you get elected, are you going to hold Manchin accountable for the damage that he's done to this state? BLANKENSHIP: Right after we finish with Hillary. (LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE) MISTICH: For NPR News, I'm Dave Mistich. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: DACA has protected people brought to the United States when they were very young, as long as they were under 31 when the order went into effect and came before they were 16. Many of those who missed the cut-off dates face deportation to countries they've never known. Jose Mares was deported to Mexico almost a year ago. He was picked up in Southern California where he'd lived since he was 8 years old. He is now 39. He now works for a nonprofit group called Al Otro Lado, which helps resettle people who've been deported to Mexico. He joins us from Tijuana. Thanks for being with us. JOSE MARES: Thank you for having me, sir. SIMON: I know it must be painful, but can you take us back to last February 9, the day you were deported? MARES: What happened that day was, you know, it started off as any regular day - you know, went about my business, got ready for work. And on this particular day, my daughter had to drop me off at work because she was taking the vehicle, you know, to get to work herself. SIMON: Yeah. Your daughter is 18. MARES: She is now 19, sir. SIMON: Nineteen, OK, 18 at the time. Yeah. MARES: Yes, sir. As soon as I got to my job, I exited my car, and I walked away probably like no more than 50 feet and, you know, I was apprehended by - it was either four or five ICE agents. You know, the good thing was that my daughter didn't see when they took me because I know she would have been probably even more devastated to see it happen. SIMON: Do you have any idea how they - how they began to get interested in your case? MARES: Well, I had a prior deportation from when I was younger for a minor drug offense. Of course, I had to return back to the states because I had my daughter. You know, I was a single father for - ever since she was 3 years old. And the way they found out where I lived, it was the day of Thanksgiving in 2015. I got pulled over because of - my tags were expired on my vehicle. And they took me in. They said I had what they called a misdemeanor warrant from 15 years back. And I went to court, like, four - four or five times, and they ended up dismissing the case. You know, so I thought that was over with, so, you know, I went about my life. And a little over a year later is when they came and picked me up and they said that - pretty much they told me that I went back on their radar for having been pulled over that day in 2015. SIMON: Yeah. But you didn't know Mexico. MARES: No, sir, I did not. This was, like, my first time actually having to live here since I was a kid. SIMON: What was it like to get to Tijuana and to realize you had to make a go of things? MARES: At first, it was scary because, you know, I'm being put in a country that I don't know. SIMON: Yeah. MARES: And I was just pretty much going by what you hear in the news, you know, that it's dangerous here, that it's a bad place. And I was desperate to get back to the states, mainly because of my daughter. SIMON: Yeah. You tried, in fact, didn't you? MARES: Yes, sir, I did. I attempted to get back. And, you know, I was caught, you know, because I was doing it illegally. But I felt like I had no choice. SIMON: May I ask, is your life in Tijuana all - is it all longing to see your daughter, or have you been able to to settle in at least a little and find sources of joy? MARES: Well, the first few months, I just - all I could think about was just, you know, seeing my daughter, being back home, being with my daughter. SIMON: Yeah. MARES: I would just sit and think, you know, of how it was and how much I wanted it, you know, to be the way it was before I was deported. But I couldn't keep on dwelling on that thought 'cause I, you know, it's just making myself miserable. And, you know, with the help of the organization Al Otro Lado, I've been able to settle into Tijuana better than I could have on my own. I've been able to find a home, and I'm employed with them. And things are better than what they were a few months ago. They definitely are. SIMON: But you just - you can't get up on a Saturday morning and drive over the border and see your daughter anytime you want, can you? MARES: No, sir, I can't. I wish that I could, you know, wake up every morning and hug her and give her a kiss on her forehead the way I used to do every morning and, you know, enjoy a cup of coffee with her and, you know, just do the things that we normally used to do. SIMON: Yeah. Jose Mares - he joined us via Skype. Thanks so much for being with us. MARES: No, thank you, sir. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: The task of digging the town of Montecito, Calif., out from under a blanket of mud and debris has officials scrambling for places to put all that mud. As Stephanie O'Neill tells us, Santa Barbara County is now dumping some of the mud onto local beaches even as they warn people to stay away from it. STEPHANIE O'NEILL, BYLINE: Marine science professor David Valentine was heading home from his job at UC Santa Barbara when he noticed some unusual activity at Goleta Beach. DAVID VALENTINE: I bicycle commute in, and I was going past the beach, so that's how I first became aware of what was going on. O'NEILL: Dump trucks filled with the wet concrete-like slurry from the Montecito debris flow one by one depositing their muddy loads onto the sand. And that got Valentine wondering. VALENTINE: What really are these materials? What are they composed of, and what are they likely to impact once they make it into the ocean? O'NEILL: In December, the biggest wildfire in modern California history stripped the mountains. When a downpour hit January 9, soil turned to mud that grabbed everything in its path. Since then, a chunk of highway 101 has been closed as crews work 24/7, first to clear it and now to repair it. Santa Barbara County says it has permission from four government agencies to do emergency cleanup and because it is an emergency, those state and federal agencies are not requiring the county to test the mud before it gets dumped on the side of the highway, into local landfills and onto the sands of Goleta Beach and Carpinteria State Beach, where people typically surf year-round. The one caveat - that it's all debris-free, according to California Coastal Commission spokeswoman Noaki Schwartz. NOAKI SCHWARTZ: The Flood Control District and the Army Corps of Engineers are removing debris, rock, vegetation and larger materials before depositing the mud. O'NEILL: And she says county public health is testing the coastal waters. That agency has found high bacteria contamination at the two beaches receiving the mud and at others, prompting this warning from Santa Barbara County Public Health Director Van Do-Reynoso. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) VAN DO-REYNOSO: All ocean water in these locations should be considered contaminated, and no recreational activities or swimming should take place. O'NEILL: And while that sounds dire, Valentine says, high bacteria levels in coastal waters are typical after rains, especially with the first rain of the season. VALENTINE: We get all sorts of different things pouring into the coastal ocean. O'NEILL: Stuff like lawn fertilizer and oil drips from cars. Still, Valentine and others say it's certain the Montecito mud contains a lot more than normal first rain runoff. Raw sewage, household chemicals and heavy metals from the recent wildfire are all part of it. But just how much is uncertain. Ben Pitterle is an environmental scientist with the nonprofit Santa Barbara Channelkeeper. BEN PITTERLE: What we can say, I think with some certainty, is that the vast majority of what's being dumped on the beaches is sand and sediment from the mountains. O'NEILL: A few days ago, Pitterle's organization began a battery of tests, including one that measures biotoxicity. PITTERLE: We collect a big jar of the mud, and we take it to a special lab that will take a particular species of aquatic mussel and they'll watch those organisms in the material. And then they'll compare how well those organisms persist compared to a clean sample of mud. O'NEILL: Pitterle's group will be posting all the test results for the public on its website with the hope that if the mud proves to be toxic to marine life, county officials will reconsider their decision to dump it at the beach. For NPR News, I'm Stephanie O'Neill in Santa Barbara County, Calif. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Facebook announced changes to its news feed algorithm this week, which it says will prioritize, quote, "high-quality news sources." Until recently, Facebook paid NPR to produce videos for that site. But some might say the changes aren't enough to stem the misinformation and sensationalism on social media. A former mentor to Mark Zuckerberg and an early investor in Facebook has become one of those social platform's sharpest critics. In a series of opinion pieces for The Washington Post, The Guardian and Washington Monthly, Roger McNamee says Facebook has, quote, "behaved irresponsibly in the pursuit of massive profits. They have consciously combined persuasive techniques developed by propagandists in the gambling industry with technology in ways that threaten public health and democracy." Roger McNamee joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us. ROGER MCNAMEE: It is entirely my pleasure. SIMON: Well, these are important allegations. Let's take them one by one. How has Facebook threatened public health? MCNAMEE: We are all addicted one way or another to smartphones. Sixty-two percent of Americans get their news from Facebook, and they get it under circumstances that are significantly less than optimal for our democracy. Facebook is a product that depends on advertising for its revenue, and the best way to get people engaged and to be interested in ads is to get them - ideally to make them either afraid or angry. And when you combine that adage with Facebook's ability to customize its content into two billion separate channels, effectively, everyone has their own "Truman Show." On top of that, they have a smartphone, which is available every waking moment, and most people are conditioned to check it within a few minutes of waking up and will use it all day long, finishing only a few minutes before they go to sleep. If you can addict your user, they are a lot more valuable. SIMON: Now, you say very bluntly in these articles that you believe Russia used Facebook to interfere in the 2016 elections. How? MCNAMEE: So the most important thing to recognize is that Russia's interference was not a hack. They did not mess with Facebook. What they did was they took advantage of the tools that Facebook has created for legitimate advertisers and applied them to manipulating the thoughts of American voters, essentially promoting polarizing issues. So they focused on things like immigration, guns, white supremacy and a variety of other issues they knew to be polarizing. And their explicit goal was to make Americans angry at other Americans. SIMON: You tried to bring your concerns to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook, whom you know very well. I think it'd be fair to say they didn't seem as troubled as you were. MCNAMEE: When I went to them, their reaction was to say, Roger, we really appreciate your coming to us with this. Our view is that these are all isolated examples of things that we can and have fixed. And more importantly, we are actually not responsible for what third parties do because legally we're classified as a platform, not a media company, so we're not, in fact, responsible. And after four months of them being incredibly polite, incredibly friendly but not moving at all, I finally gave up, and that's when I went public. SIMON: In many ways, though, hasn't the success of Facebook suggested that the world public prefers convenience to all these questions you raise about interference, invasion of privacy? MCNAMEE: I think that is indisputably true. The problem that we face I think as a country - in fact, that the world faces - is that we adopted these products to the point where more than 2 billion people use them regularly. We adopted them without really fully understanding that there was a dark side. So in a sense, it's a lot like what happened after the Second World War when an industry was created to make food convenient. And no one understood at the time that the process of making food convenient meant loading it up with fat, sugar and salt and that that would pose, in time, a public health risk. We have gone through that cycle much more rapidly with technology, but we've arrived at the same place. SIMON: What should Facebook do? MCNAMEE: I think the most important thing they can do for democracy is to contact every single Facebook user who was touched by the Russian interference in 2016. They need to send them messages - emails, texts, Facebook messages - that say we are really sorry, but we were manipulated by the Russians in 2016. They took advantage of our product to harm American democracy. And because we were manipulated, you as a user was manipulated. And as a country, I think we need to come together and recognize that while you may have liked the outcome in 2016, you're probably not going to like the outcome next time because what the Russians have done is create a playbook that anyone can use. And I don't think we want our democracy to be about bullies beating up on everybody else. And that's what happened in 2016, and that's what I fear will happen this year and in future elections. And so Facebook owes an obligation to the country to correct that. They're the only one who has the data, and they're the only one who's really believable with the message that people were manipulated. SIMON: Roger McNamee, co-founder of Elevation Partners - and he was an early investor in Facebook - thanks so much for being with us. MCNAMEE: My pleasure. It's been really fun. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: You may have heard this song before. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "QUIET") MILCK: (Singing) Put on your face. Know your place. I am MILCK. I am a singer-songwriter. I have found myself on a whirlwind of a journey ever since January 2017. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "QUIET") MILCK: (Singing) I can't keep quiet, no. SIMON: At the Women's March in Washington, D.C., MILCK performed the song "Quiet" with a group of women who were strangers until just days before. A video of the performance went viral. Now MILCK has a new EP, and it includes the song she calls her thesis. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "QUIET") MILCK: (Singing) I can't keep quiet for anyone. It has been stuck in my (laughter) throat and my consciousness for years and years and years. I have been trying to find a way to heal myself from the burdens of being silenced. And I grew up in a really traditional background. My family is Chinese-American. My parents moved here from Hong Kong, and they lived the classic American dream. My father moved to the States with just a little bit of cash and then worked his way as a burger flipper, then a custodian - through pharmacy school, then medical school. And my parents and their spirit is a very big part of my childhood and how I perhaps felt a lot of pressure to walk in those footsteps of becoming what they felt was appropriate. They wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BLACK SHEEP") MILCK: (Singing) Black sheep, crying those rebels tears. It's a battle to survive these lonely years. I was just different, even physically. I was a chubby kid, and I became really ashamed of how I was different from the standard stick-thin, polite, classy, elegant Asian-American female image. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BLACK SHEEP") MILCK: (Singing) It runs deep, it's insatiable - that hunger to be seen, to be understood. Black sheep... I've noticed that I haven't really written many love songs for this EP. Most of them are about the things that take up my headspace. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I DON'T BELONG TO YOU") MILCK: (Singing) Too long, my back's been breaking. Too long, I've been crusading for you. I wrote "I Don't Belong To You" in 2017 as I was watching - the world seemed to unravel - just news story after news story. And I was also being sent around the country and to different countries to sing and share my story. And I was seeing the hopefulness and the pain. And so I was really emotionally charged. I felt like this open nerve ending, and I needed to unleash a little bit of my anger. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I DON'T BELONG TO YOU") MILCK: (Singing) 'Cause I don't, I don't belong to you. I'm letting the lion loose, nothing to prove to you. I'm sayin, no more needing your permission. My songs, I think, have a potential to become protest songs. I don't have a power in deciding that. I've realized, as an artist, my job is to just provide honesty in a time where it's hard to know what is true and what is not. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I DON'T BELONG TO YOU") MILCK: (Singing) I don't belong to you. SIMON: That was MILCK. Her new EP, "This Is Not The End," is out now. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THIS IS NOT THE END") MILCK: (Singing) It's not the end. It's not over yet. I will fight for it till my dying breath. It's not the end. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Even before the clock struck midnight and the government shut down, the fingerpointing had begun. Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma described it on our program this way. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST) TOM COLE: Well, first of all, I don't think anybody's going to negotiate very seriously with a gun to their head. And the history of these things is that presidents win, and the party in Congress that causes a shutdown tends to lose. SIMON: Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, runs the Senate Democrats 2018 campaign operation. He joins us now. Senator Van Hollen, thanks very much for being with us. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: Scott, good to be with you this morning. SIMON: Republicans, as I don't have to tell you, say your party used immigration as what amounts to leverage, a bargaining chip. What do you think of that? VAN HOLLEN: Well, Scott, the first thing is we need to get back to work. The Senate will go back in at noon today and end this unnecessary and very avoidable shutdown. There were lots of issues at play. We are now four months into the fiscal year without a budget, which our military has said is doing great damage to them. We need to fund not only the military but the part of the budget that funds our kids' education, the part of the budget that funds the Social Security Administration, which is taking great cuts. And that's having a very negative impact on services. We need to fully fund - so if you're - there are a series of issues. DACA... SIMON: I didn't hear a yes or no as to whether or not you're using immigration as a bargaining chip. VAN HOLLEN: No, we are not. The answer is we are not. What we are doing is trying to get agreement on a whole host of important priorities, which, by the way, we believed were shared priorities, at least among a majority of senators - Republicans and Democrats. Chuck Schumer then went to the White House. As both Chuck Schumer and the president indicated, they thought they had a positive meeting. But as so often happens after these White House meetings, the naysayers at the White House got involved, and things went downhill from there. Look. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has said the White House is an unreliable negotiating partner. He's right, which is why the Senate should get this done and send it to the White House. SIMON: Let me ask you, Senator Van Hollen, what are you and other Democrats willing to give up to get a budget deal? VAN HOLLEN: We're willing to negotiate both in terms of the levels of funding for defense and the part of the budget that focuses on education. When it comes to community health centers, we can find a reasonable number to keep them going. Fighting the opioid epidemic - these are all pressing issues in our country, and they need to be resolved. When it comes to DACA... SIMON: Yeah. VAN HOLLEN: ...We saw a bipartisan agreement come out of the Senate, right? The president had asked the senators to come up with a plan. He said he would sign it. This was weeks ago. So Dick Durbin, Lindsey Graham, others went to work. They got that bipartisan deal. And we know what happened. They went to that meeting at the White House, and the president used the repulsive, racist language. And we're trying to get back to that. But, Scott, you know, my view is that the Senate should not be contracting our constitutional responsibilities to a chaotic White House. Mitch McConnell should bring up what is a bipartisan agreement in the United States Senate. And we should vote on it and then send it to the president. And then the president can decide what to do. He said he would sign whatever we sent him. He can change his mind if he wants, but let's just do our job in the United States Senate. SIMON: Well, in the, you know - roughly over 30 seconds we have left. Was this a case - 'cause of course, senators are meeting today. People are talking even as we speak. Was this a case where each side needed to signal that they were tough and willing to go to the mat, and now something can come out of it? VAN HOLLEN: Well, I do hope very much and think something can come out of this. I was disappointed last night. We had a motion to keep the government open for another three days so that we can complete this negotiation without signaling chaos throughout the federal government. Unfortunately, Republicans rejected that. But I hope we will use our time over the weekend to try to resolve these issues. Again, I believe there's a bipartisan agreement to be had in the United States Senate. Mitch McConnell should let us do our constitutional job, and then, you know, the president can decide what he wants to do when he gets the piece of legislation. But this is chaos down there. And so let's do our job in the Senate. SIMON: Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat from Maryland, thanks so much for being with us. VAN HOLLEN: Thank you. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Going to turn now to NPR's Ron Elving. Ron, thanks very much for being with us. RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott. SIMON: You heard Democratic Senator Van Hollen. We had Republican Congressman Cole. What points do they make that stand up for you? ELVING: These are a couple of reasonable guys, and they are making reasonable arguments. And if they were speaking for the two parties, I very much doubt we'd have a shutdown this morning. But it's not clear how representative they are of their respective parties. What we're seeing instead is a couple of parties being pulled back from compromise by elements of their own coalitions, their hardcore backers, if you will. So both sides are rather at odds with the larger middle of the rest of the country, the political culture of America. And the real sticking point here isn't what's in the bill. It's what's not in the bill - the fix for DREAMers that the Democrats feel they've been promised over and over again that they've negotiated and they want to see done. And they only can see a vehicle for that in a must-pass bill like this spending bill. SIMON: Well, they thought they had a deal this week, didn't they? ELVING: Yes, indeed. And they went to the White House. And the president said he'd sign whatever the deal was. And then it appears that a couple of people in the White House - at least maybe more than a couple - policy adviser Stephen Miller, chief of staff John Kelly seemed to have talked to the president, and then the president changed his mind. It's a widely shared impression. And we don't know exactly what goes on inside the White House. But the senators who wanted a deal were really unhappy about the influence of those two individuals on where the president stood. And so now at this point, we really don't know where the president stands. SIMON: The Senate meets later today. Where do they stand? What kind of movement do you see there? ELVING: They are going to try to pass, as Senator Van Hollen just referred to, a very, very short-term stopgap spending measure - just a matter of a few days. That would supposedly force everyone to stay at the negotiating table over the weekend. The president did not go to Mar-a-Lago, and he is theoretically available. And even though there's no guarantee of a breakthrough, at least it would keep people talking. And if the Senate gets a short-term extension it's probable that the House would go along, although, on the other hand, we always have to see. Both chambers have to vote. SIMON: I have to tell you - on Twitter, a man named Johnny Lovato (ph) has suggested this be called shutdown hole (laughter), which raises the question, is this going to be known as a Schumer shutdown or a Trump shutdown? ELVING: Which phrase you hear on which cable news channel you watch will probably determine which you think it is. Or maybe that's going to determine which cable channel you watch. But the two parties would clearly prefer to have a deal, but they also fear any deal that offends the hardest core of their political base. So Republicans have been moving away from their previous positions. They've been moving away from things they said they would accept. The Democrats have also dug in their heels on this. It was surprising to see that there were a handful of bailouts on both sides. We should give credit to those senators who are willing to buck their own party - both Republicans and Democrats. And maybe on the basis of that and on the basis, I think, of the country's disgust with these very short-term stopgap spending measures that we've had one after another - this is the fourth since October - that combination may actually get people to the table and may actually get people to bend. SIMON: Is there a political cost for this, though? Because people keep winning elections. ELVING: That's right. And there are elections in November. And sometimes, it's hard to know how that particular ball is going to bounce. SIMON: NPR's Ron Elving, senior editor and correspondent on the Washington desk, thanks so much. ELVING: Thank you, Scott. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Government shutdown is partial. And as NPR's David Schaper reports, many government functions will continue. DAVID SCHAPER, BYLINE: I'm standing at a security checkpoint in Chicago's O'Hare airport, and passengers are lined up to go through screening as they would on any other day. The TSA officers here are considered essential government employees and are still working. Customs agents are working, too, as are air traffic controllers who guide the planes. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney explains what other government workers are considered essential. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MICK MULVANEY: The military will still go to work. They will not get paid. The border will still be patrolled. They will not get paid. Folks will still be fighting the fires out west. They will not get paid. The parks will be open. People won't get paid. SCHAPER: Those parks are only open for as long as possible, and a statement from the National Park Service doesn't elaborate on how long that could be. And some park services may be limited. And to be clear, working federal employees will eventually be paid - sometime after the shutdown ends. About those military operations, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis says yes, active military personnel will be working. But... (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JIM MATTIS: Over 50 percent, altogether, of my civilian workforce will be furloughed. And that's going to impact our contracting. It'll impact, obviously, our medical facilities. SCHAPER: And the military personnel who are working will not have all of the support that they're used to. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MATTIS: The submarine that put to sea last week will still be out for three months. And - God bless them - the lads will not have any email connectivity, so they will not even know what's going on as they cruise quietly out there carrying out their duties. SCHAPER: Post offices will be open, and the mail will continue to be delivered during the shutdown. Social Security checks will still go out, and Medicare will be unaffected. As for the federal courts... RUBEN CASTILLO: The courts will not shut down. SCHAPER: Chicago's U.S. District Court Chief Judge Ruben Castillo. CASTILLO: This, unfortunately, does not come as a surprise to us. So we have some contingency funds that will let us fully operate until about February 9. SCHAPER: But Castillo says the only Justice Department lawyers working will be those handling criminal cases. So civil matters may have to be delayed. And if the shutdown continues and the contingency funds run out, he and other chief judges across the country will need to figure out which court employees to furlough. He says just the threat of this shutdown hurt employee morale. CASTILLO: Yeah, it's demoralizing. It's demoralizing. You feel like Congress has forgotten about you as they're in political warfare. SCHAPER: Judge Castillo says as the budget battle drags on, it's federal employees and the Americans who count on them who become collateral damage. David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago. (SOUNDBITE OF BROKE FOR FREE'S "HIGH HOPES") SCOTT SIMON, HOST: This weekend marks the first anniversary of the Women's March. Last year's demonstrations drew enormous crowds to the nation's capitol and other cities around the world. Today one of the places that protesters are gathering is New York City. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang joins us now from just outside Central Park. Good morning, Hansi. HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: Good morning, Scott. SIMON: What are you seeing? WANG: Well, I'm here right by the site where the rally is going to start in a few hours. There's tents up. They were checking the sound system a little bit earlier. And I'm seeing lots of marchers starting to gather and lots of those pink hats that we saw last year - those pussyhats. Women are wearing them as they gather to get ready to march later today. SIMON: Yeah. You've been speaking with some of the marchers, haven't you? WANG: I have been. And a lot of folks that I've talked to today came out last year. They said they for sure wanted to come out again and - essentially to say, no, we do not support what's happening right now with the Trump administration. We're concerned about encroachment on women's rights. One woman I spoke to, Bridie Bugeja, she's a psychotherapist from Northport, N.Y., on Long Island. She told me she's very concerned about what's going to happen to DACA, the immigration program for young immigrants who were brought here as children and are staying, currently, in the U.S. illegally - what's going to happen to them. And she's also concerned about all the new attention on sexual harassment because of the #MeToo movement, a new focus on that. She brought a sign with her, and here's what she told me. BRIDIE BUGEJA: I wanted to do something Seussical, as I love Dr. Seuss. I'd read it to my children when they were little. So I wrote, I don't like you in my shirt. I don't like you up my skirt. I don't like you near my rump. Replace Republicans and Donald Trump. SIMON: Well, an homage to Dr. Seuss. What do the the march organizers - what kind of objective do they have today? WANG: Well, the march organizers have told me that one of their main focuses is taking all this energy of people coming out, showing up to these marches and really channeling them to the polls this November. They're focusing on the midterm elections coming up, and they want to make sure that for the congressional races, for local races, that women and other marchers really think about getting registered to vote, encouraging other people to register to vote and to really channel their energy into ballots. And they're hoping - well, they're sending out volunteers today - in addition to marching - here in New York City to register voters. And they're also encouraging women to think about running for public office. SIMON: And there are other events planned for this weekend - aren't there? - around the march. WANG: That's right. Officially, the actual anniversary is tomorrow, January 21. And the main event is in Las Vegas. And our colleague Leila Fadel will be out there covering that. But there are marches here in New York City today. There's a march in Washington, D.C., as well as other cities and towns around the country. And so we'll be seeing and hearing a lot about the Women's March this weekend. SIMON: NPR's Hansi Lo Wang, thanks so much for being with us, my friend. Thanks for doing... WANG: You're welcome. SIMON: ...The job. WANG: You're welcome. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Becky Dinsmore was at that Women's March in Washington, D.C., last year. She said she believed it was her civic duty to protest that weekend. She split a hotel room with a friend of hers of 50 years, Albert Kiecke. He was in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the inauguration of President Trump. So a year later, how are they doing? And how do they think the president is doing? Albert Kiecke and Becky Dinsmore, thanks so much for being back with us. BECKY DINSMORE: You're welcome. ALBERT KIECKE: You're welcome. SIMON: I've thought of you both a lot over this past year of increasingly bitter partisan rivalry and your lovely touching and abiding friendship. So I got to ask before we get to the politics - you guys still friends? DINSMORE: (Laughter) yes. KIECKE: Yes, we are. SIMON: Oh. Becky sounded a little more enthusiastic than you, Albert. (LAUGHTER) KIECKE: Well, I've got a little cold, so I'm kind of down a bit. SIMON: OK. Albert, what kind of grade would you give President Trump in his first year in office? KIECKE: I'd probably give him about a B-minus. SIMON: What do you like? KIECKE: You know, one thing, he's just standing up to everybody - up to the media and all the people that are against him. But, you know, then on the other hand, you know, I get discouraged when he just tweets stuff that, you know, really doesn't matter. It only, you know, just inflames people and causes more turmoil. SIMON: Becky Dinsmore, how do you feel? DINSMORE: I - am sorry to say - would give him an F. You know, I think that it's difficult to divide his policies from what I would call his proclivities, twittering being one of them. But, you know, I think the F for me is due to the fact that he is divisive. And we've got people on both, you know, far ends of the spectrum. I'm actually - I'm surprised to hear Albert say a B-minus. So - I don't know - maybe I'll give him an F-plus. SIMON: (Laughter) I'm not sure the grade exists, but all right, yes. DINSMORE: Yes, trying to bridge that gap there. SIMON: Yeah. Albert, I have to ask - are you proud that Donald Trump is your president? Our president - forgive me. KIECKE: Yeah, I guess I'm proud. But I'm - you know, I've always held the president of the United States - even if I didn't care for their policies, I've always been proud of our presidents. SIMON: Becky, I think I know part of the answer. But let me get you to expand. Are you proud that Donald Trump is our president? DINSMORE: Well, I hate to say it because I think Albert's point is well made, which is that we should all be able to be proud of the office of the president. So I still think we're a great country. But no, I'm not proud. In fact, I'm disgusted. You know, I think that everything from his, you know, ridiculousness to what I would consider some of his actions as being diabolical. SIMON: Let me ask you about a particular issue that looms large this weekend, and that's the fate of the people who are called DREAMers, brought to this country as children. Becky, what would you like to see happen for the DREAMers and on immigration? DINSMORE: You know, to me, I just think - what would it be like going back somewhere you'd really never been before? And separating someone from their family and from their job - and, you know, I think that there is an impact on a larger group than just that individual. KIECKE: You know, I think that we should allow them stay here. It's kind of hard to send them back to the country they have no knowledge of. But also, you know, they didn't come here legally by the fault of their parents. And I don't think they should be automatically granted citizenship because of that. There, you know, should be some pathway that they could get in line with all the other people that want to be citizens and get their citizenship that way. SIMON: Sounds like you guys agree. DINSMORE: Yeah, I definitely would agree with that. You know, Albert and I could do it together. You know, why not the Republicans and the Democrats? SIMON: OK. So what do you not see in those two parties that maybe you see in your own working friendship? DINSMORE: Well, it seems to me like Trump's brinksmanship - if I can use that word - is making it more difficult for the parties themselves to work together. You know, if he would keep his mouth shut and his fingers off the Twitter keyboard, then, you know, perhaps it would be more possible. SIMON: Albert? KIECKE: Well, I just look at it like the Democrats are so upset about losing the election. And it's just been - we're just going to hold the American public hostage for four years, and we're not going to pass any legislation. We're not going to approve any judges. And, you know, we're just going to do whatever we can to make it look bad for President Trump that he won't get re-elected in three more years. DINSMORE: Right. But Albert, let me ask you this - if we were to have one bill, one topic and separate the wall from DACA, don't you think that DACA would pass? It's Trump that's attaching the money for the wall to the bill. KIECKE: Well, but President Trump also made promises to his constituents. And he's trying to keep that promise - that border wall not only from illegal immigration but also to keep illegal drugs from coming across the border. DINSMORE: But if that's true, wouldn't it pass in a bill by itself? KIECKE: Well, not because - the Democrats are not going to let it pass by itself. DINSMORE: Well, I guess this conversation is proving just exactly what we all feel, which is there are so many difficult issues. And, you know, I think people are paying a lot more attention than we might have in years past. And gosh darn, it's frustrating. SIMON: None of my business, but I hope you two keep talking. (LAUGHTER) DINSMORE: Good idea. SIMON: Been a delight to talk to both of you - Becky Dinsmore and Albert Kiecke, lifelong friends from Houston, Texas. Thanks so much. DINSMORE: Bye-bye. KIECKE: Bye-bye. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: This week, women and girls have been standing up in court to denounce the man who sexually abused them. Dr. Larry Nassar, the longtime national team doctor for the U.S. women's gymnastics team. Their testimony's has been heart-wrenching and outrageous. It's left many reeling and wondering how such blatant abuse could go on for 20 years, how the USA Gymnastics Federation (ph) failed to protect young athletes and if Michigan State University covered up the complaints against Larry Nassar. We turn now to Howard Bryant of ESPN and ESPN the Magazine. Howard, thanks very much for being with us. HOWARD BRYANT: Good morning, Scott. SIMON: I know we've both been watching the court proceedings. What did these women say? What did it mean for them to be able to confront this man? BRYANT: Well, I think it's very important for them to be able to confront Larry Nassar, especially in a public forum because this is their life. As we always talk about with sports, this is our entertainment. But this is something so heinous that they've had to deal with - and not just Aly Raisman or Simone Biles or some of the other women that have come forward - or Gabby Douglas - that have said that they've been victims of Larry Nassar but also all of the athletes that have come before because this has been going on for 20 years... SIMON: Twenty years, yeah. BRYANT: ...I think. And so I think Aly Raisman - her testimony yesterday was incredibly powerful, where she looked at him and told him he was nothing and that they were a collective and that this was finished for him. But to me, Scott, one of the big things that bothers me about this is, why was this their responsibility? There's no question that you give them credit for their courage in stepping forward. But how did this happen? And how, when you look at this, how did it go on for so long? And the - and we're still even asking the question as to if there were problems with the structure. Of course there were problems with the structure. SIMON: You mean the structure of the... BRYANT: Of USA Gymnastics and with Michigan State and Karolyi Ranch and all of the particulars where the adults are supposed to take care of these athletes, are supposed to protect them. SIMON: Yeah. BRYANT: And it's no different than any other scandal. When you're thinking about - whether it's church or concussions or the rest of it, you cannot allow - and you and I spoke about this a couple of months ago - that you allow the bad guy to go to jail and you leave the structure intact. SIMON: Michigan State University announced - the board of trustees said they're - I guess an investigation is going to begin about what might have been a cover-up lasting for 20 years. My question would be, why did they wait so long? Not only why did they wait for 20 years but why did they - Larry Nassar has been under scrutiny for some time now. BRYANT: Yeah. Well, I think that one of the reasons is for that thing. This is a very American thing that we do. We find the bad guy. We take the bad guy. And we punish the bad guy. And then we leave every mechanism that allowed the bad guy to exist and that enabled the bad guy - we leave those things alone. And Lou Anna Simon, the president of Michigan State, there are calls for her to resign right now. Clearly over some length of time of an investigation, you're going to have to find some impropriety with somebody other than Larry Nassar. He couldn't have done this all by himself. SIMON: Yeah. BRYANT: And so this is one of the things that we have to deal with as a culture because we don't deal with it very well and especially when you're dealing with young people. Joan Ryan, years ago in San Francisco, wrote a fantastic book about a lot of the abusiveness, you know - "Little Girls In Pretty Boxes" back in 1995. And there are plenty of books on this subject. But it's simply that we look at gymnastics in similar ways that we look at football and some of these other sports - is that it's our entertainment and we don't want to pay attention to what they go through to become elite athletes and all of the possible improprieties that can go on that ended up becoming reality. SIMON: Howard Bryant of ESPN, thanks so much for being with us. BRYANT: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF IKEBE SHAKEDOWN'S "THE WAY HOME") SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Federal government is in partial shutdown after Congress failed to reach an agreement to pass a spending bill. Members of the military and law enforcement will continue to work without pay, but Americans may not notice the effects of the shutdown until Monday, when most federal workers would be back at work. One exception is at national parks. NPR's Jeff Brady is in downtown Philadelphia at Independence National Historical Park. They were supposed to be open this morning. Right, Jeff? JEFF BRADY, BYLINE: Yes, it was supposed to be open. I'm outside the building that houses the Liberty Bell, and the doors are locked. There's some gates up outside, and there's a guard out front. On the door, there's a little sign. You can just barely read it. But it says that the building is going to be closed today because of the partial government shutdown. And all morning, there have been a lot of disappointed tourists sort of milling around, bugging the guard, asking him why the buildings are closed. And among those disappointed tourists was 9-year-old Emma Bridges of Bethesda, Md. She's in town with her family to celebrate her dad's birthday. And she was able to see the Liberty Bell through a window but couldn't get inside to see it close up. She was pretty disappointed, but she also had a pretty good understanding of why this is happening. EMMA BRIDGES: Because the government can't agree on a decision for the money. BRADY: And what do you think about that? EMMA: I think that they should just pick a decision so that way people can go to all these cool sites and also... UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Learn about our history, right? EMMA: ...Learn about our history. BRADY: So maybe a 9-year-old will melt some hearts in Congress. SIMON: Aw. BRADY: But, you know, one probably silver lining here is that this is a slower time of year for the sites here in Philadelphia. It's pretty cold outside, so at least fewer people will be shut out of these places than, say, during the peak of the season in the summer. SIMON: Now, Jeff, the Trump administration has said this government - they don't want this shutdown to be like the last one in 2013. More services will continue to operate. But I wonder what that looks like from where you're standing. Does it seem different this time? BRADY: I was here in Philadelphia during the 2013 shutdown, and there are a few things that are different this time. Across from the Liberty Bell, there's a visitor center. And that is open. And maybe even more importantly, the bathrooms in there are open today. That's because that center - that visitor center is operated by a contractor, not National Park Service employees. Last time, that was shut down, too. But the sites that everyone comes here for - the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, the tours associated with those sites - those are all shut down today. SIMON: So tourists can look at a Liberty Bell through the window but use a bathroom. They just can't see the Liberty Bell up close. BRADY: Yep - and can't get in and learn all those interesting facts about it. SIMON: Now, you've been looking into other national parks across the country, too. BRADY: Yeah. A National Park spokesman told me yesterday that their goal is to keep the national parks as accessible as possible while, you know, still following all of the laws and procedures. And that means parks with roads that already were open, they'll stay open. But there won't be any maintenance. So if it snows or it's icy, the roads won't be plowed or maintained. And most places that require staffing will be closed. Campgrounds may be opened. But there's no staff, so there's also no guarantee that your site is going to be ready if you're, you know, camping in the middle of January. In D.C., the park service says war memorials and open-air parks are still open to the public today. Just don't expect to see any staff. And a few examples around the country - in Alaska, folks there say they're not going to close the parks 'cause they don't really have gates on them. You can still drive up. But be careful because there's not going to be anyone there to rescue you if you get into trouble. SIMON: NPR's Jeff Brady, outside the Liberty Bell visitor center in downtown Philadelphia. Jeff, thanks so much for being with us. BRADY: Thank you, Scott. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: And we're going to turn now to NPR's congressional correspondent Susan Davis on Capitol Hill. Susan, thanks so much for being with us. SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: Hey, Scott. SIMON: As you just heard, Senator Van Hollen said, I think there's a, quote, "bipartisan agreement" to be had. Both houses of Congress are back at work today. Do you see any sign of that? DAVIS: There's a lot of talk but not much action just yet and a fair amount of hard feelings at the moment. House Speaker Paul Ryan spoke on the floor earlier today. And here's a sense of the mood of the Republicans right now. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PAUL RYAN: The federal government is needlessly shut down because of Senate Democrats. One party in one house of this Congress is deliberately holding our government hostage. DAVIS: At this stage, I would say that it's really more about finger pointing. Republicans are calling this the Schumer shutdown - in terms of Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. He also spoke earlier today. He is calling this the Trump shutdown. SIMON: So after everybody has gotten their soundbites... DAVIS: (Laughter). SIMON: ...What's ahead for the rest of the day? Do they ever talk to each other? DAVIS: There is another plan on the table. We don't know where it's going to go yet. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is trying to offer another short-term funding resolution. The original that Democrats blocked in the Senate would have carried the government through Feb. 16. Mitch McConnell wants to offer another one through Feb. 8. We're in a bit of a wait-and-see mode right now to see if that's something Senate Democrats can support. In the House, the Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said if the Senate can pass that, he is confident that the House can do the same. SIMON: President - forgive me - President Trump has been tweeting - that's a tongue twister - tweeting all morning. He's blamed Democrats, accused them of putting illegal immigration ahead of the military. He's also been speaking with Senator McConnell and Speaker Ryan. How much do Republican lawmakers need or want of direction from the White House. Senator Van Hollen, for example, suggested, just let us talk to each other and then bring it to the president's desk. DAVIS: The president has certainly injected a fair amount of confusion into these negotiations. He was for a bipartisan proposal. Then he initially opposed it. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was at the White House yesterday. He thought he had another agreement with the president on an immigration deal that would have included more money for the wall. Schumer says the White House rejected that proposal again last night. Schumer talked on the Senate floor today, and he talked about Democrats' frustration in dealing with the White House. And this is what he had to say. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) CHUCK SCHUMER: What's even more frustrating than President Trump's intransigence is the way he seems amenable to these compromises before completely switching positions and backing off. Negotiating with President Trump is like negotiating with Jell-O. DAVIS: I think you can hear in both Speaker Ryan and Leader Schumer's voices that compromise doesn't necessarily seem like it's at hand right now. There's going to be extensive talks and meetings behind the scenes on Capitol Hill. But how and when this ends we simply just don't know yet. SIMON: So do you perceive that either side is feeling any kind of impetus to negotiate any kind of warning from their political base, from what we call these days the donor class? - that you just can't let this go on too long. DAVIS: It's just too early to tell yet. I don't think most of the country has absorbed the fact that the federal government shut down. The practical effect is most people will continue to go about their day-to-day lives. I do think in this climate, it's always important to note that President Trump right now has about a 38-percent approval rating. It's the lowest point for any president at this time in his presidency. And in that mood, Democrats think that they have a leverage point there. SIMON: NPR's Susan Davis at the Capitol, thanks so much. DAVIS: You're welcome. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Almost every Democrat in the U.S. Senate voted against the procedural motion last night that might have averted the shutdown. But five Democrats voted for it, and four of those Democrats who are up for re-election this year in states that voted for President Trump. Geoff Garin is a Democratic pollster who joins us now. Mr. Garin, thanks for being with us. GEOFF GARIN: Thanks for having me, Scott. SIMON: A lot of Democrats seemed to have made a calculation they won't be blamed for the shutdown. What does your polling say? GARIN: Well, the polling, both nationally and in the Senate battleground states, indicates that voters are inclined to blame President Trump and the Republicans. There was an ABC-Washington Post poll yesterday where, by 48-28, people said that President Trump and the Republicans would be more to blame rather than the Democrats in Congress. And we polled very recently in these Senate battleground states and found - where President Trump, as you noted, had won by a margin of about 11 points collectively. And even there, by 11, points people were more inclined to blame President Trump and the Republicans rather than the Democrats. People recognize that the Republicans control the entirety of the government and think it's their responsibility to make it work. SIMON: So Democrats in conservative states that voted in favor - essentially voted with the Republicans on that motion, a Republican majority. In your mind - what? - they were unnecessarily cautious or fussy or what? GARIN: Well, you know, I assumed that they were making a judgment of what's best for their state and that's what voters expect of them. But I would note that in these states - even in the reddest of the red states - there is support among the vast majority of voters to include protections for the DREAMers in the government-funding bill. Even among voters who told us they supported President Trump in the 2016 election... SIMON: Well, let me... GARIN: So 68 percent say that the DREAMers should have been - should be included in the final bill. SIMON: But what if you balance that? Because Republicans have charged that Democrats are putting DACA recipients, which amount to perhaps less than a million people, over other groups of interest that have a lot of concerns. Specifically, let's say, the 9 million people who are insured to the Children's Health Insurance Program, CHIP. GARIN: You know, for the average citizen this is not - the common sense answer to this is, this is not a choice - that the congress ought to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time - and that there's no reason in the world why the government-funding bill can't both extend the life of the Children's Health Insurance Program and provide the promised protections for the DREAMers. It's only a kind of, you know, a Washington politician who would say, we can only do one or the other of those things. Most Americans say, this is simple. You ought to do both. SIMON: But you poll for Washington politicians, too - don't you? GARIN: I do. And I - you know, here on the merits of the argument, I think the Democrats have the high ground in the sense that the - what they're arguing about is something that the vast majority of Americans support, which is the inclusion of protections for the DREAMers. SIMON: Geoff Garin is the president of Hart Research Associates, a Democratic polling firm. Thanks so much for being with us, Mr. Garin. GARIN: Thanks for having me, Scott. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: In the U.S., end-of-life decisions are fraught and often frustrating. Many people struggle to communicate how they do or don't want to be treated as they die, which is why one man's simple and extreme solution has caught the attention of medical ethicists all over the country. Rebecca Hersher reports. REBECCA HERSHER, BYLINE: The standard way to tell people that you want to be allowed to die is to sign an official form saying, do not resuscitate me. But it doesn't guarantee that's what will happen. If you lose consciousness and end up in the ER, that form may not come with you, in which case, many doctors err on the side of not letting you die. KENNETH GOODMAN: Look. You can always be dead later. Don't take a course that's irreversible. HERSHER: Kenneth Goodman is the medical ethicist for the University of Miami Hospital. Goodman has seen a lot of dying people in his 30 years on the job. But even he was shocked last summer, when he got a call about a patient who had done something drastic with his end-of-life wishes. The patient had tattooed do not resuscitate across his chest. The word not was underlined. His signature was tattooed at the end. GOODMAN: Here's one no one's ever seen before. HERSHER: The man was 70 years old. He was unconscious when he arrived at the hospital - no ID, no one with him. The doctors asked Goodman, what should we do? It's not an official form. There's no way to know when he got this tattoo or how he feels about it now. On the other hand... GOODMAN: He's gone to the trouble of getting a tattoo that says, please don't do this to me. And he's probably seen it pretty frequently since then. I suppose every time one's looking in the mirror, one would see this. HERSHER: ...In the end, Goodman decided the tattoo was convincing. GOODMAN: If we take a piece of paper at face value, where, in fact, someone might've changed their mind, we really should probably take this tattoo at face value, even though he might've changed his mind. HERSHER: Goodman advised the doctors to take the tattoo seriously. The man got sicker and sicker overnight. They didn't do CPR. The man died. And it turned out the man had an out-of-hospital form on file with the Florida Department of Health that backed up his tattoo. So DNR tattoos have a couple of things going for them. They are hard for doctors to miss. And they're basically impossible to lose. But they're not a good solution because they're not reliable. To understand why, take another example - this one from 2012. ALEX SMITH: A person who presented with a DNR tattoo at a local hospital here in San Francisco. HERSHER: Alex Smith is a palliative medicine doctor at the University of California, San Francisco. This man was 59 years old, in the hospital for surgery. The letters DNR were tattooed in red below his heart. His doctors asked him, is that real? SMITH: And in that case, the DNR tattoo in the person's chest was the result of a poorly conceived drinking game. HERSHER: Specifically, a poker bet with colleagues from - I kid you not - the hospital where he worked at the time. He said he actually wanted to be resuscitated. So, yeah, DNR tattoos - not reliable. Doctors and ethicists say what would really be helpful for them is an easy way to access official forms from everywhere. Ideally, EMTs and ER docs would both know instantly what care an unconscious person actually wants. GOODMAN: Imagine an ordinary patient who has a preference never to be resuscitated and that were in her record. Why, then that ought to be something you could easily call up anywhere. HERSHER: With the Internet, the cloud, it seems like something that should be possible. In fact, two states do have electronic registries for end-of-life forms. Two others are considering it. And since California's pilot registry began, doctors there say they're seeing fewer patients who choose to wear their preferences on their bodies - etched in bracelets, mostly, not tattooed on their skin. Rebecca Hersher, NPR News. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Thirty-five years ago tonight, the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto changed the way audiences experience opera. While the singers performed in German on stage, simultaneous translations in English were projected above the stage. These supertitles, as they've come to be known, are now an expected part of the opera-going experience. Jeff Lunden has the story. JEFF LUNDEN, BYLINE: Jackie Vick is the executive director of tiny Intermountain Opera in Bozeman, Mont. She's one of three full-time employees. And she says supertitles are one reason some people drive 400 miles to see the company's productions. JACKIE VICK: I think it's one of the best things that could have happened to opera because it opened the door to everyone. It broke down what people considered a language barrier, so people don't have to feel like they need to know it before they come. They can enjoy the show while it's happening. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: (Singing in Italian). LUNDEN: Before supertitles, going to the opera required a bit of homework, says Marc Scorca, the president of Opera America, a nonprofit support organization. When he was a kid going to the opera, he had to read a plot synopsis or even a libretto beforehand because most of the works were in foreign languages. MARC SCORCA: It was quite a confusing experience that required of the audience member an absolute determination to figure it out. And it was clear that there were many people who would not enjoy going to the opera if it was such a mystery and so difficult to figure out what the plot was about. LUNDEN: In 1983, the late Lotfi Mansouri, who was artistic director of the Canadian Opera Company, saw a subtitled broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera's production of "Elektra." (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: (Singing in German). LUNDEN: He decided to try titles live in the theater. The innovation got mixed reviews, as Mansouri recalled in a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts interview. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) LOTFI MANSOURI: I got blasted. They called it the plague from Canada. I had vulgarized opera. But I didn't give a damn because all of a sudden, the audience was involved. LUNDEN: The person he hired to get them involved was Sonya Friedman, who'd also done the Met TV broadcast. And one of those who saw Friedman's supertitles was American diva Beverly Sills. At the time, Friedman says, Sills was running New York City Opera. SONYA FRIEDMAN: And she decided that she was going to have titles for every one of the foreign language operas at New York City Opera. And she called me and hired me for that season. And I had to do a lot of operas. GUNTA DREIFELDS: Basically, it caused an explosion in the opera world. LUNDEN: Gunta Dreifelds assisted Friedman on "Elektra" in Toronto and continues to write titles for the Canadian Opera. DREIFELDS: Within six months, over 100 companies were using some system of projected titles. LUNDEN: At first it was a kind of primitive system. They used slide projectors. DREIFELDS: We used 35-mm glass-mounted slides. They had glass-mounted so they wouldn't melt from the lamp and the projectors. It's a glorified home slideshow. LUNDEN: And Dreifelds and Friedman say they could only use 40 characters because the screen was only so big. So Sonya Freedman says she doesn't translate every word in the libretto. FRIEDMAN: You figure out the character. And you figure out the plot. And then you figure out the meaning of what these people would want to say. And so I'm very free with the translations. But I'm true to the sense of what the people are singing (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LIVE FROM LINCOLN CENTER NEW YORK CITY OPERA: RIGOLETTO") UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Singing in Italian). LUNDEN: Opera companies have long since ditched the slideshow. Supertitles are now basically PowerPoint presentations. It's cheap. It only takes two people to run. But one company resisted for more than a decade. FRIEDMAN: Well, the Metropolitan Opera didn't want titles. James Levine was the musical director, and he felt that it would very much compromise the stage. And also, he didn't want to look at them. LUNDEN: A patron donated money to have supertitles screens installed on the back of every seat. And Levine relented. Sonya Friedman is now in her 80s and semi-retired. She still licenses her supertitles to companies across the country. And she says she loves the fact that they appeal to more than just audiences. FRIEDMAN: The singers absolutely adored them because they were getting a response from the audience to the tragedy, to the comedy. They were getting feedback that they never got before from the audience because the audience, of course, understood. LUNDEN: Without having to do their homework. For NPR News, I'm Jeff Lunden in New York. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, ""LIVE FROM LINCOLN CENTER" NEW YORK CITY OPERA: RIGOLETTO") UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Singing in Italian). LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: And it's time to play The Puzzle. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GARCIA-NAVARRO: Joining me, as always, is Will Shortz. He's puzzle editor of The New York Times and WEEKEND EDITION's puzzle master. Will, Good morning. WILL SHORTZ, BYLINE: Good morning, Lulu. GARCIA-NAVARRO: How was Hollywood? SHORTZ: It's a - I had an interesting event last week. It was a Television Critics Association gala for the Hallmark channels. And I'm advising on a crossword mystery for them. There were lots of famous people there. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Really? Who is the best one? SHORTZ: Best one - I don't know. I've met Jon Voight, shook his hand. Unfortunately, he doesn't do crosswords. So... GARCIA-NAVARRO: Did you ask him? SHORTZ: I did. I did. GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) That's a good icebreaker. All right. Remind us of last week's challenge. SHORTZ: Yes, I said name a world capital. I said it's an older way of spelling the name. Drop three letters, and the remaining letters in order will name another world capital. And I said both cities have more than a million residents. Well, the answer is Djakarta. That's spelled the old way starting with a silent D. D-J-A-K-A-R-T-A. And you drop three letters. You get Dakar, the capital of Senegal. GARCIA-NAVARRO: This one was pretty challenging. We only got about 300 correct responses, and our randomly selected winner is Dan Streit of Port St. Lucie, Fla. Congratulations. DAN STREIT: Thank you very much. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Tell me a little bit about yourself. I heard that you were an elementary school teacher. STREIT: I was for 38 years. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Wow. STREIT: And I retired a few years ago. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And how long have you been doing puzzles? STREIT: Forever. GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) Forever. SHORTZ: (Laughter) Good answer. STREIT: Since I was a little kid and throughout my teaching career, the students were very puzzling. And I get involved in any puzzles I can find. GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Dan, are you ready to play the puzzle? STREIT: Definitely. GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Let's take it away. SHORTZ: All right. Dan, I'm going to give you some four-letter words. For each one, add one letter in front and one letter in back to complete a familiar six-letter word. STREIT: OK. SHORTZ: No proper names. Also, no just adding an S or D at the end of a five-letter word to get the six-letter one. For example, if I said lane - L-A-N-E - you would say planet, putting a P at the front and a T at the end. STREIT: Got it. SHORTZ: Number one is moot - M-O-O-T. STREIT: That would be smooth. SHORTZ: Smooth is right. Number two is hang - H-A-N-G. STREIT: That would be change. SHORTZ: Uh-huh. Went - W-E-N-T. STREIT: Went would be twenty. SHORTZ: That's it. Nigh - N-I-G-H. STREIT: Nigh would be knight. SHORTZ: Knight, yes. Starting with a silent K, right. Tree - T-R-E-E. STREIT: Street. SHORTZ: Uh-huh. Refi - R-E-F-I. STREIT: Let's see - prefix. SHORTZ: Uh-huh. Brad - B-R-A-D. STREIT: Abrade. SHORTZ: Uh-huh. Awes - A-W-E-S. STREIT: A-W-E-S. Let's see. SHORTZ: There's a common suffix involved on this one. STREIT: Yeah, I'm thinking E-S-T. SHORTZ: Yes. STREIT: Rawest. SHORTZ: Rawest. Yeah, that's the... STREIT: Oh, OK. That's a hard one to say. SHORTZ: ...Rawest weather we've had. Yeah. Onto - O-N-T-O. STREIT: O-N-T-O. Let's see. SHORTZ: Ever eat at Chinese restaurants? STREIT: Wonton. SHORTZ: There you go. Craw - C-R-A-W. STREIT: Scrawl. SHORTZ: Uh-huh. Isle - I-S-L-E. STREIT: I-S-L-E. Let's see - misled. SHORTZ: Misled. Good. Rest - R-E-S-T. STREIT: Rest could be - let's see. P - can I put a Y on the end? Presty. SHORTZ: It's not presty, no. STREIT: No. SHORTZ: You got the right first letter, though. STREIT: Crest. SHORTZ: Oh, no. Not a C. STREIT: Oh, OK. That was what I was thinking. SHORTZ: Sorry. I thought you had a different letter at the start. STREIT: Oh, what did you think I had? SHORTZ: I thought you said a P, actually. STREIT: A P. Yeah, I think - that's what I really said. "Prest-O Change-O." SHORTZ: Presto is it. Here's a tough one. Plan - P-L-A-N. STREIT: Plan. Upland. SHORTZ: Upland. Good. And here's your last one. Afar - A-F-A-R. STREIT: Safari. SHORTZ: Safari. Dan, you're a pro. GARCIA-NAVARRO: You are a pro. You were amazing. You have clearly been doing this for a long time. STREIT: Thank you. GARCIA-NAVARRO: How do you feel? STREIT: I feel good. That was fun. GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter). STREIT: I always love any subtle challenge you got. I'd love to try it. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. Well, you did great. For playing our puzzle today, you'll get a WEEKEND EDITION lapel pin as well as puzzle books and games. You can read all about it at npr.org/puzzle. Dan, what member station do you listen to? STREIT: I listen to WQCS - Fort Pierce, Port St. Lucie, Fla. GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's great. Dan Streit of Port St. Lucie, Fla., thanks for playing The Puzzle. STREIT: Thank you, Lulu. Thank you, Will. SHORTZ: Thanks. GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Will, what's next week's challenge? SHORTZ: Yes, it comes from listener Tom Arnold (ph) of Eugene, Ore. Take the name of a conveyance in seven letters. Drop the middle letter. And the remaining letters can be rearranged to name the place where such a conveyance is often used. What is it? So, again, name of a conveyance in seven letters. Drop the middle letter. And the remaining letters can be rearranged to name the place where such a conveyance is often used. What is it? GARCIA-NAVARRO: When you have the answer, go to our website - npr.org/puzzle - and click on the submit your answer link. Just one entry per person, please. Our deadline for entries is this Thursday, Jan. 25, at 3 p.m. Eastern. Include a phone number where we can reach you about that time. And if you're the winner, we'll give you a call and you'll get to play on the air with the puzzle editor of The New York Times and WEEKEND EDITION's puzzle master, Will Shortz. Thanks so much, Will. SHORTZ: Thank you, Lulu. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: It's day two of a partial federal government shutdown. Democrats and Republicans are struggling to negotiate a funding bill, as the clock keeps ticking, and the president keeps tweeting. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan just spoke about a new development on CBS's "Face The Nation." (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FACE THE NATION") PAUL RYAN: We passed a bill keeping things funded to Feb. 16. He is going to bring up a bill keeping funded to Feb. 8. We have agreed that we would accept that in the House. And so we will see sometime today whether or not they have the votes for that. And that's really where we are right now. GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Here to talk about that is NPR's Kelsey Snell. Kelsey, thanks for joining us. KELSEY SNELL, BYLINE: Thank you. GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. So what did Speaker Ryan say in his interview, and what does it mean (laughter)? SNELL: Well, the he he was talking about that we just heard is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. So the Senate is going to voted 1 a.m. right now. That's where it's scheduled - 1 a.m. on Monday morning - on a procedural vote that would start the process to allow them to vote on a bill that would keep the government open through Feb. 8. Ryan just said there that the House would accept that. Now, that means that it comes to the Democrats in the Senate and whether or not they are willing to support this idea. It's not a new idea. It's something that Senator Lindsey Graham floated, I believe, on Friday afternoon. And there's a little bit of support for that. It would get them past the State of the Union, so Republicans could have the government open, functioning and negotiating through the State of the Union. But it doesn't really buy them a lot of time. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So basically, what he's saying there is it's going to be a much shorter time. They're going to fund the government, kick the can farther down the road but, you know, a little bit shorter down the road, as opposed to trying to resolve this full stop. SNELL: Yeah. The - I think the thing that they're trying to do at this point is find a way to reopen the government, if they can, before people are supposed to go to work on Monday because, you know, that is the point where a shutdown becomes much more real - is when people don't show up to work. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Is this going to make things easier, or will it just complicate matters? Because the devil is in the details, right? I mean, it's not just about how long they fund the government for but actually what's in the proposal. SNELL: Yeah. And what's in this proposal, it sounds like, is just a shorter version of what was there before. And it does kind of make things more complicated at this point because everybody I have spoken with - Democrats and Republicans - say things have not gotten better over the past 24 hours. They have gotten more complicated. And people are really digging into their positions. Part of what's not helping things is both sides are focused very heavily on assigning blame. And while there are negotiations going on behind closed doors, it doesn't appear that they're getting any closer. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Let's talk about the differences that still exist. And they center around immigration. Am I right? SNELL: Yes. GARCIA-NAVARRO: What are the positions here? SNELL: Well, Republicans are divided in some ways about how narrowly this should be focused on just the people - the roughly 700,000 people we know as DREAMers. They are the people who are in the country illegally after being brought here as children. Democrats and some Republicans would really like to focus on solving that discreet issue now and doing a broader immigration reform later once that issue is resolved because DACA protections go away in March. Now, Republicans say they need to deal with other issues, broader issues and fix the immigration system because, as Speaker Ryan said today, they believe that this DACA issue is a symptom of a broader in the way we handle immigration in this country. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So basically, at this point, what the Republicans are saying is it's not just about the DREAMers. We want to do other things. And these things have actually been President Trump's priorities all along - talking about changing the immigration system, saying that, actually, they didn't want to have people come to this country that was - family reunification was not a priority, and he wants to change so-called chain migration. How has President Trump contributed to this shift? SNELL: Well, it's - he's made things kind of complicated because, as we saw last week at that meeting in the White House that was televised, he said he would sign anything. And Democrats took him at his word there, and they - that's why they felt that this negotiation that happened with six senators - bipartisan senators - would be acceptable. But it wasn't acceptable to the house, and it wasn't acceptable to many Republicans, even, in the Senate. So it is complicated because he is pulling them in a direction away from what some Democrats thought would be a solution. GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. That's NPR's Kelsey Snell bringing us up to date. Thanks for coming in. SNELL: Thank you. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: This weekend marks one year of a Trump administration, but that anniversary is being overshadowed by Day 2 of the federal government shutdown. Democrats and Republicans are taking predictable swipes at each other, trying to place the shutdown blame on the other party. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MITCH MCCONNELL: Here we are, Day 1 of the Senate Democrats' government shutdown. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) NANCY PELOSI: There's no such thing as a good shutdown. Democrats have never been for it. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) LAMAR ALEXANDER: Shutting down the government ought to be like chemical weapons is in warfare. It should be banned. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) CHUCK SCHUMER: Negotiating with this White House is like negotiating with Jell-O. GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander speaking to CNN and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. House Speaker Paul Ryan said this morning on CBS' "Face The Nation" that the House will accept a Senate bill to keep the government funded until February 8. We'll be hearing from Senator Bernie Sanders this hour and get some Republican insight later in the show. But first we turn to NPR's national political correspondent Mara Liasson, who's been very busy. Good morning. MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning, Lulu. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Where are we right now? And how did we get here? LIASSON: Well, we are still at a stalemate. The government is shut down for the second day. And as you just said, the House is now willing to accept another short-term funding bill, which is what the Democrats originally had asked for so that the two sides would have more time to negotiate around immigration, specifically what should happen to the DREAMers, who had relief from deportation until Donald Trump decided to end it. And he gave the Congress a March deadline to come up with an alternative. So the question is, would the Senate accept a short-term bill till February 8? And what kind of assurances would Democrats get in that bill that the DACA deals that are being worked on right now for the DREAMers would get a vote on the floor of the Senate? Today, Marc Short, who's the legislative affairs director at the White House, wouldn't promise that those deals could get a vote on the floor or that he'd agreed to it. So both sides are in a difficult situation. Republicans don't want to be blamed for a shutdown. They own - they control all of government. On the other hand, Democrats know that if they're seen as shutting down the government just to protect, quote, "illegal immigrants" that will hurt them particularly in the red states, where they're defending Senate seats this year. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'd like to talk a little bit about the discussion around immigration and specifically the words you just used, illegal immigrants, framing it that way. The goalposts keep moving. It sounds to me like what's now being debated is not just about DACA for the Republicans. It's now about fundamental changes to America's immigration systems. And that - those fundamental changes are what the president wants. This isn't where things started, but that's where we are now. How did... LIASSON: That's right. Well, two things changed. One is that DACA recipients, DREAMers, young people brought here - some in some cases as infants - by their parents, did not used to be called illegal immigrants even by Republicans. So they weren't letting them be legalized. It was not considered amnesty because they were too young to have knowingly committed a crime of immigrating illegally. But that has changed. The rhetoric on immigration in this funding fight has become much harsher, and the DREAMers have been lumped in with all sorts of illegal immigrants. The president's campaign committee is airing an ad saying Democrats are going to be responsible for any crimes committed by illegal immigrants - very, very harsh rhetoric. Also, the president has now been demanding - in exchange for continuing deportation relief for DREAMers or legalizing them, he's been asking for, as you say, some big, big, fundamental changes to America's immigration systems like ending chain migration - sometimes called family reunification - ending the diversity lottery and fully funding his border wall, which Democrats are coming around to saying, well, we'll give that to him. It's meaningless. It's just symbolic. They're willing to agree to that. GARCIA-NAVARRO: We have a vote dramatically timed for 1 a.m. overnight. What's the purpose of that? LIASSON: The purpose of that is to show the country that the Congress is still working on this. They're not taking the weekend off. But it's unclear if anything's going to happen in that vote. Or are they going to have to wait till Monday to see if they can get one of these bills on the floor and get - and buy themselves some more time to negotiate these bigger issues? GARCIA-NAVARRO: So buy themselves more time. If this funding bill only goes until February 8, does that mean this could happen all over again, just briefly? LIASSON: Absolutely. It could happen all over again. But at least it gets them past the State of the Union address so the government isn't shut down when the president addresses both houses of Congress on January 30. GARCIA-NAVARRO: NPR's Mara Liasson keeping us up to date. Thanks so much. LIASSON: Thank you. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: And now to an issue that is at the center of the current partisan divide in Washington - immigration. The president and his supporters would like sweeping changes to America's legal immigration system. In particular, the president has said he would like to scrap the current system based on the reunification of families - what the president calls chain migration. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Chain migration that costs taxpayers billions and billions of dollars and sanctuary cities that set free violent, criminal aliens all over our country and protect them. GARCIA-NAVARRO: We are now joined by Tomas Jimenez, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford who studies immigration. Welcome to the program. TOMAS JIMENEZ: Thanks for having me, Lulu. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So the president believes basing immigration policy on family reunification is bad for the country. But is there a case for it? JIMENEZ: Well, you know, my grandfather who came from Mexico used to say, tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are. And I think you can say something similar about immigration policy. Show me your immigration policy, and I'll tell you who you are. And so we've had an immigration policy that is based largely on family reunification. And it's a policy that says that we as a nation value families being together, that we value families staying together. Proposing to have an immigration policy based more on formal skilling is not absurd. I mean, it's an immigration policy that a lot of countries have or at least... GARCIA-NAVARRO: Canada, Australia. JIMENEZ: Exactly. Exactly. And if we choose to go that route, our children and our grandchildren will tell a very different story about what it means to be American. Looking backward, the story that we tell is that we're not just a nation of immigrants. We're a nation of underdogs. The story of a German immigrant who comes here as a barber, and his grandson is today the president of the United States. And so the president himself could write his own family story into that narrative, as could mine. If we choose to move to a system based more on formal skilling, you know, I think what it says is we want to be a nation of overdogs, a nation of people who have made it someplace else, and we cherry-pick them after the fact. And, again, it's not necessarily better or worse. It's just a radically different idea of American identity written into our immigration policy. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I've covered immigration and met migrants with family in the United States. And anecdotally, I've seen them talk about how they do better because they have someone to help them navigate the country, initially provide help with employment and other needs. Do studies support that - that people coming into this country that have connections here do better? JIMENEZ: Absolutely. You know, an immigrant comes here and then brings over their family members and ultimately creates a community. The kind of anchoring set of migrants will help subsequent migrants find housing, find jobs, help them feel like they have a cultural home. And that has actually been true for as long as we've had migration to the United States. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, we should clarify that, broadly speaking, there is bipartisan support for naturalized citizens to bring in their spouses and their minor children. So you'd be able to bring in your husband or your wife. But the question, I think, is, should they be able to bring in their adult siblings and their adult married children? JIMENEZ: You know, I think there is a reasonable case to be made that we could potentially do away with bringing over adult siblings or adult parents and that we could, in fact, privilege a system that favors bringing over minor children and spouses. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I know that you've studied what the American public thinks about our system of immigration. What are the attitudes, and how do we see ourselves as a country? JIMENEZ: Well, you know, I get concerned that we often pay attention to the loudest voices and the biggest events when we gauge what the country thinks about immigration. And if you look at national polling, the United States as a whole is pretty accommodating when they consider immigration. A majority of Americans wants the current level of immigration to either be kept the same, or they want more migrants. A majority of Americans do not want a wall on the southern border. Large majority of Americans want a mass legalization program. And one poll in particular - if you let respondents know that migrants would pay back taxes, that they would learn English and pass a background check - criminal background check - 90 percent of Americans would favor a legalization program under those circumstances. A majority of Americans are more concerned that immigration enforcement is going too far than that it's not going far enough. Some of the proposals that are coming out of Washington and particularly out of the White House are just wildly out of step with the way that Americans are thinking about immigration. Americans across the land are adjusting to new populations living among them, just as those new populations are getting used to living in a new land. And it turns out that, on the whole, those two parties are figuring out how to get along. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Tomas Jimenez joins us from Stanford University, where he is a faculty affiliate at the center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Thank you very much. JIMENEZ: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF HYAKKEI'S "KAGEROU RAILWAY") LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: It's been one year since President Trump's inauguration. We wanted to get a progress report from his supporters. So we called some up and caught some others at the rally known as the March for Life this past week in Washington - first, what they liked. STEPHEN ROWE: The biggest things I'm happy about are a lot of pro-life legislation that's moving forward. RON SCHAFER: I'm pleased with all the things that he's accomplished in rolling back regulations. BRENDA DAWKINS: I love his immigration policy. I love his tax reformation. DON REID: I'd give him an A. He has been able to withstand the onslaught of a media that hates him, members of his home party who want to get rid of him and radicals on the left who are determined to impeach him. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And now what they think the president can do better. JUDY KIMILARY: I'd like him to stay off Twitter a little bit more. JOHN LOCKHART: Get off of Twitter a little more often. DAWKINS: I'm not real happy with his tweeting out everything that he's thinking. But that's his way, it seems. CHRIS BRAZIL: Really, I haven't had much problem with really anything he's done. MICHAEL DRISKELL: He's just doing everything he promised to do. And we are making America great again. GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was Ron Schafer, Brenda Dawkins, Stephen Rowe, Don Reid, Judy Kimilary, John Lockhart, Chris Brazil and Michael Driskell, all supporters of President Trump assessing his first year in office. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Time now for The Call-In. (SOUNDBITE OF CORDUROI'S "MY DEAR") GARCIA-NAVARRO: It's also been one year since the Women's March brought huge crowds of women across the country out onto the streets after President Trump's inauguration. Last week, we asked you for your stories about how that experience did or did not stay with you one year later. We begin with Tram Nguyen, who told us the election of Donald Trump was a huge blow. TRAM NGUYEN: I was very dejected. I just felt completely helpless. GARCIA-NAVARRO: That changed with the Women's March. NGUYEN: Seeing the energy and seeing the people and their willingness to take action with me - it was really a transformative time. GARCIA-NAVARRO: She harnessed that energy and got involved in local politics and political organizations. She says she's planning to run for state office this fall as a challenger to a Republican incumbent. Nguyen is a legal aid attorney from Andover, Mass. She came to the United States with her parents when she was 5. She thinks those experiences will help her on the campaign trail and in office. NGUYEN: It's important to have voices like mine, a new voice, a fresh perspective, someone who is an immigrant who has that experience, who grew up in a working-class family but also someone who has helped vulnerable people in my line of work who have been an advocate for the people who understand what it takes to be the voice of the people. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And she hopes her background will help widen the reach of the women's movement to include more people of color. NGUYEN: Inclusion and equality takes time. It takes effort. It's a directive process. And so the more women of color who join this movement, the more it will expand out to those groups. And we should put an effort into making sure that that does happen, that this movement becomes what we want it to be. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Still, the marches didn't mobilize everyone. Rebecca Richmond is a self-described liberal feminist who thinks the marches didn't live up to their billing. REBECCA RICHMOND: The name Women's March was misleading. GARCIA-NAVARRO: She's 22 years old and lives in Sherwood, Ark. She did not go to the marches last year. RICHMOND: It wasn't necessarily for or about women. I know a lot of people say that it was called that because it was created by a woman or because mostly women attended. But I could say that for a lot of other marches, as well. I feel like the Women's March is so ambiguous that people didn't know why it was happening. Even people on the left still don't quite understand what the Women's March was about, myself included. GARCIA-NAVARRO: That it was just sort of an umbrella movement for lots of different grievances and lots of different advocacy, but it didn't have one, coherent goal. RICHMOND: Exactly. I think it was definitely kind of a way for people to show that they were disgruntled. But it didn't have any specific goal in mind, which is why I felt that these kind of marches are a bit watered down. Absolutely, if these marches are effective, and this leads to the first shaky steps of, you know, social and political change, then I'll eat my words. But as someone who values revolutionary change, I think that there are effective and ineffective ways of producing it. I think the general public just doesn't understand what these marches are for. I think a lot of people are using them rather as a - kind of a way to pat themselves on the back and network with other people who have the same beliefs. GARCIA-NAVARRO: We've had a lot of women calling in, though, to tell us that they felt energized by the march. And we've seen an uptick demonstrable of women running for office. Doesn't that count? RICHMOND: I definitely think that's correlated. But I don't necessarily think that that is causation. I think that women for a long time have been trying to be seen in public as more of serious political figures. I think it has a lot to do with the #MeToo movement. I think a lot of people are realizing that, hey, if a reality TV star can win the presidency, why can't I, an average Joe, win a political office in my town? GARCIA-NAVARRO: So can you tell me what you're planning this weekend? Are you going to be attending the march in Arkansas? RICHMOND: This weekend, I had originally not planned to attend. I know that the #MeToo march had slowly been absorbed into our reproductive rally for justice, and that had slowly been absorbed into the marches for this weekend. And when I questioned what this march was for - because I felt like I should know if I was going to show up - I got a lot of mixed responses. No one really had a solid idea until the founders of said march contacted me and told me that it was to kind of reinvigorate the public, to incentivize women to take political roles or to become activists themselves. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But I find that a little worrying. It makes me worry that people on the outside aren't going to be able to understand what these marches are for or what our goals are. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And so what did you decide? RICHMOND: I decided that I'm going to show up to the marches and basically kind of see firsthand what's going on. I know from the outside I can make a lot of criticisms. But I think I will get a much better idea about it when I actually attend. GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was Rebecca Richmond of Sherwood, Ark. Our last conversation is with Windi Hornsby of Indianapolis, Ind. Last year, she jumped in a car with some friends and drove to D.C. to join the Women's March. But then... WINDI HORNSBY: I wish that I could say that I was going to a lot of protests and involved deeply with a organization pushing forward agenda items that I thought were important. But honestly, I've just been living my life (laughter). GARCIA-NAVARRO: Hornsby is really busy. She has two daughters, works full time at a med school and is studying to get a master's in public health. HORNSBY: You know, I've been treading water, working, raising kids, trying to keep my house marginally clean. And it just doesn't leave a lot of time for continued tangible action, which is disappointing but realistic. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Her activism might not have lasted. But she got something a couple of months after the march that is permanent, a tattoo of the now feminist rallying cry - nevertheless, she persisted - on her collarbone. HORNSBY: While it reminds me of this specific time in political history and the way that I'm feeling and the way that I hope my daughters never have to feel, you know, it reminds me to push forward kind of in all things. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Did the march change anything for you? HORNSBY: It made me less afraid to share how I feel about things and to make my opinion known, you know, whereas maybe before I wouldn't have been so out and loud and proud about it. I'm not afraid to engage in difficult conversations with people anymore just because I think we have to have those difficult conversations with everyone around us and not be afraid of the reaction or the conflict that might ensue. GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was Windi Hornsby of Indianapolis, Ind. The numbers do show more Democratic women are getting involved in politics. Groups like EMILY'S List, which helps elect pro-choice Democratic women to office says there has been an explosion of interest since Donald Trump's election. And yesterday, there were more women's marches across the country. (SOUNDBITE OF CORDUROI'S "MY DEAR") GARCIA-NAVARRO: Next week on The Call-In, gentrification in our communities - wealthier people move in. Property values and rents rise. Things change and improve but not for everyone. Poor people and people of color can be left behind or leave. Are you a gentrify-er? Or do you worry that you are? Have you been priced out of your neighborhood? Or do you feel it's changed in ways that make you feel unwelcome? Tell us. Call in at 202-216-9217. Be sure to include your full name, where you're from and your phone number, and we may use it on the air. That's 202-216-9217. (SOUNDBITE OF CORDUROI'S "MY DEAR") LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: And now we return to our main story, the government shutdown. Bernie Sanders is the independent senator from Vermont, and he joins us now. Good morning, sir. BERNIE SANDERS: Good morning. GARCIA-NAVARRO: You want Republicans to make a deal on DACA, people who are brought to this country illegally as children. But how much of a deal are you willing to make on legal immigration? SANDERS: Well, I believe that we need comprehensive immigration reform that has to include 800,000 DREAMers, young people who are brought into this country as infants, but it has to go beyond that. But what this shutdown is about is most certainly not just the DREAMers. We are into almost four months of the fiscal year, and Republicans have not yet given us a budget, an annual budget. And this is not the way you run a $4 trillion entity which is called the United States government. Just the other day, the United States Armed Forces, the Pentagon, the secretary of defense said it is impossible for him to do his job. It is responsible. It is wasteful. It is dangerous for the Pentagon if they don't have an... GARCIA-NAVARRO: Sure. We... SANDERS: ...Annual budget. We have got to give it to them. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right. We can run through who is to blame for this, but I'd rather talk about what the solution is. The sticking points are on immigration. The president wants to change the system. Are you willing to scrap, for example, the visa lottery where 50,000 visas are given out to individuals from countries who aren't represented... SANDERS: I think we have to look at it in a comprehensive way. But the point right now is just the other day, just the other night, Mitch McConnell understood that he needed 60 votes to continue the - to pass a continuing resolution. And yet he went forward knowing he did not have the 60 votes. So it is time for the Republicans - let's be clear. They control the House. They control the Senate. They control the White House. They've got to sit down and negotiate and understand they can't get everything they want... GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right. But what are you asking for? What are you asking for, exactly? SANDERS: What we're asking for is three things. We are asking for an annual budget which will provide equally for defense and nondefense spending. We are asking that months and months after these terrible disasters impacted Texas and Florida and Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands - that we deal with disaster relief. And we are asking what the American people want. Recent poll had 87 percent of the American people saying that DREAMers should receive, retain their legal status that Trump took away from them. And most of those folks think there should be a path toward citizenship. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what... SANDERS: That is exactly what we want. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right. So what are you willing to give for that? I mean, this is a negotiation... SANDERS: Oh, my goodness. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I mean, and the president... SANDERS: Of course, this is a negotiation. What we're willing to give is a lot more money - I am talking not only for myself - but a lot more money for border security, frankly, than I think is necessary. Chuck Schumer, you may have seen the other day, said he's willing to talk about a wall. I think a wall is an absurd idea. But Schumer has thrown that on the table, something that Trump has been talking about from day one throughout his entire campaign. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So you're willing... SANDERS: So there will have... GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...To see a wall? SANDERS: I am willing to spend more money on border security than I am comfortable with. But everything has to be dealt with in a comprehensive manner. What I believe that McConnell has got to do right now is to give us three or four days. Let's - leadership sit down and work it out, and I think we could do it. GARCIA-NAVARRO: However, there is a vote that has been called for just after midnight tonight presumably to push the Democrats to some kind of agreement. How do you think that's going to play out? We have about 30 seconds left. SANDERS: I think it will fail because it's continuing to kick the can down the road. And, by the way, let me give you one example of how absurd these ongoing continuing resolutions are. In my state of Vermont, 1 out of 4 people get their primary health care - 1 out of 4 people get their primary health care through community health centers. Twenty-seven million Americans get their care through community health centers. That has not even been re-authorized. We're in the process of seeing the collapse of community health centers all over this country. That has to be dealt with. You got 30,000 vacancies at the Veterans Administration. That has got to be dealt with. Ten thousand people died last year... GARCIA-NAVARRO: Bernie Sanders is the independent senator from Vermont. I'm afraid that's all the time we have. Thank you, sir. SANDERS: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF MIAOU'S "MY PATH TO...") LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: There are increasing concerns over a plan to send a group of Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar beginning this week. A deal was reached between Myanmar and Bangladesh, where more than 600,000 refugees fled. Yet United Nations and humanitarian groups say the move is premature and that the conditions that led to ethnic cleansing still exist. Joining me in the studio is Eric Schwartz, president of Refugees International and a former assistant secretary of state. Welcome to the program, sir. ERIC SCHWARTZ: Pleasure to be here. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So the Rohingya have faced rape, forcible displacement, other atrocities in Myanmar, which is what forced them to flee to Bangladesh in the first place. In the past few days, Rohingya Muslims have continued, though, to pour across the border into Bangladesh. Why are the two countries talking about returning refugees to Myanmar if people are still fleeing violence? SCHWARTZ: Why they're talking about it is because they feel they have to talk about it. The government of Bangladesh wants the bulk of these people to return. They also would be feeling some domestic pressures in this area, as well. And the government of Burma, I think, is feeling some of the pressure from the international community and feels some need to be responsive. But the real story here is this is horrifying, this discussion, to be taking place right now, given the complete absence of measures in place to ensure safety and security upon return. GARCIA-NAVARRO: As I understand it, the Rohingya, according to this agreement, will be moved from the camps in Bangladesh to a camp in Myanmar where there could be security concerns. SCHWARTZ: Oh yeah, there are no safeguards in place. There - been no serious discussion of safeguards for return. You have to realize that we're talking about one of the greatest crimes in recent memory - massive abuses, forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of weeks. GARCIA-NAVARRO: There's problems, obviously, with monitoring the situation. The government won't let - of Myanmar - won't let international monitors in. And, in fact, the top U.N. official responsible for human rights was barred from the country. Is that right? SCHWARTZ: Yanghee Lee, the U.N.'s special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, has been denied entry. A U.N. fact-finding mission has been denied entry. If there was going to be a return - and this is premature - but if there was going to be a return, there would have to be some sort of international monitoring in place. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Myanmar sees most of the Rohingya as illegal migrants who originally came from Bangladesh generations ago. Bangladesh does not want them either. We're seeing a new generation growing up in refugee camps. In many ways, they are stateless people. Bangladesh is not giving newborns, for example, documents to show that they have any status at all in the country. So what is the way forward? SCHWARTZ: The bottom line is they - Rohingya have been in Myanmar for centuries. They have legitimate claims to citizenship there. And the notion that they're stateless or somehow they are kind of an alien people is nonsense. It is nonsense. It is a myth perpetrated by the authorities in Myanmar. So yeah, the government of Bangladesh should have policies that are tolerant and willing to take care of the Rohingya for as long as they need to be taken care of. But the culprit here is the government and the military in Myanmar. The government of Bangladesh needs to do what it is doing, and it needs to do more. And the international community needs to assist the government of Bangladesh. But ultimately, the solution for these people should be a solution in Myanmar. Until that's possible, the international community and the government of Bangladesh have a responsibility to provide these people with the refuge they deserve. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Eric Schwartz is president of Refugees International. Thank you so much. SCHWARTZ: Thank you. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: For the first time, an ice palace is being built block by icy block on the banks of Detroit Lake in Detroit Lakes, Minn. In total, 1,500 ice blocks will be harvested from the lake, each weighing around 900 pounds. It's the first time ice has been harvested there in 47 years. Amy Stearns works for the Detroit Lakes Community and Cultural Center, which is organizing the harvest. She joined us late last week from Detroit Lake, where the palace is being built, to tell us why they're doing this. AMY STEARNS: Oh, yes. We are building a beautiful palace here in Detroit Lakes. And it's a gorgeous day here, actually. It's, like, 28 degrees. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Only someone from Minnesota could say it was beautiful at 20-some degrees, I have to say. (LAUGHTER) STEARNS: Well, it's sunny. The sun is reflecting off the lake. It is just glistening and gorgeous out. We're harvesting the ice because we have a long history here in Detroit Lakes of ice harvesting. It happened over the span of about 70, 80 years from the late 1800s up to 1971, '72 - that winter. And we decided to bring it back for the - there's some old ice harvesters who still live in town who just - you know, to celebrate that history that we have in our community and to make the palace. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Why did ice used to be harvested there? You say that there's some old ice harvesters in town. As someone who lives on the East Coast, fill me in (laughter). STEARNS: Sure. So we have the - the Northern Pacific Railroad comes through Detroit Lakes. And back in the day, they harvested ice to go onto the railroad cars to use for refrigeration to transport food. Ice that was on these railroad cars went to Texas, Washington, all throughout the United States. There used to be a whole group of farmers and construction workers who had more seasonal-type jobs in the area. And then in the wintertime, to keep food on the table, they would harvest ice. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what does the ice palace look like now? Tell us what's in front of you. STEARNS: Well, what I'm looking at right now is only about 4 and a half feet tall at the moment. But it is going to rise on up and be very, very tall. It's going to hit about 40 feet tall. And we're going to have spires on it, flags on it. It's going to be about 30 feet wide. And it is going to be gorgeous. The ice thickness this year has been exceptional because we've had some terribly cold weather, as you might have heard. So, in fact, you have to have 12 inches of ice to harvest ice. And this year, it was actually 25 inches on average. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I would like to talk to someone building that palace. Can you pass us over to someone there just to get a sense of what it takes? STEARNS: Yes. I'll have you talk to Hans Gilsdorf. He's the artist who designed the palace. And he's been up in the air, scraping ice cubes just moments ago. GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) Great. HANS GILSDORF: Hello. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Hi. You must have cold hands (laughter). GILSDORF: No, not really. Well, compared to when we were harvesting at minus 27 with winds at 45 miles an hour, this is comparatively quite balmy. GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter). GILSDORF: And, you know, it's actually quite a workout. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. Tell me a little bit about how you harvest ice. GILSDORF: Well, we hired a company out of Spicer, Minn., to come up, and that's what they do professionally. And none of us have really worked with the ice before, especially myself. So we've been asking a lot of questions - and a lot of the old-timers that have harvested ice - to learn the process and how to work with ice. And we've mimicked a lot of their old ice-scraping tools by - myself - recreating them in my shop to recreate the ice-scraping tools. But now we're bringing in big cranes starting tomorrow - the 100-foot crane to start building this palace just block by block. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, it sounds like a lot of hard work - harder than you might have imagined. GILSDORF: Not really. I mean, it's - yeah, it is. It's physical, but it's a lot of fun. We've got a great group of people out here - and just basically playing on the beach. It's like a big sandbox. GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) Can you pass me back to Amy, please? GILSDORF: Sure. STEARNS: Hey there. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Amy, thanks for coming back. So, obviously, the big day is coming up. Are you excited? STEARNS: We are excited. We have our grand lighting on Thursday, Feb. 8, when the palace will be lit, and it will be beautiful. So we invite everyone to come. It's going to be wonderful. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Amy Stearns of the Detroit Lakes Community and Cultural Center. And we also spoke to Hans Gilsdorf, who is helping to harvest the ice and has designed the palace. Thank you both very much. STEARNS: Thank you, Lulu. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: The government shutdown is already affecting military service members and their families. While active-duty troops still have to work, they're doing so without pay, at least for now. As Alaska Public Media's Zachariah Hughes reports, the days ahead are uncertain for many. ZACHARIAH HUGHES, BYLINE: It's 15 degrees as cars and trucks crunch over the ice and rock salt on the road into Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson in Anchorage. People working at gates are letting people on. People are heading off. Folks are in the visitor's center, and they say things are going to be pretty regular for the next couple days. At this base and all the others, active-duty service members will keep working regardless of what happens in Washington. Whether they'll get back pay is up to Congress. Essential jobs like monitoring this security gate on base will still be carried out. But already, some operations are being dropped. Members of Alaska's National Guard were supposed to be here for weekend drills, but most of those exercises were canceled, affecting about 4,000 people. Likewise, the shutdown will hit civilians who work as contractors for the Defense Department. SHANEE HENDERSON: Kind of like a admin, yeah, a program coordinator. So... HUGHES: Shanee Henderson was shopping at a Target not far from base. She says employees like her were warned before the shutdown that most people would be sent home but not everyone. Henderson says some civilians will stay in jobs that are directly essential to operations. HENDERSON: If the military still comes to work, I come to work. You know, regardless, I get paid. So... HUGHES: For those people who are furloughed, a shutdown is difficult. Families can get pushed into debt, and the uncertainty of no money coming in is stressful. As more military operations have migrated to contract services, it means there's a greater share of labor being done by civilians. On military bases, many schools, counseling services and dining halls are still open. But others, like family support services and child development centers, might be closed by their commanders. Commissaries will have an orderly shutdown to get rid of perishable food items. For active-duty service members, their jobs won't be any easier the next few days. Army Lieutenant Colonel Martyn Crighton says for soldiers in Alaska, their day-to-day work stays the same. MARTYN CRIGHTON: It will mean that there's more work being done by fewer people, for sure. HUGHES: This weekend, military commanders are assessing which of their civilian contractors will still be needed come Monday. Crighton says if the government remains shut down tomorrow, all civilian staff at the base in Anchorage will still be required to show up. Those furloughed will then have just four hours to collect their things and leave. CRIGHTON: We will be making do with a much slimmer civilian workforce while most of them are on furlough. HUGHES: Whenever lawmakers reach a deal, it's likely service members, their families and civilian contractors will all have to play catch-up afterwards, something that will take longer if the government shutdown drags on. For NPR News, I'm Zachariah Hughes in Anchorage. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: In Congress, this has been a weekend of negotiations. But across the country, there have been protests against the Trump administration's policies. There were rallies yesterdays in many cities, and there are protests taking place across the country again today. Among them is a huge rally in Las Vegas held by the organizers of last year's original Women's March. NPR's Leila Fadel is there, and she joins us now. Good morning. LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: Good morning. GARCIA-NAVARRO: What are you seeing? Who's there? FADEL: Well, I'm standing right outside the stadium where they're having this political rally, and thousands of people are filing in next to me. Earlier, they were chanting, Power to the Polls, which is the theme of this rally. And organizers say it's really not about the numbers here, but they're trying to push the idea that let's take all this momentum and put it at the voting polls. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Meaning that they want people to come out and vote and show up at the polls at the midterms in 2018. FADEL: That's right. So all through the stadium, there are voter registration booths to get people registered. They want to register as many as a million people by the time they're done. After this really here in Las Vegas, they're taking it to 10 other swing states. This is being organized by the original founders of the march in 2018. And today is the anniversary of that Women's March in 2017, I mean. Sorry. GARCIA-NAVARRO: What's the energy like there? FADEL: Well, it's palpable, really. It's just starting. It's starting right now. And you can feel women out here - men, as well - getting ready to see a show. The who's who of celebrity activists are here - people like Alicia Garza, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter. Cher is performing. So this is not a march but a show. They're going to talk about politics. They're going to talk about the issues that they feel matter. And they're worried about this president, they say, as a president that they see is somebody who's anti-immigrant, anti-women, in their view, and anti a lot of disenfranchised. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Tell us why the organizers of the Women's March chose Las Vegas. It seems to be an odd choice. Last year, they were in D.C. FADEL: Yeah. They've taken it to the West Coast this year. And the reason they say is 'cause this is a swing state. This is a place that, in 2016, went for Hillary Clinton, voted for the first female Latina senator and elected her. And so they want to highlight this work as an example of what they're trying to achieve. And this year, they are record numbers of women running for office. Organizations like EMILY's List that train women say more than 26,000 have signed up to run. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Have you been able to speak with anyone, and what have they been telling you? FADEL: I have. I have. I spoke to a mother who came with four of her daughters. And they said they couldn't miss a moment to commemorate what happened last year - but also to show that they're still here, that they will go to the polls and that they are a forceful political power to be reckoned with. And I think that's what people wanted to show in both the marches - yesterday and the rally today. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Is there big turnout? FADEL: At this point, I can't tell. The stadium takes about 40,000 people. They're expecting 17,000, which is about half of what the stadium takes. And they're saying it's not about the numbers this rally but about getting that message out. So we'll see how many people turn out. GARCIA-NAVARRO: NPR's Leila Fadel covering the Women's March in Las Vegas. Thank you so much. FADEL: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF YOU.MAY.DIE.IN.THE.DESERT'S "LET'S HAVE SARCASM FOR BREAKFAST") LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Hundreds of thousands of federal workers don't know if they'll be going to work tomorrow because of the shutdown. Among them are half of the staff of the Department of Health and Human Services. That includes people that work at the Centers for Disease Control. The U.S. is in the middle of a deadly flu outbreak. To get a sense of what the government shutdown might mean for public health, we're joined now by Tom Frieden, former director of the CDC under President Obama. Welcome to the program. TOM FRIEDEN: Thanks very much. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Dr. Frieden, you were at the CDC during the last shutdown in 2013. What happened? FRIEDEN: It was really a terrible time. In my nearly eight years as CDC director, it was the only time I felt like I couldn't do my job of protecting Americans. We had to furlough - or temporarily lay off - 8,754 staff. And they were people who had been protecting Americans the day before and couldn't once the shutdown started. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And did that have practical implications? FRIEDEN: Absolutely. It meant that we couldn't continue doing laboratory work. We had to scale back some of our tracking systems for disease. Samples were stacking up in our receiving centers that we would be testing for hospitals, doctors, nurses all over the country. And I think the thing that I remember most vividly is - in the midst of it, I like to do management by walking around and see how people are doing and encourage them and learn from them. I walked through our core laboratory facility. It's usually, you know, bustling with people making up reagents and doing tests. And it was empty. There wasn't anyone there. And, you know, it was the middle of a weekday. And one of the machines was beeping. And I had no idea what it was alarming. I'm not a laboratory technician. I didn't know what the alarm was. I felt I was in some sort of a science-fiction movie... GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right. FRIEDEN: ...With the kind of risk of things happening that we wouldn't be able to recognize and stop. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, let's talk about this year's flu outbreak. It's a very bad one. What could the government shutdown mean for dealing with it? FRIEDEN: It may mean that there's less rapid response to changes in the virus, less tracking of where it's going. Doctors in different areas would be less prepared to provide rapid treatment. And if it continues to hit hard or hits harder, more difficulty in responding and less of an understanding of what's happening. There's also an issue of what happens to the people - the doctors and nurses who are dedicated to working for the American people - who can't come to work. It's not just that they're told, please don't come in. They're told, you cannot check email. You cannot voluntarily do your work. And the decision of who gets sent home and who doesn't is pretty random. If you happen to be on a funding stream that isn't year to year, you keep working. If your job is to take care of rats used in an experiment, you come in because they're considered government property. They can't be harmed. But if your job is to monitor human health, you may be told that you're nonessential. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So... FRIEDEN: And that's not something that's good for someone's morale, obviously. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right. So it's really not clear who is essential and nonessential stuff in that circumstance. FRIEDEN: It's a very legalistic definition, and there's some odd exceptions. There's also a very human aspect of this. There are single mothers and people caring for older parents who need each paycheck. And if the paychecks don't come, they've got real problems. It's really a lose-lose. We lose money. We lose safety. And there isn't anyone who wins from this. GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's former CDC director Tom Frieden. He is currently the president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, an initiative of Vital Strategies. Thank you so much for joining us, sir. FRIEDEN: Thank you. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: In a courtroom in Michigan, there have been weeks of harrowing testimony in the sentencing hearing of Larry Nassar. He's the disgraced former doctor for the U.S. gymnastics team who stands accused of sexually abusing more than 140 women and girls - among them, Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney, Gabby Douglas and Ali Raisman. On Tuesday, a family friend of Nassar's testified that he sexually abused her for six years as a child. Her powerful words have become a national news story on their own. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) KYLE STEPHENS: Perhaps you have figured it out by now. The little girls don't stay little forever. They grow into strong women that return to destroy your world. GARCIA-NAVARRO: The woman who spoke those words, Kyle Stephens, joins us now from Chicago. Welcome to the program. STEPHENS: Thank you. GARCIA-NAVARRO: How did you come up with those words that resonated so powerfully? STEPHENS: I spent a lot of time working on my statement. It was really just whenever I had a feeling or a line pop into my head, I wrote it down for the nearly two years that we were kind of going through that whole emotional process. Federal sentencing - we'd been through police investigations. We had been through testimony and preliminary hearings. So then I just kind of tied them all together. GARCIA-NAVARRO: For those who may not know your story - and I know it's difficult to talk about it. But Nassar's abuse started when you were in kindergarten. And it destroyed your family in many ways. STEPHENS: It did. Yeah. My parents were good friends with Larry Nassar and his wife Stephanie. So when I accused him - those details are super uncomfortable, as you can imagine. So I didn't divulge all of them. And so my parents ended up choosing to believe him. And then kind of conversely, them believing that I was a liar and that I would lie about something so horrific really created a huge rift in my family. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And then years later, when it was apparent that, in fact, it was true what you were saying, it caused your parents some real difficulty. STEPHENS: Yeah. My mom - it's so, so incredibly hard for her now. My mom's just trying to do the best she can by me. And I think my dad did the same thing before he passed. GARCIA-NAVARRO: What was going through your mind as you heard the testimonies of the other women in court? Did you realize that there were so many, many others? STEPHENS: I knew that there were so many others. The prosecutors and the detective had kind of kept me updated on the numbers whenever we spoke. But I think once you get in there and all these numbers - now they have faces, and they have moms, and they have dads. And then they get up behind that podium, and now they have a story. You feel sadness because they're so bravely standing up there and talking about their raw pain. And then you feel so proud of them that they're able to do that - not only to him but in front of the whole world because so many of them have chosen to be publicly identified. And then you feel - I think you also feel a little bit of relief because you're listening to them detail their pain. And as much as you don't want them to be going through it, now you're not the only one. And you know you're not crazy. Now all those feelings and those emotions aren't really a part of your personality, like you believed. But they're a symptom of what Larry Nassar did to you. GARCIA-NAVARRO: It's been clear throughout this trial that seeing women speaking out has encouraged others to do so. You know, originally, I think 80 women were going to speak at the trial. And now it's 120. Some said they decided to speak after hearing testimony like yours. STEPHENS: Yeah. One of the most incredible things is to see the prosecutor walk up and say, our next victim is going to be anonymous. Please turn off the cameras. And then the person gets up in the courtroom and says, you know, I've changed my mind. I'm going to speak now. That is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Administrators at Michigan State are currently facing a lot of scrutiny after reports surfaced that they were told about Larry Nassar's behavior, and they didn't act. USA gymnastics, as well, has been called out in court. Do these institutions need to face repercussions in your view for the failure to protect young girls in their care? STEPHENS: Absolutely. I mean, we need to translate all of this into processes and policies that support reporting and prevent this from happening. And the fact that Michigan State and USA Gymnastics are on the first step where they don't want to admit that they have a problem or that they're a part of the problem - they're just holding all these women back from healing. They are a roadblock on our path to change. GARCIA-NAVARRO: What do you hope comes from this trial? STEPHENS: Obviously, I want Larry Nassar to be put behind bars. And that's going to happen. GARCIA-NAVARRO: He's already been convicted for child pornography. STEPHENS: Yes. But as horrific as this has been for all of the victims, it's a moment of light. It's a moment of clarity for us as a society to say, wake up. We can't let this happen again. GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's Kyle Stephens, who testified at the trial of Larry Nassar. Thank you very much for speaking with us today. STEPHENS: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF RRAREBEAR'S "MOON") LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: The Nigerian militant group Boko Haram came to the world's attention four years ago when fighters abducted 276 girls from a boarding school in the town of Chibok. Since then, the group has kidnapped thousands. One of those who was abducted was Patience Ibrahim. She was just 19 years old and already a widow. Her story is told in a new book, "A Gift From Darkness." It begins in Maiduguri in northern Nigeria, where German journalist Andrea Hoffmann first met Ibrahim. And a warning to listeners - the conversation you are about to hear contains gruesome details not suitable for younger listeners. Hoffmann began by describing the first camp Patience was taken to. ANDREA HOFFMANN: These camps are really beyond what we can picture. The first camp she went to was not a set-up camp. It was out in an open space, more or less, a humid area with some trees, a lot of grass and a lot of mosquitoes. But there was no houses or anything. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So there's sexual slavery in these camps, forcible conversions. And actually, she details cannibalism. There's this macabre soup that is served every night in the first camp. HOFFMANN: Yes. That really struck me. And she was very specific about that. What she says is that Boko Haram slaughters the men that they think have been unfaithful to the group. And then afterwards, she says, they are prepared. And they are served as food. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And throughout all this, Patience is pregnant with her husband's child, who is Christian, as she is. But she can't show it. HOFFMANN: Yes. She and other women, as well, testified the same thing. They saw that when Boko Haram captures a Christian, and they know this woman is pregnant, what they do is they slit off the belly and take out the unborn child and kill the mother and the child. They just tear it out, saying that they do not want any Christian offspring. And since this woman was a Christian but - and furthermore, her husband was a Christian, which is more important to them, obviously - that the child would be Christian and has no right to live. So she saw that. And she knew what was going to happen if they knew that she was pregnant before she came to the camp. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'd like to know - these stories are obviously so difficult and painful. But how do you verify something like this? How do you, as a journalist, try and make sure that what she's saying happened? Because trauma can obviously manifest itself in all sorts of different ways. HOFFMANN: Yeah. It was very hard to verify some of the things. For example, I tried to verify the location of the camp. And that was an easy thing to do because, you know, I could trace it with some villages. And they had a church register. And so other women said, oh, yes. That's true. You know, the camp was in that area. And then I talked a lot to other women and asked them about what they witnessed and the practices. And many of them told these horrible things about pregnant women that were slit open. And they also told me that they have witnessed horrible rituals with blood, you know, cutting off heads, slitting open the throats and drinking the blood - things like that. What I could not have in another testimony was her claiming that they put the meat of other soldiers that they had killed inside the soup. So I wrote it like that in the book. You know, she was really insisting on this fact. But I know she is traumatized. So I just have to put it as her testimony, which I think is important to transport. But I cannot verify it 100 percent. GARCIA-NAVARRO: What were you hoping to draw attention to by writing this story? What are you hoping the world should know about what's happening in Nigeria? HOFFMANN: What really struck me was the fact that this almost happened at the same time that ISIS took that big territory in Syria and Iraq. And the whole world was watching. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And when they had the kidnapping of the Yazidis, the Yazidi minority. HOFFMANN: Yes. And everybody was focused on Iraq and Syria. And at the same time, more or less, the same thing happened in Africa. And it was just a footnote. OK. We noticed that the Chibok girls were kidnapped, but that was about it. We never gave it a great deal of attention. And it's just as important for these people that have to suffer it. And for me, the most important thing is really getting the testimony. If it's written down, it's written down, you know? It's fixed. It won't go away, you know? GARCIA-NAVARRO: It can't be forgotten. HOFFMANN: You know, it's part of bringing justice to these women. GARCIA-NAVARRO: How is Patience doing now? When was the last time you spoke with her? HOFFMANN: I sometimes speak to her on the phone whenever I can get in touch with someone that can find her and can translate and so on. And she's doing well. She was thinking about going to the south. But now she has decided to stay in Maiduguri because she has met another man. And she is actually engaged. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And she and her daughter, who was born at the end of the book - how old is she now? HOFFMANN: Yeah. She's almost 2 years now. And she's doing very well. So Patience has really succeeded and done a great job with this little girl. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Andrea Hoffmann is the author of the book "A Gift From Darkness." Thank you so much. HOFFMANN: Thank you. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Dry, arid landscapes, adobe houses, cacti and brush. The American Southwest is home to musicians Joey Burns and John Convertino. And their band Calexico has spent more than two decades exploring it. Their latest record, "The Thread That Keeps Us," is a tender view of a rough terrain. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "END OF THE WORLD WITH YOU") JOEY BURNS: (Singing) Love in the age of the extremes. There's nothing better that I'd rather do than to scatter all the myths and walk to the start of the end of the world with you. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Guitarist and vocalist of Calexico Joey Burns joins us from KUAZ in Tucson, Ariz., to discuss the band's ninth studio album. Joey, congratulations. Nine studio albums. No small thing. BURNS: Thank you so much, Lulu. It feels good. It feels good being here. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. So you and your bandmate have spent - I think it's 20 years in Tucson. Is that right? BURNS: Yeah, that's right. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Wow. How has that shaped your sound? BURNS: Well, I'd say it's kind of given a lot of inspiration. It's given us the opportunity to play in front of a really incredible and diverse community here in southern Arizona. There's a lot of love here. GARCIA-NAVARRO: But a lot of the songs on the album take place in sort of harsh settings. I want to play the opening of the song "Voices In The Field." (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "VOICES IN THE FIELD") BURNS: (Singing) Running through fields of flowers and smoke, leaving behind all that we've built. The garden now in ashes and the roof is caving in. A broken hourglass, blood running thin. That song "Voices In The Field" is inspired by people who are uprooted and have to leave their homes, basically, have to run for their lives. I was thinking about Syrian refugees. I was thinking about immigrants coming from Central America, thinking about refugees from Africa and just wondering what it would be like to be in their shoes. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And I guess southern Arizona has a big connection with the border and, obviously, with immigration. BURNS: Most certainly, yeah. It's a beautiful region here. And the borderlands between United States and Mexico - it's a great place. And the reason why I enjoy living here and what attracted me to moving here from California was the fact that you've got a lot of different cultures coming together. GARCIA-NAVARRO: What do you do when you want to process something that you've seen in the news or around you and put it into music? BURNS: I usually kind of pick up a guitar or sit behind a piano. And then I take my sketches and ideas to John Convertino, who sits behind the drums... GARCIA-NAVARRO: You do sketches? You draw things? BURNS: Yeah. I have twin daughters who are 6 years old, Genevieve and Twyla. And they love whenever I, you know, make drawings or sketches. And, sometimes, I'll write them on a postcard and send them back home for when I'm touring far away. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So you don't forget. I'm curious. Have they heard the album, and what's their favorite song? BURNS: Twyla and Genevieve both really helped out with the writing of one of the songs called "Girl In The Forest." (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GIRL IN THE FOREST") BURNS: (Singing) Well, the girl in the forest reached out to ease my worried mind. I was coming up with ideas that were influenced from what was happening at Standing Rock and talking about protests and machines and diggers and cranes. And I think it kind of got heavy for them. And at some point, they just kind of turned to me and said, why can't the song just be about this girl who communicates with the animals and all things in the forest? And I thought, that is just simply beautiful. (SOUNDBITE OF CALEXICO SONG, "GIRL IN THE FOREST") GARCIA-NAVARRO: And "Flores Y Tamales" - what's that about? I'm intrigued, being a Spanish speaker. BURNS: Well, it's a cumbia. And we've been enjoying cumbias for many, many, many years thanks to our good friends at the Little Poca Cosa restaurant here in Tucson. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Shout out. BURNS: Yeah, they were the first ones to turn me on to cumbias. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FLORES Y TAMALES") JAIRO ZAVALA: (Singing in Spanish). BURNS: It features our guitar player, Jairo Zavala, who is from Madrid. And Jairo said, you know, I have some lyrics. Maybe I could sing over this. And he just - he nailed it. It's incredible. And it's a beautiful song that just talks about coming together despite being separated either by border or by distance or by ideas. And in this case, it's "Flores Y Tamales." GARCIA-NAVARRO: The album's called "The Thread That Keeps Us." Clearly, that's a theme. BURNS: Well, I think in these days, I think we're often talking about what divides us. Or at least it's being talked about a lot in the news. So I thought, what are those things that bind us or that connect us? Where can we agree? And so for me, I like the fact that the title is a question because I think, ultimately, when you read it, you go, OK, well, what is it, you know? Is it love? Is it a cup of coffee? Is it music itself? GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was guitarist and vocalist Joey Burns of the band Calexico. He joins us from KUAZ in Tucson, Ariz. Thanks so much. BURNS: Thank you for having me, Lulu. I love the show. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: And now for something I saw this week that brought me a lot of joy because even reporters get starstruck. It's true. Ana Belaval is a reporter with WGN TV in Chicago. And she is, to put it mildly, a huge fan of Ricky Martin. Listen. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) ANA BELAVAL: So - no. But seriously, he called me mama, baby. Can we make this happen? GARCIA-NAVARRO: She was gushing after a live interview with the Puerto Rican actor and singer. And what she didn't know but everyone else could see was Ricky Martin was actually listening. What followed was TV gold. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I'll call 911, Ricky. Don't worry. (LAUGHTER) BELAVAL: Oh, he's still there? RICKY MARTIN: Don't. I love what I'm hearing. I love it. I love it. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Ana Belaval is on the line. Welcome to the program. BELAVAL: Thank you. Such an honor to join you, Lulu. Good morning. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Good morning. You are, I take it, a huge Ricky Martin fan. I'm a huge Ricky Martin fan. You sounded very excited there. BELAVAL: Oh, I clearly was. And if I was going to go viral, it is awesome to go viral with him. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I think you might be as famous as Ricky Martin right now after that interview (laughter). BELAVAL: Oh, goodness. To be on the same sentence with him is just amazing. I've been following him since Menudo. My mom took me to a concert. I remember (speaking Spanish) in Puerto Rico. And my friend Celeste and I made our mothers not sing because we needed to sing and take it all in. So I've been a huge fan for a long time. I remember people were joyful. And I was like, oh, my goodness. He's one of mine. (LAUGHTER) GARCIA-NAVARRO: And Menudo, for people who might not remember - that was the boy band that he was a part of back in the '80s. BELAVAL: I can't believe we have to explain that, Lulu. I really can't. We're that old. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I know. But there's some people out there who may not know. So you actually lobbied your colleague Dean Richards to let you ask a question during the actual interview. Why were you wanting to be a part of this interview, other than the fact that you are such a fan? BELAVAL: I have had so many missed opportunities to meet him. And honestly, after Hurricane Maria, when the local government was running around like headless chickens, these performers just went to work - right? - put boots on the ground. And he was - I will never forget. No one could get to Aguadilla. And he got a FedEx plane to Aguadilla, which is on the west coast of the island, to go help people who really needed it. And so that just elevated him in my eyes. GARCIA-NAVARRO: You did attribute your enthusiasm to being a minority and a native Puerto Rican when you were explaining why you were so excited to your colleagues. BELAVAL: This is the other thing. I've traveled. I've been blessed to travel for work. And wherever I go, and I say Puerto Rico, they say Ricky Martin. And honestly, you know, as a member of a minority, we don't have a lot of positive images in the general market, in life in general because they're not exposed. It's just outstanding. And I needed to thank him. I guess I've reached that age that I act like my mother. And I needed to, on behalf of the island of Puerto Rico, thank him and also ask him if he was going to continue those missions because we do need all that help. And we need the focus on our island and all the other islands that were affected by Hurricane Maria. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So I have to ask you - what happened later? Did Ricky reach out? What's been the response generally to your interaction? BELAVAL: Well, you know, there's a lady who gave me a great line that, in Puerto Rico, we're all six degrees of Lin-Manuel Miranda because we're all related or know somebody somehow that knows Lin. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Lin-Manuel Miranda, of course, the creator of "Hamilton" on Broadway. BELAVAL: Oh, yes. So that's what we've been playing. Like, my sister-in-law knows a niece of a good friend of his. And it's more been the viral phenomenon than honestly him reaching out to me. But I have a friend who said we should start, like, a crowdfunding thing where we raise funds for Puerto Rico recovery, and Ricky and I finally hug. So... GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) I feel like you get something out of that. BELAVAL: Yes, for the island, absolutely - and, you know, I would love to travel with him to Puerto Rico on one of his missions and help out and cover it for our station and keep the ball rolling where it comes to our recovery. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, congratulations on meeting your celebrity crush. BELAVAL: (Laughter) Well, not yet, Lulu - I don't know what I'm going to do if I ever meet him in person. They're going to have to bring the rescue team. No. I'll be dignified. I've been doing this for long enough that I know how to behave in an interview. I just swore that I - he couldn't see me. And my co-workers and I were just chatting. And that's the kind of show we have. GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter) Ana Belaval is a reporter with WGN TV in Chicago. Thank you so much. BELAVAL: Thank you. GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Speaking Spanish). BELAVAL: (Speaking Spanish). (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CLARIDAD") MENUDO: (Singing in Spanish). LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Publicly at least, there seems to be little sign of progress to end the government shutdown so far. Someone who spent time behind closed doors during these tense negotiations is Brian McGuire. He was chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and now works as a lobbyist. He joins us here in the studio to provide some insight into how this may go. Good morning. BRIAN MCGUIRE: Thanks for having me. GARCIA-NAVARRO: You worked for Senator McConnell during the last shutdown. Am I right? MCGUIRE: Correct. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Good times (laughter). All right. He wasn't the majority leader then. But from your experience, give us a sense of what is happening behind closed doors right now. Take us into the room. MCGUIRE: Yeah. Nobody enjoys these episodes. I think at the moment, there's probably a lot of sitting around and waiting. These negotiations are not happening in a kind of frenetic environment. They're happening, you know, among staff with a lot of just kind of patient people waiting for something to break. But I think in the case of the Republican, you know, leadership in the Senate, there's a certain amount of exacerbation here because there's really no point, from their standpoint, as to why Democrats have decided to do this. There's no deadline on DACA that needs to be resolved. And... GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right... MCGUIRE: ...Everything in the bill is something the Democrats have said that they support. So in addition to the kind of inconveniences that Dr. Frieden just enumerated, I think people are just kind of scratching their heads as to why this is happening. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I think, obviously, the Democrats have a very different opinion, which we have heard elsewhere in the show. But I'd like to talk a little bit about the president. And how important is it to have an active, engaged president who can make a deal on this kind of situation? McConnell himself has complained that he doesn't know what kind of immigration deal President Trump would sign. How much is the president helping or hurting this process? MCGUIRE: The president, I think, is, you know, playing his part here. He convened large groups at the White House repeatedly. The White House staff is clearly quite engaged. They're actively, you know, making their case on the Hill. I really think the key players here are the Senate Democrat leadership, particularly Chuck Schumer, who I do think is the architect of this shutdown and is doing it for some... GARCIA-NAVARRO: But the... MCGUIRE: ...Reason that is hard for some to understand. I mean... GARCIA-NAVARRO: But McConnell himself has complained that he doesn't know what President Trump wants. I mean, he has sort of signaled different things at different times. He's gone back and forth. And from my understanding, a president's engagement in this is vital to bring different sides together. Ultimately, it's about negotiation. Is it not? MCGUIRE: Presidential leadership is important, but I think in this case, what we're talking about is resolving an issue for which there is no imminent deadline, at least not, you know, in the next 24, 48 hours. And so this is a negotiation in terms of what the president is willing and not willing to do. That has to do with a, you know, DACA resolution that does not have to be caught up in this government shutdown. The shutdown is, in my view, easy to kind of decouple from DACA. The Democrats have decided to put them together and kind of force this moment in... GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, they say they want to ensure that it actually gets dealt with. Senator... MCGUIRE: Yeah. But... GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...McConnell, according to the Reuters news agency, said through a spokesperson that Republican senators are opposed to changing the rules on voting. And that, I think, is in response to the nuclear option, which President Trump tweeted about this morning, which means a vote can pass by a simple majority. Why do you think they're opposing this? And we have about 30 seconds. MCGUIRE: Sure. I think Republicans are conscious of the fact that the filibuster is something that is quite valuable to the minority when the minority is, you know, looking to assert its will. And the Democrats are showing right now by filibustering the spending bill that they, you know, enjoy that right right now that the Senate provides. You know, this is something that both parties have benefited from at different points. But again, it's not clear how Democrats are benefiting from - at this point, in filibustering this spending bill on an issue that Republicans, including the president, all seem willing to come up with a compromise on. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Brian McGuire, former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, thank you so much for coming in. MCGUIRE: Thanks for having me. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Chances are you have seen an ad for a test to find out about your ancestry. Maybe you got a kit for Christmas, and now you're waiting for your results. So what do you need to know when you open these results? Health editor Gisele Grayson and her mother help us explain. GISELE GRAYSON, BYLINE: History professors never really retire. CARMEN GRAYSON: Are you clicking view your reports, Gisele? G. GRAYSON: All right. All right. View my report. I'm with Carmen Grayson, my mother, who taught at Hampton University for 25 years. C. GRAYSON: World history, military history, American history, Greece and Rome history (laughter). Do you want me to stop? G. GRAYSON: We're opening genetic test results from a company called 23andMe. Mom recently became interested in what our genes could tell us about her family's migrations to Washington from Canada, from France and from Italy. We got some good information, and a puzzle. Last fall, we used a different company, Helix, that works with National Geographic. Mom's results? C. GRAYSON: Thirty-one percent from Italy and Southern Europe. G. GRAYSON: Did you expect that? C. GRAYSON: Definitely. Two grandparents, both born in Italy... G. GRAYSON: And lived there as far as you can trace back. They gave birth to my mom's mom, Gisella D'Apollonia. But my Helix results had no Italian and Southern European category. Was I switched at birth? C. GRAYSON: You were born with a lot - a lot - of black, curly hair. G. GRAYSON: So she was sure it was me in the hospital nursery. And we do kind of look alike. So we decided to get this second opinion from 23andMe. C. GRAYSON: My top category is Italian, 11 percent. Do you have any Italian? G. GRAYSON: I have 1.6 percent Italian. C. GRAYSON: There you go. G. GRAYSON: (Laughter). All right. C. GRAYSON: My daughter. G. GRAYSON: But, really, how could I have an Italian grandmother and little to no Italian in my results? We put the question to geneticist Aravinda Chakravarti at Johns Hopkins. ARAVINDA CHAKRAVARTI: That's surprising, but it may still be within the limits of error that these methods have. G. GRAYSON: The science is good, he says, but the ways the companies analyze genes leave room for interpretation. CHAKRAVARTI: They would be most accurate at the level of continental origins, and as you go to higher and higher resolution, they would become less and less accurate. G. GRAYSON: As in my case. The results got me to Europe, just not Italy. A few things are at play in this ancestry analysis. First is our actual genetic material. The rule is you get 50 percent of your DNA from each parent. But Elissa Levin, with the company Helix, says a process called recombination means each egg and each sperm carries a different mix of your parents' genes. ELISSA LEVIN: When we talk about the 50 percent that gets inherited from Mom, there is a chance that you have a recombination that just gave you more of the Northwest European part rather than the Italian part of of your mom's ancestry DNA. G. GRAYSON: Then she says that companies compare your DNA to samples they have from people around the world who have lived in a certain area for generations. LEVIN: What are the specific markers? What are the specific segments of DNA that we're looking at that enable us to identify, you know, those people are from this part of Northern Europe, or Southern Europe or Southeast Asia? G. GRAYSON: And as the companies get more samples, they'll get more accurate. Also humans have migrated and mingled for tens of thousands of years, and most people have a DNA mix. So - says Robin Smith, with 23andMe - a computer algorithm does some sophisticated guesswork. ROBIN SMITH: Let's say a piece of your DNA looks most like British and Irish, but it also looks a little bit like French, German. Well, based on some statistical measures, you know, we would decide whether to call that as British, Irish or French, German. Or maybe we'd go up one level and we call it North Western European. G. GRAYSON: Could that explain my case? SMITH: It was a little surprising to me, yeah. But, you know, in looking at, you know, the fact that you had some Southern European and the fact that you had some French, German, the picture became a little bit clearer to me. G. GRAYSON: So for now my Italian grandmother doesn't show up in these tests. No matter, all the researchers say, let the results add to your life story. The DNA is just a piece of what makes you you. Gisele Grayson, NPR News. MARTIN: And just a note - the company 23andMe mentioned in this story is an NPR funder. DAVID GREENE, HOST: All right. So genetic tests can help you explore your heritage, but can your DNA also tell you what diet is best for you? NPR's Allison Aubrey asked that question. ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: If you're curious about personalized nutrition advice, meet Kimberly Desjardine. She was, too. So a few months ago, she paid a couple hundred dollars for a personalized nutrition service called Habit. Now, to get the process started, she used an at-home test kit. She swabbed the inside of her cheek to get a DNA sample, and she pricked her finger to get blood samples. She then mailed them to a lab for evaluation, and here's what she learned. KIMBERLY DESJARDINE: I think the aha's that came out of the test were that I was a protein seeker. It just basically said that I need more protein than the average person. AUBREY: The recommendation was partially based on the results of her blood test. It showed her response to starch and sugar was not good. So high-protein foods, she was told, would be better. The test also showed that she had a variant of a gene that makes her sensitive to caffeine. DESJARDINE: Information like that makes me think twice about having that cup of tea in the afternoon. You know, 'cause I now know that if that's going to impact me, affect my sleep, et cetera... AUBREY: Now, hold on here a second. What I need to point out is that these are two different kinds of tests. The caffeine test is based on her DNA, but the test to measure her response to starch and sugars is a blood glucose test. It's not based on her genetics. So this left me wondering, with an increasing number of personalized nutrition services on the market, how much can your genes really tell you? I put the question to Dariush Mozaffarian. He's the dean of the nutrition school at Tufts University. DARIUSH MOZAFFARIAN: DNA is of course important, but it plays a pretty minor role. AUBREY: He says so far genes only explain about 5 to 10 percent of the risk linked to diet-related conditions like type-2 diabetes and obesity. MOZAFFARIAN: For basic healthy living, it's not about your genes. It's about your behavior. AUBREY: This could change. Future advances could give new insight. But, he says, for now a personalized diet comes down to factors other than your genes. MOZAFFARIAN: Such as your age, how much extra weight you're carrying, how you respond to eating starch or sugar. Really, it's these other things that are much more important. AUBREY: Think about this example. Mozaffarian says cutting back on snack foods with lots of simple starch and sugar is good advice for everyone, but he says there are big differences in how well people respond. So when Kimberly Desjardine's glucose test showed she was not handling starch and sugar well, that was very useful information to her even though it didn't come from her DNA. So what's the potential value of these services? MOZAFFARIAN: They get people to stop and step back and think about being healthy and eating a healthy diet. AUBREY: Desjardine says this has been true for her. Her results nudged her to change her habits. Allison Aubrey, NPR News. DAVID GREENE, HOST: All right. It seemed like an encouraging moment in one of the world's worst refugee crises. As we've been reporting for months, the Rohingya, a Muslim minority, were driven out of their home country Myanmar. The U.N. and the U.S. government called this ethnic cleansing. The Rohingya have been packed into crowded refugee camps across the border in Bangladesh. Now, tomorrow, Bangladesh was planning to begin sending Rohingya back home as part of a deal to resolve the crisis. But this has now been postponed. And human rights groups and many refugees themselves are questioning whether it's safe for them to return anyway. NPR's Jason Beaubien is in one of the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. And he's on the line. Hi, Jason. JASON BEAUBIEN, BYLINE: Hey. How you doing? GREENE: I'm OK. I can hear some of the sound around you. Describe just exactly where you are. BEAUBIEN: So yeah. I'm in what now has become the largest refugee camp in the world. It's just across the border from Myanmar. I can actually see Myanmar from where I am here in this camp. And it just extends from miles and miles - these bamboo huts that people have erected with little plastic coverings over the top of them. And this is where the Rohingya are now - sort of hold up after being driven out of Myanmar primarily since August. Most of them came since August. Some of them came from before that. GREENE: And so there was this deal that had looked like was going to send some of them finally back home. What happened here? BEAUBIEN: Well, many people thought that this deal was overly optimistic to begin with. And they're saying now that there are problems with the logistics of this and just simply they weren't ready to go. There were also some other problems. Like the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees wasn't involved in what was going to be the process of moving people back. UNHCR's normally the agency that sort of helps accompany people going back and deal with those types of transitions. This was something that was banged out between the Bangladesh government and the Myanmar government. And right now, they're just saying that they don't have the logistics in place. But in addition to that, many people - as a matter of fact, every refugee that I have asked has said that they won't go back under the conditions - the way this deal was was set up. GREENE: I mean, I know so many were mistreated by the military. Is that the reason? I mean, they just feel like as hard as life might be in these camps, it might be worse if they return home. BEAUBIEN: Absolutely. I mean, they worry that they will be killed. Basically, just a few months ago, they fled from what they say is the Myanmar military and pro-government supporters. And they say that there's nothing that's really changed that means that they would have safety if they go back. So that is the main thing. They just are fearing for their own safety if they returned at this point in time. They also have been basically stateless inside Myanmar. They're not considered citizens. They're viewed as essentially illegal immigrants despite the fact that they've been there for generations. And they say that that also really needs to change. They need to be treated as citizens and with dignity. GREENE: As you look across this camp, Jason, I mean, what are the conditions? And how long would the Rohingya be able to live in camps like this if they can't go home? BEAUBIEN: The conditions have improved dramatically from when people first arrived. You know, the World Food Program is now distributing food. They've set up, you know, toilets and outhouses. So things have improved a lot. But they're still incredibly simple shelters. They are stuck on hillsides that are just sand essentially. And there's great concern that when the monsoons come, this whole place is just going to turn into a mud pit. You know, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people crowded in here. So the conditions are not great, but people say at least here they feel safe. GREENE: NPR's Jason Beaubien is in a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh just across the border from Myanmar. Jason, thanks. BEAUBIEN: You're welcome. (SOUNDBITE OF OWSEY'S "I FELT HELPLESS LOOKING AT YOU THEN") DAVID GREENE, HOST: So the FBI is this nation's top law enforcement agency. But it has come under attack from President Trump and his allies. And that has current and former FBI officials worrying about the toll this might take on the bureau's ability to do its job. Here's more from NPR's Ryan Lucas. RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: For some two months now, the FBI has found itself the target of a consistent campaign. Headlines in the conservative press and pundits on cable news shows have repeatedly raised questions about its integrity. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "JUSTICE WITH JUDGE JEANINE") JEANINE PIRRO: There is a cleansing needed in our FBI and Department of Justice. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) NEWT GINGRICH: I think it's pretty appalling, the level of corruption we're beginning to see in the FBI. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) TOM FITTON: There was no distinction between the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Department of Justice and the FBI. LUCAS: That's Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the conservative group Judicial Watch's president Tom Fitton. Democrats say the allegations are an attempt to distract from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. But for many current and former FBI officials, the immediate political battles are almost secondary to a bigger worry - will the allegations sap Americans' faith in the FBI? CHRIS SWECKER: We're very concerned about the credibility of the FBI because we're having to defend it on a daily basis. And we've never had to do that before. LUCAS: That's Chris Swecker. He spent 24 years at the FBI before retiring as an acting assistant director. He says there's been controversy in the past. SWECKER: But never accusations that the FBI had become a political tool for one party or another. LUCAS: It's difficult to gauge whether the efforts to discredit the FBI have gained traction with average Americans. Anecdotally at least, former agents say they are having to answer uncomfortable questions from family, friends and neighbors who want to know this - what's going on with the FBI? STEPHANIE DOUGLAS: We all get asked that. Even FBI agents ask that to each other. What's going on with the bureau? What do you know? Who have you talked to? What have you heard? LUCAS: That's Stephanie Douglas, a former FBI executive assistant director for the National Security Branch. She and other former officials say they worry the political allegations could hamper the work of agents out on the streets, the ones who are working cases on everything from bank robberies and terrorism to white-collar crimes or kidnappings. Again, Douglas. DOUGLAS: There may be some temporary impact. When people feel like an organization like the FBI becomes political, it can impact the trust that certain people give to the organization. LUCAS: It isn't just about politics, though. Douglas worries about agents being able to elicit the help of witnesses. DOUGLAS: Will that impact the public's ability to cooperate with an investigation? LUCAS: The potential is a concern. FBI sources tell me that agents have raised the issue of the public's perception of the bureau at office meetings. Critics point to anti-Trump text messages sent by a senior FBI agent involved in the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Russia probe. They say that supports their claims that the FBI is tainted by political bias. Officials don't defend those texts. But they stress that some 35,000 people work at the FBI. Political opinions span the spectrum. Again, Swecker. SWECKER: Let's face it, we all have political opinions. Agents vote. That's a political act in and of itself. But if you can't leave that at your house when you go to work as an FBI agent, then you need to be in another line of business. And people recognize that. LUCAS: There's one aspect of the current criticism that sets it apart from past periods of turmoil. The president himself has repeatedly gone after the FBI. That, former FBI officials say, is shortsighted. Here's Konrad Motyka. He's a retired FBI special agent who also served as the head of the FBI Agents Association. KONRAD MOTYKA: I think it's important for all politicians to remember that, you know, the FBI's a core institution of the United States government. And making its mission more difficult or harming its overall credibility is not in the best interest of the country. LUCAS: At the same time, the Russia investigation shows no sign of coming to a close. That may mean the FBI will stay in the political crosshairs, too. Ryan Lucas, NPR News, Washington. (SOUNDBITE OF THE POLISH AMBASSADOR'S "DARK BETWEEN STARS") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: The Sundance Film Festival has in some ways become a forum for more than film. This year, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was there promoting a documentary that she's appearing in. But when she spoke to NPR's Nina Totenberg on a stage at Sundance, the conversation broadened. NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: The occasion for Ginsburg being here is the premiere of a CNN documentary film about her life and her role as a young lawyer who became the architect of the legal fight for women's rights. The phrase sexual harassment was unknown in those days, so I asked Ginsburg if she had ever experienced inappropriate sexual conduct. Oh, yes, she answered, lots of times. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) RUTH BADER GINSBURG: The attitude to sexual harassment was simply get past it. Boys will be boys. TOTENBERG: As a personal example, she cited her experience with a chemistry professor when she was an undergraduate student at Cornell and was worried about what she called her abilities as a chemistry student. And her professor offered to give her a practice exam. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) GINSBURG: So he gave me a practice exam. The next day on the test, the test is the practice exam, and I knew exactly what he wanted in return. TOTENBERG: What did you do about the professor? Did you just stay clear of him? What did you do? GINSBURG: I went to his office, and I said, how dare you? How dare you do this? (APPLAUSE) GINSBURG: And that was the end of that. (LAUGHTER) TOTENBERG: I assume you did quite well on that exam. (LAUGHTER) GINSBURG: And I deliberately made two mistakes. (LAUGHTER) TOTENBERG: I ask Ginsburg what her thoughts are about the #MeToo movement. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) GINSBURG: Well, I think it's about time. And... (APPLAUSE) GINSBURG: ...For so long, women were silent, thinking there was nothing you could do about it. But now, the law is on the side of women or men who encounter harassment. TOTENBERG: And does she worry about a backlash? (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) GINSBURG: When I see women appearing every place in numbers, I'm less worried about backlash than I might have been 20 years ago. TOTENBERG: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Sundance Film Festival. Nina Totenberg, NPR News. (SOUNDBITE OF JEFRE CANTU-LEDESMA'S "THE STREETS ARE FILLED WITH RAIN") DAVID GREENE, HOST: And this is day three of a government shutdown. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Yeah. Lawmakers worked all weekend to try to reach an agreement. Last night, the Senate leadership agreed to vote on a resolution that's going to happen today around noon Eastern. If it passes, the government will reopen for three weeks. But the debate over immigration policy, the reason the government shut down in the first place, has yet to be resolved. GREENE: And let's see where this might be going with NPR's Scott Detrow, who's here. Hey, Scott. SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Morning, David. GREENE: OK, so we have a vote today at noon that if it goes in one direction, it could reopen the government at least until February 8. Are Democrats signaling that they are willing to support this? DETROW: It seems like just enough Democrats might support this. So just to recap, Mitch McConnell went on the Senate floor last night and promised the Senate will address immigration next. That follows talks all weekend by a large group of moderate senators from both parties looking for a way out. So many of the Democrats who had been pushing for this confrontation all along say this is just status quo. There's nothing new here. There's no difference between a three-week funding bill and a four-week funding bill. And promises to deal with immigration is what McConnell and President Trump have promised all along and kept punting, so there's frustration from many Democrats. But a lot of moderate Democrats, Democrats up for reelection next year do not want a protracted shutdown and seem to be looking for an off ramp all weekend. GREENE: Well, I mean, you mentioned President Trump - a lot of Democrats complaining and saying that they can't trust him because he can change his mind unexpectedly. Where has the president been in all of this so far? DETROW: Curiously absent ever since the shutdown began. President Trump stayed in the White House all weekend, no public appearances, not even that many tweets, just some pictures the White House sent out of him in the Oval Office making calls, wearing a make America great again hat. And from what we can tell, he has not really been too involved in the negotiations, which is interesting since one dynamic that brought us here is the fact that President Trump keeps seeming to agree to one thing in meetings with Democrats and then backtracking right afterwards. Over the weekend, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, said negotiating with Trump is like negotiating with Jell-O. GREENE: One of those people in Washington who always come with a turn of phrase to capture attention is Chuck Schumer. DETROW: I haven't negotiated with Jell-O, so I don't know. GREENE: (Laughter) The president did tweet though something about maybe Republicans using a nuclear option. What would that be, Scott? DETROW: Yeah, that would be changing the Senate rules so that you only need the bare majority of 51 votes to do anything. That's something that most senators from both parties don't want to do because they know that a couple of elections later, they could be the ones in the minority. GREENE: All right, so both sides are accusing the other of playing politics. Some are calling this the Schumer shutdown, some are calling this the Trump shutdown. Last night, Senator Flake of Arizona said, let's end all the blame game rhetoric. But, I mean, are there political winners and losers here once this is resolved? DETROW: So we'll stick with the blame game, I guess, (laughter) for our purposes. You know, I think that if this gets resolved with this deal we're talking about right now, three weeks instead of four weeks and still no hard promise on DACA, it's hard to say that Democrats got anything out of this. It looks like Republicans basically kept the status quo. We'll be able to end the shutdown for now, but I think it's important to point out that with just three weeks deal, we could be in this exact situation, maybe in another shutdown, in just a matter of weeks. MARTIN: Can I point out two things? One, it was super interesting to hear Lindsey Graham say he doesn't feel like he has a valuable partner to negotiate in the White House, referring there to Stephen Miller, who's taken the lead on immigration policy, giving him a whole lot of influence - totally fascinating. And the second thing I want to note, the fashion of working over the weekend. When you have to be working over the weekend, apparently it's mandatory to wear the baseball hat. We've got Trump wearing the baseball hat, we've got Lindsey Graham - I'm working on the weekend, I've got to have my hat on. That's all I have to say. DETROW: (Laughter). GREENE: A new fashion statement. Let's all wear hats next weekend together. MARTIN: Right. GREENE: Scott Detrow - thanks, Scott, we appreciate it. DETROW: Thank you. GREENE: So this federal shutdown, I mean, depending on how long it goes or maybe if it's just a few days, I mean, it really could affect millions of people in this country. MARTIN: Right. And this is when federal employees have to ask this very awkward question. Am I essential, am I not essential? If you're not a so-called essential employee, then odds are you don't have to go to work today. The shutdown also means that hundreds of thousands of paychecks are currently on hold. GREENE: All right, NPR's Wade Goodwyn has been looking at who has been hit the most by this shutdown. And, Wade, where is the biggest impact here? WADE GOODWYN, BYLINE: Well, at first, it's not really going to be all that bad. You know, as you mentioned, some workers are going to go to the office today to find out whether they're essential or not. But, you know, the category of what's considered to be an essential service can be expansive. Law enforcement, military, air traffic control, Veterans hospital, post office men and women will keep trudging through the weather. The post office has a funding stream that's happily independent of Congress. You know, even at the Department of Agriculture, inspections of eggs, meat, dairy, poultry, those are considered essential to safeguarding American lives, so they'll keep right on inspecting. Social Security, Homeland Security, Justice Department, FBI, CIA keep right on going. GREENE: Wow. GOODWYN: I mean, can you imagine the chaos if all the TSA agents were suddenly furloughed? You know, not going to happen. There's going to be plenty of folks to pat you down. GREENE: So, I mean, you're naming a list of agencies here that are still going to be operating. Who's not operating? I mean, break this down for us. GOODWYN: Well, I mean, who's not operating is maybe the national parks. They're supposed to be open this time, they weren't last time. But if it were me, I'd check before I present myself at the gate. You know, another big one, if you're trying to buy a house and get a mortgage loan approved and your bank has to verify your income to your social security number and the IRS, the shutdown is going to be a big problem for you because the IRS is not deemed essential. You know, if that goes on for two or three weeks, it's going to drive realtors mad with frustration. GREENE: Have you been talking to people who may or may not be affected by this? GOODWYN: I did. I talked to a hydrologist out of Durango, Colo. named Derek Ryter. His science research helps keep the state of Oklahoma in drinking water, which is rather important. And here's Ryter. DEREK RYTER: I'm very disappointed with the entire situation and also stressed because we have a lot of work we need to get done. You know, I can't miss a house payment. If I miss a paycheck, I don't have, you know, reserves to make up for something like this. GOODWYN: You know, the 2013 shutdown lasted 16 days. And Standard and Poor's said that was about a $24 billion hit to the economy. Somebody should break down this price tag, you know, the political bickering hourly cost. Maybe that would get Congress's attention. GREENE: That would be interesting. I mean, President Trump talking about the cost and what he sees as the cost, he has said that the shutdown is going to devastate the country's military. Is that true? GOODWYN: Well, no. I mean, The Washington Post fact checker gave President Trump's tweets on this subject 3 Pinocchios out of 4, three Pinocchios meaning mostly false. The nation's military will soldier on, if it's not too early in the morning for bad puns. My apologies. GREENE: Never apologize for that, Wade. NPR's Wade Goodwyn, we appreciate it, thanks. GOODWYN: My pleasure. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GREENE: All right, some other news now. Vice President Pence is on the move right now. MARTIN: He was in Egypt and Jordan over the weekend. And this morning, the vice president is in Jerusalem. Pence met with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He will not, however, be meeting with any Palestinians on this trip. They were furious over President Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, so they've refused to meet with Pence while he's in the region. So the question now, what exactly can Pence achieve on this trip? GREENE: And let's ask NPR's Daniel Estrin, who is in Jerusalem. Hey, Daniel. DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: Good morning. GREENE: So how is this big decision from President Trump about Jerusalem affecting this visit? ESTRIN: Well, White House officials at first weren't expecting the Jerusalem issue to be the centerpiece of the vice president's discussions on this trip, but it has been. Jerusalem's been front and center. The king of Jordan called on the U.S. to rebuild trust and confidence in the possibility of peace. And so Pence on this trip has tried to explain the rationale behind the Jerusalem declaration. He has said by recognizing what he called the obvious, that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, that creates an opportunity to, quote, "move on," to move on to issues that need to be negotiated at the peace table. The Palestinians are not at all interested in moving on. They have claims in Jerusalem as well. The Palestinian leaders now are refusing any U.S.-led peace process and refusing to meet with Pence. GREENE: Ok, so given that the Palestinians are refusing to meet with him, Israeli leaders are, how has this trip felt and how has it played out so far? ESTRIN: Well, today in Jerusalem, Pence was greeted by an Israeli honor guard that played the American and Israeli national anthems. Pence was grinning the whole time. An evangelical organization in Jerusalem has put up signs next to Pence's hotel that say, you are a true friend of Zion. Pence is an ardent supporter of Israel. He has been for a long time. He's a devout Christian. He was one of the biggest advocates pushing Trump to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. So he feels very welcome here. GREENE: And he's going to be giving a speech at the Israeli parliament today. What can we expect? ESTRIN: Well, he has said that he is going to stand before the Israeli Parliament and say that if both Israelis and Palestinians agree, the Trump administration will support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, meaning creating an independent Palestinian state next to Israel. Now that's a vision that many in the Israeli government today actually reject. So we'll see how lawmakers react. Arab lawmakers are boycotting Pence's speech. GREENE: OK, NPR's Daniel Estrin in Jerusalem covering a visit by Vice President Pence to Jerusalem. We appreciate it. ESTRIN: No problem. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. February 14 is approaching, and the Bronx Zoo would like you to break out of your old Valentine's Day routine. There's nothing interesting about chocolate or flowers, nothing distinct. Now, if you want to show your betrothed how much you really care, name a cockroach in their honor. For 15 bucks, you can give a name to one of the zoo's giant Madagascar hissing roaches. The deluxe package includes a printed certificate and a roach pin. And, if your true love must have something sweet, chocolate roaches. It's MORNING EDITION. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Let's go to the Middle East now. That's where Vice President Mike Pence has been meeting with regional leaders. He was in Egypt and Jordan over the weekend. This morning, he is in Jerusalem. Pence has met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but he will not be meeting with any Palestinians. They have refused to meet with the U.S. vice president in protest of President Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. We're joined now by NPR's Daniel Estrin in Jerusalem. Hey, Daniel. DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: Hi. MARTIN: Clearly, we are seeing the real-world effects of President Trump's choice to recognize Israel - to recognize Jerusalem, rather, as the capital of Israel. ESTRIN: Right. Actually, White House officials had said at first that they weren't expecting the Jerusalem decision to be the centerpiece of the vice president's trip. But Jerusalem has been front and center. The king of Jordan called on the U.S. to rebuild trust and confidence in the possibility of peace. And so Pence has tried to explain the Jerusalem declaration on his trip. Today he said - by recognizing what he called the obvious, that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, then that creates an opportunity to, quote, "move on" - to move on to issues that need to be negotiated at the peace table. Now, the Palestinians have no interest in moving on. MARTIN: Right. ESTRIN: They feel their claims to Jerusalem have been brushed aside here. And so now the Palestinian leader is refusing any U.S.-led peace process. And the Palestinians are refusing to meet with Pence, too. MARTIN: Pence has, though, met with Israeli leaders, Netanyahu among them. Do you know what's come out of those? ESTRIN: Well, Pence was greeted first by an Israeli honor guard that played the American and Israeli national anthems. And Pence was grinning that whole time. Afterwards, Pence met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who greeted him very warmly. And when Pence arrived at his hotel, he was greeted by signs put up by an evangelical organization in Jerusalem. The signs say, you are a true friend of Zion. Pence is an ardent supporter of Israel. He is a devout Christian. He was one of the biggest advocates pushing Trump to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. MARTIN: So he's going to give the speech today - Pence is - at the Israeli parliament. We're going to hear more the same, presumably, a very pro-Israel point of view in this moment. ESTRIN: Yes. He's going to be reaffirming the U.S. declaration that Jerusalem is Israel's capital. But he also says he's going to be standing before the parliament and saying that if both Israelis and Palestinians agree, that the Trump administration will support creating an independent Palestinian state next to Israel, which is a vision that many in the Israeli government today actually reject. So we will have to see how Israeli lawmakers react to that. We know already that Arab lawmakers in Israel's parliament are boycotting Pence's speech. MARTIN: All right, NPR's Daniel Estrin reporting this morning from Jerusalem. Thanks so much, Daniel. ESTRIN: You're welcome. DAVID GREENE, HOST: The U.N. Security Council is holding another emergency meeting today about the situation in Syria. The latest cause of concern is open warfare between two American allies. Over the weekend, Turkey sent fighter jets and ground troops into Syria to target Kurdish fighters. It did this to send a message that they are not willing to accept Kurds in the U.S.-led coalition that's battling ISIS. And there are reports of casualties on both sides. NPR's Peter Kenyon is with us from Istanbul. And Peter, what drove Turkey to act here? PETER KENYON, BYLINE: Well, Turkey's complained for quite some time about American support for these YPG Kurdish fighters, as they're known. They're part of a key fighting group that's called the Syrian Defense Forces. They've been battling ISIS in Syria. The Pentagon armed and trained these Kurdish fighters because they're good. They get results. But Turkey sees them as aligned with its own Kurdish militants in southeast Turkey. And Ankara warned it wouldn't allow this to continue, this Kurdish force on the other side of the border, and now it's acting on that. GREENE: OK. And there seems to be a lot of concern here, beginning with the Security Council meeting - this emergency meeting - later today. So what exactly is the fear? KENYON: Well, France called for the meeting because this operation has it alarmed, along with a number of other countries, including some that don't agree on much. Both Egypt and Iran, for instance, condemned this incursion. Now, Russia takes a slightly different approach. It's Syria's biggest ally, of course. They blame the U.S. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says Washington infuriated Turkey with its unilateral actions in Syria. As for the Security Council, it's not clear what it wants to do or what it has the votes to do. But it's pretty clear that this is not a good sign for this coalition, which is supposed to be fighting Islamic State forces. GREENE: Well, and the U.S. is at the center of all of this because they're trying to work with two different sides here who don't often get along. So how is the Trump administration responding to what's happening? KENYON: Well, Secretary of Defense James Mattis said Turkey did alert Washington before launching this attack. He went on to say we understand Turkey's facing armed Kurdish militants on its own soil. He thinks Ankara does have legitimate security concerns. And the State Department, which had urged Turkey not to do this, yesterday called on Ankara to, well, keep it as short as possible and avoid civilian casualties. So it sounds like concern is being voiced but not outright condemnation. GREENE: Have casualties been avoided so far because it sounds like there have already been some? KENYON: There have. Hard to get absolutely reliable numbers, of course, but there are unconfirmed reports from inside Syria of a number of casualties - not a huge number. That could change. NPR reached a spokesman for the Syrian defense forces - that's a group that includes the Kurdish fighters - and he said the invaders hadn't managed to break their front lines. But he said the Turkish airstrikes are a big challenge. And he made an interesting comment. He said the U.S. response hasn't been what we'd hoped for. There's a kind of a history of Kurds in the region feeling betrayed by the U.S. and others, so this comment might have some echoes of that. Now over on the Turkish side, one Syrian national was reported killed in Reyhanli - that's a border town - when rockets came across from Syria. Scores more people were wounded, and the military says it destroyed those launching sites. GREENE: And so Peter, just briefly, I mean, is the U.S. trying to send a message to Turkey to keep this brief? How - what indications are you getting about how long this operation could last? KENYON: Well, the president says it'll be very quick. But how they do that and accomplish their goals remains to be seen. They want a 19-mile safe zone. After Afrin, they want to go on to Manbij. If they do all of that, that's going to take some time. GREENE: NPR's Peter Kenyon reporting for us in Istanbul this morning. Thanks, Peter. We appreciate it. KENYON: Thanks, David. (SOUNDBITE OF GOOD GUY MIKESH AND FILBURT'S "FREDDY") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Our next story comes from Lahore, Pakistan, where two sisters host regular meetings of the Jane Austen Society. It has hundreds of members. Austen wrote her novels 200 years ago in the English countryside. But as NPR's Diaa Hadid reports, her stories are resonating with women of a certain class in this conservative Muslim country. (SOUNDBITE OF L'ORCHESTRA NUMERIQUE'S "PRIDE AND PREJUDICE - MAIN THEME (FROM PRIDE AND PREJUDICE BBC 1995 ADAPTATION)") DIAA HADID, BYLINE: Step into this Jane Austen Society party, and you are instantly transported from Lahore's bustling streets to the setting of one of Austen's novels. (SOUNDBITE OF CUTLERY CLINKING) HADID: There's chandeliers and Victorian furniture. One host, Mahlia Lone, is dressed for the occasion - hair in curls, a low-cut, frilly top and an elegant skirt. Her sister Laaleen Sukhera is the other host. LAALEEN SUKHERA: Is it Pemberley, or is it "Downton Abbey?" HADID: Laaleen leads an Austen-themed quiz. SUKHERA: Ladies, try this one. Was it Bingley, Wickham or Darcy? Who had 10,000 a year? Somebody tall and handsome. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Darcy. (CROSSTALK) UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: (Clapping) Bravo. HADID: The sisters grew up in Pakistan's tiny wealthy elite. They studied in English and devoured Austen novels. Here's Laaleen. SUKHERA: We find it easy to relate to her. We find it easy to relate to her era and her characters because Pakistan 200 years later is still very similar to the Regency period. HADID: Austen's books are about women who must marry well. They can't inherit their father's property, and they may not work. And that pretty much sums up the predicament of elite women in Pakistan, like the sisters hosting this event. This is Mahlia. MAHLIA LONE: So one of the basic themes in, for example, "Pride And Prejudice," was the law of primogeniture. If there is no son, then the father's estate goes intact to his next male relative. We actually have a law like that here. How much more real and substantial can it be? SUKHERA: Everything revolves around marriage whether it's courtship, or it's making a good match, or it's getting your children settled with the right kind of family. HADID: And Austen's heroines fight the system. Here's Lizzy from the BBC adaptation of the novel "Pride And Prejudice." (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "PRIDE AND PREJUDICE") JENNIFER EHLE: (As Elizabeth Bennet) You would never think of marrying a man like that simply to secure your own comfort. UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: (As character) No. But, Lizzy, not everyone is the same. HADID: The similarities run so deep that Laaleen has curated a collection of stories adapted from Austen. It's set in contemporary Pakistan, and it's called "Austenistan." The women didn't have to look far for material. Some of Austen's most beloved characters are sisters who deal with their limited options differently. Mahlia sees her younger sister Laaleen as headstrong, romantic and irresponsible, just like a typical younger sister in an Austen novel. She's hit a nerve. SUKHERA: I don't know. I don't agree. I'm not such a romantic at all. LONE: You're emotional. SUKHERA: Who isn't? You are. LONE: I'm the practical one. SUKHERA: No, you're not. You're super emo. That's how you see yourself. HADID: Even Mahlia's story for the collection features a character who she says is a mix of her sister and Lydia from "Pride And Prejudice" - that's the scandalous one who elopes - even if Mahlia says her sister is not that bad. LONE: It's the minor things - like minor... SUKHERA: (Unintelligible). LONE: Yeah, she had... SUKHERA: (Unintelligible). LONE: Yes. But there are tiny quirks. You know, there are small quirks. Oh, I also want to do this. I'm 16, but I want to grow up quickly. It's that. HADID: Her sister Laaleen shoots her a look. It's clear Mahlia sees herself as the more sensible type, a typical older sister in an Austen novel. Mahlia's learned important lessons from Austen - marry well and smartly manage your husband. For instance, her first draft of the story for the collection was tame, but the publisher wanted a racier story, something more authentic and contemporary. LONE: And I had to - I asked my husband for permission. Earlier, my story was very timid. HADID: Why did you ask your husband for permission first? LONE: He has to support me, right? So if he gets scandalized, and everyone's making fun of him, and he divorces me - so where am I, right? HADID: She says it was a strategic move. LONE: Social politics - that's exactly what Jane Austen writes about. You make one slip-up, and you're out. It's contemporary world, so you can make a couple of slip-ups, and then you're out. HADID: Mahlia walks a fine line. She's independent. She works as a magazine editor. But she acknowledges she had to marry well to live the life that she wanted. LONE: Not just marry well but remain in the marriage. So it becomes all about, you know, perpetuating the system. HADID: And the system has treated them well. As we chat, a maid brings tea, scones and serves us fresh lemonade. Now it really feels like a Jane Austen novel. The sisters laugh - close but not quite. SUKHERA: The glasses would've been placed with perfect symmetry. And when we watch "Downton Abbey" we're like, oh, my God, how come we can never have that? But yeah. HADID: We sip our lemonade, and Laaleen reads out a passage from her story in "Austenistan." SUKHERA: (Reading) So what is an inch or two here and there with a house like that? HADID: It features a matchmaking auntie. She sets up a young woman with a rich bachelor. And when the woman hesitates, she's lectured. SUKHERA: (Reading) You're a lovely girl, Roya Beeta (ph). But do you know how many girls with decent backgrounds, anorexia and designer clothes are waiting to pounce on him? (APPLAUSE) SUKHERA: How was the accent? LONE: Dramatic reading. HADID: Laaleen also drew from her own experience. Like a headstrong heroine, she didn't have an arranged marriage. She waited for love. SUKHERA: You know, whichever suitable gentleman pursued me with the most ardent fervor was the one I actually ended up marrying and had children with. And that's over now (laughter). HADID: She's getting a divorce, and it's been ugly. She and her husband are fighting over custody of their three little girls. LONE: And there's nothing - not one single penny so far. HADID: The sisters are clearly frustrated with how women are treated in Pakistan. But just like in Austen's time, Laaleen knows there's not much sympathy for a woman who breaks the rules. SUKHERA: When a marriage fails, it's your fault because you haven't been able to handle him properly. HADID: Manage. Manage. SUKHERA: You still don't know how to make your ideas appear like his ideas. You still don't know how to - yeah, that's you. HADID: That's you. She's looking at her older sister Mahlia, who jumps in to explain the difference between them. LONE: So there's eight years difference between us sisters. Like, I work the system, and she walked out. That is challenging the system, but it's tough. You only do it as a last resort. You don't do it as a first, second, third. HADID: Even after leaving her husband, Laaleen didn't find independence. SUKHERA: First, you start off as the daughter of somebody. Then you're the wife of somebody. And now I'm the daughter of somebody once again. HADID: Just like Austen's days - so it is 200 years later in Pakistan - you can work a system. You can rebel. But you can never escape the rules. Diaa Hadid, NPR News, Lahore. (SOUNDBITE OF L'ORCHESTRA NUMERIQUE'S "PRIDE AND PREJUDICE - MAIN THEME (FROM PRIDE AND PREJUDICE BBC 1995 ADAPTATION)") DAVID GREENE, HOST: It is Monday morning, and the U.S. government is still shut down. That means hundreds of thousands of federal workers are staying home today. Bipartisan talks over the weekend did not produce an agreement to end the shutdown. But there are some signs of compromise. The Senate is meeting this morning and holding a procedural vote at noon Eastern time for a temporary spending bill. That would be another of the stopgap measures to open the government back up. Here's Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell last night. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MITCH MCCONNELL: When the Democrat filibuster of the government funding bill ends, the serious bipartisan negotiations that have been going on for months now to resolve our unfinished business, military spending, disaster relief, health care, immigration and border security, will continue. GREENE: OK, that's Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Fellow Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who was negotiating a deal with Democrats over the weekend, pointed to a different problem. That would be Trump adviser and immigration hardliner Stephen Miller. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) LINDSEY GRAHAM: As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we're going nowhere. He's been an outlier for years. GREENE: Jonah Goldberg is with us again this morning. He's senior editor at National Review. Jonah, thanks for coming in. JONAH GOLDBERG: Hey, great to be here. GREENE: So talking about the blame game here, I mean, Lindsey Graham, a Republican, is he basically suggesting that this is the Trump shutdown? GOLDBERG: He's certainly not helping with the White House's messaging. I think that's for sure. Look, I'm of the school that says, you know, if hypocrisy were helium, everybody would have higher voices and some people would just float away. GREENE: (Laughter) You're wondering if everyone would just start floating away from Washington... GOLDBERG: Yeah. I mean... GREENE: ...Then the government would reopen. GOLDBERG: (Laughter) You know, basically, everybody is contradicting some position they had in the past on some of this. And so the contest right now is for everybody to sort of seem the most disappointed and the most reasonable. And we saw that last night with Senator McConnell. We see that with Chuck Schumer. I think that even explains why Donald Trump has stayed out of the limelight for the last couple of days because everyone wants to make it sound like we're the voice of reason, we're trying to fix this and it's the other guys who are the problem. GREENE: Well, the Democrats, I mean, obviously as everyone would argue they're being reasonable, the Democrats are arguing they're being reasonable, they just - immigration is near and dear to them. They are fighting for the so-called DREAMers, and they're saying that they are going to stand on principle here. What do you see as unreasonable in that argument here? GOLDBERG: Well, first of all, what they are saying is - which contradicts their positions in past shutdowns - is that they are going to vote - they're voting against funding the government, despite the fact there was nothing in the legislation to fund the government that they opposed. They wanted to add new issues that were controversial to it, which is a very Ted Cruzian (ph) kind of position. And part of the problem in parsing all of this is that, you know, a lot of these terms get thrown around quite glibly. You know, DREAMers, DACA kids, those terms are used interchangeably. But DACA kids, many of whom are not kids anymore, are about 800,000 people. The DREAMers are a couple million. And a lot of serious policy objectives get snuck in either by Lindsey Graham or by Dick Durbin or by Chuck Schumer or by the White House without fully explaining the consequences of a lot of these things. And everyone wants to seem like they're the reasonable one doing it. You know, there's a lot of talk in Washington over the weekend about how Chuck Schumer offered to pay for the wall. But the White House budget director Mick Mulvaney was saying, well, no, he promised to authorize building it, not fund it, which is a... GREENE: We'll start looking at the devil could be in the details... GOLDBERG: Yeah, that's sort of my thought. GREENE: ...When we start digging into stuff that people say. You wrote on Friday one of the most important democratic norms is the idea that the political opposition is the opposition, it's not an existential enemy. I mean, are you pointing to what you see as the big problem in Washington everyone's just talking past each other and not actually getting down to the nitty gritty and figuring out some sort of real policy deal? GOLDBERG: Well, I think part of the problem is that both sides are looking to placate their bases. And when you talk to your base, you're no longer in the business of persuasion. You're in the business of purity. And when you're speaking in that kind of language, you're basically saying the other side are a bunch of heretics and tribal enemies and all the rest. And it makes it very, very difficult to get anything done. GREENE: Jonah Goldberg is senior editor at National Review. He gets a lot done when he comes in here and speaks to us. We appreciate it, Jonah. Thanks for being here. GOLDBERG: Thank you, David. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Government employees aren't the only ones facing uncertainty today because of the shutdown. So are tens of thousands of government contractors. And this week, NPR is taking a closer look at contract workers, a fast-growing part of the American labor force. ERIC ISAACKSON: My name is Eric Isaackson. I'm from Leonardo, N.J., and I'm a merchant marine deck officer. REBECCA MILLER: My name's Rebecca Miller. I'm an emergency medicine physician. I'm 42 years old, and I live in Martinez, Calif. MIKE TENNANBAUM: My name is Mike Tennanbaum. I'm 31, and I'm an independent business consultant and strategist. MARTIN: So it sounds like each of those people are involved in a different industry, but they are actually all part of this fast-growing workforce. They are all contract workers, who work on a project for a limited period of time. And according to this new NPR-Marist poll, this kind of impermanent workforce makes up 1 in 5 jobs in this country. Again, 1 in 5 jobs is a contracting job in America. NPR's chief business editor Pallavi Gogoi and Barbara Carvalho, who's the director of the Marist Poll at Marist College, are here to help us dig into the findings of this survey. Good morning to you both. PALLAVI GOGOI, BYLINE: Hi, Rachel. BARBARA CARVALHO: Hi there. Thank you for having me. MARTIN: All right, Pallavi, start off by just explaining your starting point for this poll. GOGOI: So we basically wanted to look at the U.S. economy, which we know is pretty solid right now. MARTIN: Right. GOGOI: It's been growing for 8.5 long years. And a lot of people, 96 percent of Americans who can and want to work have jobs. But yet there is a sense of anxiety. And we wanted to see what was behind that anxiety. So we basically, I think, have the answer to that through the results of this poll that one of the reasons is that Americans are working in these impermanent, under-contract jobs. MARTIN: So contracting, you think some people might like it because it gives them flexibility in their life. They can be their own boss. But you're saying your survey results reveal that it's this instability that actually causes people a lot of angst? GOGOI: Absolutely. I mean, not only are jobs impermanent, the pay is unstable. We found that almost half of the workers, their pay varies from month to month and that's a problem. The other thing that we found is that over 50 percent of them don't receive any benefits from their jobs. That's neither health care nor retirement. MARTIN: Because they don't work for just one company... GOGOI: Exactly. MARTIN: ...It's on them to get it. Barbara, you're a pollster. Is this something that you have seen in your other polls, this rise of contracting work? CARVALHO: Well, I think what's very interesting is what we do see is that employment is no longer a one-size-fits-all solution. We often talk about full time or part time, but I think a better characterization is new time because people are really having to put together their own way of figuring out how to make ends meet and how to earn an income. We found quite a large proportion of even full-time workers, 30 percent, say they do something else besides their full-time job for pay. MARTIN: What about wages because we've heard a lot in the last couple of years about how wages have been stagnant. Is there any sign that that is changing? CARVALHO: Well, in this survey, what we found was that 44 percent of workers did not actually receive a raise in the past year. Now, that means a majority did. And we characterized it and defined it a little differently than the Bureau of Labor Statistics might. So we found that on average, there was a pay increase of about 4.5 percent. But the difference was that we also included people who changed jobs and got a higher salary. Thirty-two percent of Americans who had a full-time job actually changed jobs in the last two years and about half of them did earn more in their new job. GOGOI: Can I jump in here for a quick second? I love the point that Barbara made about people moonlighting within this sort of contract jobs. So you basically have people who have full-time jobs but they're doing something else for pay. And you just have parents who are constantly working. After a full day's work, they might be getting into their cars, into an Uber or Lyft a couple of hours, maybe turning on their computers for a side gig because even if they make enough, like, they've gotten raises, there is just so much anxiety out there that they're worried whether it will last and they're working overtime to prepare for the worst. MARTIN: So, Barbara, another thing you all looked at in this survey is how Americans writ large, not just contractors, how everybody feels about their own job stability. What did you find? CARVALHO: Well, I think we have a little bit of a difference here in terms of how people assess employment in the broader scheme of things, in other words, the future of work, and how they assess their own jobs. Although people don't feel that they are going to lose their job or that losing their job is an imminent thing in their lives, I think what they do worry about is the day to day and the month to month about having an income that provides a certain level and a standard of living that they can appreciate. MARTIN: And of course we're going to be exploring all of these questions all week, right? Stories about this poll will air on MORNING EDITION, on All Things Considered. And you can read these pieces on npr.org. We also want to hear your own stories, so you can go to our website, engage with us on Facebook and Twitter. And we've been speaking with NPR business editor Pallavi Gogoi and Marist College's Barbara Carvalho about this new survey. Thanks to you both. GOGOI: Thank you, Rachel. CARVALHO: Thank you. DAVID GREENE, HOST: As we've been hearing this morning, the major sticking point in a possible deal to end the government shutdown is DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. That program gives protections to many of the so-called DREAMers who immigrated to the U.S. illegally as children. Democrats have said they will not vote for a budget unless it extends DACA. Republicans are saying let's pass the budget first and get to DACA after that. Cristina Jimenez is co-founder and executive director of the activist organization United We Dream. She joins us from our bureau in New York. Good morning. CRISTINA JIMENEZ: Good morning GREENE: And, Cristina, we should say you're a former DREAMer yourself, right? So this is very personal for you. JIMENEZ: I grew up undocumented in New York City, and my brother is a DACA recipient. So, you know, like me and my brother, we have millions of young Americans that grew up here and don't have immigration status and have been caught up in this crisis created by Trump when he terminated the DACA program that protected almost a million young people from deportation on September. GREENE: You say created by Trump, and certainly, there are many people and many Democrats who would say that. I just want to ask you about a way that Republicans are coming to this. They are saying that they are certainly open to extending DACA. President Trump has said that himself. The program expires in March. Republicans are saying let's just get this budget deal done and then let's dig in to figure out a solution to that. Why not take that offer? JIMENEZ: The reality is that we cannot wait. You know, up until this week, we have over 16,000 young people that have already lost DACA, and that means that they're vulnerable to deportation in an era where deportations are happening every day at a much higher number than under the last administration. Juan Manuel is a DACA recipient who was already deported back to Mexico. And just recently, Osman in Pennsylvania, another DACA recipient, was detained and held in a detention center until our organizing efforts were able to get him out. So the urgency of this crisis is now. We cannot wait until March. And this is why we need a breakthrough in Congress to get the DREAM Act passed, which is a bipartisan legislation that will protect undocumented young people and create a pathway to citizenship for them. And it's supported by over 86 percent of Americans, including Republicans. GREENE: Including Republicans - and that leads to my next question. Are you worried that taking such a hard line on this budget vote could actually backfire? You've had Republicans who are very willing to talk about a bipartisan solution to this. There was the Durbin-Graham bill. Are you worried that a political showdown over the budget could actually poison the waters and backfire for you? JIMENEZ: I think it's clear for Americans that we have a challenge in the White House. You know, the president's recent comments really revealed what's underneath his immigration policy. So I really think that in this moment we have an opportunity for Republicans to really step in and do the right thing and give us a breakthrough, come to the table, create a solution, not only for DACA but for the other issues that are on the negotiation table and to not allow folks like Stephen Miller to control the debate here. I mean, what we have seen is that there have been bipartisan negotiations, and they have been rejected by the White House - first agreed to by the president in some instances. And then we have seen how Stephen Miller and others in the White House have changed the president's mind on this. So even, you know, Senator Graham said that Stephen Miller has been a huge problem. So I really think the Republicans have an opportunity to lead in this moment, come to the table - and Democrats - to work together for a solution. GREENE: Cristina Jimenez is the co-founder and executive director of United We Dream. We appreciate your time this morning. JIMENEZ: Great to be here. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Good morning. I'm David Greene. You might recognize this from the Beach Boys. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SURFIN'") BEACH BOYS: (Singing) Surfin' is the only life, the only way for me. Now surf. GREENE: It was actually their first hit. Of course, before earning them money and a career, the song earned Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson an F. He turned it into his high school music teacher his senior year, and he failed the class. Of course, at age 75, Wilson returned to his high school recently, and the current principal changed Wilson's grade to an A. It's MORNING EDITION. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: It is day three of the federal government shutdown. Lawmakers worked all weekend to try to reach an agreement. Last night, the Senate leadership agreed to vote on a resolution today at noon Eastern time. If it passes, the government will reopen but just for three weeks. The debate, though, over immigration policy has yet to be resolved, which is the issue that led to the shutdown in the first place. NPR's Scott Detrow is here in the studio to talk about this. Hey, Scott. SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Good morning. MARTIN: Is the shutdown likely to end today? DETROW: Unclear, but there's is a path out of it that did not exist for most of the weekend. MARTIN: OK. That's progress. DETROW: That's progress. Not many Democrats are publicly committing to this vote that's going to happen at noon. But many of them were in the room over the weekend as moderates from both parties worked to strike some sort of deal here. A lot of Democrats still don't like this, especially the ones who pushed to take the stand to begin with. It does not resolve the immigration issue at all, just a promise to work on it some time soon, which is what Republicans were saying all along. And it's three weeks instead of four weeks, difference of just one week. So that's where we are at the moment. MARTIN: Does that mean that the Democrats blinked? - because, basically, Republicans are just saying the same thing they have said before. Trust us. We'll fix immigration. DETROW: I think that might be the best way to look at it. Or just enough Democrats might be willing to blink later today to get this bill passed. President Trump and Mitch McConnell have been promising to get a permanent protection for DACA all along. And this really is more of the same there. And that's what led to this to begin with. A lot of Democrats were just fed up with President Trump seeming to agree to some sort of compromise in one moment and then going back, you know, later in the day or the next day. And, you know, Republicans have argued all along that they have until March to deal with DACA. That's when the program was set to expire. MARTIN: Yeah. DETROW: Of course, it's in a holding pattern right now with the federal government - with a federal judge ruling otherwise. But Democrats have argued that you have hundreds of people in the program losing protections each day. This needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later. MARTIN: This clearly means Democrats are the ones who are feeling the political pressure if they're the ones who are going to compromise in this moment. DETROW: Yeah. I think that's true. Basically, every single Democrat in Congress wants to get a solution for DACA, wants to do this immediately, feels very strongly about it. But as this progressed and as Republicans started repeating the line that Democrats are siding with illegal immigrants over the military, over the federal government, we heard from a lot of Democrats who said they were worried by that. They were worried that Republicans were winning the argument with voters over this shutdown. MARTIN: If the shutdown does come to an end and a deal comes together, will that have happened because of President Trump or despite him? DETROW: I think really despite President Trump. He was missing in action almost the whole weekend. President Trump stayed in the White House - no public appearances, hardly any tweets even. And from what we can tell, he wasn't really involved in the negotiations, which was really an interesting turn. MARTIN: Lindsey Graham - Senator Graham over the weekend said the White House has been standing in the way of a deal on immigration. And he did not mean the president when he said that. He meant White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller. DETROW: Yeah. The quote that Graham said was, "as long as Stephen Miller's in charge of negotiating immigration, we're going nowhere. Miller's is a real hardliner, one of the many staffers who seems to be pulling Trump back from the deals Trump wants to make." But, you know, the Republican Party has really shifted. And actually, many, many voters are more in line with Stephen Miller than Lindsey Graham who wants a broad compromise. MARTIN: NPR's Scott Detrow - thanks so much, Scott. DETROW: Thank you. DAVID GREENE, HOST: And a new series is debuting tonight on TNT. "The Alienist" is the story of a group of sleuths in the 19th century on the hunt for a serial killer. It's based on the best-selling novel. NPR TV critic Eric Deggans says the show is really an attempt by TNT to redefine its brand. ERIC DEGGANS, BYLINE: First off, "The Alienist" isn't a drama about a guy who hangs out with little, green men from Mars. The title comes from a term used in the 1800s to describe psychologists who are said to help people alienated from their true natures. In this case, the term refers to Dr. Laszlo Kreisler. He's a doctor in 1896-era New York City who's so modern-thinking, he chides parents who demean their son by using the term bedwetting. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE ALIENIST") DANIEL BRUHL: (As Dr. Laszlo Kreisler) The medical term is enuresis. Bedwetting has connotations of shame. That is unhelpful to a child. MARIA TERESA CREASEY: (As character) What we'd like to know, doctor, is if you can cure Ezra (ph). BRUHL: (As Dr. Laszlo Kreisler) As an alienist, I treat mental and emotional disorders in my patients, and I try to alleviate the condition. I do not presume to cure them. DEGGANS: Played with a confident, bloodless precision by Daniel Bruhl, Kreisler is a doctor with a God complex who insists he doesn't have one. When he hears that a young, male prostitute is found horrifically murdered, he sends a friend who just happens to be an illustrator for The New York Times to capture the crime scene. That friend John Moore, played by Luke Evans, describes a brutal scene. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE ALIENIST") LUKE EVANS: (As John Moore) I saw a boy dressed suggestively in girl's clothing who had been - it was as if an animal had torn him apart. BRUHL: (As Dr. Laszlo Kreisler) More specific. Deep wounds or shallow? Precisely executed or haphazard? Were the viscera exposed? The guts, Moore. EVANS: (As John Moore) I know what viscera are. DEGGANS: What unfolds is a little like "Silence Of The Lambs," 1800s-style, as Kreisler uncovers a brutally gory serial killer preying on male prostitutes. Because they're sex workers, police generally couldn't care less. So the doctor assembles a team of helpers, including Dakota Fanning as a secretary in the office of then-Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. Kreisler realizes he has to do something psychologically dangerous to understand this killer. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE ALIENIST") BRUHL: (As Dr. Laszlo Kreisler) His acts are so wretched, so evil that only if I become him - if I run my knife through a helpless body and pluck innocent eyes from a horrified face, only then will I recognize that what drives me is not an absence of emotion - no - rather, a torrent of feeling, the kind that gives meaning and purpose to my own blackened soul. DEGGANS: The tension between today's values and the morals of that time is what powers the show. The audience knows Kreisler's right when he faces down critics and insists that psychological and medical evidence can reveal the killer, predicting modern profiling and forensic technology. Kreisler's team includes a wealthy woman and two poor Jewish men resisting the sexism, classism and anti-Semitism of the time. But Kreisler and his buddy John Moore are also wealthy white men, so they constantly benefit from the system they're rebelling against, which adds an odd note. "The Alienist" TV show is based on a popular book of the same name from the 1990s. It's a lushly rendered, gritty tale with a kind of nudity, gore and explicit themes often seen in today's quality TV shows. But it's still the largely predictable story. It's also an obvious attempt by TNT to change its brand from the home of conventional dramas like "Major Crimes" and "Law & Order" reruns. But many viewers these days seem to want the comfort food of classic TV reboots and family dramas. I'll keep watching beyond the two episodes TNT let critics see early, but I suspect "The Alienist" isn't quite creative enough or conventional enough to be the home run that TNT needs. I'm Eric Deggans. (SOUNDBITE OF LUDOVICO EINAUDI'S "EXPERIENCE") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: The U.S. Senate will try again today to strike a deal and end the government shutdown, or at least try to buy some time. So far, neither party has budged in all this. The GOP wants a continuing resolution on spending now that does not include a fix for DACA, or, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but with a promise to address that issue early next month. Here's Republican Senator Jeff Flake. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JEFF FLAKE: I will add my vote for this agreement, as the majority leader has simply outlined, that we have a CR that runs through February 8. We seek to have an agreement on immigration before that time. MARTIN: Some Democrats say they can't wait to fix DACA later and they may keep voting down a Republican funding bill that doesn't include it. Now on the third day of the shutdown with hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed, it's not clear where the compromise is. A group of 20 senators from both parties worked through the weekend to figure that out. Chris Coons, Democrat from Delaware, was one of them. He is up bright and early to join us in our studio this morning. Hi, Senator. CHRIS COONS: Good morning, Rachel. Great to be with you again. MARTIN: Great to have you here. So the Senate reconvenes today. You're going to hold a vote on whether or not to end the shutdown and fund the government. How will you vote? COONS: Well, it depends on what final agreement is reached between our leaders. The group that you mentioned, 20 of us, spent hours meeting on Saturday and on Sunday taking ideas and suggestions to our respective leadership and trying to get them to a final point of agreement. The good news, I think, is that the number of Republicans who are saying that they are committed to addressing DACA, to trying to move forward on a balanced bill that includes investment in border security and a path to citizenship for dreamers, has steadily grown. And... MARTIN: Is that enough, though? Republicans are just promising you that they will work on it. Is that enough to get your yes vote today? COONS: So what happened last night that you just played, the clip, was apparently enough for Senator Flake. It is not enough for me. And part of this challenge really is about trust. We're in this mess largely because of President Trump. President Trump, I'll remind you, announced back in September that he was canceling the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA program that currently allows 800,000 or so Americans, people from our community, to stay here with authorization. And he said we're going to work this out legislatively by March 5. And Leader McConnell has, before last night, been saying, why are we focusing on this? There's no urgency. We don't need to deal with this. And there are a whole series of long delayed things that we are months overdue resolving - the Children's Health Insurance Program, community health centers, funding for disaster relief, finally reaching agreement on investments on funding for defense and domestic priorities. We are trying to add this to that menu and say, we're nearly done with all of that, let's just sit down and hammer it out. That's why, Friday night, a number of Democrats said, let's keep the government open for three days. Let's make sure the military gets paid, hammer it out this weekend and be done on Monday. And when McConnell says no, no, no, let's keep it open 30 days and maybe we'll get to it, some of us struggle to trust him because of the famously vulgar way that President Trump sort of blew up the last time that Senators Graham and Durbin offered him a bipartisan deal, now two weeks ago. MARTIN: I hear you, though, saying your position hasn't changed. So where's the compromise? I mean, if you're saying that we still need a fix to DACA in this deal, we still need a solution to the Children's Health Insurance Program, Republicans say that's not going to happen. So we're at a stalemate, still. COONS: We have made real progress in negotiations over the weekend, and I have more confidence in Republicans who are working with us on these other issues. The progress, although it may seem small to you, the progress that happened last night was for Leader McConnell to stop saying that dealing with DACA and border security is a side issue, there's no urgency, we don't need to address this, to at least saying, we will proceed to it by February 8 if we haven't resolved it by then. But I'm pointing out to you that given the president's response, it's hard for any of us to believe that it will actually move forward in a substantive way. I'll remind you the president's response to the government shutdown has been, in tweets lobbed from the White House, to urge that they change the filibuster roll and just shove us aside and move forward. MARTIN: But I guess my question stands. If you're not getting those things today, are you going to vote for this procedural vote that would essentially end the shutdown? COONS: At this point, I'm not going to vote to change to accept a 30-day CR or 21-day CR. I think the things that Leader McConnell could do that would satisfy Senator Schumer's concerns and many others are really not that complicated. They're laid out in detail, and he knows what they are. And at this point, it's a - there's some confidence-building measures we need to see that would move us forward. MARTIN: Like what? COONS: That's really in the hands of leadership at this point. But I'll tell you that there's a way to say I'll get around to it, and there's a way to say in exactly this way on this timeline with a vote. MARTIN: You need more concrete assurances written into anything that you would sign. COONS: And that Republicans who are negotiating, I believe, in good faith are also going to insist that we move, that this be among the things we take up. MARTIN: But the longer that people aren't getting paychecks, the longer that the government is shut down, do the Democrats suffer politically? COONS: The government shouldn't be shut down. This is not a good thing for our country. But the reasons the government is shut down, I will remind you, begin and end, I think, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There were several times that President Trump was offered a solid bipartisan compromise. There is a good deal on the table that would address all of this that's now been rejected by the president twice. We need to move to this issue as the Senate and let the Senate resolve it, and I'm optimistic after lots of hours spent meeting in large and small groups over the weekend that we can and we will. MARTIN: Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, thank you so much. DAVID GREENE, HOST: And let's talk more about the impact of this shutdown. It could affect millions of Americans. That includes hundreds of thousands of U.S. employees who will stop getting paid from the Defense Department to the IRS. Now, some of them are heading to work today anyway, uncertain whether they'll actually be working and worried about what the shutdown will mean for their finances. NPR's Wade Goodwyn has been following this side of the story. Hi, Wade. WADE GOODWYN, BYLINE: Good morning. GREENE: So how big of an impact is this shutdown going to have on the country? And, I guess, where is it going to be felt the most? GOODWYN: Well, at first, it's not going to be all that bad. Some federal workers, as you mentioned, are going to go in the office for a few hours, find out whether they've been deemed essential and will continue to work. If they're not, then they're furloughed and go home. Doesn't matter if you're essential or nonessential for the most part - nobody is getting paid. But the category of what's, you know, considered an essential service is pretty expansive - law enforcement, military, air traffic control, veterans hospitals. Post office men and women will keep trudging through the rain, sleet and snow. The Postal Service has a funding stream that's happily independent of Congress. Social Security, Homeland Security, Justice Department, FBI, CIA keep right on going. I mean, can you imagine the chaos if all the TSA agents were furloughed? GREENE: No... GOODWYN: Not going to happen. There's still going to be plenty of folks to pat you down. GREENE: OK. So it could be felt personally for people who are not being paid. But you're saying much of the federal government is going to keep operating. So maybe even shutdown is the wrong word to use here. GOODWYN: As a general rule of thumb, if the agency is involved in protecting the public in a law-enforcement matter, then they're working. If the agency are regulatory or administrative, then they're furloughed but not always. Like, the EPA - regulatory, so they're furloughed, right? But on Friday, EPA's head guy Scott Pruitt said, hey, we've got enough money for another week, so everybody come to work, which I found to be an impressive rainy day fund. That's 14,000 employees. GREENE: Yeah. GOODWYN: Look. It's the duration of the shutdown that's important. If the Republicans and Democrats cut a deal today or tomorrow, this will be much ado about nothing. But if we start running deep into the second week, it's a lot more serious because hundreds of thousands of employees won't be getting paid. Last night, I talked to a guy in Durango, Calif., named Derek Ryter. He's at the U.S. Geological Survey. He's a hydrologist, a scientist whose research is helping keep the state of Oklahoma in drinking water. And Ryter has been furloughed. DEREK RYTER: I'm very disappointed with the entire situation and also stressed because we have a lot of work we need to get done. You know, I can't miss a house payment. If I miss a paycheck, I don't have, you know, reserves to make up for something like this. GOODWYN: You know, the 2013 shutdown lasted 16 days. And Standard & Poor's said it was a $24 billion hit to the economy. You know, somebody should break down this price tag - the political bickering hourly cost. Maybe that would get Congress's attention. GREENE: Well, one of the things we've been hearing from President Trump - also from some Democrats - is this shutdown could devastate the country's military. Can you fact-check that for me? GOODWYN: Well, I mean, look. The Washington Post fact-checked it and gave President Trump's tweets on the subject three Pinocchios out of four - three Pinocchios meaning mostly false. The nation's military will soldier on, if it's not too early in the morning for bad puns. My apologies. There will be furloughs inside the Defense Department. A lot of civilian workers will stay home, and that's a pretty big number - 300,000. And as for the rank and file, usually, Congress figures out a way for military personnel to continue to get paid during the shutdown. That's what they did last time. But even with no congressional action, however, the military gets paid through Feb. 1. GREENE: I'm just still looking back to you saying that one agency was able to stay open for another week by finding some sort of rainy day fund. But the longer this goes, the worse it gets. So where do the big problems start cropping up? GOODWYN: Here's a big one - if you're trying to close on a house and get your mortgage loan approved, your bank has to verify your income using your Social Security number. And this shutdown is going to be a big problem for you because the IRS is not deemed essential. And if this goes on for one, two, three weeks, this is going to drive realtors, buyers and home sellers mad with frustration. And in Texas and a lot of other states with hot real estate markets, there are a lot of people in that situation. GREENE: NPR's Wade Goodwyn. Wade, thanks a lot. We appreciate it. GOODWYN: My pleasure. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: It is the first weekday of the partial government shutdown. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill worked through the weekend, trying to find some kind of compromise to reopen the government. President Trump also stuck close to his office. He canceled plans to travel to his Mar-a-Lago resort this weekend. Instead, he stayed behind at the White House during those negotiations. For more, we're joined by White House correspondent, NPR's Scott Horsley. Hey, Scott. SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel. MARTIN: What do we know specifically about the role that the president played in negotiations over the weekend? HORSLEY: Well, we know it was a low-key role. He stayed largely out of sight during the weekend. The president did spend some time on the phone with the No. 2 Republicans in the Senate and the House, John Cornyn and Kevin McCarthy. His chief of staff was on the phone with Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader. And Marc Short at the White House legislative liaison was also on Capitol Hill last evening. But there was no big, you know, White House summit where he brought all the players together to sort of knock some heads, as Chuck Schumer had suggested he do at the end of the last week. This was a case where the guy whose face is on the cover of "The Art Of The Deal" apparently left the deal making to others. MARTIN: So we know he was on the phone. We know that because the White House tweeted out this picture of the president at his desk in the Oval Office on the phone. The president, though, was pretty quiet on Twitter, which is extraordinary. So do we imagine that this was intentional to keep the president quiet? HORSLEY: It's always risky, I think, to try to assign strategy to the president's Twitter feed. But, you know, you heard Senator Chris Coons talk earlier in the hour about the lack of trust. And this is a case where the negotiations are in a delicate stage. You could say this shutdown happened because of a lack of trust. Ending this shutdown is going to take some trust rebuilding, and it may be that the less the president is seen, the easier that is. The White House was also busy dealing with the mechanics of the shutdown over the weekend. For example, there was a flurry of activity over getting the sports channel on Armed Forces Network restarted so that men and women in uniform around the world could watch the NFL playoffs. MARTIN: Right. Both Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer and Republican Lindsey Graham suggested that the president has not been a reliable negotiating partner and more specifically that the president's aides have been interfering in talks, especially when it comes to immigration - Senator Graham in particular calling out White House adviser Stephen Miller. Can you explain what his role has been in all this? HORSLEY: That's right. Miller is a policy aide and a speechwriter for the president. And he used to be an aide to now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions when Sessions was in the Senate. Sessions and Miller are both hard-liners on immigration. Graham described Miller as an outlier for years. That was certainly true back in 2013 when they torpedoed a bipartisan immigration compromise. But it may be that the center of gravity in the GOP has moved in Miller's direction. MARTIN: NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley. Thanks, Scott. HORSLEY: You're welcome. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Let's go to the Middle East now, where Vice President Mike Pence spoke today at the Israeli Knesset, where he praised a recent decision by President Trump about Jerusalem. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: By finally recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital, the United States has chosen fact over fiction. And fact is the only true foundation for a just and lasting peace. MARTIN: Pence has met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, although Palestinian officials have refused to meet with him to protest the administration's decision about Jerusalem. With us now NPR political correspondent Tamara Keith, she is traveling with Vice President Pence. Hi, Tam. TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Hi. MARTIN: What was the vice president's reception like? It sounds like he wasn't exactly welcomed by everyone during his appearance. KEITH: Not by absolutely everyone. I will say that he was overwhelmingly supported and got numerous standing ovations throughout his remarks. However, right at the beginning of his remarks, there was a protest where some Arab lawmakers stood up with signs saying, Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine. They then left the hall under a strong escort, you could say. MARTIN: The vice president also made a little bit of news by getting specific about the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. What can you tell us? KEITH: Right. So President Trump had said that he was going to begin the steps to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had said that it could take something like three years. Well, today - and this was another one of those standing ovations - Pence announced that the embassy will open in Jerusalem before the end of 2019. That is a big shift. That's an acceleration, if you will. And was - got round applause in the room that lasted a very long time. MARTIN: Anything else of note in that address at the Knesset? KEITH: Yeah. So I would say that, then, Pence moved on to the other part of the way the administration sees this deal - is we move the embassy, and then we still want you guys to work toward peace with the Palestinians. And the applause as Pence delivered some of those lines was significantly more polite than it was exuberant. And in particular, talking about the idea of a two-state solution - not everyone applauded in a big way when he talked about that. MARTIN: For that. You can imagine, yeah. But what does it mean that the vice president is there in this moment, trying to move the needle on negotiations, but the Palestinians won't even engage in the conversation right now? KEITH: Yeah. I mean, it's a fascinating thing where, initially, Vice President Pence had planned this trip around Christmastime, and he was supposed to meet with Palestinians. And then after the president's decision on the embassy, those meetings were canceled. Pence, through back channels, according to people who have knowledge of it, has tried to set up those meetings. He's asked the Egyptian president and the king of Jordan to ask the Palestinians to talk to him to begin talks again - and, you know, crickets on the other end there. MARTIN: Where does the vice president go from here after he's done with his trip to Israel? KEITH: He heads back to the U.S. and - to either a government that's functioning and running or a government that's shut down, which is something that has sort of been a presence throughout his trip - answering questions from us about the government shutdown. MARTIN: NPR's Tamara Keith traveling with Vice President Pence in Jerusalem today. Thanks, Tam. KEITH: You're welcome. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: All this week we're taking a look at the growing significance of freelance work in our economy. Some 32 million Americans now rely on freelance or contract work for their primary income. That's according to an NPR/Marist Poll released this week. And fewer than half of these workers receive benefits like sick leave or retirement savings. NPR's Yuki Noguchi explores what that means for the future of the social safety net. YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Matt Nelson has learned to love his freelance Web developer life. It allows him to split time between pursuing passions and making a living. But it didn't start out that way. MATT NELSON: I didn't get into freelancing personally by choice, you know? I could not find a job for the life of me. I couldn't get an email back or a phone call for the life of me. NOGUCHI: Nelson volunteers as leader of the Madison Wisconsin chapter of Spark, a networking group started by the Freelancers Union. His group is made up of 350 varied freelancers. NELSON: Lawyers, realtors. We've got a guy that does bug farming consulting. We had an astrobiologist. NOGUCHI: They exchange tips and share stories, often of the indignities they suffer. NELSON: I was stiffed by an NGO that was out of state for not quite enough money to make it worth my while to go to small claims court Nebraska. (Laughter). And, as a freelancer, that's tough. NOGUCHI: Nelson, who is 41, says he and his freelance and contractor friends often feel they're flying solo without support to fall back on. NELSON: We really don't have much of a social safety net. And, you know, that's terrifying. NOGUCHI: This is a vexing problem for freelancers and policymakers. Virginia Senator Mark Warner worries workers without benefits will strain tight public budgets even more. He says freelancers ought to be able to get benefits that they can keep, regardless where they work. Warner sponsored a bill to encourage experimentation with those types of programs. MARK WARNER: If we don't have a social contract for this workforce, if we don't have social insurance that moves with the workers then I feel like the economic discontent and economic insecurity that comes from working with no safety net under you would rise dramatically. NOGUCHI: Rene Flores, a Los Angeles freight truck driver, is living that reality. Trucking deregulation turned most drivers into contractors four decades ago. But Flores says the company didn't treat him as a free agent. RENE FLORES: (Through interpreter) They always assigned me the work they wanted to do. They would always send me where they wanted to go. They always set the price. I never did. NOGUCHI: Being a contractor, he says, only meant he had to pay for his own gas and truck repairs, and the company didn't give him health insurance, which became a huge problem when he fell on the job three years ago. FLORES: (Speaking Spanish). NOGUCHI: Flores developed a giant hernia but endured the pain without medical care. He complained about the lack of benefits in a newspaper interview and got fired. He took a new job but found he couldn't work without surgery. So Flores borrowed $10,000 from friends to get a cheaper surgery in Mexico. He returned to work still bandaged and bleeding. FLORES: (Through interpreter) I'm also worried about my family. I don't have the resources to keep going for two more weeks and pay my rent and my bills. NOGUCHI: The toll of insecurity isn't just financial. CAROLINA SALAS: Being a freelancer, you really have to, really have to be on top of your emotional and mental health. NOGUCHI: Carolina Salas is 32 and freelances in New York City helping medical practices attract new patients. Salas says the stress and demands of freelance work pinched her sciatic nerve, immobilizing her for six months. SALAS: As a contractor, the expectations of you are much higher than if you were an employee. They're moving so quickly, and they have so little consideration or awareness for you that they sometimes forget that you're actually human. NOGUCHI: She says defending one's humanity is hard. Clients control the purse, after all, and there are fewer legal protections for contractors compared to full-time employees. SALAS: People are not talking about this because people say it's the sexy thing to do, everybody's doing it. It's, like, actually, no. If you just start talking to people and you start talking to them about their emotional state and their sense of self-worth, they'll tell you that they've taken a hit and that it's hard. NOGUCHI: Salas emigrated from Venezuela and has freelanced for eight years. In that time she's learned to track her time and expenses, push back on unrealistic deadlines and save for retirement and emergencies. But she says not all freelancers are equally equipped. SALAS: That is what concerns me because I come from a place where there was not much of a middle class, and I know what that looks like. And so I'm not saying that, you know, the United States is going in that direction, but I'm very familiar with inequality. NOGUCHI: Those worries are not unfounded, says Sara Horowitz, founder of the Freelancers Union. SARA HOROWITZ: There are really big risks in freelancing because the income is so episodic and freelancers aren't entitled to unemployment insurance, and this is really bad for low-wage workers in particular. NOGUCHI: Horowitz says freelancers need to band together. She's an advocate for things like union-sponsored health insurance. The Freelancers Union, for example, has offered it to its members for two decades. HOROWITZ: The answer is to build this safety net that's universal for everybody, not to say, this is only for very low-wage workers, nor is it to say, this is for highly skilled professional workers, but actually, they're all going through this together. NOGUCHI: The best antidote to fear, she says, is to create a new social safety net where freelancers can rely on each other. And with a growing group of tens of millions of Americans freelancing, she says, that's also a powerful voting bloc. Yuki Noguchi, NPR News, Washington. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: When the Affordable Care Act became law, the state of Oregon embraced it. As a result, some 95 percent of Oregonians now have health insurance, one of the highest rates in the nation. That's due in part to Medicaid expansion. Today, that's going to be put to the test as Oregonians vote on the tax package to pay for it. Kristian Foden-Vencil of Oregon Public Broadcasting reports. KRISTIAN FODEN-VENCIL, BYLINE: The federal government gave states plenty of notice that Medicaid payments would be trimmed after the Affordable Care Act was introduced. So here in Oregon, Democrats joined with Republicans, hospital owners and health insurance CEOs to come up with a tax to pay for it. Even though it's hundreds of millions of dollars a year, hospitals and insurance companies agreed to pay it. But under state law here, voters can use the initiative process to collect signatures and force a public vote on a new tax. And that's what Julie Parrish did. JULIE PARRISH: They passed the tax to the people without a lobbyist - right? - small businesses, mom-and-pop businesses, individuals who have to buy their own. FODEN-VENCIL: Parrish is a Republican state representative who grew up on Medicaid. But she doesn't like the tax package. She says it's inequitable because it doesn't apply to big corporations and unions. PARRISH: This was about a fundamental disagreement that taxing other people's insurance is the way to fund Medicaid. FODEN-VENCIL: So Measure 101 is now on the ballot. Some Republicans want a no vote. They don't like the new tax. And they don't trust the Oregon Health Authority with the money. On the yes side are all kinds of advocacy groups and the vast majority of Oregon's health organizations, who say 48 other states have some form of this new tax. Andy Van Pelt is the executive director of the Oregon Association of Hospitals and Health Systems. ANDY VAN PELT: The alternative of lack of coverage - we're talking kids, seniors, people with disabilities - is unacceptable. FODEN-VENCIL: He says it's cheaper to treat people with health insurance than to treat them without insurance when they turn up sick in emergency rooms anyway. VAN PELT: There's a real possibility that people could lose their coverage. It will just destabilize the Medicaid program for hundreds of thousands of people. And that would be utter chaos. FODEN-VENCIL: While the Trump administration hasn't managed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, it has taken several steps to dismantle it. The effect of Measure 101 on Oregon's Medicaid expansion remains to be seen. But if it fails, state lawmakers will spend the next couple of months searching for new ways to pay for it. For NPR News, I'm Kristian Foden-Vencil in Portland. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: After three days, the government shutdown ended. Democrats and Republicans joined hands and made peace. And all was good in the land. DAVID GREENE, HOST: (Laughter) Promise I'm not laughing at that. That did not happen. All they actually... MARTIN: It didn't? GREENE: ...Did was buy - it didn't. But they did buy a little more time. Congress now has just three weeks. That is the window to reach an agreement on government spending and also immigration. So what is the way forward here? MARTIN: The way forward is to ask NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley what the way forward is. Hi, Scott. SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel. MARTIN: So this whole shutdown revolved around DACA, right? This is - we've said it many times - this is Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program protecting young immigrants brought here as children, often illegally. So no agreement was reached on DACA. Has this shutdown changed anything, or are we in the same place that we were? HORSLEY: Well, the fate of the DACA recipients is still very much up in the air, as it's been since last September. On Friday, the senators who voted to shut down the government were demanding permanent protection for those young DACA recipients. They didn't get that. What they did get was a promise from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that he would find a solution during these next three weeks or, failing that, that he would open up the Senate floor for an open, freewheeling discussion where people could offer ideas and amendments. That was, you know, a subtle shift - no guarantee it will pay off for the DACA recipients, certainly no guarantee of what the House might do. But it was enough to flip 30 Senate votes and reopen the government. MARTIN: So Democrats got a promise from Republicans. That's what they got in exchange for the government shutdown. Is that going to come back to bite them politically in a midterm year? HORSLEY: The real winners here won't be known, I guess, for three weeks when we see how this process plays out. But the Republicans were the ones who were smiling and doing the victory dance yesterday while progressive Democrats were sending angry emails about capitulation. There was a group in the center, both Republicans and Democrats, who both want to help the DACA recipients and also wanted to keep the government open. They succeeded yesterday in beating back the far left, the group that was demanding a DACA fix above everything else. The question now is whether those centrist senators will succeed in beating back the far right that's demanding much more draconian immigration moves in exchange for a DACA fix. MARTIN: Where's the White House in all this? Because I've heard tell that the administration was behind some ads that came out saying the Democrats have caved - using that language - it's not exactly, like, a way to bridge the gap right now, in this moment when people need to come together. HORSLEY: There was some spiking of the football yesterday, and we'll see if that if that backfires. Once it became clear the government would reopen, the president met yesterday with a group of Republican senators, including Tom Cotton and David Perdue. They're some of the immigration hard-liners who want to see big changes in the legal immigration system. He also met with a couple of Democrats, Joe Manchin and Doug Jones. They would be in that centrist group. They were against shutting down the government all along. The president is still looking for money for border security, including his wall; an end to the visa lottery; changes in the legal immigration system. He was largely invisible over the weekend, which may have been helpful to Republicans. We'll see if he's more visible and more active in this next phase of the process. MARTIN: All right, NPR's Scott Horsley. Thanks so much, Scott. HORSLEY: Good to be with you, Rachel. MARTIN: We're going to stick with the issue of immigration because deportations are a huge part of the overall immigration debate, David. GREENE: Yeah, they certainly are. And it's mostly Mexican and Central American immigrants who are being picked up and sent back to their home countries. What is not well-known, though, is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, is also aggressively deporting people from all over the world. And deportations to several countries, including Haiti, rose sharply in 2017. MARTIN: All right, NPR's John Burnett has been looking at the data. He joins us now. Hey, Don. Wait - Don... JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel MARTIN: ...You're not Don. You're John. Hi, John. BURNETT: I'm always John. MARTIN: So when we say all over the world, which countries are we talking about exactly? BURNETT: Well, as David said, in recent years, the same four countries dominate deportations. And that's Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. And those account for 9 out of 10 deportations. But the interesting news comes from the other 186 countries where the U.S. deports people to. The number of deportees from the other nations rose 24 percent in Trump's first year according to our math. There were big increases in all sorts of foreign nationals who had been living in the U.S. illegally from all over the world. Deportations to Brazil and China jumped. Removals of Somalis nearly doubled. Deportations to Ghana and West Africa are up more than two times. The biggest increase is Haiti. The number of deported Haitians soared from 300 in 2016 to more than 5,500 last year. And the reason is that thousands of Haitians who had been living in South America rushed to the U.S.-Mexico border and crossed in California and Arizona. They mistakenly thought they could get humanitarian relief, but it wasn't the case. They were detained and deported. MARTIN: And we should point out that these countries - so separate from Mexican and Central American immigrants, these countries represent a relatively small percentage of total deportations. BURNETT: Ten percent. Right. MARTIN: Yeah. But still, it is notable. Do we just presume that this has to do with the Trump administration's generally harder line on all kinds of immigration? BURNETT: Yeah, that's definitely one of the explanations. I think there are two factors. And the first is the so-called recalcitrant countries that used to refuse to accept deportees from the U.S. are now repatriating them. The Trump administration is very proud that it was able to broker these agreements with these countries, and they consider it an untold story. So you do see big increases in deportees to places like Somalia, Guinea, Cuba, Bangladesh, Iraq and Afghanistan. And, for instance, with Iraq, the administration took it off the travel ban list in return for the country agreeing to repatriate its deportees. And then second, as you said, ICE agents are just more aggressive in the interior. They used to make more arrests on the southwest border. Now they're nabbing people inside the country and a lot of visa overstayers. MARTIN: Visa overstayers, yeah. So we should also note, though - the Trump administration is still deporting fewer overall people than the Obama administration did. Correct? BURNETT: That's right because there are fewer people trying to cross at the southwest border. MARTIN: So people are being deterred there. And you say that ICE is just being more aggressive. I mean, how are they finding all these undocumented people from all over the world? BURNETT: Well, you know, a lot of these are visa overstays. And so they may start with information on a visa application. But a lot of these overstayers have been here for years and have likely changed addresses. So ICE really finds them the way they do everybody else. They depend on information from neighbors who turn them in or friendly jailers or tips from the courthouse. And ICE operates under these tough new rules. They'll arrest anybody in the country illegally, whether they've committed a serious crime or not. And so they're really starting to round up more of these folks from all these different countries in the interior. MARTIN: All right, NPR's John Burnett. Thanks so much, John. BURNETT: Sure, Rachel. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) MARTIN: All right, now we're going to get a rare look inside the Syrian city of Raqqa. GREENE: Yeah. So this city was once - and actually not so long ago - a stronghold of ISIS. But Syrian rebels backed by a U.S. air campaign pushed ISIS out of Raqqa last year. And now really comes the hard part - rebuilding. The United States has promised to be a big part of that for the long haul. MARTIN: NPR's Michele Kelemen joins us now from Kuwait City. She just went to Raqqa with the Trump administration's top foreign aid official. Hey, Michele. MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Hi, there. MARTIN: What does Raqqa look like? KELEMEN: Completely devastated. I mean, we took a drive right through the center of the city - at least the streets that were cleared of rubble. And we also got to walk around that soccer stadium where ISIS reportedly held and tortured prisoners. I was with Mark Green, the USAID administrator, and he says, you know, going to that place was a real reminder of the depth of the evil of, you know, the ISIS caliphate, as they called it. But he also said that he saw signs - and these are his words - of the human spirit. You saw some shops that are open amidst the rubble, some workers trying to rebuild and, surprisingly, a lot of kids on the street. MARTIN: So are people going back there? I mean, are Syrians returning to try to start over? KELEMEN: A few have. And, you know, and certainly what Green was hearing is that more want to go. We drove up to a camp north of Raqqa a couple of hours, where about 16,000 Syrians are living. He met with a couple of people who had fled Raqqa. And they told him directly that they want to return. The problem is there's still no electricity or running water, so that's one of the big priorities now. MARTIN: Can you help us understand, at this point, what the U.S. is doing there? KELEMEN: I mean, broadly, the mission is to make sure ISIS doesn't re-emerge and to help those Syrians who fought to liberate the city after months of U.S. airstrikes - that they're able now to stabilize the place. There are a couple... MARTIN: But that - Michele, we've heard that. I mean, that's what we've heard in Iraq, in Afghanistan. We've got to stay there as long as it takes to keep the bad guys away. That could be interminable. KELEMEN: Well, that's right. And then you look at the amount of devastation here and think about how you fix all of that. You know, they say that this is not a nation-building project - that this is really just stabilization. But I can tell you, it's going to be a huge task, given just how much rubble there is on the streets, to get any semblance of normal life back to Raqqa. MARTIN: All right, NPR's Michele Kelemen - she got a rare look inside the Syrian city of Raqqa. It was once, not long ago, a stronghold, the center of the ISIS caliphate. ISIS has been pushed out. The U.S. and its partners are trying now to rebuild. Michele, thanks so much. KELEMEN: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF ALI FARKA TOURE AND TOUMANI DIABATE'S "RUBY") DAVID GREENE, HOST: We're going to hear now what it's like to be trolled by white supremacists and also how hard it is for victims to do anything about it. NPR's Kirk Siegler takes us to Whitefish, Mont. That is where neo-Nazis have aimed what they call a troll storm at Jewish residents. And we should note this story has some language that could be offensive to listeners. KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: What is trolling? Well, for Rabbi Francine Roston, it meant when her personal information got published online, her phone number, address, then a barrage of harassing emails and Facebook posts. FRANCINE ROSTON: The messages were very frequently Holocaust themed. We're going to destroy you, your people should have been destroyed, you should destroy yourself, you should go jump in an oven, we're going to come cremate you. SIEGLER: Her voice starts to shake when she talks about it. Once an anonymous troller even posted that her two kids had better watch out. ROSTON: And a few comments later, someone said the name of my son. And, you know, I... SIEGLER: Roston is the rabbi of Glacier Jewish Community, a synagogue without walls, as she puts it, that serves Whitefish and the surrounding Flathead Valley. ROSTON: I understand free speech but imagery directed towards Jews because they're Jews relating to the Holocaust, the message there is we want you dead. SIEGLER: This trolling was promoted by a well-known white supremacist from Ohio by the name of Andrew Anglin, he's the publisher of a neo-Nazi website called The Daily Stormer. In articles on his website, he called for a troll storm against Jews in Whitefish. He also planned a march through the streets of town on Martin Luther King Day last year and told people to bring their guns. ROSTON: At the core of Anglin's campaign was an old, old story of Jewish hatred that the Jews were taking over this pristine white town of Whitefish and driving out the whites. SIEGLER: The Jewish community in the resort town of Whitefish is tiny. Roston took the threat seriously. The police chief told me they couldn't do a whole lot at the time because these trollers were mostly anonymous and they weren't showing up at her door threatening imminent violence. So they said, go dark, don't engage. ROSTON: Right. If you saw we have security system around the house that we never had. SIEGLER: The police believe most of the trollers were coming from outside Whitefish, but Roston wasn't taking any chances. The local rabbi, a progressive social justice activist, bought a gun. ROSTON: I had a friend fly out and train me in handguns, and I purchased my first handguns. I wanted to make sure that I could protect myself and protect my family. SIEGLER: That planned march never happened. Anglin and the Nazis didn't show. Whitefish staged its own anti-hate rally in the freezing cold. Now, this kind of trolling has happened elsewhere for sure, but the events in Whitefish are noteworthy because of the timing and who was involved and how vicious it got. There's a lot of arguing over who's to blame, but pretty much everyone in this resort town at the doorstep to Glacier National Park says one person is at the heart of this controversy. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) RICHARD SPENCER: Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory. (APPLAUSE) SIEGLER: That's the white nationalist Richard Spencer speaking in 2016. He lives in Whitefish part time. Locals say he's brought unwanted attention to this liberal-leaning pocket of Montana. About a year ago, there was a reported argument that began between a local realtor and Richard Spencer's mom. It was over a building Sherry Spencer owns in Whitefish, which was becoming the focus of a potential protest against her son. The realtor is Jewish and local news reports about the dispute got the attention of Andrew Anglin, who called on his neo-Nazi followers to come to the defense of the Spencers. That Jewish realtor is now suing Andrew Anglin over his troll storm with the help of the Southern Poverty Law Center. She's not giving interviews but her local attorney John Morrison is. JOHN MORRISON: These are not informational, opinion or any other kind of protected First Amendment communications. These are assaults. SIEGLER: Montana and the Flathead Valley around Whitefish in particular has long been a haven for extremism. In 1988, the state passed a strict anti-intimidation law, which Morrison says the trolling violated. But where is the line between protected speech and a clear threat of violence, like an alleged verbal assault? The courts have generally said speech doesn't become illegal unless a threat is imminent. Mark Randazza, a prominent First Amendment attorney, says this is hard to prove and it should be. MARC RANDAZZA: You hear that a lot from people who are trying to engage in censorship, that this isn't a First Amendment issue. Well, the fact that we're talking about it makes it a freaking First Amendment issue. SIEGLER: Randazza is Andrew Anglin's attorney. I reached him in Las Vegas where he's based. RANDAZZA: If you believe in freedom of expression, you have to believe in it for Nazis and Klansmen and pornographers and anybody else you might find to be objectionable. SIEGLER: Randazza stressed to me that he too thinks the memes and the anti-Jewish slurs were awful. Richard Spencer's mom also condemned the trolling. But Randazza says when you put tools in place to restrict speech, it can backfire later. RANDAZZA: Mr. Anglin, all that he intended to incite and all that he did incite was people expressing themselves. SIEGLER: People in Whitefish are torn over this case. Their town is dependent on tourism, and they don't want any more negative attention. But on the other hand, the trolling got really hateful and personal. The Rabbi Francine Roston told me that she thinks one of the trollers was the father of someone she knew. And the trollers didn't stop at just the Jewish community. They started going after anyone in town they even thought was Jewish and local businesses that had anti-hate signs posted in their windows. Before I left Whitefish, I met Jennifer Runnels. She and her young family live in this old farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Her husband inherited it from his grandfather. JENNIFER RUNNELS: I have my curing rack right over here. SIEGLER: She has a soap-making business and when she heard about the trolling, she decided to put together gift baskets to give to the trolling victims. RUNNELS: And I'm not sure who told the news. But the news was there and they interviewed me, so I was on the news that night talking about what we were doing. And then the next morning, I was on The Daily Stormer. SIEGLER: Andrew Anglin's website. Then came the emails and the posts on Yelp about her business. RUNNELS: I got fake reviews that said my soap was made with the fat of Holocaust victims. SIEGLER: She was scared at first, but then she tried to shrug it off. RUNNELS: They are very misogynistic. They like to use names like whore and slut and bitch. SIEGLER: Runnels told me people here are sort of resigned to the fact that there may not be any recourse for the trolling victims. RUNNELS: There was nothing anybody could do, and the police told us that. SIEGLER: And she says she and her neighbors are bracing for it all to come back if the lawsuit moves forward. And they'll speak out again, she says, and hold more rallies and protests. Lawyers for Andrew Anglin have filed motions in federal court to dismiss the case, but the judge has yet to rule. Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Whitefish, Mont. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Good. Morning, I'm David Greene. It is not every day you get a souvenir from space. And so if a small meteor fell into your yard, you might keep it, right? Some villagers in India did. But then scientists examined the 20-pound rock and... (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "JOE DIRT") HAMILTON CAMP: (As Meteor Bert) Well, it ain't a meteor. GREENE: This scene from the movie "Joe Dirt" became way too real for this village. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "JOE DIRT") CAMP: (As Meteor Bert) Oh, yeah. See, them airplanes, they dump their toilets 36,000 feet and the stuff freezes and falls to Earth. We call them Boeing bombs. GREENE: Ew. It's MORNING EDITION. DAVID GREENE, HOST: You know, we hear a lot about Mexican and Central American immigrants picked up and deported by officers from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. But our colleague John Burnett has been digging into the statistics from 2017, focusing on other countries from the Middle East to Africa to Asia. And it turns out deportations to many of those countries increased sharply in President Trump's first year compared to the year before. John joins us from Austin, Texas. Hey there, John. JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: Morning, David. GREENE: So as you've been crunching these numbers, what exactly is standing out to you here? BURNETT: Well, we know in recent years the same poor countries dominate deportations - Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. They do account for 9 out of 10 deportations. But the interesting news is in the other 186 countries in the list. The number of deportees from other nations rose 24 percent in Trump's first year, really big increases from all sorts of foreign nationals around the globe who were living in the U.S. illegally. Deportations to Brazil and China jumped. Removals of Somalis nearly doubled. Deportations to Ghana and West Africa are up more than two times. The biggest increase is Haiti. The number of deported Haitians soared from 300 in 2016 to more than 5,500 last year. And the reason is that thousands of Haitians who'd been living in South America rushed to the U.S.-Mexico border and crossed at California and Arizona. They mistakenly thought they could get humanitarian relief. But that wasn't the case. They got locked up and then deported. GREENE: So you're really getting beneath the headlines here because there have been headlines about how the overall number of deportations under President Trump actually went down. But you're focusing on these other countries. And where you dig deeply, you see this increase. So explain that for us, if you can. BURNETT: Right. Well, first of all, the overall deportations went down because fewer people, mainly from Latin America, were trying to cross the southwest border. They call it the Trump effect. So we're talking about the other 10 percent here. And I think there are two things that are happening for the jump in deportations. First, so-called recalcitrant countries that used to refuse to accept deportees from the U.S. are now repatriating them. And the Trump administration is proud of this. And they feel like it's an untold story that they made these agreements with these countries. So we're seeing big increases of deportees to places like Somalia, Guinea, Cuba, Bangladesh, Iraq, Afghanistan. For instance, with Iraq, the administration took it off the travel ban list in return for the country agreeing to repatriate its people. And the second thing I think that's going on is ICE agents are just more aggressive, as we've reported all last year. Here's Jessica Vaughan. She's policy director for the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports Trump's get tough immigration policies. JESSICA VAUGHAN: Interior enforcement has been stepped up under the Trump administration. And so they are encountering more targets for deportation who are visa overstays. And they come from all over the world. BURNETT: So these visa overstays are a big problem. I mean, more travelers overstay their visitors' visas - there were more than 600,000 in 2016 - than cross the border illegally. GREENE: And what is ICE saying about that? Is that a big priority for them to go after these visa overstays? BURNETT: It is. ICE has been wanting to crack down on those for a while. And Trump has, again, you know, taken the shackles off. ICE said in a statement to NPR, it apprehends all those in violation of immigration laws regardless of national origin. GREENE: OK. So, John, how are these countries reacting to these numbers? BURNETT: As far as I can tell, Ireland is the most concerned. They only had 34 Irish sent home last year, which is tiny compared to more than 100,000 Mexicans deported. But they estimate there's up to 50,000 Irish visa overstays living in the U.S. illegally. So the government of Ireland has actually appointed a special envoy to the U.S. Congress to figure out a legislative fix to find a path to legalization for the undocumented Irish living here and get more work visas. Let's listen to Fionnuala Quinlan. She's Ireland's consul-general in Boston talking about the Irish community there. FIONNUALA QUINLAN: There's such widespread, you know, fear in the community. And of course, you know, I mean, the impact for people who have to live in the shadows, you know, nervousness around driving. There can be issues with isolation because people are increasingly afraid to, you know, go out and, of course, the difficulty of not being able to return home. BURNETT: So NPR did reach out to a couple dozen embassies. And we heard from the Hungarian Embassy and said that they've put a page up on their website warning Hungarians, the U.S. Immigration Police are out in force. And you overstay your visa at your own peril. GREENE: Interesting stuff. NPR's John Burnett reporting. John, thanks. BURNETT: Sure, David. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Some of the world's most influential politicians, CEOs, artists and thinkers are in Davos, Switzerland, this week for the annual World Economic Forum. This year, President Donald Trump will join this group of global elites, making him and Bill Clinton the only sitting U.S. presidents to have attended Davos. We're joined now by Ishaan Tharoor. He writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post, and he is doing the hard work in the beautiful mountains of Davos. Hey, Ishaan. ISHAAN THAROOR: Hi, there. MARTIN: I understand you guys had a little bit of snow. So the 1 percent are really roughing it. THAROOR: (Laughter) It's been really quite remarkable. Davos, as you said, is a beautiful, picturesque mountain town. But in the past couple of days, it's experienced the worst - the largest snowfall it's seen in over two decades. So there's a lot of snow here. People have been slipping and sliding. So it's actually canceled a bunch of events. MARTIN: Wow. THAROOR: And some world leaders have been waylaid. So it's all... MARTIN: Oh, OK. I shouldn't just make light, yeah. THAROOR: Yeah. A bunch of presidents couldn't make it so far or have had panels canceled. So the forum has begun with this cloud over it. MARTIN: But we know President Trump, so far, plans to still come to Davos, which is - I mean, we should note this. Donald Trump ran against the political establishment, not only in the U.S. but around the world, and against ideas like the kind that folks at Davos tend to embrace about a global community. So how is Trump's arrival shaping conversations there already? THAROOR: It definitely is the kind of permanent conversation happening here. Everyone is very curious about what he's going to say and the kind of impact he's going to have. He's bringing a pretty significant-sized delegation as well. So there's a lot of interest in what his other Cabinet ministers that are coming with him will say. And yes, it's interesting because Davos is all about things that are ideologically anathema, it seems, to the Trump administration. They talk about collaboration and multilateralism. They talk about the importance of reckoning with migration and the importance of honoring the dignity of migrants. They talk about, you know, collaborative trade deals. So it's all about stuff that Trump has consistently vilified in his rhetoric. Even Steve Bannon once referred to Trump's opponents as the party of Davos. So this place is really the embodiment of everything that you would think this administration has opposed. MARTIN: Do we know if the president plans to address Davos in any formal way? THAROOR: Well, he'll be delivering a big speech on Friday, and that's going to be the showpiece event. But it's also going to come after a number of other very important speeches. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaking - that's kind of the big opening address of the whole event. And then we're going to see a kind of one-two punch of French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel tomorrow. And those will be interesting to watch because they'll potentially be a kind of pre-emptive broadside against Trump. MARTIN: So what do we expect President Trump to say? I mean, what does he want out of this meeting? THAROOR: To be completely honest, nobody is really quite sure. President Trump could use this as a forum to hammer home certain points on the supposedly unfair trade deals that the U.S. has stomached in recent times. The Trump administration has been very strong of late, specifically on China. They issued a report last week even suggesting that China should never have been allowed into the World Trade Organization a couple of decades ago. So he could hammer home a pretty protectionist, hawkish message. Or he could try to turn the page and reach out to the world in a way that he has not yet done. MARTIN: All right, Ishaan Tharoor of The Washington Post talking to us from Davos, Switzerland. President Trump is expected to attend this year. Ishaan, thanks so much. THAROOR: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF MARK BARROTT'S "CIRRUS AND CUMULUS") DAVID GREENE, HOST: And we have an update now on a series we have been doing all this month. It is about online dating. And Rachel, I know that's something you know a thing or two about. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Little bit - it's true. I met my husband online in 2009 - way back in the olden days (laughter). GREENE: Not so far back, 2009. But, you know, things have changed since then. Online dating has become a lot more common. MARTIN: Right. GREENE: I was stunned by this number. Some 100 million people have downloaded the Tinder app. But, you know, this whole thing can be pretty frustrating. MARTIN: Totally. I mean, I was in the trenches, man. And it can be hard and disheartening. There are all kinds of profile pictures. We've heard about that. It's not really what the people look like. And then there's just, you know, disaster dates and people who don't show up - whatever. There are a lot of horror stories, but it can work out. GREENE: Yeah. But you're not alone with the horror stories. People are exhausted. They're discouraged by the process. And that was the case for Kat McClain. KAT MCCLAIN: I was going out a lot. I was getting burnt out. I was bored. It felt like another job, and I definitely don't need another job. I work enough (laughter). GREENE: So Kat's a 26-year-old attorney here in LA. She describes herself as this meticulous planner. She's a former gymnast She's a die-hard sports fan, and she's also a longtime user of those dating apps. MCCLAIN: But I was feeling like there was something wrong with me. You know, I was the only person that I knew who wasn't in a successful relationship. And everyone around me was making it work. And I was like, what am I doing wrong? Like, why? Why does this keep happening to me? GREENE: So she decided that she was going to enlist some help. She hired a matchmaker. MARTIN: A matchmaker? Like, "Fiddler On The Roof" - like a yenta matchmaker? GREENE: I mean, not exactly. But she went to a company. It's called Three Day Rule. And let's tag along for her journey. And this journey is going to include a first date - we'll get to that a bit later - but first, a little bit more about Three Day Rule. TALIA GOLDSTEIN: So when I started the company, actually it was just a blog. And I took the name from "Swingers," the movie. It's this old stupid rule that guys used to wait three days to call a girl after getting her number. GREENE: So I was sitting talking to Talia Goldstein - she's the founder of Three Day Rule - and she says that the rules for finding a date have totally changed. We were talking at the company's high-rise office in LA. GOLDSTEIN: We find matches in all different ways. If our client is interested in a corporate guy, we're crashing real estate conferences and medical conferences. GREENE: They have a database also of 90,000 single people. And of course, all of that access does not come cheap. MCCLAIN: Six thousand? MARTIN: Six thousand bucks? GREENE: Six thousand dollars. MARTIN: Whoa. GREENE: That was Kat there. Yeah, she was telling you how much she pays to use this service, Three Day Rule. And from that money, what you get is you get 6 dates over a six-month period. And you also get this personalized matchmaker. MCCLAIN: I was really at ease. Like, one of the first things I noticed was just how easy it was to talk to her. GREENE: So Kat's talking about her matchmaker, Alexa Geistman. And when I met up with the two of them in the company's conference room, Alexa had already spent a couple of months just getting to know Kat. ALEXA GEISTMAN: We have a very close relationship. So we do talk quite a bit, a few times a week. MCCLAIN: Having someone like Alexa around to keep me positive and centered and grounded has been - I mean, life-changing sounds so dramatic but life-changing. GREENE: Kat was looking for a relationship. And so Alexa told her to search on all fronts, including dating apps. MCCLAIN: I also changed all of my profiles from bottom to top - the pictures, the bio, the, like, what-are-you-looking-for section. So it's been a really different dating app experience. MARTIN: So then, Kat does this whole, like, overhaul of her profile. And what happened? Did it work for her? GREENE: I mean, it kind of worked. She didn't have a single bad date with an online match after that. MCCLAIN: I would say that I'm a better online dater for having done this. And I am just - I'm better at picking people. I'm better at presenting myself accurately. GREENE: So she meets the love of her life on a totally different site - you're not going to feel like that was somehow a failure? GEISTMAN: Absolutely not. I mean, I might attribute some of the success to me because I've really helped her become an even better dater. GREENE: But she still hadn't found anyone serious yet. GEISTMAN: I think she needs someone with a quiet confidence that shares the same values as her. GREENE: All right. And that is where Kevin comes in. He was a guy in Three Day Rules' database. Alexa had introduced him to Kat over email, and they were getting ready to go out that night. How are you feeling about tonight? MCCLAIN: I'm excited. So my goals for tonight are, like, drink slow, ask questions, do not put on a show. Like, don't start your, like, Kat stand-up routine. Because I do have this, like, habit of just starting to tell rapid-fire, self-deprecating jokes when I get nervous. GREENE: So Kat met Kevin at this restaurant in LA. Both of them were clearly a little nervous at the beginning. KEVIN BIELY: Kat? MCCLAIN: Yes. Hi. Sorry. GREENE: And Rachel, it probably did not help that we had put microphones on the table (laughter). MARTIN: Right, no pressure. GREENE: Yeah, no pressure. But they were really good sports. MCCLAIN: I bet you at least a few people here think we're famous. BIELY: Exactly. Right? MCCLAIN: So... BIELY: Someone's, like, Googling me. Like... GREENE: All right, a little awkward at the beginning - but the conversation got going, and it was constant. And you could really hear the chemistry. They learned they had similar upbringings.... BIELY: So I grew up with a military family, so we bounced around a little bit when I was young. MCCLAIN: Yeah, yeah. I am also a military brat. BIELY: Oh, nice. GREENE: ...Also a similar sense of humor about who their ideal partner might be. BIELY: If she's got a job and she chews with her mouth closed, that's like 90th percentile right there. MCCLAIN: That's sounds stunningly like my criteria. GREENE: Oh, my God. I'm, like, uncomfortable listening to their first date. MARTIN: I know. Me, too. First date (groaning). GREENE: It's so uncomfortable. But it went well. They talked so long they actually closed out the restaurant - after dessert, of course. MCCLAIN: I could do the sundae. BIELY: Awesome. MCCLAIN: Half the sundae. BIELY: Half the sundae. Half a sundae? MCCLAIN: Yeah. BIELY: What will we do with the other half? MCCLAIN: You should have the other half. BIELY: Maybe I'll have it. OK. Fair enough. MCCLAIN: (Laughter). (SOUNDBITE OF PHONE RINGING) GREENE: OK. So about a month and a half after that first date, I caught up with Kat on the phone. MCCLAIN: Hello. GREENE: Hey, Kat. MCCLAIN: Hey. GREENE: So how are things going? MCCLAIN: Things are really great. Literally just a couple of days ago, we had to define-the-relationship conversation. So... GREENE: Whoa. Kat says even though her Three Day Rule experience with this company made this possible, none of the rules seemed to matter anymore. MCCLAIN: It didn't matter that we talked about marriage on the first date. And it didn't matter that I told a bunch of stupid jokes. And it didn't matter who texted who first afterwards. None of that stuff is important. Sometimes stuff just works. MARTIN: So it worked for her, huh? GREENE: It did work out for her. And - I mean, she said sometimes stuff just works. So yeah, she deleted her dating apps. Now she and Kevin Biely are dating exclusively. It was really nice to hear that. MARTIN: Yeah, but she paid a ton of money. Does she have any regrets about that? GREENE: She did pay a ton of money. And she said that she doesn't regret that at all because - I mean, this company brought her to Kevin. And it also - she said the coaching gave her this better overall outlook on dating. And Kat said not everyone needs to hire a matchmaker. You don't have to go out and spend this money. You can. It can help. But at the end of the day, no matter what you do, it really still comes down to chemistry. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FIDDLER ON THE ROOF") NEVA SMALL: (As Chava, singing) Matchmaker, matchmaker, I'll bring the veil. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Well, the federal government is back open today after a three-day shutdown. This happened because enough Democrats in the Senate got on board with a Republican plan to fund the government for three more weeks. Democrats had been saying they would not budge without a permanent solution for DACA. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program protects many Americans who were in the country illegally as children. A good number of Democrats, though not all, were willing to accept a promise from Republican leaders that they're serious about taking up DACA in the coming weeks. Mo Elleithee joins us in our studios in Washington. He's a veteran Democratic strategist. He's now executive director of Georgetown University's Institute of Politics and Public Service. Hi there, Mo. MO ELLEITHEE: Hey, David. GREENE: So what did Democrats actually get here? ELLEITHEE: Look, I think they got from Leader McConnell the most firm commitment to date so far that the Senate would take up DACA. Now, there are a lot of people out there, a lot of Democrats out there that say, that ain't good enough, the leader's promises aren't something to be trusted. But you kind of get the sense that this is the most firm commitment that he's made to date, and now there's a deadline. And if he doesn't bring it up by that deadline then I think you're going to see all hell break loose with the Democrats going after the Republicans. GREENE: But I just want to be really clear. Weren't Republicans already essentially promising that they would work out DACA? So was it worth shutting down the government to get - what? I mean, a more reassuring promise? ELLEITHEE: Well, you know, there was a promise to do something, but without a date certain, without a timeframe for doing so. The silver lining for Democrats in this, I think, is that they got that. Now, look, I think there are a couple of major takeaways from this experience in the past few days. Number one, the politics of shutdowns are never clear cut, even when the polling shows one party may get the blame. I remember back during the shutdown of 2013 when everyone said Republicans were going to get the blame, and the next year, they came back and won a historic route in the midterms. So the politics of this is never as clear cut as it looks when it's going on. Number two, you do now have this date and this commitment from McConnell to get something done, and now the pressure is on him to deliver. People want to see DACA dealt with. They want to see these dreamers taken care of. If he doesn't deliver after a shutdown, after making this promise to end a shutdown then there's going to be significant pressure on him. Number three, the partisans on either side are not happy right now. You saw that... GREENE: Yeah. You had a lot of Democrats voting against this. ELLEITHEE: Yeah. GREENE: I mean, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris. ELLEITHEE: And you've got a lot of Republicans, particularly in the House, who are not happy that Leader McConnell made a commitment to deal with DACA. GREENE: But focusing on your party, I mean, isn't that a problem? Isn't that a rift at a moment when you really want to be showing a united front? ELLEITHEE: Ask me again in three weeks. Right? Ask me again when, if they haven't dealt with DACA, and you see us barreling towards another shutdown then I think this rift could become something. GREENE: So Democrats have to hold on and not - I mean, just shut down the government indefinitely if they're not happy with... ELLEITHEE: Well, Democrats have a choice right now. They can either squabble over this deal yesterday, or they can coalesce and use the next three weeks, use this as a rallying cry to push even harder to see some sort of action on DACA. GREENE: That's what you think has to happen now? ELLEITHEE: I think that what's got to happen now. But as we've seen in politics over the past year, everything is volatile and we don't know what the next three weeks are going to look like. But I would argue Democrats, if they really want to get something done on DACA, they actually now have one of the greatest opportunities they've had since this whole debate began, since the president pulled the rug out from under this program. They now got McConnell to lay down a marker as to when this was going to get done. They need to hold him accountable to that. GREENE: All right. Speaking about this moment - the government shutdown is over and where Democrats go from here - with Mo Elleithee. He's executive director of the Institute of Politics and Public Service at Georgetown, also a longtime Democratic strategist. Mo, thanks, as always. ELLEITHEE: Thanks, David. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Bill Cosby was in the spotlight last night. He delivered an impromptu performance at a jazz club in Philadelphia. It was the first time Cosby has been on stage since 2015, when accusations against him of sexual assault started to build. Bobby Allyn of member station WHYY reports that some saw this performance as Cosby's attempt to sway public opinion ahead of his second trial happening this spring. BILL COSBY: All right. Let's raise the volume. Here we go. BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: Cosby wore a grey hoodie with the words Hello Friends written in colorful letters as he sat in front of a mostly African-American crowd of about 50 people. Cosby's representatives let reporters know this was happening just two hours before it started in a small venue in Philadelphia's Germantown neighborhood. He told stories about his quiet Uncle William who loved to drink, the birth of his younger brother when he was a kid, and he joked about getting older and his blindness. COSBY: You laugh when blind people walk into things. Hey, guess what? Blind people laugh when sighted people fall down. (LAUGHTER) COSBY: (Laughter). ALLYN: At times, he did scat singing, directing a jazz band instrument by instrument. COSBY: Be dee bum. Ba deeble weeble. Ba da bee doo bee doo (ph). UNIDENTIFIED MUSICIAN: (Playing woodwind instrument). COSBY: It sounds much better with him doing it. (LAUGHTER) ALLYN: At one point, he left his wooden stool and got behind the band's drum kit and played some beats before he was replaced by an 11-year-old drummer, who he had some banter with. COSBY: Who am I? UNIDENTIFIED BOY: Bill Cosby. COSBY: And what do I do? UNIDENTIFIED BOY: You're a comedian. COSBY: I used to be a comedian. (LAUGHTER) ALLYN: Used to is the key phrase. Cosby's comedy career was shaken following dozens of women accusing him of sexual abuse spanning decades. Then there was the 80-year-old's two-week criminal trial last year that ended in a hung jury. Cosby's second trial, on the same charges, that he drugged and molested a woman at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004, is set to start in April, yet his avuncular spirit at the club betrayed this past. Not one word about his accusers or his new trial made it into his routine. DAVID HARRIS: So he's reintroducing himself as that old comedian, that funny guy. And that's how he wants to be thought of now. ALLYN: David Harris is a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Before Cosby's first trial he kept a low profile, but this time around, Cosby had dinner at an Italian restaurant and invited the media. He's made publicized stops at barbershops and bakeries, and now this freewheeling performance. Harris says the climate during his next trial will be different. HARRIS: What with the Me Too movement very strong out there, he needs all the help he can get in terms of public sympathy from any person who might sit on the jury. (SOUNDBITE OF JAZZ CLUB AMBIENCE) ALLYN: Back at the jazz club in Philadelphia, where most gave Cosby a friendly reception, views on Cosby's retrial varied. Craig McIver, a longtime friend of Cosby's and jazz drummer, said he thinks the jury will acquit Cosby. McIver says he doesn't believe the accusations. CRAIG MCIVER: I've been around a lot of famous people as a professional drummer, and I can tell you, people throw themselves at these people. They really do. ALLYN: McIver wasn't sitting far from club regular Julia Conway. She had a different take on the Cosby scandal. JULIA CONWAY: I believe the women. I really do. ALLYN: Conway says she's glad prosecutors in Pennsylvania decided to refile criminal charges against Cosby. CONWAY: I feel as though it's too many women for them to make up similar stories. If there were a few I think it would be different. ALLYN: For NPR News, I'm Bobby Allyn in Philadelphia. DAVID GREENE, HOST: In Puerto Rico, a third of homes and businesses are still, still without electricity months after Hurricane Maria flattened the power grid there. The island's publicly owned power utility has been dogged by issues for years. And now Puerto Rico's governor, Ricardo Rossello, is trying something new. He has a plan to privatize the power company over the next 18 months. Here's NPR's Adrian Florido. ADRIAN FLORIDO, BYLINE: In a televised address from the governor's mansion, Rossello harshly criticized the public utility, which he said had abandoned maintenance of the electric grid over the last decade, making it ripe for the total destruction it suffered during Hurricane Maria. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) RICARDO ROSSELLO: (Speaking Spanish). FLORIDO: "The electric energy authority will cease to exist the way it so deficiently does today," Rossello said. He added that in the coming days, the government would begin working to sell the utility to private companies, which he said would transform the electric grid into a, quote, "modern, efficient and less expensive one." (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) ROSSELLO: (Speaking Spanish). FLORIDO: "This will be Puerto Rico's leap toward modernity," the governor said. In Puerto Rico, nearly a third of the public utility's customers remain without electricity more than four months after Maria. As it's struggled to restore power, the utility known as PREPA has also been mired in controversy facing accusations of issuing inflated grid repair contracts and uphoarding (ph) critical supplies needed to fix the power grid. PREPA is also $9 billion in debt. Talk of privatizing it has been going on since before Maria hit. In August, the board that the U.S. Congress put in place to oversee Puerto Rico's troubled finances signaled support for privatization. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Speaking Spanish). FLORIDO: After the governor's address on Monday, Thomas Rivera Schatz, the president of Puerto Rico's Senate, said legislative leaders support the plan and will pass a bill to make it legal. Others were critical. San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz tweeted that the plan was putting the island's economic future in the hands of private interests. Ex-governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla said he was worried about the jobs of utility workers. The Utility Workers Union also opposes privatization. On Monday evening, Jose Ortiz Rodriguez (ph) was sitting in a plaza near the governor's mansion in San Juan. He said he opposed privatizing the electric utility, too. JOSE ORTIZ RODRIGUEZ: (Speaking Spanish). FLORIDO: "I think the government made its work difficult on purpose," he said, "so it could justify this move." But Angel Antonio Lopez (ph), who was sitting nearby, said he was happy about the plan. ANGEL ANTONIO LOPEZ: (Speaking Spanish). FLORIDO: "Because it'll bring more competition," he said, "and we'll be able to choose the utility company that serves us best." Adrian Florido, NPR News, San Juan, Puerto Rico. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GREENE: All right, we do want to mention a developing story we're watching closely this morning. A tsunami warning has been issued for the coast of Alaska. Authorities are urging coastal residents to move to higher ground after a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck some 160 miles off the coast of Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska. There are no immediate reports of damage or injuries. We're going to bring you the latest developments on this story as they come in. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Good morning, I'm Rachel Martin. A California resident presumably named Bob wanted to make sure people could find his address. So he made a legit-looking road sign reading Bob's house with an arrow pointing to the right. And he hung it up on the side of the road right under a sign for the town of Coto de Caza. Officials noticed it earlier this month and they took it down. In a Facebook post, they said Bob could pick up his sign at city hall, no questions asked, and maybe keep it as a nice wall hanging at home. It's MORNING EDITION. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Federal government workers are back on the job today. The government has reopened. This follows a change of heart by some Senate Democrats. Thirty-two of them opted to side with Republicans and restore government funding through February 8. Congress now has just three weeks to reach an agreement on government spending as well as on immigration. So what's going to happen now? Let's ask NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley. Hey, Scott. SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, David. GREENE: All right. So this whole shutdown revolved around DACA. That is the program protecting young immigrants who are in the country illegally as children. No agreement was reached on that. So what's changed here? HORSLEY: Not much has changed for DACA recipients. They're still in limbo just as they've been since last September when President Trump announced plans to phase out the Obama-era protections they've been getting. Last Friday, the senators who voted to shut down the government were demanding permanent protection for these young immigrants. They didn't get that. What they did get was a pledge from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to find some kind of solution over the next few weeks - or failing that, to have an open debate on the Senate floor. That's a pretty thin reed, but it was enough to change the votes of 30 senators and reopen the government. GREENE: So you have Democrats wanting it to look like Republicans have been standing in the way of protecting young immigrants. You have Republicans who are now almost doing a victory dance saying that the Democrats were playing political games holding the government shutdown for several days - any sense for who came out ahead here? HORSLEY: Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell almost smiled yesterday. Progressive Democrats, on the other hand, they're the ones sending angry emails that their allies capitulated. The real winners here, I think, are going to be hard to assess until we actually get through this next period and see if there is, in fact, some protection for the dreamers. But, you know, there was a group of centrist senators, both Democrats and Republicans, who wanted to both help DACA recipients and keep the government open. They succeeded yesterday in beating back the far left, the progressive wing who were insisting that DACA protection be put above everything else. The question now is can they beat back the far right who want more draconian changes in the American immigration system. GREENE: And, Scott, where is President Trump in all this? HORSLEY: He is still looking for more money for border security. He wants an end to the visa lottery. He wants big changes to the legal immigration system to make it more weighted to high-skilled immigrants and less weighted to family members of those who are already here. Over the weekend, the president stayed largely out of sight, and that was probably helpful for his fellow Republicans. We'll see if he plays a more active role going forward. He did meet yesterday once it became clear that the government was going to reopen. He met with six Republicans, including a couple of hard-liners, Tom Cotton and David Perdue. He also met with a couple of Democratic Senators, Joe Manchin and Doug Jones. They were in that group of Democrats who voted to keep the government open all along. GREENE: And meanwhile, I just want to ask you about another subject. The White House has introduced some new import tariffs with China being singled out for a big one, which seems significant. What's going on here? HORSLEY: These are tariffs on washing machines and solar cells that foreign manufacturers have been evading some of the existing tariffs by shifting production around. You know, the Trump administration has been threatening to impose tariffs like this for some time. We'll see if it's the beginning of a trend - still waiting to see what happens with steel and aluminum. On solar cells, there was a divide between the manufacturers and the installers. And in this case, the Trump administration sided with the domestic manufacturers. GREENE: NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley - Scott, thanks. HORSLEY: You're welcome. DAVID GREENE, HOST: OK, some big news here in LA this morning - the nominations for the 90th Academy Awards were announced in Beverly Hills, Calif. And the supernatural romance "The Shape Of Water" swept the nominations, earning 13 in all. (SOUNDBITE OF ALEXANDRE DESPLAT'S "THE SHAPE OF WATER") GREENE: Yes, that's the theme from the movie we're hearing there. That music is a great way to segue to NPR arts correspondent Mandalit del Barco, who is covering a lot of film news. She's in Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival - news there, news here in LA. Hi, Mandalit, how are you. MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: Good morning, David. GREENE: Well, before we get to "The Shape Of Water," some history made this morning, right? DEL BARCO: That's right. You know, this year's nominees include Rachel Morrison, the cinematographer also known as the director of photography for "Mudbound." And this morning, she became the first woman in the history of the Academy Awards to earn a nomination in this category. The first woman - and we're at number 90 this year. Other notable nominations are Greta Gerwig as best director for "Lady Bird." A woman has only won best director one other time. That was Kathryn Bigelow in 2010 for "The Hurt Locker." And Jordan Peele will compete against her and others for his work on "Get Out," making him just the fifth black man nominated in this category. And, David, you might be shocked to learn that Meryl Streep was nominated for her role as Katharine Graham in "The Post." That's really a big shocker, right? GREENE: Not so shocking, everyone expected that - but what a performance - and could be some groundbreaking groundbreaking wins this year at the Oscars. Well, let's get back to "Shape Of Water" - 13 nominations. I mean, and that's for a movie on a pretty shoestring budget - right? - just under $20 million to make this. DEL BARCO: Yes, exactly. And, you know, this is the first nomination for Guillermo del Toro since 2007 when he was nominated for "Pan's Labyrinth." And his lead actors in "The Shape Of Water" are also nominated in the best actor categories. And Guillermo del Toro could join his friends, fellow Mexican directors Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu who won the top Oscars in the past few years for their films "Gravity," "Birdman" and "The Revenant." And, David, it could be a big win for Mexico if "Coco" wins as best animated feature. It was a love letter to Mexico and the Day of the Dead holiday. It's catchy song "Remember Me" is also up for best song. GREENE: And we should say though. "Shape Of Water" getting all of these nominations - getting the most nominations does not necessarily mean that you win best picture. So what other films are competing for that category? DEL BARCO: Well, that category could go up to 10 pictures. But there were nine nominations this year. And that included "Call Me By Your Name," "Darkest Hour," "Dunkirk." We have "Get Out" and "Lady Bird," "Phantom Thread," "The Post" - of course, "Shape Of Water," like you said, and "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri." GREENE: A big list - and we should say before I let you go. You're in Park City covering Sundance. And isn't often - Sundance is often a preview for what movies might get to the Oscars, right? So there might be some familiar titles here for you. DEL BARCO: Yes, last year, the horror film "Get Out" was a secret midnight premiere here - the hottest ticket in town. "The Big Sick" was a film at this festival as was "Call Me By Your Name" and "Mudbound" and three of the documentary nominations. So, David, I'm now off to see a few more movies that we might be talking about this time next year. GREENE: You go do that. NPR arts correspondent Mandalit del Barco joining us from member station KPCW in Park City, Utah - thanks, Mandalit. DEL BARCO: You're welcome, David. (SOUNDBITE OF BENJAMIN BRATT SONG, REMEMBER ME") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: There were protests yesterday in Seoul, South Korea, a protest that disrupted a visit by North Korean officials. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting in foreign language). MARTIN: The protesters told NPR they are skeptical that these new plans for uniting the two Korean teams at the next month's Winter Olympics will ease tensions over the North's nuclear program. Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth shares that skepticism. I spoke with her shortly after she returned from a visit to Japan and South Korea. TAMMY DUCKWORTH: There's no illusions among our allies and our own military leaders that the North Koreans are not continuing to pursue to refine their nuclear capabilities even as they participate in the Olympics. MARTIN: We spoke with the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, just recently on this program. And he argued that President Trump's strategy on North Korea, this strongman approach, might eventually end up breaking this long stalemate. Let's listen to this clip. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST) RYAN CROCKER: It may just be that the difference in tone that President Trump has existed, it may do something down the line there. MARTIN: What do you make of that? DUCKWORTH: Well, the problem is we don't know if the difference that he makes is going to be good or bad. Frankly, Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea, is facing a major economic crisis at home and he's telling his own people, yes, you're going to be starving, no, you're not getting the, you know, medicines and the food that you need, but it's important for us to put all our money in this nuclear program because the rest of the world and especially America is out to get us. And we have in Donald Trump someone who actually provides him with the tweets and the actual clips of him saying these things. He might as well be working for the North Korean propaganda machine. MARTIN: So at the same time, the Trump administration will argue that what has happened in the past, this tactic of strategic patience as it was called when it comes to North Korea, that that has not yielded results over decades. So if this isn't going to work, what will? DUCKWORTH: Well, when I talk to the experts on the ground, both in Japan and in Korea, they said two things in particular. First and foremost, that we must maintain a strong military defense and that there can be no gap between the United States and Korea and the United States and Japan when it comes to a unified defense and then we have to invest those resources. The other thing that they're saying is that the sanctions, the new sanctions that have just been imposed by the United Nations, are actually starting to work. And they think that that is in fact one of the reasons why North Korea came back to the table and are sending Olympians. MARTIN: Lastly, I understand you were able to talk to some defectors. What did you take away from those conversations as to what life is like in North Korea right now? DUCKWORTH: You know, I talked to a gentleman who is spending his time now that he's in freedom trying to rescue human trafficking victims because the Chinese are accepting North Korean slave labor. And in fact, many North Korean women are being sold into China. Most people don't realize that slave labor is one of the biggest exports out of North Korea and a major source of revenue for them. And I think this is where additional sanctions, additional diplomacy with China and Russia will yield some results. MARTIN: Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois. We've been talking about her recent trip to South Korea and her visit to the Demilitarized Zone. Thank you so much for making the time, Senator. DUCKWORTH: Thanks for having me on, Rachel. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: The shutdown is over but in many ways, Congress is still stuck in the same place. Republicans have to come up with a spending bill that will pass with support from Democrats. And Democrats are insisting that it has to include a fix for DACA. These are protections that would run out in March. So where's the White House in all these negotiations? And what does President Trump want to see in any compromise bill? We have Hogan Gidley on the line with us now. He's special assistant to the president and deputy White House press secretary. Mr. Gidley, thanks for being with us. HOGAN GIDLEY: Thank you so much for having me, Rachel. MARTIN: The reason Democrats finally signed on to the temporary deal to get the government back open is because Senate Republicans agreed to take up the issue of DACA. This covers some of the people who were brought here illegally as children. President Trump has said he wants to find a solution for the DACA recipients too. So what does that look like, according to the White House? GIDLEY: Well, the president has been very clear. He does want a solution. He wants a bipartisan solution. He's been talking about that for quite some time. But he's also been clear on this, that any national security package must include four main components. One is border security with a wall, two is ending chain migration, extended chain migration, three is ending the visa lottery program and four is finding a lasting, long-term solution for DACA, something that has eluded this country for quite some time. MARTIN: But let me ask you, a couple weeks ago, the president said, hey, I'm going to leave this to Congress. Let them come up with a deal, I'm going to sign it, as long as it met those four criteria that you just laid out. A bipartisan group of lawmakers did that. They came up with a plan that met all those criteria. They took it to the president and he said, no. GIDLEY: It didn't include any of those things, quite frankly. Senator Graham and Senator Durbin came to the president with a bill that actually increased illegal immigrants, increased the chain migration and granted legalization to as many as 8 million illegal immigrants and didn't provide any funding for a border wall whatsoever. MARTIN: That's not how they characterize it. GIDLEY: That's - well, I understand that. But a study by DHS and DOJ proves that. And when you look at the Migration Policy Institute's analysis of how many people are in this country illegally when you include DREAMers and the DACA recipients, you're looking at about 3.2 million people. Senator Graham and Senator Durbin's bill would give them legal status and then also give legal status for three years to their parents. And once they became citizens, it also granted them the ability to have chain migration for their aunts and uncles and cousins and second cousins and third cousins... MARTIN: So the president changed... GIDLEY: ...Making the total around $10 million. MARTIN: The president changed his mind. He at first was hands off on this and said, Congress, you deal with it, I'll sign it. I'm not going to nitpick. And then he decided to get into it. GIDLEY: Well, I wouldn't say nitpick. It didn't address any of the issues he talked about. I mean, again, when they came to him with a border wall funding, DHS commissioned a study and it said it needed $18 billion - not wanted but needed $18 billion for a wall. They came - Senator Durbin and Senator Graham came to the president said, we have a deal. It's bipartisan, everyone's excited. He said, great, bring it over. They brought it over and it had $1.6 billion, less than 1/10 of what was needed to complete a wall. So it was a complete... MARTIN: So you want more funding for that border wall in any compromise deal. What about a DACA solution... GIDLEY: Well, we need more funding for it. That's from DHS. MARTIN: What about a DACA solution? Would the president support a pathway to citizenship? GIDLEY: The president wants everything on the table because you have to have that in order to negotiate something that's long lasting. He's been very clear that he wants to protect those folks that are here, the youngest people in the DREAMers scenario and the DACA recipients. That's something he wants to do. But as far as... MARTIN: What would stand in the way? What would stand in the way from him supporting a pathway to citizenship? GIDLEY: Well, what would stand in the way from anything is legislators, excuse me, congressmen or senators who deal disingenuously. When they call him and tell him they have a bipartisan deal and they've come to an agreement and they bring it in front of him and it doesn't address any of the major areas he asked for, that's going to be a problem. And let's just be clear about Senator Durbin and Senator Graham. When they called the president and presented him a plan that was, quote, unquote, "bipartisan," they made it sound as though they'd worked so hard and gave up to get a little and worked back and forth. Senator Graham and Senator Durbin have been on the same page on immigration for decades. So it wasn't a long stretch for them. They've had this bill sitting in their back pocket it seems like for a while. MARTIN: You don't consider them to be representative of a true bipartisan solution. GIDLEY: No. In fact, if you look at the Harvard study that just came out, I mean, it's an 80 percent issue people want to close down the borders. It's a 70 percent issue to end chain migration, a 68 percent issue to end the visa lottery program and ask people to come here on merit. That's a 70 percent issue, and this is a study from Harvard. So Senator Graham and Senator Durbin are so far out of the mainstream on what this country thinks. MARTIN: The American population also wants a solution for the DACA recipients, republicans and democrats. GIDLEY: Absolutely and so does the president. He's been very clear about that. MARTIN: I want to move on now because there are reports about some staffing issues that we should address, a report specifically that the president was not pleased with how his chief of staff, John Kelly, characterized his evolution on immigration and the border wall. Does John Kelly still enjoy the full confidence and support of President Trump? GIDLEY: Absolutely. They have a mutual respect for each other. I've seen them work together on multiple occasions. They are working so well together. And it's so indicative of how the press coverage has been with this president when 90 percent of the coverage has been deemed negative by various independent polling companies and then also showing so much of that coverage has to do with palace intrigue. It's just, quite frankly, nonsense. MARTIN: Axios, the news site, is reporting that FBI director Christopher Wray threatened to resign over pressure from the president and the attorney general. They reportedly want Ray to fire Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. What can you tell us about that? Did Wray threaten to resign because he didn't like pressure coming from the White House? GIDLEY: Actually, nothing - I haven't spoken with the president about that, so I've really got nothing to add. MARTIN: Hogan Gidley, deputy White House press secretary, thanks for your time this morning. GIDLEY: Thank you. DAVID GREENE, HOST: All right. Now we're going to get a rare look into the Syrian city of Raqqa. This was the de facto capital of ISIS, but Syrian rebels, backed by a U.S.-led air campaign, forced ISIS out last year. NPR's Michele Kelemen went into Raqqa with the Trump administration's top aid official. MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: In the dimly lit basement of what was once a soccer stadium in Raqqa, Centcom Commander Joseph Votel, and Mark Green, who runs the U.S. Agency for International Development, are walking through the rubble and listening to stories about what went on here. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: They used to use a lot of these for jail cells. KELEMEN: Green says he got a sense of what he calls the depths of their evil. MARK GREEN: When you walked to that soccer stadium, went down below and you looked at some of those rooms that were used as torture chambers, it's a reminder of what people have been through. KELEMEN: But Green saw something else on his first tour of Raqqa. GREEN: There's obviously all signs of gloom and terrible things that have happened, but I'm an optimist, and I look and see signs of hopefulness in kids playing, in people trying to restore some normalcy to their lives. KELEMEN: There are blocks and blocks of rubble in central Raqqa, but there's also the occasional store and many children showing the victory sign as Americans pass by in a convoy. USAID and the State Department have a small team working in northern Syria to help restore water and irrigation systems and oversee contractors clearing thousands of IEDs in mines left behind by ISIS. General Votel says it's all part of the U.S. military strategy. JOSEPH VOTEL: Our coalition campaign is not over there. We're moving into what I frankly regard as the more challenging, the more difficult part of the campaign, and that is how we consolidate the gains and how we get people back into their homes. KELEMEN: Officials won't call it nation building and insist they're not involved in an open-ended mission. They say this is just about stabilizing the area and helping local partners on the ground like those who fought ISIS on America's behalf. VOTEL: The manpower is here in Raqqa. We need to harness the international community to get the big resources in here. KELEMEN: But unlike in Iraq, where Votel also visited this week and where 18 countries are helping the U.S. train Iraqi forces, the U.S. is doing this on its own so far in northern Syria, where it doesn't even have permission from the government. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently laid out a case for a long-term U.S. presence to keep Iran in check and encourage a peace process that would ultimately bring about a government that the U.S. can work with. The delegation that went to Raqqa had more immediate concerns on their minds. YASMIN WAHID: (Foreign language spoken). KELEMEN: This woman, Yasmin Wahid (ph), says her family was being held by ISIS as human shields before they managed to escape Raqqa last year. Now living at a camp a couple of hours to the north, she told Green that she'd like to return home but there's still no water or electricity. GREEN: I've been to other camps in other parts of the world where people have lost hope, where people make it clear they're not going home. These people want to go home. So there's an immediate job to be done. And if we can build the world's support for it, if we can build the resources that are necessary, I think we can solidify the extraordinary progress that we've seen from our men and women in uniform. KELEMEN: But USAID has been reluctant to lure people back to Raqqa until experts can get a handle on the land mines and booby traps still being found in houses and buildings throughout the city. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Raqqa, Syria. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Earlier today a strong earthquake in the Atlantic Ocean caused a tsunami warning in Alaska. Here's the voice of an officer from the Kodiak, Alaska, police force. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) DEREK BEAVER: Hello, Kodiak. Sergeant Beaver here. Just want to give a reminder to everybody. This is not a drill. This is an actual tsunami warning. Everybody, get at least a hundred feet above sea level. MARTIN: That warning was eventually downgraded, but not before it caused many Alaskans to evacuate their communities for higher ground. One of those who was evacuated, reporter Emily Kwong of member station KCAW in Sitka, Alaska. Emily joins us now on the line. Thanks so much for being with us. EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: Thank you, Rachel. Good morning. MARTIN: Good morning. So we understand things are stable at this moment, but what happened when the alarm went off? KWONG: Well, it's quite a violent way to wake up in Sitka, Alaska. I woke up to the sound of my roommate actually pounding on the door saying, get up, get up. We received a text message alert of some kind saying that there was a tsunami warning, though no siren was going off yet. That did happen eventually around 1:20 a.m. local time, and that means evacuations immediately to two schools, Sitka High School and Keet Gooshi Heen Elementary School. So I went there. MARTIN: And what was it... KWONG: And a voice boomed overhead telling us evacuate. Yeah. MARTIN: And so what was the greater scene like? I mean, I imagine this doesn't happen all the time so people were clearly understandably anxious? KWONG: A bit, though it's kind of old hat for people in island communities, those who've lived here for a long time. Some didn't leave their homes, those on higher ground. But for those in the schools, for the kids, it was a little bit like a sleepover that hadn't been planned. Everyone was there in their pajamas and I saw kids dribbling basketballs and playing games and roughhousing each other, trying to take a nap and shield their faces from the fluorescent bulbs, and some parents talking, wondering aloud whether school was going to happen that day. So it was fairly calm for a tsunami warning... MARTIN: Right. KWONG: ...Though certainly concern until we received the all clear about an hour and a half later. MARTIN: So at this point there are no concerns? Everything is fine? KWONG: There are no concerns as of now. So there were some tidal fluctuations reported in Sitka's harbors by the National Weather Service of about 0.4 feet. So 4 inches. And that's not enough to cause a major concern here so everyone's gone back to their homes, back to sleep, potentially. MARTIN: Back to sleep. KWONG: But no concern here right now. MARTIN: OK. Emily Kwong of member station KCAW. Again, a strong earthquake in the Pacific Ocean caused a tsunami warning in Alaska. That warning was eventually downgraded. Emily, thanks so much. KWONG: Thank you, Rachel. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: In the introduction to this report, we mistakenly say the earthquake was in the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, it was in the Pacific Ocean.] DAVID GREENE, HOST: Well, another milestone in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. NPR has confirmed that the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, sat for an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller last week. Let's talk about this with NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, who's here. Hi, Carrie. CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Hi, David. GREENE: So what exactly are you learning? JOHNSON: Well, two Justice Department officials confirmed to me this morning that Attorney General Sessions did, in fact, sit for a voluntary interview last week with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. That was first reported by The New York Times, and, David, it seems to be the first publicly known interview with a Trump cabinet official. Remember, Mueller's investigating Russian interference in the presidential election, contacts with the Trump campaign, and allegations of obstruction of justice in the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Jeff Sessions is in a position to know something about all of that. GREENE: OK. So we know what Sessions might know, the question is how helpful he may have been in advancing Mueller's investigation, right? Do we have a sense for that? JOHNSON: Right now these lips are zipped. The Justice Department is not characterizing what Sessions said in the interview and Special Counsel Mueller is declining to comment on the ongoing investigation. David, Mueller has shown he can keep a secret. Remember, he reached a plea deal with foreign policy aide George Papadopoulos last year that came as a surprise even to Trump officials. It's not clear what, exactly, these investigators have up their sleeves. GREENE: Can we just take a step back for a moment? I feel like you can lose sight of the broader picture here when a story, you know, moves along as this one has. This is the attorney general of the United States as a witness in an ongoing investigation. This is no small thing. JOHNSON: No small thing. Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation last March because he was so involved in the Trump campaign, but we also know Sessions met with the Russian ambassador, Sergei Kislyak, at least twice during the campaign. And even though he was recused, Sessions did play a role in advising President Trump to fire FBI Director James Comey last year. Democrats wonder if that was an attempt to obstruct justice, to throw a wrench in these investigations. Now, Sessions has said that Trump was right to fire Comey, but that's a matter of interest to investigators at the FBI and on Capitol Hill. GREENE: OK. Carrie, I know there are a lot of unknowns here, but this investigation by Robert Mueller now - what? - eight months old or so, I mean, any thought about what this Sessions interview could tell us about where Mueller is trying to go here? JOHNSON: To regular people, this calendar may seem slow, but in the context of an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department and the FBI, David, it's actually really fast. GREENE: This is no time (laughter). JOHNSON: Really fast - remember, Robert Mueller has already charged Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, his deputy Rick Gates. Mueller has already reached please with George Papadopoulos, that foreign policy aide, and also Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and former White House strategist Steve Bannon recently got a grand jury subpoena. Now, it looks like Bannon has agreed to do a voluntary interview, like Sessions did, instead of a forced one, but the Mueller team is now nearing the president's inner circle here and lawyers involved in this matter think, before it's all over, the president himself, Donald Trump, is going to have to sit for an interview with the special counsel Robert Mueller and some FBI agents, no information yet on when that may take place though. GREENE: And when an investigation takes place in secret like this, we have no idea about whether it could be weeks, months, years, who knows? I mean, there could be news at any moment. JOHNSON: The White House keeps saying it's going to be over soon, but the White House has no control over that, only Robert Mueller and the Justice Department do. GREENE: OK. NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson reporting this morning. Carrie, thanks. JOHNSON: My pleasure. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Come with us on a journey inside the Earth. Well, inside a special layer in the Earth. A quarter of the Northern Hemisphere is covered with what's called permafrost, and for the first time in centuries, the permafrost is beginning to warm up because of climate change. TOM DOUGLAS: And that's a mammoth bone right there. MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF, BYLINE: Whoa. It's just sticking out of the wall. DOUGLAS: Just sticking out of the wall. GREENE: As it thaws, the permafrost is unleashing something that could affect the whole world. NPR's Michaeleen Doucleff reports. DOUCLEFF: We start off 40 feet underground inside a tunnel about as wide as an SUV. All around us are signs of extinct creatures. Tusks are sticking out from the ceiling, and a skull pokes out from the ground. Ancient bones. DOUGLAS: Where we are here has been dated at about 14,000 years ago. DOUCLEFF: I think this is one of the coolest places I've been to. DOUGLAS: Really? All right. Cool. Neat. DOUCLEFF: That's Tom Douglas, a geochemist with the U.S. Army. He says, back in the 1960s, the Army dug this tunnel so they could study the permafrost. All the walls are covered in a soft brown dust, but what's underneath is hard as concrete. DOUGLAS: If I tap on this now, you'll see it's hard as a rock. DOUCLEFF: Yeah. DOUGLAS: That's permafrost. Anything in there is frozen. You can even see the little marks on there. It's pretty hard. DOUCLEFF: Permafrost is technically frozen soil, but think of it in terms of chocolate cake. Typically that cake is spongy, soft. But if you take that cake and dip it into water and freeze it, it turns hard. That's exactly what happens to soil when you freeze it. You get permafrost. We walk deeper into the tunnel. DOUGLAS: All right. So keep going. DOUCLEFF: Those woolly mammoth bones aren't the only bizarre thing hidden in permafrost. Just then we walk right through another one. OK. DOUGLAS: So here's a nice wedge. DOUCLEFF: It looks like a giant wall of ice, but it's really an upside down iceberg buried in the earth, and the tunnel cuts right through it. It's a huge chunk of ice all around us. DOUGLAS: Yeah. I mean, it's basically the size of a house or something. DOUCLEFF: Wow. These icebergs are buried throughout Alaska. They're buried under homes, under office buildings, bridges. And they've been frozen solid for centuries, even longer. They actually hold the ground together. Here's the problem. DOUGLAS: That's about 99 percent water ice by volume. DOUCLEFF: So when the ground warms up... DOUGLAS: Imagine turning that into water. You'll leave a trench in the ground that people could fall into, right? DOUCLEFF: Or, this whole tunnel could collapse? DOUGLAS: Exactly. DOUCLEFF: That's exactly what's happening across Alaska. A study in 2016 found that these giant buried icebergs are melting rapidly. New lakes are forming in some places. They're draining in others. Rivers are appearing where they never were before, and the land is sinking. Clearly this is going to be a big problem for Alaskans and other people up North. But that's not what worries Tom Douglas the most. There's something else hidden here that could affect the whole world. DOUGLAS: Keep going down. Watch your head. DOUCLEFF: Douglas takes me deeper down into the tunnel. DOUGLAS: This is really an amazing feature of the tunnel. It's the only place we see it. DOUCLEFF: He shines his flashlight up to the ceiling. DOUGLAS: What does that look like to you? DOUCLEFF: Like grass. DOUGLAS: Green grass, right? DOUCLEFF: Yeah. It's green? DOUGLAS: It's green grass. DOUCLEFF: Whoa. DOUGLAS: Yeah. See that? DOUCLEFF: Wait. We have to tell people that, like, the grass is actually growing down. DOUGLAS: Upside down. DOUCLEFF: Yeah. DOUGLAS: This was in ice, and had been preserved that way for 25,000 years. I mean, if I... DOUCLEFF: Wait. This is 25,000-year-old grass? DOUGLAS: Yeah. DOUCLEFF: That's incredible. DOUGLAS: Yeah. Really amazing. DOUCLEFF: You see, the thing is, basically anything that's died in the Arctic over the past hundred-thousand years is buried and preserved down here. The permafrost is packed with plants, like this grass, and dead animals, like those woolly mammoths we saw earlier. All this life is made of carbon. In fact, there's a massive amount of carbon down here. There's more carbon trapped in this permafrost than all the carbon humans have spewed into the atmosphere, first with steam trains then with their cars, planes, coal plants, everything we've done since the Industrial Revolution. DOUGLAS: The permafrost contains twice as much carbon as is currently in Earth's atmosphere, 1,600 billion metric tons. DOUCLEFF: Right now this carbon is trapped, frozen. So the big question is what happens to this carbon as the permafrost thaws? Because, you see, there's not just dead creatures in the permafrost. Down here, we are also surrounded by something that's coming back to life. DOUGLAS: See, that white flag right there is where you've got the 27,000-year-old material. DOUCLEFF: A few years ago, Douglas and his colleagues ran a very simple experiment. They brought big drills into the tunnel and cut out chunks of ice. DOUGLAS: We collected basically pieces about the size of a Coca-Cola can. DOUCLEFF: They took the ice back to the lab... DOUGLAS: Let it slowly come up to room temperature. DOUCLEFF: ...And then looked for signs of life. A few days later, something started growing like gangbusters - ancient bacteria. DOUGLAS: This is material that stayed frozen for 25,000 years old, and, given the right environmental conditions, came back alive again vigorously. DOUCLEFF: Once the bacteria warmed up, they were hungry, and they started eating the dead plants and animals, turning their carbon into gases. DOUGLAS: Both carbon dioxide and methane. DOUCLEFF: Those are the two main gases that cause climate change. Now, that was in the lab. But imagine these bacteria waking up as the permafrost thaws all around the Arctic - in Canada, Greenland, Russia, here in Alaska. Charles Miller is a chemist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who studies permafrost. He says that in the past few years they've started seeing the microbes here waking up, warming up and releasing gases. CHARLES MILLER: There's been quite a tremendous change in the temperature of the permafrost. This warming is causing carbon dioxide to be liberated from the land surface so we see a net release of carbon from the land back to the atmosphere. DOUCLEFF: Miller says they don't know yet how much carbon will get released from thawing permafrost or how fast it will happen. It's a big wild card of climate change. But once gases start coming off, it could form this type of feedback loop. MILLER: Over which we would have essentially zero control. DOUCLEFF: Where the gas coming from the ground warms the Earth, in turn causing more gas to be released, and more and more warming. Michaeleen Doucleff, NPR News. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Ursula Le Guin has died at 88. Her books included "A Wizard Of Earthsea" and "The Left Hand of Darkness." She wrote science fiction and fantasy with a literary flair and a feminist sensibility. NPR Books editor Petra Mayer says she influenced countless writers who came after. PETRA MAYER, BYLINE: Ursula K. Le Guin submitted her first story to the magazine Astounding Science Fiction when she was just 11 years old. It was about a time machine, and it was rejected. That didn't stop her. Very little stopped her. When she began publishing as an adult in the 1960s, sci-fi and fantasy had few women and no respect. But she helped change that, winning a slew of awards and forcing mainstream critics to pay attention. Author Mary Robinette Kowal considered Le Guin a mentor and a friend. MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: I think that she did a lot for science fiction and fantasy, not just for women and women's roles because of her feminism but also legitimizing us as an art form. MAYER: Kowal met Le Guin when they worked together on an adaptation of one of Le Guin's stories, but she first read the "Earthsea" books when she was 12. "Earthsea" is a world of islands full of people who aren't white, which was revolutionary when the first book came out in 1968. It was also a world where magic was a balance between power and responsibility. KOWAL: What I remember most about it was the power of words - because that is how the magic in "The Wizard Of Earthsea" works - and how careless words could have hugely unintended consequences. MAYER: And Le Guin's words had a lot of power. Before she created "Earthsea," wizards were old white men with long beards - Merlin and Gandalf. Kowal says Le Guin turned that image on its head, introducing characters like a young magician learning his craft and eventually women who weren't just the wicked sorceresses of the past. So if you're reading a book about, say, a boy at a magic school or a young woman who discovers she carries a long-lost talent for wizardry, you're reading someone who owes something to Le Guin. And if you're reading a short story collection that blurs the borders of the speculative and the real, you're reading someone who owes something to Le Guin because she was one of the first writers to cross those borders too. She was the daughter of two anthropologists, which had a profound effect on her work. You can see it in one of her best-known novels, "The Left Hand Of Darkness," which is about a man from Earth who arrives as a diplomat on a planet where gender is fluid and ambiguous. And he has to find a way to bridge the differences between his own world and theirs. It was far ahead of its time, and it has as much of anthropology and literary fiction in it as it does space saga. Again, Mary Robinette Kowal. KOWAL: There were a lot of people who will read an Ursula Le Guin book and go, well, this isn't science fiction, it's literature. But, of course, it is science fiction. And so a lot of times, she can be a gateway drug for people. MAYER: Le Guin did write plain old literature and children's books and volumes of advice for writers and poetry and essays on everything under the sun. In fact, as she told NPR in 2015... (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST) URSULA K. LE GUIN: I still kind of twitch and growl when I'm reduced to being the science fiction writer. I'm a novelist and increasingly a poet. And sometimes I wish they'd call me that. MAYER: Le Guin had stopped writing fiction by then. She said that well had gone dry. But she hadn't lost her voice. She attended the National Book Awards in 2014 to accept a lifetime achievement prize, which she did with a fiery speech about commerce, freedom and art. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) LE GUIN: Resistance and change often begin in art and very often in our art, the art of words. MAYER: Ursula K. Le Guin died Monday at her home in Portland with her husband by her side. She was 88. Petra Mayer, NPR News. (SOUNDBITE OF SHOOK'S "CHANGING WIND") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: This is the story of a document that few people have read, a document that's classified but is receiving a lot of publicity. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Yeah, some Republicans are promoting this classified paper by California Congressman Devin Nunes. He's chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He is also a prominent supporter of President Trump. And you may recall that Nunes said last year he was going to step back from the investigation of Russia's involvement in the U.S. election. But Nunes kept investigating on his own. And the result is a classified memo which some Republicans insist contains important information. INSKEEP: Let's talk about this with NPR's Ryan Lucas, who's in our studios. Good morning. RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Good morning. INSKEEP: I suppose we should begin by asking how it is that a classified memo has come to the public's attention so widely to begin with. LUCAS: Well, a lot of it has been through very public discussion by members of the House Intelligence Committee and generally Republicans in the House about the memo without actually telling the public what's in it. Because it's classified, we don't know what's in it. But what they have done is talked about potential abuses by the Obama administration - the Obama administration FBI and Justice Department - and what they say is surveillance of the Trump campaign. INSKEEP: OK. So I think I've seen this on social media. You have Republicans saying I've read this memo. This memo was horrible. This memo is terrible. There are terrible things in there. But of course, we can't know what the evidence is. This memo is - well, how did Nunes come up with this information, assuming there is information? LUCAS: Well, it's based on material that was provided by the FBI and the Department of Justice. And this is really an effort that Nunes has led since he stepped aside from leading the House investigation into... INSKEEP: He said he's going to do his own probe here. LUCAS: ...Russian interference here. Basically, he said I'm going to look into what I think are abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is used to conduct surveillance. And this is the output of that. This is the output of several months of investigation by the House Intelligence Committee's Republican staff. Democrats have not been a part of this. And Democrats are certainly not happy with the output. INSKEEP: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - that is the law that says that Americans cannot be surveilled by the intelligence community unless there is some kind of a warrant saying that they're an agent of a foreign power. And his suggestion is that Americans were surveilled anyway - although we don't know what the evidence is. If this is a classified memo - if it's in a room with the House Intelligence Committee - if it was produced by the Republicans, have Democrats been able to see it at all? LUCAS: Democrats certainly have been able to see it. And members of the House Intelligence Committee - Democrats on it have all said that this is really just a collection of talking points that Republicans have come up with. They say that it's a hit job on the FBI and that it basically aims to undermine Robert Mueller's investigation into, of course, possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. And they say that this is all part of a broader Republican effort to try to undermine Mueller... INSKEEP: Ryan... LUCAS: ...And support Trump. INSKEEP: ...You talk with people in the intelligence community. Do they think this is a hit job on the FBI? LUCAS: There's a lot of frustration with how the intelligence community has been attacked politically and being used as a tool politically in the broader kind of struggle over the Russia investigation and the Trump administration. There's certainly a lot of frustration at the FBI that it has been a target of these attacks. And it's something that's generating a lot of concern there. INSKEEP: And very briefly - could this memo ever be released? LUCAS: Republicans say they're looking for a way to do that, yes. INSKEEP: OK, Ryan. Thanks very much. LUCAS: Thank you. INSKEEP: NPR's Ryan Lucas. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) INSKEEP: President Trump is heading to Davos, Switzerland, today. GREENE: Yeah, to hang out with globalists, as his backers have sometimes called those who disagree with him. He's attending the World Economic Forum. This is an annual gathering of the world's business elites. And this year's theme - Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World. President Trump is going to be promoting the United States as the place in the world to do business. INSKEEP: NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson is covering this story. Good morning, Mara. MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve. INSKEEP: Isn't he hanging out with everybody he denounces, the president? LIASSON: (Laughter) Yes, he is. He is bringing a message to Davos about his accomplishments. GDP up, unemployment down, stock market roaring - this is what Gary Cohn, his top economic adviser, said yesterday. He's going to be telling those plutocrats that America is back in business - open for business. Instead of bringing his populist pitchfork, he's got his salesman's portfolio. And he's going to be telling these people he lowered taxes and cut regulations and they should invest in the U.S. INSKEEP: I guess we should remind people - this is an annual gathering of the global elite, of very, very rich people and powerful people from around the world. When they gathered a year ago, President Trump was just taking office. There was profound concern about what that meant for them and for countries around the world. What about this year? LIASSON: This year, they're feeling that Donald Trump has turned out to be a lot more friendly to the kind of people who go to Davos - those wealthy, elite globalist plutocrats - than many people thought. Although his rhetoric is still populist and protectionist, he hasn't drained the swamp. He just gave big tax cuts to the wealthy and to big businesses. So he doesn't seem like the populist revolutionary that they once thought he might be. He hasn't dropped his message about reciprocal trade, but he has not pulled out of a single trade deal yet with the exception of TPP, which is the Asian-Pacific trade deal which is moving forward without the U.S. now. He did put tariffs this week on a couple of products from China - washing machines and solar panels. We don't know yet if and how China will retaliate. But he has not pulled the U.S. out of the WTO or NAFTA. INSKEEP: I'm thinking of the word hobnob. You get to go and hobnob with other powerful people when you go to Davos. Who's he going to hobnob with? LIASSON: Yes, this is a uber-hobnobbing. INSKEEP: (Laughter) So who's on his list of hobnobbing? LIASSON: Well, he's going to have an actual formal meeting with the British prime minister, Theresa May. He's had some tensions with her. He's also going to meet with President Kagame of Rwanda, who is currently the chairman of the African Union. And this comes after Trump reportedly made those disparaging comments about African nations - why do we need more immigrants from those countries? - which, in a general way, he's denied. So one question is, will he have to acknowledge what he said or apologize, as many African nations have been demanding that he do? INSKEEP: Mara, always a pleasure talking with you. LIASSON: Thank you. INSKEEP: That's NPR's Mara Liasson. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) INSKEEP: We travel next to what's become the world's largest refugee camp. GREENE: Yeah, this is a camp in Bangladesh. And more than 800,000 Rohingya people are living in this one area. The refugees came from neighboring Myanmar. The majority were fleeing a brutal crackdown by the military there last fall. Now, Bangladesh had a plan to return them to Myanmar this week, but that effort is now on hold. INSKEEP: NPR's Jason Beaubien is at Cox's Bazar, which is the name of the urban area where this refugee camp has spread. Hi there, Jason. JASON BEAUBIEN, BYLINE: Hey. INSKEEP: What do you see when you're there? BEAUBIEN: Well, what you see is just this incredible expanse of shelter. I mean, it's actually not really in an urban area. All of the refugees have gone into these hills outside the city - the town of Cox's Bazar. And what's so amazing about this refugee camp - and I've gone to a lot of different refugee camps - this one just goes on and on as far as you can see. It's just these shelters packed right next to each other. I mean, you have to imagine, this is like the entire population of Washington, D.C., or Boston, just all of them moving out of one area and setting up these makeshift tents out in the countryside. It's just an almost unimaginable number of people sort of living out in the rough here. INSKEEP: What... BEAUBIEN: And there's also a lot of frustration and some - you know, it's incredible. I was talking to this one woman today. She just found out she was pregnant. I was at this clinic, and she just found out she was pregnant. And I asked her, you know, are you excited about that? And she said no, this is my last child. She's only 20. It's only her second child. And I said, why aren't you excited? And she said, you know, the Myanmar government wants to extinguish the Rohingya. And until this conflict is over, I don't want to bring any more Rohingya into the world. INSKEEP: Well, you can imagine the dilemma. Bangladesh isn't really happy to have them where they are. A lot of other countries don't necessarily want them. There was this plan to send them back to Myanmar, where they wouldn't have felt so welcome either. What happened to the plan to send them home? BEAUBIEN: So the plan is still on the table. It's simply been delayed. Bangladesh and Myanmar worked out this deal to essentially - they had said in the deal that they're going to send all of these refugees back into Myanmar. They halted that because they don't have the logistics in place. Myanmar wants to vet who's going to come in. They only, however, have just suspended it at the moment. And they say that they're going to move forward with it. INSKEEP: Is this a death sentence for some people, if they are sent back to Myanmar? BEAUBIEN: Well, that's what people here are telling me. They're saying that if they get sent back, they're just simply going to be killed. They have been a stateless group. They're a Muslim minority inside Myanmar. They've been harassed for years - decades by the government and pro-government troops there. And they say that they would be - a lot of them tell me directly, I'd be killed if I go back to Myanmar right now. INSKEEP: Are the Bangladeshi authorities willing to send them back rather than let them stay? BEAUBIEN: Bangladesh has a huge problem on its hands. I mean, we also are seeing frustration here. You've got this huge number of people now living in these hills. They're taking up resources. Bangladesh wants to get this problem solved. And so they're saying they would be willing to try sending them back if Myanmar agrees to take them and do it safely. INSKEEP: Jason, thank you very much. BEAUBIEN: You're welcome. INSKEEP: That's NPR's Jason Beaubien at a giant refugee camp in Bangladesh. (SOUNDBITE OF FLA.MINGO'S "WANDER") DAVID GREENE, HOST: Up until this week, Pennsylvania Republican Patrick Meehan was helping to lead the House Ethics Committee's investigation into sexual harassment. Well, now he is the subject of an investigation. Meehan denies sexually harassing a staff member, but, as NPR congressional correspondent Scott Detrow reports, he does admit he told her he was attracted to her. SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Last spring, Pat Meehan got noticeably jealous when he found out one of his staff members was in a serious relationship. So the suburban Philadelphia Republican tried to explain himself. He wrote her a letter and then told her in person... PATRICK MEEHAN: That I have an affection for her. But I clarified that beforehand that I was a happily married man. I was not looking for any kind of a relationship. DETROW: In an interview with Philadelphia Public Radio station WHYY, Meehan said he just wanted the much younger staffer to know how he felt. MEEHAN: I admitted that it was something that, from time to time, I struggled with. DETROW: As Meehan told his story Tuesday, one phrase stood out. MEEHAN: The term soulmate. And I can only tell you what it meant to me. DETROW: Meehan says it's a bond. MEEHAN: It related to the kind of kindred spirit that was going through the experiences that we shared together. And in my job, as with all colleagues like this, you know, there are highs. There are lows. There's excitement. There's all kinds of things that you deal with. DETROW: It's pretty unusual for a lawmaker to share all this with the press. Meehan has his reasons. MEEHAN: Because I've got people making accusations that somehow I have acted in a sexually harassing way. DETROW: He sees nothing wrong with telling a much younger subordinate he was attracted to her. The woman felt differently and filed a harassment complaint. After the lengthy congressional mediation process played out, Meehan paid her a taxpayer-funded settlement. And despite all that, he says he's still running for re-election. The woman's lawyer says in a statement she has repeatedly requested that Mr. Meehan cease discussing this matter. Scott Detrow, NPR News. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Now we have the story of newlyweds separated by an ocean. They are among many people left in limbo as President Trump's administration slows the flow of refugees to the United States to historically low levels. Here's Matt Katz of our member station WNYC. MATT KATZ, BYLINE: In many ways, Andre Twendele and Lisette Lukoji are typical newlyweds. They're affectionate, doting. They chat by phone every day. ANDRE TWENDELE: Oh, my God. We talk about everything. What did you eat? What are you doing? When are you going to sleep? KATZ: But they haven't seen each other in more than a year. Andre and Lisette are refugees who fled the Democratic Republic of Congo. Andre landed in the United States just days before the election of President Trump. Lisette remains stuck in a refugee camp in Malawi. Their story begins 12 years ago in Central Africa. Back then, Andre was a law student. TEWNDELE: I like to defend people, to stand for people. KATZ: He and his friends were arrested for leading a protest in opposition to the authoritarian rule of Congolese President Joseph Kabila. One night, Andre says the jail guards marched them out of their cells and deep into the forest. Andre had become friendly with one of the guards. So when they lined the students up, this guard made sure Andre was last. The first seven were shot and killed. Then the guard pretended to shoot Andre. He dropped, played dead. TEWNDELE: It was very, very bad. People died in my presence. My friends, they died in my presence. KATZ: Andre waited until the guards were gone and walked for hours, eventually hitching a ride to the Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi. TEWNDELE: So I start a new life, and it was not easy. KATZ: He fought hunger and illness and loneliness. Then, eight years into his life there, a woman named Lisette Lukoji walked into the camp, barefoot. Lisette says she also suffered under President Kabila. She says the regime jailed her after a dispute with her uncle, forcing her to leave her 2-year-old daughter, Lorette, behind. And she says three prison guards raped her. She escaped and made her way to the refugee camp. The transition was hard on Lisette. Yet, amid the misery, she fell in love. LISETTE LUKOJI: (Speaking French). KATZ: "Love just happens," she says, "I love him." TEWNDELE: I love her because she can complete something that miss in me. KATZ: They got married right there in the camp. They moved in together in the home he had made of mud and sticks. They had no electricity, no running water, no work. Still, they had hope. Andre had earned a college equivalency degree at an American college program set up at the camp. Then, after extensive screening, he was approved to be resettled in the U.S. But he had started the application process before he met Lisette. Lisette would have to stay behind. TEWNDELE: I was crying like a baby. So it was not easy. KATZ: He had been a refugee for 11 years, 11 years of being stuck. So it was decided - Andre would take this opportunity and go. Lisette would stay and then follow him to America. TEWNDELE: She told me that, no, just go. I know that you are my husband. You love me. And you will do your best to help me so I can join you there in USA. KATZ: According to the U.N., every minute, 20 people are displaced from their homes somewhere around the world due to persecution or conflict. The U.S. has resettled 3 million refugees since 1980. And over the last three years, more refugees came to the U.S. from Congo than anywhere else. But now... TEWNDELE: With our new president, everything is tough. KATZ: As a candidate and president, Trump has questioned the mix of immigrants coming to the U.S. His administration has slashed the number of refugees allowed into the country to the lowest level in nearly 40 years, citing lax security screening. Two weeks ago, he allegedly used vulgar language to refer to African countries. LUKOJI: (Speaking French). KATZ: Lisette has applied for a visa, but she has no idea if and when she'll be able to rejoin her husband. Nonetheless, Andre is building a life in America for her but without her. On a break, in the middle of his overnight shift at a seafood packaging plant in Elizabeth, N.J., Andre made sure to call Lisette before heading back to work. The crew processes fish flown in from across the world. All but two of the dozen or so workers I meet are immigrants. CHARLES: I'm from Nigeria. My name is Charles. ANI: My name is Ani. I'm from the Philippines. AMOS: I'm Amos from Liberia, West Africa. KATZ: Many in this new generation of refugees are worried that they won't be able to bring their families here. For now, Andre sends money he makes at the plant to Lisette. She uses it to buy food and to charge her cellphone. For NPR News, I'm Matt Katz. (SOUNDBITE OF RICHARD HOUGHTEN'S "MOVEMENTS AND MELODIES") INSKEEP: This story is part of a WNYC series called Unsettled. It's a look at the global refugee crisis. (SOUNDBITE OF RICHARD HOUGHTEN'S "MOVEMENTS AND MELODIES") DAVID GREENE, HOST: Good morning. I'm David Greene. Japan is known for its gadgets. I mean, if you stay in a Japanese hotel, it's hard to tell what all those buttons do in the bathroom. The latest invention - a nose-hair trimmer that plugs into your smartphone. Yes, some have asked why you would want nose hairs falling all over your screen. Well, it's no surprise this comes from the company Thanko, which already brought us an armpit fan, a pocket washing machine and earbuds that make you look like an elf. It's MORNING EDITION. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: President Trump speaks to the global elite this week. He is visiting the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Trump's economic adviser Gary Cohn says the president wants to promote the United States. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) GARY COHN: America is open for business. We want the world to invest in America and to create jobs for hardworking Americans. INSKEEP: The president will deliver that message to people he has attacked in the past as globalists, people who are also a bit like himself - wealthy global business people and political leaders. NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson is following this. Good morning, Mara. MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Steve. INSKEEP: I am just thinking - this is an annual meeting. Last year, China's president was the big speaker and spoke up for the global trade system. What's President Trump have to say this year? LIASSON: As you just heard Gary Cohn say, he's going to bring a message about his own accomplishments - GDP up, stock market roaring, unemployment down. As Cohn said, he's going to tell the elite in Davos America's back in business, open for business. Instead of bringing his populist pitchfork, he's going to bring his salesmen's portfolio and tell these global business leaders that he just lowered taxes and cut regulations, and they should invest in the U.S. INSKEEP: There's no secret that global business leaders and political leaders were worried about President Trump one year ago. What about now? LIASSON: I think they're less worried. Last year, they were worried about Brexit and Trump and a populist rebellion. There was a lot of handwringing about income inequality. Actually, the best quote I read about Davos was from Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan, who said Davos is where billionaires tell millionaires how the middle class feels. INSKEEP: (Laughter). LIASSON: But in many ways, Trump has turned out to be a lot more friendly to the kind of people who go to Davos than many people thought. He - his rhetoric is still populist and protectionist. But he's given big tax cuts to the wealthy. He hasn't drained the swamp. He has a pro-big-business agenda. This is good for the elite globalist plutocrats who go to Davos. And his message of reciprocal trade has not disappeared. He will deliver it this week. But he hasn't pulled out of a single trade deal yet. He did put some tariffs this week on a couple of products from China - washing machines and solar panels. We'll see if China retaliates against that. But he has - significantly has not pulled the U.S. out of the WTO or NAFTA. INSKEEP: Yeah. I guess we should be clear. He did kill the Trans-Pacific Partnership... LIASSON: Yes... INSKEEP: ...But that... LIASSON: ...Which is going ahead without the U.S. INSKEEP: Yeah. Yeah. But that deal never took effect, at least... LIASSON: Right. Right. INSKEEP: ...Never took effect with the United States. I wonder if this meeting underlines a basic contradiction in what the president has to say or let's say complexity. He says he's sticking up for the little guy, sticking up for the forgotten man. But his approach is to make it easier for wealthy people or, perhaps he would say, job creators. LIASSON: Yes, it's a supply-side theory. If you give tax cuts and shower benefits on so-called job creators, jobs will be created. And the incomes and wages of the ordinary men and women will go up. And we'll see if he's correct. INSKEEP: Any notable meetings for the president while he's with so many world leaders and business leaders? LIASSON: Yes. He's going to meet with the British prime minister, Theresa May. He's had some tensions with her. He's also going to meet with President Kagame of Rwanda, who is currently the chairman of the African Union. This comes after the president reportedly made those disparaging comments about African nations, saying we don't need any more immigrants from those nations. He's generally denied the comments. So the question is, will he have to acknowledge them or apologize as many African nations have demanded? INSKEEP: NPR's Mara Liasson. Thanks very much. LIASSON: Thank you. DAVID GREENE, HOST: All right, now some new details about Minnesota Public Radio's decision late last year to cut off its business ties with Garrison Keillor. The break with the creator and former host of "A Prairie Home Companion" came amid allegations that he engaged in inappropriate behavior. And now an investigation by Minnesota Public Radio News reveals that Keillor fostered a work environment that left some women feeling mistreated, sexualized or belittled. Reporter Matt Sepic has our story. MATT SEPIC, BYLINE: The company ended its relationship with Keillor in late November, immediately halting distribution of "The Writer's Almanac" and rebroadcasts of Prairie Home Companion shows Keillor hosted until his retirement. At the time, Minnesota Public Radio CEO Jon McTaggart revealed very little, but now, he says a woman who worked on "Prairie Home" had come forward a month prior with allegations of sexual misconduct. McTaggart says the woman's attorney sent a 12-page letter outlining accusations of unwanted sexual touching and dozens of inappropriate incidents over a period of years. Along with the letter were excerpts of emails from Keillor. MPR hired an outside law firm to investigate, and McTaggart says Keillor was included in the process. McTaggart says the investigation has been thorough. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JON MCTAGGART: We've been, from the beginning, committed to the privacy and confidentiality of everyone involved, including Garrison. We have not made public the documents, the allegations, the identities of anyone involved. SEPIC: Jon McTaggart spoke publicly yesterday just as Minnesota Public Radio News, which operates independently of the company's corporate structure, was about to air the results of its own investigation into Keillor's past. It found that he had at least two consensual romantic relationships with women in workplaces he led. In 2009, his production company offered one of his subordinates $16,000, a non-disclosure agreement and a contract. The woman said she never cashed the check, nor did she sign the proposed confidentiality agreement. In 1999, another woman, Patricia McFadden, was fired from Keillor's "Writer's Almanac" program and sued Minnesota Public Radio. She did not allege sexual harassment but said Keillor bullied and humiliated women on his staff. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PATRICIA MCFADDEN: I think people who have power and influence and good fortune have more responsibility to behave well than anybody. And it should not be an excuse to behave badly and treat others so poorly, especially women. SEPIC: In a 1999 court filing, MPR disputed the claims in McFadden's lawsuit. Molly Hilgenberg, who worked in Keillor's St. Paul bookstore, says she was in the shop one day in 2012 when Keillor wrote a limerick on a white board. It was about how he found one of his female employees physically arousing. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MOLLY HILGENBERG: I don't even really remember my reaction. I just was in shock. And I was like, that is so wildly inappropriate, you know, in my mind. But I didn't say anything, which I still regret to this day. SEPIC: Hilgenberg says Keillor apologized. Keillor has repeatedly declined to comment for this story, but in November, he told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that his ouster then was simply the result of putting his hand on a woman's bare back to console her. CEO McTaggart says Keillor's public statements, quote, "have not been fully accurate." On social media, Keillor has said he's working on a novella called "Inappropriate Behavior" and a screenplay about a man who returns home to the fictional Lake Wobegon after being fired from his job. The offense - sending a sexual limerick to fellow employees. For NPR News, I'm Matt Sepic in St. Paul. DAVID GREENE, HOST: If your city gets a new sports franchise, it's exciting, sure, but you are doomed to years of failure. Expansion teams just don't do well, at least not immediately. Well, if there's one city that could beat the odds... (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Let's tell Vegas and the world that we are ready for this. Go Knights, go. Go Knights, go. GREENE: The Vegas Golden Knights are the National Hockey League's newest franchise. And as of this morning, they've got the second-best record in the NHL. W.G. RAMIREZ: They've shattered every expansion team record in every major sport in each league's midway point. They've done the unthinkable. GREENE: That's sportswriter W.G. Ramirez, who follows the Golden Knights for The Associated Press. He describes how the Knights built their roster by cherry-picking players who other teams deemed dispensable. RAMIREZ: They're looked at as rejects. We're the spare parts, if you will, OK. So they come together and they bond during training camp. Now you bring a major sports franchise to a town that is now with 2.1 million people. And when I was growing up in this town, there were half a million people. Now you got 2.1 million people of transients from the East Coast - or all over the country - but, you know, that are hockey fans. They all come together to form this team, including Marc-Andre Fleury, who was brought in as the face of the franchise. GREENE: Well, and Marc-Andre Fleury, I mean, I have been a fan of him for years. He was the goalie for the Pittsburgh Penguins, my team. And he gets replaced by a younger goalie. He feels like a reject but also just does his job and is such a team player for so long. And now to see him somewhere else succeeding, I mean, that story seems to say something about everything you're talking about. RAMIREZ: Absolutely. And, you know, when I asked him at the beginning of the season - this team has been brought together basically to build for the future. And he says, I don't know what you're talking about, to be honest with you, because the players in this locker room, we're not going out there on the ice just to play and let them beat us up. We're going out there to win. GREENE: And win is just what they have done. Of course, what makes this story even more compelling is that the Knights began their season in the shadow of one of the most deadly mass shootings in modern American history. Just days after that massacre at the Mandalay Bay Casino, the Knights hosted their first home game. And defenseman Deryk Engelland greeted the sold-out crowd. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) DERYK ENGELLAND: To the families and friends of the victims, know that we'll do everything we can to help you and our city heal. (APPLAUSE) ENGELLAND: We are Vegas strong. (APPLAUSE) RAMIREZ: They have brought this community together. That week, they went to the hospital to see victims. They went to the police department to visit with the first responders. But they're still, to this day - after home games, they hold meet and greets, certain players. City National Arena is the practice arena. That place alone is standing room only for practices. Afterwards, fans will flood the parking lot. And those players, when they pull out, they pull off to the side so they can sign autographs and take pictures. They 100 percent absolutely believe and know what they mean to this community. And they're the first ones to say how much the community means to them. GREENE: We're talking about a great sports story in Las Vegas with W.G. Ramirez. He writes about sports in southern Nevada for the Associated Press. Hey, thanks for joining us. RAMIREZ: All right. Thank you. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Television viewers have a chance to relive a notorious chapter in American history. It was a 1993 standoff between the FBI and the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. A six-part drama called "Waco" begins tonight on the Paramount Network. Here's NPR TV critic Eric Deggans. ERIC DEGGANS, BYLINE: If you only know Taylor Kitsch as that kid from "Friday Night Lights" or from "True Detective's" truly awful second season, you are in for a surprise because Kitsch is mesmerizing as David Koresh, the leader of the Branch Davidians religious sect. He preaches the joy of living in their isolated community of Mount Carmel just outside Waco, Texas. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "WACO") TAYLOR KITSCH: (As David Koresh) So how is it a man can find joy here? Joy doesn't come from having something or being something. It comes from becoming, becoming more than you are today. DEGGANS: At first, Koresh comes off as a well-meaning guy who likes playing guitar in a local band. But it soon becomes obvious the Branch Davidians have a different way of living. All the men except Koresh are celibate, and the women serve as his wives, including the teenage sister of Karesh's legal wife played by Julia Garner. She's beginning to have doubts about the arrangement. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "WACO") JULIA GARNER: (As Michelle Jones) When David had his vision that he should take me as his second wife and nobody knew what to do about it. And just like that, I became his second wife. And just like that, I had serenity. And, I mean, what about my dream? Who cared anything about my dreams? UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: (As character) Hasn't David been good to you? GARNER: (As Michelle Jones) That's not the point. DEGGANS: The point of many scenes in the first episode of "Waco" is to humanize the Branch Davidians until they run afoul of federal agents looking for good publicity who have heard of Koresh's polygamy and know the group is stockpiling weapons. There's a good guy among the feds. Michael Shannon - for once not playing a bug-eyed sociopath - is FBI negotiator Gary Noesner, who pushes his boss to spend more resources on training agents to negotiate instead of using force. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "WACO") MICHAEL SHANNON: (As Gary Noesner) There's a paradox to power. The more force you bring to a situation, the more likely you are to meet resistance. If we can spend some of those resources training agents to negotiate, I guarantee you that you would invest a lot less in body bags. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) We can't talk our way out of every situation. Show of force helps bring people to the negotiating table. DEGGANS: That's a handy bit of foreshadowing for what's to come - a botched raid on the Branch Dravidians that produces a 51-day standoff and, eventually, scores of deaths. In the first three episodes shown to critics, "Waco" seems to downplay the extremism of Koresh and his people. It blurs the question of whether Koresh was dangerously crazy, a con-man or a well-meaning-but-deluded soul. It also highlights the cluelessness and cowboy tactics of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who created a dangerous siege with a group that was already anticipating the end of the world. The whole project is a bold move for the Paramount Network, which just last week changed its name from the young male-focused cable channel Spike TV. With names like Kitsch, Shannon, John Leguizamo and "Supergirl" star Melissa Benoist in the cast, "Waco" plays like a mid-level film carved into six parts. It's a well-chosen project for a cable channel that needs a hit to redefine itself as the home of more adult-oriented, high-quality fare. The result is a compelling, tragic tale that allows stars like Kitsch and Shannon to play different, surprising roles, just like the new cable channel that's featuring the show. I'm Eric Deggans. (SOUNDBITE OF WILLIAM AUGUST HUNT'S "THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR WALKING") TORI LETZLER: (Singing) These boots are made for walking. DAVID GREENE, HOST: On Capitol Hill, there is this secret memo that's being kept in a secure room in the Capitol. And for a document that is classified, it is getting a whole lot of publicity. This is a four-page report prepared by Representative Devin Nunes. He's chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. And he's been investigating whether the Obama administration abused surveillance powers to target the Trump campaign. This memo is classified. Only members of Congress have seen it, though they're not able to talk about exactly what is in it. NPR justice reporter Ryan Lucas is here. Good morning, Ryan. RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Good morning. GREENE: I know you can't tell us what is in this memo since it's classified, but what can you tell us about it? LUCAS: Well, it's important to note, as you did, that Devin Nunes is the man behind this. He's the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. And importantly, he is an ally of President Trump. You may remember that Nunes stepped aside from the committee's Russia investigation amid an ethics probe into his handling of classified information. He was later cleared in that. But in the interim, he's basically been conducting his own investigation parallel to the committee's probe. And this memo is the output of that effort. And at root, it purportedly alleges that the FBI and the Justice Department abused a surveillance power known as FISA to target the Trump campaign, also reportedly alleges that the FBI leaned on the infamous Trump-Russia dossier to help get court approval of its surveillance. And I say reportedly because, as you said, this memo is classified. It hasn't been released to the public. We don't know what's in it. But it has become a rallying cry, really, for conservative Republicans in the House, suggesting that this is an epic scandal. One said that it's worse than Watergate. The public must see it. There's even a hashtag on Twitter, #releasethememo, that's been trending. Interesting point here, though - Russia-linked networks on Twitter were promoting the hashtag in recent days. That's according to the Alliance for Securing Democracy which researches influence operations by Russia and other countries. GREENE: I'm just thinking - worse than Watergate. I mean, that's quite a charge to make for a memo that we really don't know what's in it. I mean, have Democrats been able to see this memo? And what are they saying about it? LUCAS: Democrats have seen it, yes, and they have been pretty blistering in their criticism of it. They say it's basically a hit job that tries to discredit the FBI and by extension, of course, special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation. All of the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee put out a statement. They called this memo a misleading set of talking points for Republicans. And they boil it down to this - that it is indeed an attempt to undermine Mueller while at the same time kind of turning a blind eye to the political damage that it could do to the FBI and the country's democratic institutions. GREENE: So this is a political back-and-forth right now. I mean, Republicans saying this is an epic scandal, Democrats saying this is a smear campaign. Are we ever going to be able to resolve this in some way and actually know what's there? LUCAS: Releasing the memo would be the way to really find out. And we don't know at this point whether it will be released. Republicans say they're searching for a way to do that. What we do know is that the FBI hasn't seen the memo yet. It says it's requested a copy. They want to evaluate it and take appropriate steps. To date, that request has been denied. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said yesterday that Trump might become involved in the declassification process if it reaches that point. GREENE: OK. So Republicans have been pushing this memo at a time when the special counsel's investigation is going forward. They have also been really playing up some text messages between an FBI investigator and a lawyer at the bureau. What's going on there? LUCAS: That's right. The president himself alluded to that yesterday on Twitter. These are texts between an investigator who's a senior FBI official involved in the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Russia probe and an FBI lawyer. The Justice Department has provided the texts to Congress. There are texts from about a five-month stretch that were missing. The Justice Department says this was because of a technical glitch when the FBI upgraded its phones. But again, the focus on the texts and the memo are both part of, basically, a long-running effort by some Republicans, particularly in the House, to paint the FBI and the Mueller team as politically biased. GREENE: NPR's Ryan Lucas joining us this morning. Ryan, thanks. LUCAS: Thank you. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Congress is trying again to make progress on immigration. Democrats stepped back from a government shutdown triggered by their demand to protect people brought illegally to the U.S. as children. In return, they received a promise to at least consider that issue in the Senate. Some Republicans also favor a deal for DACA recipients, but over a period of decades, the Republican Party has shifted on immigration. Here's NPR's Don Gonyea. DON GONYEA, BYLINE: For decades, it was constant, the way Republican presidents and other party leaders talked about immigration. Take Ronald Reagan, a hero then and now to GOP conservatives. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) RONALD REAGAN: I think the time has come that the United States and our neighbors, particularly our neighbor to the south, should have a better understanding and a better relationship than we've ever had. GONYEA: That was from 1980 at a GOP candidate debate before Reagan was elected president, but it sounds almost like he's reacting to today's immigration debate. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) REAGAN: Rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don't we work out some recognition of our mutual problems? GONYEA: On the stage debating him that day, another 1980 GOP presidential hopeful, George H.W. Bush, arguing that children who are in the U.S. illegally should be allowed to attend U.S. public school. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) GEORGE H.W. BUSH: I don't want to see a whole thing of 6 and 8-year-old kids being made, one, totally uneducated, and made to feel they're living with - outside the law. GONYEA: Now let's jump forward a couple of decades to the presidency of George W. Bush, who could be finishing his father's sentences in these comments at the White House in 2004. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) GEORGE W. BUSH: Many undocumented workers have walked mile after mile through the heat of the day and the cold of the night. GONYEA: They risked their lives, Bush said. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) GEORGE W. BUSH: Workers who seek only to earn a living end up in the shadows of American life. GONYEA: Again, those were mainstream Republicans speaking, each elected president. But over the past decade, a very different discussion of immigration has taken hold within the GOP, eventually building to this. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. GONYEA: It's Donald Trump, kicking off his presidential campaign two and a half years ago. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) TRUMP: They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards, and they tell us what we're getting. GONYEA: And, of course, there was this staple of Trump campaign rallies. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) TRUMP: Build that wall. Build that wall. Build that wall. GONYEA: Ari Fleischer was the press secretary for President George W. Bush. He's been watching this shift on immigration within the GOP closely. ARI FLEISCHER: Donald Trump talks about immigration in a way that's very different from how George Bush talked about it, how Mitt Romney talked about it, how John McCain talked about it. But it's also true that Donald Trump won the election. GONYEA: Key, Fleischer says, is how working-class voters look at the issue. FLEISCHER: Frankly, I think the biggest change was the economy weakened. People who were in America were worried about their jobs and their livelihood, and they did worry about a surge of people coming through illegally, a lower-priced labor force that would squeeze Americans. GONYEA: Economists say what drives wages goes way beyond immigration. Still, such worries gave the topic more potency than it previously had within the GOP. But Mark Krikorian, an advocate for less immigration at the D.C.-based think tank the Center for Immigration Studies, has a different theory. He says that establishment GOP leaders of an earlier era were simply out of touch with working people. MARK KRIKORIAN: Ordinary Republican voters were just much more hawkish on immigration than Republican politicians and advisers and fixers and donors and the whole political class. GONYEA: In 2013, conservatives blocked an immigration bill that had passed overwhelmingly in the U.S. Senate. Krikorian notes that years earlier GOP voters were strong enough to prevent passage of immigration legislation pushed by President George W. Bush, and he believes all of this helped set the stage for Donald Trump. KRIKORIAN: He took advantage of that gap between what the actual voters wanted and what the political class was offering. GONYEA: Now many Republicans in Congress feel they've closed that gap with the GOP base. And with Trump in the Oval Office, they expect to at last get an immigration policy that the base also likes. Don Gonyea, NPR News, Washington. DAVID GREENE, HOST: In Philadelphia, health officials announced yesterday they're going to support the development of supervised drug injection sites. But federal officials are not on board with this idea, as Nina Feldman of member station WHYY reports. NINA FELDMAN, BYLINE: The idea behind supervised injection sites is that people can safely inject drugs under medical supervision using clean needles. An estimated 1,200 people died last year in Philadelphia from drug overdoses. The city estimates that such a facility in Philadelphia could prevent up to 76 overdoses per year. Health Commissioner Thomas Farley says these sites aren't just about harm reduction, they're also an access point for treatment. THOMAS FARLEY: The most important thing for the site is that it be something that's inviting to drug users. We need to make it easy for those people to come in so that you can then engage them. FELDMAN: Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner says he won't go after people using drugs in a supervised area. LARRY KRASNER: I think it's wonderful that the city is doing something that they did not do in the early days of the AIDS crisis and certainly something they didn't do during the crack crisis. FELDMAN: While local support has grown, there are no guarantees on a federal level. Patrick Trainor is a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration in Philadelphia. He says they can't condone a measure like this. PATRICK TRAINOR: The criminal activity that will come through this area will essentially doom neighborhoods that have it. FELDMAN: Studies have not found supervised injection sites reduce neighborhood crime. For NPR News, I'm Nina Feldman in Philadelphia. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep with an old saying about newspaper work. Dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog, now that's news. And it happened in New Hampshire. People say a man tried to evade arrest by hiding under a pile of clothes when a police dog sniffed him out. The man allegedly choked and bit the dog. The man is now under arrest. And the police dog, or as some may call it, the poor little puppy, is feeling better and is back to work. It's MORNING EDITION. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Having been through a brief government shutdown, members of Congress face a question - what now? A debate still looms over immigration. And the agreement ending the shutdown keeps the government open only a little more than two weeks. Bill Hoagland of the Bipartisan Policy Center has been here before having seen previous government shutdowns. He was a former Senate staffer. He's in our studios. Good morning, sir. BILL HOAGLAND: Good morning. INSKEEP: From the outside, this just seems like a pointless waste of time that frustrated a lot of people. But have past shutdowns ever produced positive results? HOAGLAND: In a - I went through a major shutdown in 1995-1996, which - during the Clinton administration and Newt Gingrich as speaker. And it was over the issue of the Contract with America and implementing that particular proposal. INSKEEP: Yeah. HOAGLAND: It was terrible. It was 21 days. In fact, we had it for a few days. We opened up. We shut down again. Long story short, it was much longer than this current one. But out of that then came after, when we finally - reopened government was in 1997. We actually came together on a major bipartisan budget agreement to balance the budget. So it is difficult, obviously, but out of this may come some good. INSKEEP: You - meaning the very same issues over which the government was shut down, President Clinton and Republicans who controlled Congress worked out an accommodation eventually? HOAGLAND: They worked out an accommodation after the fact, yes. But they had to go through that struggle. INSKEEP: Was the shutdown part of that process then, people had to test their power and find out the limits? HOAGLAND: I think they had to. I think that was part of the negotiations that went on to figure out where people stood on particular issues, how strongly they felt about them. And it gave them an opportunity then to come back and actually come to some agreement later on. So there may be some silver lining in these shutdowns. This was a short one and still a lot to do here in the next 14 days, as you say. INSKEEP: So is a shutdown OK, then? Is it natural? HOAGLAND: No, I - we would all prefer that there not be government shutdowns. But sometimes when you have very strong feelings on each side of the issue, in this particular one over DACA and the immigration issue, I can understand how it could lead to this kind of a situation that we had this last week. INSKEEP: Let's talk about those strong feelings over an issue. I'm wondering at moments like this - I wonder it a lot, actually - is Congress really just representing the public in that people are profoundly divided in this country over their vision for the country and over their vision for the way forward on a range of issues? HOAGLAND: Well, the issue of immigration is clearly a very divisive issue in this country today, as we've seen. This is what President Trump ran on very strongly. But I think we're also seeing - which is in from a - no surprise coming from a person who works for the Bipartisan Policy Center - that we're very happy to see that there are Republicans and Democrat senators on both sides of the aisle that are working up there to find some middle solution. And I think major solution - major public policy issues, whether it's health care, taxes or immigration, the only solution long-term - sustainable solution is one that's done in a way that is in a bipartisan way at the center of the country. INSKEEP: Is it a little strange, though - and Lindsey Graham pointed this out during the shutdown - that there was a divide over an issue where there seems to be lots of bipartisan support? Large majorities of Americans want at least a fix for DACA recipients. HOAGLAND: At least for DACA. I think what's dividing it, the immigration issue, there are other issues besides DACA - the wall, the visa program, issues associated with long-term immigration reform. And those are the kinds of issues that I think are - that are making it very difficult to reach an agreement here because the president wants to deal with all four of them. INSKEEP: Very briefly, is the table set now for a solution? HOAGLAND: I think the - yes, I think definitely it is. I think there is a clear solution coming given this fact that the majority leader has made it very clear that come February 8, they're going to move forward with something. INSKEEP: Bill Hoagland of the Bipartisan Policy Center. Thank you very much. HOAGLAND: Thank you, Steve. DAVID GREENE, HOST: After days of often raw and painful testimony from his many victims, Larry Nassar, the former doctor to the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team is expected to be sentenced today for sexual assault. As Kate Wells of Michigan Radio reports, the shock waves from this case are now reaching some of gymnastics' most powerful leaders. And just a warning - you might find some of this story disturbing. KATE WELLS, BYLINE: So far, some 150 women and girls have come forward in court to share how they were abused by Larry Nassar. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MATTIE LARSON: Larry, you were the only one I trusted. In the end, you turned out to be the scariest monster of all. WELLS: This is Mattie Larson. She's a former national champion. And she, like so many others, says Nassar was able to thrive in an environment where he was the nice guy. In a world of screaming coaches and relentless pressure, Nassar listened to these girls - snuck them junk food, made them feel special. The first time Larson met Nassar was at the USA Gymnastics National Team Training Center in Huntsville, Texas. It is famously known as the Karolyi Ranch, named for coaches Marta and Bela Karolyi. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) LARSON: There is an eerie feeling as soon as you step foot onto the Karolyi Ranch. It is completely removed from all civilization - and that's no mistake. WELLS: At places like the ranch, Nassar had unlimited access to young girls who had been taught to work hard and never question authority. Larson says the first time Nassar abused her, she thought him touching her genitals must be part of treating her pelvis injury. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) LARSON: Almost each and every time I receive treatment from Larry from that moment on, he would molest me. WELLS: Isabell Hutchins was an elite gymnast at a Michigan gym run by a former Olympic coach. She remembers when she injured her leg, Nassar told her she was fine. And her coach made her keep practicing for another month until she was eventually rushed to the ER. The X-ray there showed a broken leg. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) ISABELL HUTCHINS: It looked like an ax splitting a piece of wood. And we believed the child-molesting doctor over the child who was the one experiencing the pain. WELLS: Larson, the national champion, says eventually she tried to injure herself so she would not have to go back to the national training center where Dr. Nassar was working. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) LARSON: I was taking a bath when I decided to push the bathmat aside, get on the floor and bang the back of my head against the tub hard enough to get a bump so it seems like I slipped. (Sobbing) My parents immediately took me to the hospital because they thought I had a concussion. WELLS: Several of these women accuse USA Gymnastics, the sport's governing body, of being slow to respond to reports of abuse. But this week, they're being heard. Three of USAG's board leaders stepped down. Former Olympic coach John Geddert was suspended Monday. Sponsors like Procter & Gamble, Under Armour and AT&T are pulling their support. Larson, the former national champion, says this is all coming after some 150 women and girls poured out their hearts about decades of abuse. LARSON: It's never too little too late. I mean - no, I take that back. There's things that are too late sometimes. But you know, it's happening now, and that's great. WELLS: For his part, Nassar is expected to be sentenced later today for sexual abuse. He's already facing 60 years in prison for child pornography possession. For NPR News, I'm Kate Wells in Lansing. (SOUNDBITE OF CHIHEI HATAKEYAMA'S "DOOR TO THE COSMOS") DAVID GREENE, HOST: We're going to turn now to Pakistan, where charges have come down in a high-profile child murder case. And I just want to warn you - they are going to be some violent details here that could disturb some of you. This is a story that centers on a young girl. She was found in a trash heap after being raped and killed. And this sparked deadly protest riots in her hometown, and the rest of Pakistan took note. NPR's Diaa Hadid is in Islamabad. Hi, Diaa. DIAA HADID, BYLINE: Good morning. GREENE: So first of all, it sounds like there's been a big development in this case. HADID: Right. So yesterday, Pakistani officials said that they had apprehended the suspect in this case. He's a 23-year-old man who knew the family. People are now clamoring for his public execution, including senators in Pakistan's Parliament. GREENE: Is there something unique about this case that has caused so much outrage that we're seeing right now? HADID: You know, this case, sadly, isn't unique at all. The town where this girl, Zainab Amin, is from - it's called Kasur. And its name is actually synonymous with child rape. In 2015, a massive pedophile ring was uncovered there. It involved 285 children. And some of them were raped at gunpoint and filmed. And after Zainab was killed, eight other families petitioned the provincial high court, demanding justice for their children who were also assaulted and murdered in the same neighborhood as Zainab over the past two years. GREENE: So I guess then - I wonder, if we're seeing all of this outrage in response, are we seeing a turning point in Pakistan? HADID: Well, activists say it actually is an important step. This morning, I rushed to the offices of Mamtaz Gohar. He's with Sahil. It's a child protection advocacy group. He speaks in broken English, but this is what he had to say. MAMTAZ GOHAR: We give totally credit to this Zainab case because after this case, we have more media sensitization. Child sexual abuse is still a terrible subject in our society, and now it has been discussing in our family with our children. HADID: And so - I mean, what he's saying here is that actually after Zainab's murder, dozens of families came forward across Pakistan to report the same thing had happened to their children. And that is a step forward. But, you know, Mamtaz and other activists say there's so much left to go because this is a whole institution and structure that leaves children vulnerable. There's a culture of shame around speaking out about sexual assault. And poor families are often intimidated when they try to tell authorities what happened to their children. Perpetrators are often powerful. The police can be negligent. Lawyers can be expensive. And so activists like Mamtaz say justice is still nearly impossible to obtain... GREENE: Wow. HADID: ...Especially for poor families. GREENE: It's a long road to travel to actually get rid of the cultural shame and have the right response to something like this. But what do you think is happening here? Is the case of this little girl - I mean - just people have just reached a point of not being able to accept anything more? HADID: You know, it seems actually like, yes, that's what happened. There was three days of rioting in Kasur after Zainab was killed. And this case really became national after people in social media picked it up. And what they were doing were tweeting two pictures of Zainab side by side. One of them showed a beautiful little girl in a pink jacket, and she was smiling. And the other one showed a broken body on a trash heap. And that seems to have ignited this national conversation because people could finally see what this looked like. GREENE: NPR's Diaa Hadid reporting for us in Islamabad this morning. Diaa, thank you. HADID: You're welcome. (SOUNDBITE OF LTO'S "RISE") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Alabama Senator Doug Jones is in our studios. He's the Democrats who just won a special election in a deep red state. He had hardly arrived here in Washington when disputes over spending and immigration led to a brief government shutdown. Jones and other Democrats voted to end it on Monday in exchange for a promise that the Senate will at least consider protecting immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. Senator, good morning. DOUG JONES: Good morning, Steve. INSKEEP: What do you say to Democrats who think that your side caved in here? JONES: Oh, I don't think they caved in at all. I mean, you know, look - they - you make a point. I think that was important. I had a little bit different equation. If you recall, I voted to keep the government open in... INSKEEP: Right. JONES: ...The first vote. But, you know, I think that the way the Senate has been operating, in which everything is attached to some kind of spending bill - and the Senate - it hasn't been for some time the kind of deliberative body that it's supposed to be, where you have legislation, you come to the floor of the Senate and you debate it. And every - you know, all sides have an equal opportunity to put something on the floor, talk about it, debate it and then hopefully pass something. To be able to do that, I think, with the DACA and DREAMers and a little bit broader immigration - not necessarily the broad piece of reform - I think that was a major breakthrough. It hadn't happened in months, if not a couple of years. INSKEEP: That's what Democrats did get, was a commitment that the Senate would at least take up legislation... JONES: Yeah. INSKEEP: ...To protect DACA recipients. Do you believe that you'll have a fair shot? JONES: I think so, absolutely. You know, I think one of the biggest issues that the Senate faced this past weekend was one of trust. And that - it was a huge hurdle, and it was distrust on both sides. INSKEEP: Well, this is Mitch McConnell saying, trust me. I'm going to bring it up. JONES: Well, that's right. INSKEEP: Do you trust him? JONES: And there were a lot of people that did not. There were also people on the other side that didn't trust Democrats. You know, I think this was a big breakthrough because you had a bipartisan group of senators, that actually grew in number over the course of the weekend, that said, we've got to get past this. We've got to put our cards on the table. And we've got to trust each other to do what the Senate does best - and that's deliberate. INSKEEP: So the Senate takes this up. Maybe it gets 60 votes. Maybe it becomes law and then goes to the House where lawmakers don't seem that inclined to consider it at all. JONES: Well, I think if the Senate can come up with a bill that is 60 votes, I think there will be a lot of pressure on the White House and the House to pass something. We have another deadline of March 5 coming up, in which there are going to be people starting to be deported. That is also, I think, a driving factor to get something done. INSKEEP: Senator, I want to remind people you're a red-state Democrat. Your seat was previously held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions... JONES: Right. INSKEEP: ...Who is a hard-liner on immigration. But you're both representing the same electorate. How different, if at all, is your approach to immigration? JONES: Well, I think my approach is going to be a lot different than Senator Sessions'. There's no question about that. I am going to try to work to try to find some agreement to go forward. I think it's important that we work to try to give the DACA kids - the DREAMers an opportunity to stay in this country like they have. It's the only country they have ever known. I understand some of the arguments on the other side. I know - every Democrat wants to increase border security. I think there is a bipartisan consensus with that. The devil is always in the details. But I think that there's a way that we can go forward. With this deadline looming up, I just don't think you're going to want to see the videos of these kids. There are teachers - there are people in the military being deported. And I think there will be the right give and take. INSKEEP: DACA's a tiny slice of this. We're talking about 11 million people in the United States illegally. You favor a path to citizenship for them? JONES: No, I don't think we're going to get there on this right now. I think... INSKEEP: But at any point in the near future? JONES: Yeah, I don't know. I think we have to see. I think a broader immigration reform package is going to be down the road. I think we need to address some of the issues at hand right now - the issues of the DACA kids and the issue of the border security right now. That's the two most important things that are on the table. Let's get those on the table, find common ground the way we need to and then we - you know, once you can find common ground, Steve, you can find it on other issues. INSKEEP: Senator, lots of people have noted that the Republican Party has moved right on immigration. We're reporting on that, in fact, in this very program, the evolution of the Republican Party over decades. But some people have noted that the Democratic Party has shifted, too. Do you think that your party has moved left on immigration in recent years? JONES: No, I don't think so. I think you have people in the party with diverse views. There's no question about that. And some are probably more left than more right. What I think the people in the Democratic Party are doing - they want to find a way for these kids to stay here. They want to find a way that we can come up with some kind of comprehensive reform. INSKEEP: But I'm just thinking - Peter Beinart of The Atlantic wrote a few months ago that, a decade ago, you could find a liberal like Paul Krugman writing explicitly that there are economic costs to immigration. The benefits - there are benefits, too, but they might not be so great. Is it hard for Democrats to acknowledge that now? JONES: No, I think - you know, look, I think things have changed. We're a more diverse country than we were. I think people evolve in their views as the country changes, as circumstances changes. I think that that's appropriate. So what I really want to do is to try to let this bipartisan group of senators do their work. INSKEEP: Senator, pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much. JONES: Awesome, Steve. Thanks for having me. INSKEEP: Doug Jones, Democratic senator from Alabama. DAVID GREENE, HOST: And let's bring in another voice now. It is Republican Bob Goodlatte of Virginia. He is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. And as we mentioned, there was a bipartisan deal in the Senate to take up DACA in coming weeks. Goodlatte is part of a bloc of conservatives in the House - a sizable bloc - who have some demands of their own. He has a bill that would reduce legal immigration to the United States by 25 percent, maybe more. It would also crack down on so-called sanctuary cities. Goodlatte's bill is called the Securing America's Future Act. And the congressman is on the line. Welcome. BOB GOODLATTE: Good morning, David. GREENE: So your bill has some Republicans behind it - a good number - and others not. Carlos Curbelo of Florida labeled it, actually, the Bannon Bill - after Steve Bannon - said it's deeply flawed, would destroy American agriculture. There's clearly a debate here. So I wonder, why push something so controversial right now? GOODLATTE: Well, first of all, there are a few who disagree with this in our conference. But this has overwhelming support from Republicans, and it meets the test that both the president and the speaker of the House have put forward for immigration reform. And that is that we address the DACA issue and we do it in a generous way. This is not a temporary fix as the first proposal in the Senate was. This is a permanent fix so that DACA recipients can stay in the United States with three-year renewable approvals, indefinitely. Secondly, it addresses the speaker's commitment that we not let this situation happen again. And that's really what the president's requests are - that we address border security. And he and the secretary of homeland security made it very clear that's not just a wall. That is what happens when somebody gets across that border and abuses our asylum system, that is released into the interior of the country and told to come back for a hearing... GREENE: Right, but... GOODLATTE: ...Years later... GREENE: If I... GOODLATTE: ...And also, it addresses chain migration, which is, of course, going to result in a reduction in the number of people here for immigration. Now, Doug and others are right that we need more in immigration. This is not a comprehensive bill. And we support the president and others' position. So... GREENE: Well, let me just - if I may, Congressman - pick up on that. GOODLATTE: Sure, sure. GREENE: I mean, if there is more to do - you're not going to be able to do everything within a period of a week or two. GOODLATTE: No, no. We don't try to do everything in this bill. GREENE: And you have... (CROSSTALK) GREENE: I mean, there seems to be a lot of agreement over DACA. And if DACA is so important to you as you say, why risk letting that program expire to push ideas that even some of the members of your conservative bloc say you just don't have the votes at this point? GOODLATTE: Well, first of all, it is very important that you not let the problem persist. And therefore, if you're going to solve the DACA issue, you have got to give the Department of Homeland Security the tools to make sure that when you have a surge of people - as you always do when you have a generous program - more people try to come into the United States. You've got to be able to address that when it occurs. And it's an ongoing problem, even today with an administration that's dedicated to securing the border and enforcing immigration laws. They have all kinds of loopholes that they have to deal with. And those loopholes need to be closed. And that's what we're asking in this situation. GREENE: May I ask you, Congressman... GOODLATTE: And we also very much favor using some of those reductions in chain migration for a merit-based system. But we're not putting that into this bill because it's not comprehensive immigration reform. GREENE: Let me just ask you - and some of - some Republicans accused the Democratic Party of playing politics in recent days, saying that they were willing to hold up the government funding, shut down the government to stand firm on something like DACA. Could you not be accused of doing the same thing here - I mean, holding up what could be a solution and a bipartisan way forward on one part of this, keep the government funded and then have conversations about things important to you later? GOODLATTE: Oh, no, no, no. Absolutely not. These go together. And it was agreed. We had a wonderful meeting where we had members from the House and the Senate and the president. We had Republicans and Democrats. And we agreed on four matters to negotiate. And that's exactly what our bill is. Nothing I have seen so far - and I'm hopeful of this group in the Senate, that they will take the enforcement side of this equation seriously. But this bill does that. It addresses DACA and takes the requests of the Department of Homeland Security for security at the wall; enforcement that makes sure that when people enter the country illegally, they can be returned home safely and addresses chain migration and the crazy visa lottery system, where people are admitted to the country not based on anything close to merit or even family relationships but based upon pure luck. GREENE: Congressman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, thanks so much for your time this morning. We appreciate it. GOODLATTE: Thank you. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: In Afghanistan today, gunmen stormed an office of Save the Children. It's an attack on an aid group. At least three people have been killed. Twenty-five more are injured. Jennifer Glasse is a reporter based in Afghanistan. She's on the line. Where exactly did this happen? JENNIFER GLASSE: Steve, it happened in Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. INSKEEP: In eastern Afghanistan - so we're talking about one of the more insecure parts of the country. And what happened? GLASSE: Well, about 9:30 this morning local time, a car bomb was exploded outside the offices of Save the Children in Jalalabad. A massive bomb, Steve - IT set a bunch of cars alight. And then a number of gunmen - four gunmen, we believe - stormed into the offices of Save the Children. And for more than eight hours, they exchanged gunfire, threw grenades and fought with Afghan security forces while 46 people hid in the safe room in the basement of the building. INSKEEP: Some people here are going to be stunned by this just because the group is called Save the Children. Is this normal to have this kind of attack on an aid group? GLASSE: We have seen increasing attacks on aid groups here in Afghanistan over the last couple of years. Last year, the International Red Cross, which has operated here in Afghanistan for more than three decades, actually closed two clinics and vastly cut back its operations here because seven of its staff members were killed over the course of 2017 and a number of others were abducted. And indeed they decided that it was really just getting too risky to carry out aid operations here. And a lot of the NGOs are really reconsidering whether they can work here, who they can trust. They depend on the local communities to allow them to come in and do their work, and now the local communities can't really assure their safety. And that's becoming a real problem. And this is a country, Steve, that really depends on international aid. It depends on these kinds of organizations. Save the Children (inaudible) they helped 1.4 million children in Afghanistan, and it has suspended operations. INSKEEP: So is this the Taliban's way or someone's way of undermining the government? GLASSE: It is. It is not the Taliban. The Taliban explicitly denied any responsibility. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility on its website, but it certainly does put pressure on the Afghan government. Now, President Ghani issued a statement saying this actually shows that the military operations are putting these groups under pressure, and that's why they're attacking these soft targets. But that's a very hard sell to the Afghan people who will suffer without the help from these aid organizations. INSKEEP: Does it feel to you like the insurgency - or maybe we should say the various insurgencies, 'cause I know there are various groups - that the insurgencies are growing worse? GLASSE: I think security certainly is a big concern here. The Afghan military and police and security services are taking punishing casualties. You might remember, over the weekend, there was a terrible attack here in Kabul on a very prominent hotel that killed 22 people, including more than one American. We're certainly more careful here. Kidnapping is a concern. And for regular Afghans in the countryside where the fighting has intensified, it's certainly very difficult. INSKEEP: Jennifer Glasse reporting in Kabul. Thanks. GLASSE: Good to talk to you. DAVID GREENE, HOST: This week, we have been exploring the realities of modern work. A new NPR/Marist poll found a lot of confidence in the future among American workers. A vast majority said they actually don't feel that threatened by the economic forces we hear so much about, like automation. NPR's Alina Selyukh talked to some people who could be affected by it. (SOUNDBITE OF WHEELS SQUEAKING) CHRIS BEATTY: Next aisle. ALINA SELYUKH, BYLINE: When you go shopping online, chances are whatever you bought has been in a warehouse cart sort of like this one - tall metal shelves on wheels. BEATTY: Seventeen D (ph), one piece, slot one. SELYUKH: Chris Beatty is filling this cart in a warehouse in southern New Jersey that handles some of the top cosmetic brands. Today, Beatty is picking. He rolls the cart through aisles, finds the creams or lipsticks people bought and drops them into slots on his cart to fill online orders. He is definitely humming while he works. BEATTY: (Humming). SELYUKH: Beatty's 26, a lean guy in jeans, a sweatshirt and a knit cap. He's been working in warehouses for a few years now. He says his father got him into it. He used to operate a forklift. BEATTY: He just told me, hey, look, just go with the flow. If they need help, go help them, you know? And that's what I did. I - anytime they needed help, I helped them. Anytime - overtime - I stayed. So that's how I got into warehouses. Warehouse work is pretty fun. SELYUKH: Right now, Beatty works for a company called Radial. They're pretty new, and they're not a giant operation like Amazon or Walmart. But if you ask most labor economists, they'll tell you automation is coming fast to the whole industry, just like in manufacturing years back. Do you think your job could be done by a robot? BEATTY: That's a tough one, but I don't think a robot could do this. SELYUKH: Why not? BEATTY: It... SELYUKH: Or you just don't want it to do the job. BEATTY: Nah, nah. SELYUKH: (Laughter). BEATTY: I love my job too much. SELYUKH: I heard this kind of optimism in conversations with other Radial workers and with some who worked for Amazon, though Amazon workers spoke off the record to comply with corporate nondisclosure policies. Neither group was particularly worried about robots, and their confidence aligns with a new NPR/Marist poll, which found 94 percent of U.S. workers - almost all of them - say it's unlikely they will lose their jobs to automation. MARC MUNN: There's a lot of jobs in here that could be taken over by machines. But who's going to run the building if the machines are in here? SELYUKH: Marc Munn is a manager at Radial. Beatty works in his department. He told me he felt safe about his job because he is a senior manager who helps keep this place running. MUNN: And you still need someone to come in here, open it up. You still need someone to oversee it. If something breaks and there's a machine running in here, I don't think we're going to have other machines in here to fix that, so that's where my job comes into play. BIBIANA RAMOS: I know there is machines that make the boxes but not this kind of boxes. SELYUKH: Bibiana Ramos is a packer. She carefully folds nice tissue paper inside a special box. RAMOS: I think our customers - they like their products to look nice and presentable. SELYUKH: Basically, you're saying you can make it look good in a way that a machine can't. RAMOS: Right. Yes. SELYUKH: All this illustrates the complexity behind the buzzword automation. For now, warehouses are hiring a lot to keep up with our online shopping boom. But people studying the field point to Amazon's investment in thousands of robots as a sign of things to come. For now, smaller competitors like Radial can't spend that kind of money. Plus, the machines aren't that smart yet. At Radial, one item of automation is a conveyor belt that sorts boxes by shipping type. But it can't process something small like an envelope, so that part of someone's job. In this case, it's Kyle Niver who is scanning the envelopes manually. Do you think your job could be done by a machine? KYLE NIVER: Yes. I worked in a place that does this kind of stuff. They build machines for this. So yes, I do feel like that could be taken away. SELYUKH: So they build sorting machines. NIVER: They build sorting machines and picking machines. SELYUKH: What the companies tend to say about automation is, yes, the robots are coming, but they won't completely replace human dexterity and versatility. The men who run this Radial warehouse told me they definitely didn't see robots taking over in the next five years. After that, it's hard to predict. When I caught up again with Beatty, I told him about the Amazon robots that automate the very job he's doing today. Instead of workers walking the aisles to find products on shelves, Amazon's machines bring the shelves to the workers. BEATTY: That would be pretty cool to see a robot bring some of your work to you, but I'm a hands-on guy. I like to do my own stuff. If it - if they come, they come, you know? There's nothing we could do about it. We just have to keep on doing what we do. SELYUKH: Beatty says he and his father have talked about the future and automation a few times, but he says he just can't worry about that for now. Alina Selyukh, NPR News Burlington, N.J. (SOUNDBITE OF VULFPECK'S "CENTERING FUGUE") DAVID GREENE, HOST: Spotify, the music streaming service, is popular and also unprofitable. And now Spotify is planning a very unconventional initial public offering. Embracing its status as an industry disruptor, Spotify's breaking with convention and opting to launch its IPO without the help of an investment bank. As Charles Lane from member station WSHU reports, not everyone is convinced this is such a good idea. CHARLES LANE, BYLINE: Typically how IPOs work is the company going public hires a big investment banker, several of them, to both issue new shares and then go out and sell them. But Spotify plans to simply list its shares on the market and then let them trade. George Parker is a finance professor at Stanford. He says this is almost unheard of. GEORGE PARKER: To me, that is very analogous to a person that puts a sign out on the street and says this property is for sale by owner. LANE: It's like saying, I got the coolest house on the block, everybody will want to buy it - so why give a cut to a broker? PARKER: Spotify, by doing this, is very confident that the public already understands Spotify's value and that it does not need others to tell the story. LANE: Some analysts estimate this could save the company as much as $300 dollars in fees. Also Spotify's current private investors can simply cash out without waiting for the traditional lock-in period to end. From this perspective, a direct listing is just a more efficient way to IPO. KATHLEEN SMITH: We don't think this is at all another way to go public. It's an inferior way, a defensive way to come out into the public market. LANE: Kathleen Smith is founder of Renaissance Capital. She says in 2016, Spotify got an unusual loan from a group of private investment firms, including Goldman Sachs. The investors demanded a number of conditions to the loan. SMITH: Suggesting that the investors thought the company's private valuation was way too high. LANE: Spotify boasts a 140 million users, but most of them don't pay. They listen to the ad-supported stream, and ad revenue is only $300 million a year, a fraction of what the service truly costs. Spotify recently announced plans to move more aggressively into podcasting and multimedia news, a space where ad revenue may be more lucrative. Jake Shapiro, CEO at the podcasting platform RadioPublic, says global podcasting ad revenue is about $250 million a year. JAKE SHAPIRO: But by all measures it's growing by leaps and bounds, and we anticipate doubling and tripling or more of that revenue in the coming months and years. LANE: So if Spotify's plans are successful, it would be positioned to take advantage of that growth. But right now Spotify is still an unprofitable company pushed towards an IPO by private equity firms eager to cash out. Smith says mom and pop investors won't buy it. SMITH: Investors have been more cautious about companies that don't make money. LANE: Spotify's IPO is scheduled for late March or early April, but many details remain to be worked out. For NPR News, I'm Charles Lane. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: We have news this morning about the American Red Cross. The charity organization acknowledges it forced out a senior executive amid allegations of sexual harassment and worse in 2012. The dismissed executive was then hired by Save the Children after a favorable recommendation from the Red Cross. The Red Cross has confirmed all of this and apologized for that job recommendation in response to an investigation by two ProPublica reporters, one of whom is Justin Elliott and is on the line. Good morning. JUSTIN ELLIOTT: Good morning. INSKEEP: Who's the official, and what did he allegedly do? ELLIOTT: So the official's name is Jerry Anderson, and he was a veteran Red Cross staffer. He had run two very large programs, the relief efforts after the Indian Ocean tsunami in the early 2000s, and then later the relief effort after the Haiti earthquake. Two young women who had worked at the Red Cross when they were in their early 20s later came forward to the management of the organization with allegations of in one case sexual harassment. Another young staffer at the Red Cross attended a happy hour with him in Washington and then the next morning woke up in his apartment. She couldn't remember what happened, has a memory gap, went to the hospital and got a rape kit done. Jerry Anderson denies any sexual misconduct, but the Red Cross did bring in one of their lawyers to do an investigation, and they concluded that he had violated their policies and forced him out. INSKEEP: Before we get to that, were the police ever brought in as the woman spread word of what she thought had happened? ELLIOTT: She decided she didn't want to report it to police. And actually in both cases, the women initially didn't report what had happened, even to Red Cross management. They were very young, you know, in their first jobs out of college, and both feared that it would hurt their careers. About a year and a half later, the allegations did make their way to management, and that's when the investigation began. INSKEEP: And we should mention these accusers are now giving their names. They're named in your story, Eliza Paul and Camille Herland. And you said that the Red Cross did push out the executive back in 2012. What makes this story different in your mind from so many other stories we've heard about in recent months? ELLIOTT: We feel like we really got a window into how institutions have dealt with these cases. In this case, David Meltzer, who at the time was the head of the international division of the Red Cross, now is the general counsel of the organization, sent an email announcing Jerry Anderson's departure in which he praised him, said that Anderson himself was choosing to leave, thanked him for his leadership. Meltzer also then gave a staff meeting in which he repeated those comments, which was very upsetting to some people in the audience. And then the Red Cross gave positive references to Anderson very shortly thereafter when Save the Children was considering hiring him. And Save the Children says that they were never told that this person had just been fired after an investigation found that he committed a serious misconduct. INSKEEP: Were they just not told, or did they actually get a glowing reference about this gentleman? ELLIOTT: Save the Children has told us that the Red Cross gave only positive references. So we don't know sort of all the details there, but the Red Cross has acknowledged that laudatory reference was given, and they have said that they are now taking unspecified disciplinary action. They say that shouldn't have happened. INSKEEP: Are employers legally required when a former employee applies somewhere else to disclose everything that's in the personnel file? ELLIOTT: Employers are generally not required to say much of anything about an employee who has left. We were told by experts in this area that a lot of large employers have adopted the policy of just giving sort of name and dates of employment. But we were also told by people that even if that's the policy, there are often sort of informal networks in which you do get more information about somebody you're considering hiring. The humanitarian industry sort of as a whole has actually been looking at these issues. There was a report recently issued by a task force in the industry identifying this question of information sharing about people who've committed serious misconduct and whether it should be done better and whether how it's been done in the past is actually working. INSKEEP: Justin Elliott of ProPublica, who reported this story with Ariana Tobin. Thanks very much. ELLIOTT: Thank you. INSKEEP: Anderson responded to ProPublica through his attorney. He denies any sexual misconduct. You can read ProPublica's full report at propublica.org. DAVID GREENE, HOST: President Trump made this surprise appearance in front of reporters last night and during the session he made some promises. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Yeah, he said he'd be willing to be interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of the Russia investigation - investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. And the president added he would do it under oath. GREENE: Well, let's explore this with NPR's Mara Liasson, who was one of the reporters in the room at - what - Mara, was this like an impromptu press conference, or what happened here? MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: It was absolutely impromptu. We were in the office of a senior White House official who was going to brief us off the record about immigration. In walks the president, presumably on his way out the door to go to Davos. And he started talking on the record, and he kept on talking. And he did... GREENE: Doesn't happen every day when you're covering the White House, does it? LIASSON: Doesn't happen every day. He did say he would do it under oath - as in talk to Robert Mueller. He said he'd love to do it. He said he was looking forward to it. He said, subject to my lawyers and all of that. And of course later, one of his lawyers, Ty Cobb, gave a statement to The New York Times that tried to walk back Trump's promises a little bit. He said Trump was not volunteering to go before a grand jury. But there it is - I would do it under oath. GREENE: OK - with the caveat, subject to my lawyers, which leaves all options open, I guess. LIASSON: Yes. GREENE: What else stood out to you as he was discussing this investigation? LIASSON: Well, two other things stood out to me. One is he said he doesn't recall asking Andrew McCabe who he voted for - McCabe was the acting director of the FBI - although he said that question would be unimportant. He also talked about obstruction in a new way. He said there was no obstruction. He said, quote, "oh, well, did he fight back? Did he fight back? You fight back, and they say it's obstruction." In other words, he was suggesting that his efforts to defend himself against the investigation were unfairly interpreted as obstruction. Presumably, that includes firing Jim Comey. GREENE: Wow, he got into a lot of details about this investigation... LIASSON: Yeah. GREENE: ...This impromptu session. LIASSON: Yeah. GREENE: So - OK, you said you were originally there to talk to a senior administration official about immigration. And I mean, I guess sometimes when you're talking to a senior White House official, they might say, well, you have to hear from the president himself on that. And you got to hear from the president himself... LIASSON: Yes. GREENE: ...On that. What did he say? LIASSON: That was the most interesting part. Also, Congress has been asking - even begging to find out, what does the president want in a deal on immigration for the DACA recipients? What would he sign? And he was very specific. He said he wanted a path to citizenship. He said, quote, "over a period of 10 to 12 years." He said he wanted $20 billion for the wall for 800 miles of wall. We asked him, what does he want on chain migration or family unification? That's a very important sticking point here. He said we want a new standard. He said you can't just bring anybody you've ever met into the country. But wives, husbands, sons and daughters would be OK. And then he said he wants the visa lottery system either gone or replaced. So that's a framework for a deal. GREENE: Yeah, those are details - although details like the wall, money for the wall - didn't Minority Leader Chuck Schumer say that the wall is now off the table? LIASSON: Yes because he had offered Trump the wall in exchange for legalizing the DREAMers. And when Trump didn't take that, he said that's off the table. But that would absolutely be part of a final deal. He also said that he had a message for DACA recipients. He said they shouldn't worry. Tell them not to be concerned. So this is something new. Donald Trump is getting involved in the details of legislation, and he actually is trying to make a deal. He will have to sell this to his hard-line conservatives in the House if something like this passes the Senate, and maybe he will be able to. GREENE: NPR's Mara Liasson. Mara, thanks. LIASSON: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GREENE: OK, President Trump had another conversation yesterday. And unlike that meeting with reporters we just heard about, we do not have an audio recording. INSKEEP: Nope. This was a phone call between President Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The two countries, Turkey and the United States, have reached an awkward moment. Turkish jets have been bombing Kurdish forces, Kurdish forces armed by the United States to fight ISIS. Yes, a NATO ally of the United States bombed forces allied with the United States. The White House said President Trump warned that Turkey's operations threaten their shared goals. Turkey does not agree, though, on what was said. GREENE: And let's turn to NPR's Peter Kenyon who is in Istanbul. Hi, Peter. PETER KENYON, BYLINE: Hey, David. GREENE: So they call this a readout. This is when the White House, you know, types up an account of what the president discussed with a world leader. We see this all the time. It's usually a lot about cooperation and shared goals. This feels different, like the readout's being, you know, studied more closely now. KENYON: Very different. The White House went first - quickly sent out its own summary of the call - and it was pretty sharp. It focused on President Trump's concerns over this military operation against the fighters that the Pentagon, you know, thinks are crucial to this fight against ISIS. The White House says Trump spoke about escalating violence, undercutting the goals in Syria. And since then, we've seen even stronger language. Now the White House homeland security adviser is quoted as saying it would be preferable if Turkish troops would remove themselves from the conflict in Syria. Now, there's one particular worry for the U.S., and that's Turkey's intention to move from Afrin, where they are now, toward a place called Manbij, further east. And there are U.S. forces there. Now, Turkey's foreign minister has responded to U.S. statements by saying - well, we've got trust issues with the U.S. right now, and that makes it impossible for us to really talk seriously about our plans in northern Syria. Ankara's version of this exact same call is remarkably different, basically accusing the White House of misstating the content of what was said. Never brought up - several phrases in the White House readout were completely denied in the Turkish one. So two remarkably different summaries. GREENE: How serious is this in Turkey, I mean, this disagreement over a very important phone call? KENYON: Well, it's the latest in a series of disagreements. I mean, it's just sort of the latest sign that anti-American sentiment here is running stronger than it has in years. Meanwhile, you've got some conservatives in the U.S. questioning whether Turkey even belongs in NATO anymore. Now, if the polls are to be believed, Turkey's people are rallying behind Erdogan. We'll see how it goes. INSKEEP: You know, this is a reminder of something that was said by the very first president, George Washington, who observed that countries do not act based on friendship; they act based on interests. And this is a circumstance where the U.S. and Turkey, though they're allies, just don't see their interests exactly the same way in northern Syria. GREENE: Something we're seeing exposed here. NPR's Peter Kenyon in Istanbul. Peter, we appreciate it. KENYON: Thanks, David. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GREENE: All right, we're going to turn now to the question of, who is to blame for a long, long pattern of abuse? INSKEEP: Yeah. And this number is stunning. More than 150 women say they were sexually abused by Larry Nassar. The former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State doctor was sentenced to up to 175 years in prison yesterday. His crimes go back decades. And so people are asking, how could that happen, and how could it happen so long? Who was in charge? Well, the former CEO of USA Gymnastics resigned last year. And now the longtime president of Michigan State University, where Nassar also worked, has stepped down. So what do we know about what they knew? GREENE: OK, we have USA Today sportswriter Christine Brennan with us. Hi, Christine. CHRISTINE BRENNAN: Hey, David. How's it going? GREENE: It's going OK. BRENNAN: Yeah. GREENE: But this a - I mean, this is a terrible story to cover. And I guess we're seeing the fallout now. And I guess - can you just remind us about this former university president and why she says she's now resigning? BRENNAN: In 2014, David, she received a Title IX complaint and word that there was an investigation, and this would be, of course, of Larry Nassar, the man who did these horrible things to so many gymnasts. And she said that she really didn't have the curiosity to even go any further and find out what it was about. And when you consider that this was less than three years after the horrors at Penn State involving Jerry Sandusky and you've got a university president at Michigan State just a few hundred miles away - it is just unbelievable that a university president wouldn't look into this and take it a step further and see what this was about. So President Simon was under fire and under pressure. The board of trustees was very supportive of her up until about, you know, last night. But clearly, the waves and waves of victim impact statements, the continuing storyline here that riveted the nation - horrified the nation - it just became too much for her to keep her job. GREENE: And so - I mean, first this started out as USA Gymnastics. Now we're saying the head of Michigan State having to resign. I mean, Christine, you've covered scandals involving sexual abuse by powerful figures in athletics. You mentioned Sandusky of Penn State. I mean, have you - are there solutions out there to prevent something like this from happening? Why does this keep happening? BRENNAN: Proactive, new-age leadership. It's just amazing that these young women feel powerless to speak out, even as they are some of the most powerful and successful athletes in the world. And that's, of course, what we're talking about with these Olympic gold medal gymnasts who felt they had no place to - nowhere to go, no one to tell, almost paralyzed in their fear over this doctor as they're in the Olympic pipeline and don't want to, obviously, lose their place by speaking out. So a whole new day has to dawn here. And it has to happen with the U.S. Olympic Committee leading the way - and they're very concerned - but to have younger voices and openness, liaisons with athletes. But it is just appalling, frankly, that now we've had two of these in this decade involving two of the most respected sports programs, Penn State, Michigan State - and of course Michigan State with USA Gymnastics because this doctor did all these terrible things at both places. GREENE: Christine Brennan covers sports for USA Today. Christine, thanks a lot. BRENNAN: David, thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF VETIVER'S "STRANGER STILL") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Thanks to a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence, the Senate has confirmed a new ambassador for religious freedom. Sam Brownback steps into the job. He leaves his post as governor of Kansas, and in Kansas, he leaves behind some big, unresolved questions. Here's Jim McLean of our member station KCUR. JIM MCLEAN, BYLINE: For the past several months, Brownback has been the lamest of lame ducks. First nominated in July for the State Department job of fostering religious freedom abroad, everyone expected him to be gone by early fall - Thanksgiving at the latest. But when lawmakers returned to the Statehouse this month to open their 2018 session, there was Brownback delivering the State of the State address, calling for more public school funding. (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) SAM BROWNBACK: My budget recommendations includes an additional $600 million in funding over the next five years. My proposal does not include a tax increase. MCLEAN: Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Jim Denning were stunned and infuriated. The governor had proposed a massive increase in spending on his way out the door but no way to pay for it. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JIM DENNING: His financial acumen, as we know, is very low, but this is reckless. He's given everybody a sense of false hope that he's just solved the school issue when he's made it a hell of a lot worse. MCLEAN: That, in microcosm, is what things have been like between Brownback and the legislature since voters demanded that lawmakers clean up the mess in Topeka, a mess caused by deep income tax cuts in 2012 that Brownback hoped would make Kansas a magnet for business, but which triggered a budget crisis. They were repealed last year, and revenues are starting to recover, but not enough yet to restore cuts to universities and highways, let alone repay millions borrowed from the state pension fund. All that now falls to Lieutenant Governor Jeff Colyer, who, gearing up for his own gubernatorial campaign, has been forced to play an awkward waiting game of promising changes while not seeming too eager. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JEFF COLYER: I know you're - you want to get a whole lot of answers right now, but they'll be coming. There's one governor at a time. MCLEAN: With the remainder of the year, Colyer will be that governor. Keeping the job will depend on how quickly he can repair the lingering damage from Brownback's red-state experiment. For NPR News, I'm Jim McLean in Topeka. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. The movie "Baby Driver" is about a man driving the getaway car for bank robbers. In Charles Town, W.Va., police say a robber got away differently. It's the freelance economy. You don't put a driver on staff. The robber just called a cab. He asked the driver to wait at the bank, and then came back out and was driven away. But you can't trust the help. The driver recognized the suspect's photo from an earlier robbery and called the police, who later found the suspect. It's MORNING EDITION. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Reporters were talking with a White House official when the boss walked in. President Trump unexpectedly took questions. And in response to those questions, he said he is willing to meet with Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russia's participation in the 2016 presidential campaign. The president added he would do that under oath. The apparent confidence matches his insistence that he's done nothing wrong. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: There's been no collusion whatsoever. There's no obstruction whatsoever. And I'm looking forward to it. INSKEEP: NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson was in the room. Mara, good morning. MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve. INSKEEP: I guess we should mention this happens with a lot of presidents. Reporters - you're are in the White House. The president just unexpectedly drops in. How's the room change when he walks into a room? LIASSON: Well, the room changes. You don't want to talk to that senior White House official. You want... INSKEEP: (Laughter). LIASSON: ...To talk about the guy himself. And there becomes a scrum, and everybody kind of presses in to hear what he has to say. And with Donald Trump, you never know what he has to say. So a lot of suspense. INSKEEP: Well, in this case, he is asked about Robert Mueller. Did he mean it when he said he would take questions under oath? LIASSON: I have no idea whether he meant it or not. I can tell you what he said. He said, I would do it under oath. He said, quote, "I'm looking forward to it." He said, I would love to do that. And then, of course, he said subject to my lawyers and all of that. And later on, one of his lawyers, Ty Cobb, did issue a statement saying that Trump was not volunteering to go before a grand jury. So... INSKEEP: Oh. LIASSON: ...We'll see. INSKEEP: So in other words, his personal lawyers will still want to negotiate the terms under which he says anything.. LIASSON: Yes, yes. INSKEEP: ...That he may have said. LIASSON: But the president was pretty emphatic - I would do it under oath. INSKEEP: What else did the president say? LIASSON: Well, the other thing that I thought was interesting is he began to defend himself against obstruction charges in a new way. He suggested that just fighting back, or defending himself, against the allegations is being misinterpreted as obstruction. He said, did he fight back? You fight back, and they say, oh, it's obstruction. So presumably, he's talking about firing Jim Comey. INSKEEP: Yeah, exactly. The question is, how did you fight back? That's what.. LIASSON: Right. INSKEEP: ...The special counsel may want to know. I should mention, Mara, that you were originally in the room talking with a White House official about immigration. And it seems that reporters also asked the president about that since, of course, it's a very big deal right now. LIASSON: And he made a lot of news. He said he was open to a path to citizenship for DACA recipients. Here's what he said. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) TRUMP: Over a period of 10 to 12 years, somebody does a great job, they've worked hard - it gives incentive to do a great job. But they've worked hard. They've done terrifically, whether they have a little company or whether they work. Or - whatever they're doing, if they do a great job, I think it's a nice thing to have the incentive of, after a period of years, being able to become a citizen. INSKEEP: DACA recipients, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the people brought here as children whose protected status is about to expire - he wants them to be able to stay here as citizens perhaps. LIASSON: Right. He said, quote, "it's going to happen at some point in the future." He made news on other elements of a deal. He said on the issue of family migration - what he calls chain migration - he wants a new standard. He said, you can't bring everyone you've ever met into the country, but he said you'd have wives, husbands, sons and daughters allowed to come in. He said he wanted a new standard on that. He said he wanted the visa lottery system either gone or replaced. That's a little more flexible. He wants $25 billion for 800 miles of wall. All of those things are very similar to what the bipartisan group of senators is talking about on Capitol Hill. INSKEEP: Although that last point, the wall - Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, at one point said he was willing to at least start paying for that but says that's now off the table after the president backed away of his parts of the deal. LIASSON: Right. But he said that's because the president didn't take the deal he was offering him. But that will be part of any final deal. And what's interesting is the president got some praise from Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham and criticism from Steve King, the hard-liner in the House. So you can see what the president is going to have to do if he is going to truly make this deal. INSKEEP: NPR's Mara Liasson - thanks. LIASSON: Thank you. DAVID GREENE, HOST: And we're reporting this morning on political turmoil in Brazil. An appeals court yesterday decided to uphold a corruption conviction against the country's former president, Lula da Silva. This ruling could have a huge impact on Brazil's election this year. Lula, as he's universally known, is the frontrunner. NPR's Philip Reeves is with us from Rio de Janeiro. Good morning, Phil. PHILIP REEVES, BYLINE: Good morning. GREENE: So just put this in perspective for us, this moment. What is the meaning of this verdict? REEVES: Yeah, let me give you some context 'cause there are some very big themes in play here. For some years now, Brazil's prosecutors and judiciary have been going after top politicians and business executives. This is all part of an attempt to clean up the massive institutionalized corruption here. They jailed some of the most powerful people in Latin America. I'm sure you remember. It's called Operation Car Wash. GREENE: Yeah. REEVES: This case is part of that, David. It pitches the judiciary against a former president who was once extraordinarily popular and still appears to have the support of more than a third of the country. The judiciary in this case has stuck to its position. The three judges were unanimous in concluding that Lula accepted an apartment as a bribe from a construction company. And they actually increased his prison sentence from nine-and-a-half to 12 years. GREENE: Oh, actually increased the sentence, this appeals court did? REEVES: Yes (laughter). GREENE: So how is Lula reacting? REEVES: Well, with defiance. He held a rally in the city of Sao Paolo last night after the verdict. And he insisted, as he has for some time, that the conviction's politically motivated, part of an attempt to block his return as president. Some people think that his strategy is to use this conviction to present himself as a victim of political persecution to boost his support and that of his leftist Workers' Party. But in the long run, he needs political allies. And they may well start turning their attention elsewhere in the light of this verdict. GREENE: Although this is interesting - he is seeing maybe an opportunity or maybe making the best of a situation, presenting himself as the victim maybe in the presidential campaign. But can he actually run in a presidential election if he's facing this conviction? REEVES: Well, Brazilian law says that right now he's become ineligible to run in the election. But the law doesn't kick in until he registers as a candidate in August. And then the case would go to the electoral courts, which would almost certainly uphold the law. But this all means, David, that there's, you know, this huge uncertainty here in Brazil about the upcoming election, which is only nine months away. There are other candidates, or potential candidates, out there. But it's worth noting that polling second in the presidential race right now is a congressman from the far right, Jair Bolsonaro, who has a highly controversial record that includes making homophobic and sexist remarks. GREENE: So will Lula go to jail for those 12 years or for any time? REEVES: Not yet. He still has some further avenues of appeal to higher courts. It's thought that he's unlikely to be jailed until those are exhausted. But yesterday's verdict is definitely a very big blow. GREENE: Quite a political moment in Brazil. That's NPR's Philip Reeves talking to us from Rio de Janeiro. Phil, thanks. REEVES: You're most welcome. (SOUNDBITE OF SPANIOL AND MERAKI'S "CONFISSAO") DAVID GREENE, HOST: And, you know, I was lucky enough to be in gorgeous Park City, Utah, this past weekend. There was a fresh coating of - well, more than a coating. There was a foot of new snow, amazing skiing and a whole lot of movie stars around town there for the annual Sundance Film Festival. But to me, the true stars are the intrepid film critics, including our own Kenneth Turan, who bravely watches movie after movie so that we don't necessarily have to. KENNETH TURAN, BYLINE: (Laughter). GREENE: Kenny joins us from Park City. Hey, Ken. TURAN: Hey, David, how you doing? GREENE: I'm good. I wish I were still there. I feel jealous you're still - we were just having lunch in Park City a couple days ago, and now I'm back to work in LA. You're at work, too, watching movies. So where should we start? TURAN: Well, you know, usually, I like the documentaries, and they were good this year, too. But this year, the dramas really grabbed me. You know, and there was one, actually, that I just really enjoyed called "Juliet, Naked." It's from a book by Nick Hornby. You know, his books have made other films like "High Fidelity" and "About A Boy." And it's got this really charming plot about an obsessive rock fan played by Chris O'Dowd, his long-suffering girlfriend, played by Rose Byrne, and then there's the rocker himself, the reclusive Tucker Crowe, played by Ethan Hawke. And the three of them somehow come together, and it's just charming. GREENE: This is a different Sundance for you if you're focusing on the dramas. Are... TURAN: I know. I don't know. I'm kind of getting up in the morning, and I'm wondering, you know, what's going on here? GREENE: Are there more dramas that caught your eye? TURAN: Yeah, there are two others that I really liked. One is called "Wildlife." It's the first directing for Paul Dano. He's an actor who people will probably remember from "Little Miss Sunshine." He played the young Brian Wilson in "Love & Mercy." He's taken a Richard Ford novel - this is a novel about a marriage kind of slowly falling apart. The co-stars are Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal. It just was a pleasure to experience this film. And there's one more. There's a film called "Leave No Trace." This is the new film by Debra Granik. It's a story of a father and daughter who are homeless by choice. He's an Army veteran who is just - has some mental problems, and they live in an enormous urban forest in Portland. And it's really uncompromising. It's wrenching. It's - but it's wonderful by the end, and I was really impressed by it. GREENE: Well, can I ask you about a documentary or two? TURAN: (Laughter). GREENE: If - I don't want to take you back to - take you a place you don't want to go. But, you know, as the former Moscow correspondent for NPR, I was so curious about this new film "Our New President." TURAN: Yes. "Our New President" was fascinating. It's about Russian TV. It's not about how the Russians might have influenced our election. It's about what the Russians see themselves. It's how our politicians are portrayed on Russian TV screens. And it's kind of jaw-dropping. You know, we think we've heard things like fake news. This is nothing compared to what the people in Russia have to see on their TV screens. GREENE: Oh, yeah. I'll have to see this movie. TURAN: But, you know, the ones that - there was a pair of documentaries that I really enjoyed so much. I mean, I - just gave me the best feeling. They are - both have a similar subject. They're about science fairs. One is called "Inventing Tomorrow." The other is called "Science Fair." And they're about these young high school scientists from all around the world who are very earnest, and very serious and very committed to kind of putting on experiments that will help save the world. But they're also teenagers, and they're charming, and they're guileless. And, you know, it was just tonic to experience, you know, their energy on the screen. Just seeing them just made me feel good. GREENE: Well, I'm glad that you're feeling good. And thanks for introducing me to Park City. It was my first time at Sundance. I appreciate it. TURAN: We miss you David. Wish you were still here. GREENE: I would be happy to come back. Talk to my bosses, Kenny. TURAN: (Laughter). GREENE: That is Kenneth Turan. He reviews movies for us at MORNING EDITION and also for the Los Angeles Times. Kenny, enjoy the rest of time there. TURAN: Thank you, David. (SOUNDBITE OF GLENERO SONG, "SUNDANCE KIDS") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Many people listen to NPR while multitasking. People listen while driving, cooking, watching kids, taking a shower. But multitasking is another word for being distracted, so do yourself a favor and focus. NPR's Shankar Vedantam came across a solution to distractions. SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: This... (SOUNDBITE OF BEEPS) VEDANTAM: ...Is the sound of science. (SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSION) VEDANTAM: At least, it's what science sounds like at one lab at George Mason University. I'm playing a game called "Warship Commander." Little planes of different colors glide toward my ship at the bottom of the screen. The game looks simple, but as Melissa Scheldrup explains... MELISSA SCHELDRUP: So if it's yellow, what you'll need to do is... VEDANTAM: There are lots of rules. SCHELDRUP: Red, fire on right away. He's blue. He's good. Let him go. Airplane or aircraft are going to come in, and click them and the IFF button. VEDANTAM: Scheldrup is a Ph.D. student at George Mason's human factors and applied cognition lab. SCHELDRUP: And then it will tell you here in the communications window if it's a friend or a foe. VEDANTAM: I'm not exactly a natural. I think it's 030, I think. (SOUNDBITE OF BUZZER) VEDANTAM: Oh, no. I guess not. This lab has volunteers play video games to understand how interruptions affect our minds. The game forces the player to pay attention to two things at the same time. While I'm busy shooting enemy aircraft and making sure that friendly planes get through unscathed, I also have to listen to updates about my warship. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (As game character) Communication channel is now Oscar. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (As game character) Now on course 090. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (As game character) Communication channel is now alpha. VEDANTAM: To follow the game's rules while also keeping track of all the updates, I have to hold a lot of things in my head at once. The number of things you can keep track of at any one time is shaped by something called your working memory. Scheldrup says having a good working memory is key to bouncing back from an interruption. SCHELDRUP: People who are generally good at that have less of a negative effect of interruptions. And people who are not so good at it seem to be affected more. VEDANTAM: Scheldrup and her colleagues wanted to know how people could boost their working memory capacity. They decided to try some brain stimulation - specifically, run a little electrical current through the part of the brain that handles working memory, the prefrontal cortex. SCHELDRUP: Very simplistically, it's like a 9-volt battery that we have electrodes attached to, and depending on where you put the electrodes on the brain, you can either make it more difficult for neurons to fire or make it more easy for them to fire. VEDANTAM: Scientists have inserted electrodes in people's brains for decades. These devices can help patients with serious disorders like Parkinson's disease. What Scheldrup's lab does and what I've signed up for is much less invasive - electrodes attached to the side of my head. It's a little disconcerting when people bring out sterile alcohol prep pads before a psychology experiment, but all right. SCHELDRUP: Yeah, yeah. Don't be nervous. VEDANTAM: I'm not nervous. SCHELDRUP: Like I said, don't be nervous. It's fine. VEDANTAM: Not nervous, not nervous, not nervous. SCHELDRUP: It's all great. VEDANTAM: All great. I will live. SCHELDRUP: All right, how's that one feel? Too tight? VEDANTAM: Nope, feels good. SCHELDRUP: Awesome. VEDANTAM: Now, this might be useful in boosting my brain, but they don't do very much in the fashion department. SCHELDRUP: You kind of look like a World War I patient that got hit in the head and has a white band around your forehead. VEDANTAM: Melissa turns on the electrodes. (SOUNDBITE OF BEEP) VEDANTAM: I'm feeling a very, very mild tingling. And I play the game again. (SOUNDBITE OF VICTORY TUNE) SCHELDRUP: So you got six out of six that time. You got them all right. VEDANTAM: All right. Scheldrup can't say for sure whether I improved because of the electrodes. Maybe I just got better with practice. But when she analyzes the results from many volunteers in her study and controls for the effects of practice, she finds the electrodes do help. Now, Scheldrup admits that running electricity through your head isn't the most practical, everyday solution to interruptions, but... SCHELDRUP: It informs other techniques. So if we know that modulating working memory performance or working memory ability affects these things, then we can say, what techniques can maybe supplement your working memory? VEDANTAM: For instance, if we know that boosting working memory makes us better at handling distractions, scientists can then try to figure out what new techniques might improve working memory. A few miles from this lab, Georgetown University professor Cal Newport thinks we need fewer technological solutions to the problem of distractibility. Newport's taking a cue from influential writers and thinkers like J.K. Rowling and the psychiatrist Carl Jung. CAL NEWPORT: They all seem to have this drive to, on a regular basis, cut themselves off from their lives of business, and communication and distraction and isolate themselves to think deeply. VEDANTAM: Take Mark Twain. He had a cabin on the property of his house where he would retreat for solitude. NEWPORT: It was so far from the house that his family had to blow a horn to try to catch his attention and let him know that dinner was ready. VEDANTAM: Newport's come up with a name for this practice of thinking deeply without distraction - deep work. The opposite of deep work is, no surprise, shallow work - sending emails, answering calls - the kind of tasks that often dominate office jobs. Newport says the problem is worse than we admit. NEWPORT: Even when people think that they're single-tasking, what they're still doing is every five or 10 minutes a just-check. Let me just do a just-check to my inbox. But even those very brief checks that switch your context even briefly can have this massive negative impact on your cognitive performance. VEDANTAM: In his book, "Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success In A Distracted World," Newport describes his work habits. NEWPORT: I work during very set hours during the day, and I plan out the day like a chess player moving the pieces around. I don't let my mood dictate how my day unfolds. And then three, I've made myself very comfortable with annoying people. I'm bad at email. I have just set the expectations that I'm just not available a lot. I'm not someone that you can expect a quick answer from, and that also causes some trouble, of course. But all of this adds up to allowing me to regularly have long portions of many of my days focused on deeper thinking. VEDANTAM: No social media, limited email, strict limits on appointments - if all this structure and planning sounds like a way to turn yourself into an automaton, Newport turns this thinking on its head. NEWPORT: So to have a structured day, for example, to protect your mind from distraction, I actually think makes you more human and less robotic than what most people do, which is to sit there like a human network router and just sort of process messages and tasks all day like a blind computer processor. VEDANTAM: So there you have the options - retreat to a quiet cabin in the woods or get your head zapped with electricity. Personally, I'd prefer the cabin, but I don't have one. Shankar Vedantam, NPR News. (SOUNDBITE OF RUSS LIQUID'S "OPUS ONE") INSKEEP: Whenever he can focus, Shankar is host of the Hidden Brain podcast and radio show. DAVID GREENE, HOST: President Trump has repeatedly trashed Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Trump has said it makes the country look bad. He has called it a hoax. Well, he may soon play a more direct role in it. Mueller has signaled he wants to talk with President Trump before he finishes his work. And last night the president told reporters he's game. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I'm looking forward to it, actually. GREENE: He did add a big caveat, though - that he is going to take advice from his lawyers. NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson is here. Hi, Carrie. CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Hi, David. GREENE: So what exactly are the rules when the Justice Department is interested in interviewing the president of the United States? JOHNSON: Well, it's happened before. Remember, a special counsel interviewed George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney as part of that investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA operative. President Bill Clinton was interviewed by Ken Starr in the Whitewater investigation. And if Robert Mueller wants to interview President Trump, he can make that request. Investigators are usually pretty accommodating, David. If it's a voluntary interview, the president's lawyers can be in the room and the FBI can come to the Oval Office instead of making the president go to some dumpy government building (laughter). GREENE: (Laughter) Well, then I guess it's more convenient for the president. So the president last night saying that he's game, even suggesting he would talk under oath, although his lawyers backed away from that a little bit. But those aren't official, like, commitments. I mean, the president could still say no if he wants to. JOHNSON: The president did leave himself some room, and in fact he's been all over the map on his level of desire to talk with Robert Mueller. If the president ultimately says no, the special counsel could issue a grand jury subpoena basically compelling the president to show up. That would be hardball, and the president could fight the subpoena legally, but most experts think he would eventually have to talk or at least show up. But he wouldn't have to talk, David. The president can assert the Fifth Amendment, the right against self-incrimination. That's a constitutional right for everyone, including Donald Trump. But clamming up could pose a political problem for him. That's because during the campaign and a trip to Iowa in September 2016, Trump brought up the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server, and he pointed out then that some of her aides had taken the Fifth. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) TRUMP: So they have five people taking the Fifth Amendment, like you see on the mob, right? You see the mob takes the Fifth. If you're innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment? JOHNSON: Trump also told comedian Bill Cosby on Twitter back in 2014, why are you taking the Fifth? You look guilty as hell. But, David, there's another view that the legal risks of talking could outweigh any political consideration. There's a risk of making a false statement, exposing yourself to criminal charges for lying, even if you maintain, as the president does, that he didn't do anything else that was against the law. GREENE: So a lot to calculate here if you're the White House once this request comes through, if indeed it does. Carrie, I know you've been talking with lawyers in the past few days about this, people who have been on both sides of these kinds of high-stakes investigations, right? JOHNSON: Yeah. Bill Jeffress has been a criminal defense lawyer in Washington more than 30 years. He told me he can't remember a politician asserting his right against self-incrimination while he's still in office. Jeffress thinks it might be better to try to manage this process by sitting for a voluntary interview where your lawyer can pop up and help you. On the other hand, there's Peter Zeidenberg. Zeidenberg was a longtime public corruption prosecutor. He told me he's not sure that President Trump will pay any political price if he ultimately decides not to talk to Mueller. Zeidenberg says, compared to all the other norms that President Trump has broken this year and last year asserting the Fifth, really isn't all that remarkable. And what's more, he says, the president and his allies are already laying the groundwork to try to discredit the Russia investigation by attacking the FBI. GREENE: What is the morale inside the FBI and inside DOJ, you know, which you cover, right now under attack like that? JOHNSON: Hearing words like under siege and unimaginable - these are people who chose to work in civil service, could make more money, really fighting in some ways in their own White House at this point. GREENE: NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson joining us this morning. Thanks, Carrie. JOHNSON: My pleasure. DAVID GREENE, HOST: All right. Today, a dozen North Korean hockey players crossed the border into South Korea. The women are forming a joint Korean team to compete in the Winter Olympics there. This is part of an effort to show unity, even if it does not address big overall issues like ending the North's nuclear weapons program. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: First comes the challenge of unifying the players into a single team. The coach who must lead that effort is Sarah Murray, a Canadian. Today, she greeted the North Korean players with flowers. But Murray admitted earlier in the week, she's facing a challenge. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) SARAH MURRAY: It is a tough situation to have our team be used for political reasons, but, you know, it's kind of something that's bigger than ourselves right now. INSKEEP: She says one obstacle is that the North Korean players just aren't as good as the South Koreans. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MURRAY: I've been assured that I have ultimate control. They keep saying that it's my choice about the lineup; it's my choice who plays. So as far as I know, I have complete control, and I'm going to play the players that I want (laughter). GREENE: That little laugh there makes me wonder, given the diplomatic stakes, if Murray may find that by the time the Olympics begin next month, a number of Korean officials will have suddenly become hockey experts. (SOUNDBITE OF OLYMPIC ANTHEM ORCHESTRA AND STEPHEN RUCKER'S "HOPE OF A NATION") DAVID GREENE, HOST: Today, an Albanian immigrant who has been here in the United States for 17 years is scheduled to be deported. Since his arrival in the U.S., Ded Rranxburgaj has tried to get legal status here. In 2007, he received a temporary protected status because he was the sole caregiver for his wife, who has multiple sclerosis. The temporary status was revoked last October, and he was ordered to return to Albania. He did not. Instead, Rranxburgaj took refuge along with his wife and his two sons in Detroit's Central United Methodist Church. And we reached the minister there, Reverend Jill Zundel. JILL ZUNDEL: We follow Jesus, who said, you know, I was a stranger, and you took me in. And the Old Testament is full of giving kindness to foreigners and sojourners. And so that's our call. And when anyone is threatened, we feel like we need to protect them, even if they're threatened by our own government. And we declared ourselves a sanctuary church, actually, in 2017, in January. GREENE: And can you just - Ded's last name - could you just pronounce it for me? ZUNDEL: Ded's last name is... DED RRANXBURGAJ: Rranxburgaj. ZUNDEL: Rranxburgaj. So... GREENE: Rranxburgaj. Is that him? ZUNDEL: Yes. He's here in the room. GREENE: Really? ZUNDEL: Yes. GREENE: Could I chat with him for one moment... ZUNDEL: You sure can. GREENE: ...And then come back to you? ZUNDEL: Oh, sure. Hold on one second. RRANXBURGAJ: Hello. My name is Ded Rranxburgaj. GREENE: Well, it's nice to talk to you. How are you holding up? RRANXBURGAJ: It's - you know, I got very bad situation. My wife has been sick from like, 11 years. GREENE: And your wife has multiple sclerosis. Is that right? RRANXBURGAJ: Yes. GREENE: How - what's her condition right now? RRANXBURGAJ: It's very, very, very bad. GREENE: I understand that you were cooperating with ICE for a very long time but then decided not to go to a scheduled meeting with them a few days ago. Why did you decide not to go? RRANXBURGAJ: Because it's - I'd be scared to go over there because to go over there, probably, it's - stop me over there and send me back. GREENE: Why did you come to the United States in the first place 17 years ago? RRANXBURGAJ: I come like everybody come and - you know, free country for better life like everyone that's tried to be in here. GREENE: Well, thank you for talking to us. If you could put the reverend back on, that'd be great. Thank you so much. RRANXBURGAJ: You're welcome. ZUNDEL: Hello. GREENE: Hi. So I guess I want to ask you, do you recognize that you're harboring a fugitive, someone who's been labeled a fugitive by the United States government? ZUNDEL: Well, we're not really harboring a fugitive because we did a press conference, and we let Immigration know exactly where he is. So we're not hiding anybody in the building at all, and we're protecting him and trying to push Immigration to do the humane thing and give him a stay to be able to take care of his wife. GREENE: We should say, I mean, the government has the right with a warrant to come into your church if they want to. I know that their general policy has been to not come into places of worship, but they could come at any point. What is your plan if that happens? ZUNDEL: Our plan is to videotape it, livestream it as it's happening. I want the world to see if Immigration comes and tries to tear this family apart - exactly what's happening. GREENE: As difficult as it is to grapple with this story and the idea of a husband being taken from his wife who's very sick, this is a man who was originally ordered to leave the country by a judge in 2006. A judge refused his appeal in 2009. ICE has been working with him within the legal framework, not detaining him, letting him go through the whole legal process. I mean, in terms of justice based on U.S. law, isn't the law on the government's side here? ZUNDEL: Yeah, but that doesn't make it a just law. It makes it a law. He's followed everything Immigration has asked him to do, and then something happened in the last three months, and then he was threatened with deportation. GREENE: Some would say that allowing him to stay might send a signal to people around the world that as long as you can get to the United States, even illegally, you're going to be able to stay and that that undermines the legal immigration process. How do you respond to that? ZUNDEL: I say the legal immigration process is a broken system. And so yes, while we acknowledge that he didn't go through the right channels, he's been here. He's not a threat to anybody. He's been paying taxes. He's been working. He's been caring for his family. But he represents a lot of families in the United States that are being torn apart now because of an administration who is labeling these people as illegal. And we see them as human beings, and we're trying to get him to stay in the country. And he's not being allowed that chance anymore. GREENE: Reverend Zundel, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. ZUNDEL: Thank you so much. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: OK. Tonight, the New Orleans Opera celebrates its 75th anniversary with a performance that can best be described as spicy. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) NEW ORLEANS OPERA: (Singing) Tabasco, Tabasco, the sauce that we all do love so. DAVID GREENE, HOST: OK. If you didn't catch those words there, yes, they were singing - Tabasco, Tabasco the sauce that we all do love so. INSKEEP: There's a rhyme. PAUL MAUFFRAY: The title of the show tonight is "Tabasco: A Burlesque Opera." INSKEEP: That's the opera's conductor, Paul Mauffray, who says he discovered the "Tabasco" score while searching for historical music from his hometown. MAUFFRAY: I knew that New Orleans had the oldest opera history in America, so I was curious to see what was part of our musical heritage. GREENE: His hunt led him to an 1894 production of the "Tabasco" opera. MAUFFRAY: I didn't even realize that Tabasco sauce had been around that long. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED SINGER: (Singing) For I'm a chef of high degree with the biggest sort of salary. MAUFFRAY: It's about an Irishman who gets lost at sea and ends up in Tangier, Morocco, and is forced to become a chef for a Pasha who loves spicy food. And he's got to come up with a spicy meal. And sure enough, the Tabasco sauce saves the day (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED SINGER: (Singing) For my victuals I like hot, and my prattle's polyglot. INSKEEP: The "Tabasco" opera debuted in Boston in 1894, and from there, it went to Broadway. But after a legal battle over earnings, its composer locked the score in a box, where it stayed for decades until Mauffray discovered it in an archive six years ago. MAUFFRAY: I'm sure that if "Tabasco" had not had this horrible fate of being locked away in a crate and lost, it would have become the cornerstone of our American opera history. GREENE: The show is making its fiery return in New Orleans this weekend for five - yes, I did that - for five sold-out performances. INSKEEP: Hot. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Good morning. I'm David Greene. You need a job? Well, a veterinary clinic in Ireland is looking for a cat cuddler. That's an official position. The posting asks, have you counted kittens before sleeping? Do you feed stray cats? Does petting cats make you feel warm and fuzzy? They also prefer if you understand different types of purring. Remember, this is a cat-only clinic. So all your work, your patients are going to act like they don't care. I think I just outed myself as a dog person, didn't I? It's MORNING EDITION. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Here is a partial list of things on which the United States and Turkey disagree. They differ over a Turkish cleric who's taken refuge in the U.S. They differ over exactly how to approach the war in Syria. They differ over who their friends are. Turkish jets bombed Kurdish groups that had been armed by the United States. And they even differ over what the two countries' presidents said yesterday in a phone call. NPR's Peter Kenyon is in Istanbul. Hi there, Peter. PETER KENYON, BYLINE: Hey, Steve. INSKEEP: OK. So President Trump gets on the phone, calls Turkey's president, Erdogan. Afterward, the White House gives a readout, as they call it, of what was said. And Turkey says no, no, no, no - no, that's all wrong. What's the dispute here? KENYON: Well, yes, the White House went first. They put out this readout, and it was quite pointed. It talked about Trump's concerns over Turkey's military operation against these Kurdish Syrian fighters. These are the folks that Washington says it needs in the fight against ISIS. The White House also said Trump spoke about escalating violence undercutting the goals in Syria. And one particular worry is Turkey's intention of moving from Afrin, where they are now, to Manbij, further east, and that's where there are U.S. forces stationed. Trump also talked about destructive and false rhetoric coming from Turkey and about the prolonged state of emergency in the country. Turkey's version - nothing like that, completely different. Basically, they accused the White House of outright misstating what was said in the phone call. The Turks claim Trump never raised concerns about escalating violence. There was no mention of the state of emergency. They did talk about the U.S. forces in Manbij and avoiding clashes, but essentially, there was no talk of destructive or false rhetoric - so a 180-degree difference. INSKEEP: Essentially, the Turks say that they were not reprimanded at all on this call, which would be a way to think of what Trump supposedly said - or the White House said (unintelligible). KENYON: Well, exactly. And more than that, Turkey said, this wasn't really a conversation. This was an exchange of views. Yeah, that's a much chillier description - a phrase diplomats sometime use to describe strong disagreements. INSKEEP: OK. So it's a disagreement over what was said in a phone call, which can sound kind of minor. Is this serious in the minds of Turkish officials? KENYON: I think there's worries that it could get quite serious. Certainly, this issue of confrontation militarily on the ground between American and Turkish troops is something to worry about. But this, you know, is a series of disagreements. As you mentioned at the top, anti-American sentiment here is quite strong. Meanwhile, in the U.S., some conservatives say, what is going on with Turkey? Do they even belong in NATO anymore? People here are basically, because of the conflict going on next door, are rallying behind President Erdogan. And Turkey has been fighting its own Kurdish militants, you know, for decades. So that's some of the background to that. There's some dismay among the secular population here. But these days, they're pretty much a minority. INSKEEP: You remind us that Turkey is fighting these Kurdish militants in Turkey. Then across the border in Syria, you have Kurdish militants - if you want to call them that - or Kurdish forces that are allied with the United States, the ones who were bombed. They're trying to fight ISIS. How's the war going? KENYON: Well, the military says its forces are doing quite well. It says they've captured more Kurdish positions, even today, in the Afrin region. They say, throughout this operation, they've killed or captured more than 300 terrorists by which they most likely means Syrian Kurdish fighters. There's been a bunch more airstrikes, 200 targets hit since the operation began but no indication of the operation nearing its finish. INSKEEP: Peter, these are NATO allies, Turkey and the United States. Is anybody... KENYON: That's right. INSKEEP: ...Trying to fix up relations? KENYON: Well, what we're hearing so far from the two principals suggests just the opposite. Sides seem to be digging in. Trump's homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, is quoted as saying Washington prefers that Turkish troops withdraw themselves from Syria. And then Turkish officials are saying it's U.S. support for terrorists in Syria that's the problem and if Washington wants to avoid a clash, it should review its forces. In other words, move out of the way. That doesn't sound very conciliatory so far. INSKEEP: NPR's Peter Kenyon is in Istanbul. Peter, thanks. KENYON: Thanks, Steve. DAVID GREENE, HOST: So it's been nearly four years now since Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine by force. This was a move that led to sanctions against Russia, also soured relations between Russia and the West. NPR's Moscow correspondent Lucian Kim was in Crimea when Russian troops arrived, and he returned there this week. We began our conversation with Lucian talking about the changes he's noticed since Russia took over. LUCIAN KIM, BYLINE: What I found most surprising is that people were afraid to talk on microphone even if they support the takeover, even if they support Russian President Vladimir Putin. The main complaint I heard from almost everyone I talked to was that there's not enough work, that prices have doubled because the land connection to Ukraine has been cut. One driver even told me that the bribes have doubled. GREENE: Well, that's so interesting because wasn't part of Russia's promise to improve life for Crimeans economically? So it sounds like there might be some reason for regret and that you're hearing some of that. KIM: Well, exactly. I mean, I was surprised. I actually met one young man in the pedestrian zone here in Simferopol, and he said he voted in the referendum, which was never really recognized by any other country, but he voted in that referendum for joining Russia, and now he's very unhappy and wants to leave. He doesn't like the lack of political freedom and the lack of economic opportunity. But he is in a minority. Most Crimeans did support the annexation and continue to support it despite all the economic hardship. People tell me they think it would be much worse in Ukraine, which often can be quite a dysfunctional place. Or, they look at the war which is going on in Eastern Ukraine. They say, well, at least we don't have that. And I think it's important to also say that even vocal critics of the annexation here in Crimea say not everything is bad. There really have been new investments such as kindergartens, schools, roads, hospitals, even some new power stations. All that is being built because Crimea is a prestige project for Vladimir Putin. GREENE: And how much of this is about trust in Vladimir Putin? I mean, we see that, you know, in Russia obviously there are people who feel economic hardship but still have faith in that president. KIM: I think it's very much tied to his personality. People were criticizing the level of corruption, the lack of jobs. And at the same time, they said they were ready to vote for Putin in the upcoming election because he had, in their words, reunified Crimea with Russia and accomplished this historic mission. GREENE: And Lucian, I mean, I know it's official policy still of the United States that Crimea belongs to Ukraine, right? Is there any prospect of Crimea ever going back to Ukraine, or is this Russian control basically permanent? KIM: Well, it's hard to imagine this annexation being reversed anytime soon in part because the population is either just completely apolitical or actually supports the Russian presence here in Crimea. People aren't particularly pro-Ukrainian because after Ukrainians got independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian state did quite a poor job in building a strong identity in Crimea and establishing a sense of loyalty to the state. Another reason why it will be hard to reverse this process is that Russia is really doing its best to make it irreversible. There's a huge military buildup here in Crimea. And at the same time, Russia is in a big rush to finish a bridge connecting Crimea to the Russian mainland, and they're hoping that this will also solve some of the logistical problems bringing prices down. That bridge is due to open later this year. GREENE: All right. NPR's Moscow correspondent Lucian Kim talking to us from the Crimean capital of Simferopol. Lucian, thanks a lot. KIM: Great to talk to you, David. DAVID GREENE, HOST: President Trump said yesterday that he would be game to sit down with special counsel Robert Mueller. This comes after Trump has criticized the investigation into Russian election interference, calling it a hoax, also bad for the country. Trump's Republican allies, meanwhile, have raised doubts, not just about the special counsel, but more broadly about the Justice Department and the FBI, alleging that there is a bias - and among them, Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson, who has focused on anti-Trump text messages exchanged by two members of the FBI. There are several months' worth of texts missing. The FBI has blamed this on a technical issue. Senator Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, joins us this morning. Senator, welcome. RON JOHNSON: Morning, David. GREENE: So what worries you about these text messages? R. JOHNSON: Well, I've been involved, really, in this investigation for almost three years now, starting with the revelation that Hillary Clinton was using private server. And that's really my involvement in this. My committee has jurisdiction over federal records. This is serious business, you know? I do believe that Hillary Clinton broke the law in using that server, and let me just quick quote law. Whoever having lawful possession or control of any document relating to the national defense through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years. That's... GREENE: But what does this have to do with the text messages we're talking about, though? R. JOHNSON: So it - this is - all springs from that. Director Comey really conducted a sham investigation into that email scandal. And the doctoring of the memo that he was writing two months before he exonerated her - I mean, that was not an investigation designed to uncover the truth leading to a prosecution. It was, really, in hindsight, when you take a look at all the evidence, a investigation designed to cover up the truth and exonerate Hillary Clinton. GREENE: But if you don't mind, Senator, I don't want to have you litigate Hillary Clinton's email situation here. I just - I... R. JOHNSON: Well, again, it all springs from that. GREENE: Sure. Sure. R. JOHNSON: ...Because we got the text when the Office of Inspector General was undertaking investigation of Director Comey's conduct in the email investigation. So people lose context in terms of what this all springs - you know, came from. And so now we have these texts - completely unvarnished inside view at the top levels within the FBI showing an unbelievable level of bias, first of all, but also some pretty concerning certain phrases. You know... GREENE: Well, you - I want to ask you about one of the... R. JOHNSON: We can't take that risk. It's like a life insurance policy. And the latest batch - and, again, this is the one that is making more news. GREENE: Well... R. JOHNSON: The latest batch is - when they're mulling over whether they should really join the Mueller investigation, Strzok, who, again, was the deputy assistant director of the Counterintelligence Division - he was probably investigating the Russian connection - deciding whether or not he wants to join the Mueller investigation, says, I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there's no big there there. OK. GREENE: OK. Well, you also focused on two words from one of the texts, which was a secret society in the texts, and you... R. JOHNSON: You know, I didn't. Other people brought that up. GREENE: You suggested this could - this might mean a secret group within the FBI holding meetings off-site. And you went on to say, this could mean corruption at the highest levels of the FBI. R. JOHNSON: Well, I think... GREENE: There is talk now that reference may have been a joke. I'm just wondering if you feel you might have jumped to conclusions here. R. JOHNSON: No. All I was connecting was, we - you know, I have all kinds of people come in our - to our - in front of our committee, giving us information. And I had heard that there were off-site meetings. And so I was just connecting the dots there. It could be a joke. Those off-site meetings could be completely harmless. You know, (unintelligible). GREENE: Is there a campaign here by Republicans to discredit the FBI, to discredit Mueller? Is that what's going on here? R. JOHNSON: Certainly not on my part. My part, again - my involvement goes back three years. And the sham investigation into what I believe was a crime by Secretary Clinton - by the way, another pretty important piece of information came out of the last batch of texts is that now we know from these texts that President Obama received a text or a email from Clinton from the territory of a sophisticated adversary. GREENE: OK, Senator, I apologize. I just - we don't have the time this morning to go back in history. R. JOHNSON: Well, I understand. I know. And that's - there's the problem with how these things work. GREENE: I just - let me just ask you the bottom line. Do you have full confidence in Mueller and whatever he concludes? R. JOHNSON: Yeah, listen, he's probably perfectly qualified for his investigation, but now that this thing has expanded into possible - you know, for sure bias, possible corruption at the highest levels of the FBI, he would not be qualified to investigate that. He's just too close. He has too many conflicts of interest. Somebody needs to take it... GREENE: But what about the Russia investigation? Do you have confidence in that? R. JOHNSON: Yes, but I really do believe the intelligence committees - both the House and Senate - I would've liked to seen them complete their work before a special counsel ever would've been appointed because I have the exact same experience. Once a criminal investigation began on the Hillary Clinton email scandal, my own committee investigation was really frustrated. We were given, you know, diddly squat in terms of information. And now it's all coming out. GREENE: Let me just... R. JOHNSON: Now we're starting to learn a whole lot more than we should've learned way back in 2015 and 2016. GREENE: We just have a little time left, Senator. I just wonder, is - do you worry that some of the messaging right now about the FBI, alleging corruption, alleging scandals as big as Watergate could undermine confidence in the FBI, which is, you know, at the front lines of fighting terrorism? R. JOHNSON: Yeah, I know. Listen, I want to make sure that the FBI is beyond reproach in terms of integrity. The only way that they restore their integrity is if we get to the bottom of this. And we need transparency here, and that's all I'm trying to provide. I'm trying to get to the bottom of this, find out if there is corruption, get - root it out and restore the credibility to these premier law enforcement agencies that do need to have the respect of the public. GREENE: Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, thanks a lot. We appreciate it this morning. R. JOHNSON: Have a good day. GREENE: And NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson is here with us. And Carrie, what struck you from that conversation? CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Well, it's pretty remarkable that President Trump has been tweeting, beating up and attacking the FBI - these two FBI personnel for exchanging text messages. It's become a cause for Senator Ron Johnson and others, whereas, you know, there are people like Senator Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee. He says that this - these missing texts appear to be just a technical glitch. He's taking the FBI at his word. The concern within the FBI and within the Justice Department, David, is that some of this messaging is causing the public to lose faith in them and their work on criminal investigations, public corruption, the next time - God forbid - a terrorist attack occurs, and that this kind of messaging could be doing permanent damage and undermining confidence in the bureau and the Justice Department moving forward by a political party - the Republicans - which have, in the past, been very vocal in supporting law and order. GREENE: All right, NPR's Carrie Johnson. Thanks, Carrie. We appreciate it. C. JOHNSON: You're welcome. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Wednesday was the day of judgment for Larry Nassar. A judge sentenced the former USA Gymnastics doctor to up to 175 years in prison. She said, you've done nothing to deserve to walk outside a prison again. The judge allowed statements by many of Nassar's more than 150 victims, any who wanted to speak. Wednesday was also a day of accountability for the president of Michigan State University, where Nassar also worked. President Lou Anna Simon resigned. Michigan Radio reporter Kate Wells has been covering this story for more than a year. She's on the line. Good morning. KATE WELLS, BYLINE: Hey, Steve. INSKEEP: Can you work us through the timeline here? When did victims start reporting crimes by Larry Nassar so far as you know? WELLS: More than 20 years ago, according to these women and girls. We know that multiple women and girls say they have been talking to their MSU coaches, trainers, staff. We heard from one of them in court this week, Larissa Boyce. She says she told her MSU gymnastics coach that Nassar's so-called treatments were becoming sexual. This was back in 1997. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) LARISSA BOYCE: I told somebody. I told an adult. Instead of being protected, I was humiliated, I was in trouble and brainwashed into believing that I was the problem. WELLS: And we know that from an administrative standpoint, this school launched a 2014 Title IX investigation against Nassar. But that investigation ended up clearing Nassar at the time and letting him go back to work, even as a separate MSU Police investigation against Nassar continued for more than a year. And we know that Nassar assaulted more than a dozen girls during that time. INSKEEP: OK. So Lou Anna Simon was not university president when these reports began coming in. But was... WELLS: Right. INSKEEP: ...The university president from 2004 onward. When, so far as you know, did she learn how bad this was? WELLS: During - at least, we know that she heard about the 2014 investigation. And she says she told the school to play it straight. But the anger towards her has really been building over this last year and a half. She has been seen as kind of tone deaf on this. At one point, she told victims that it would have been impossible to stop a determined sexual predator like Nassar. In her resignation letter last night even, she said, as tragedies are politicized, blame is inevitable. As president, it is only natural that I am the focus of this anger. So victims feel like they're not really feeling, even now, accountability from MSU. INSKEEP: Wait a minute. She's not saying, I'm responsible for what happened, and I have to take ultimate responsibility because I'm the top person. She's saying, I just want to avoid a political fight. WELLS: She's certainly saying, you know, I'm really sorry to victims that this happened. But no, nothing in terms of - look, we could have done this better, and we really messed this up. INSKEEP: Does Michigan State University face further investigation? WELLS: Definitely. MSU is now under open investigations by the NCAA, the state attorney general, and they're facing more than a hundred civil lawsuits in court. INSKEEP: Kate, thanks very much. WELLS: Thanks, Steve. INSKEEP: Kate Wells of Michigan Radio. (SOUNDBITE OF VETIVER'S "STRANGER STILL") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: President Trump has arrived in Davos, Switzerland, meeting some members of the global elite at the World Economic Forum. He's already met today with leaders of some U.S. allies. And when we talk of the global elite, we, of course, must include NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley, who is traveling with the president, who's in Davos himself. SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: (Laughter). INSKEEP: Well, you're elite to us anyway, Scott. HORSLEY: Thank you, Steve - a temporary adjunct. INSKEEP: What was it - there we go. There we go. What's it like to be there? HORSLEY: Steve, there's a lot of money, and there's a lot of snow. Davos is a beautiful Alpine ski resort. We flew over the mountains by helicopter to get here this morning. And, you know, I was just eyeing some of the scheduled sessions on the agenda, everything from preventing global pandemics to protecting elephants. This is the mecca of globalization where the movers and shakers come each winter. And into this environment comes Donald Trump to promote his "America First" agenda. INSKEEP: After having spent a lot of time attacking what he calls globalists. Now, we mentioned some of the leaders of allied nations that the president is meeting with. One of them is Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel. We have a little bit of their press conference to play here. They were talking at this point about the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. Let's listen to President Trump. (SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They have to respect the process, also. And they have to respect the fact that the U.S. has given tremendous support to them over the years in terms of monetary support and other support. So we'll see what happens with the peace process, but respect has to be shown to the U.S. or we're just not going any further. INSKEEP: Scott Horsley, what do you hear there? HORSLEY: Well, this is the first time the president has met with Prime Minister Netanyahu since the U.S. announced that it is recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Both Trump and Netanyahu called that a historic decision. They also both insisted, rather curiously, that it will advance rather than set back the Middle East peace process. Trump, also, you heard there speaking very critically of the Palestinian leadership and their refusal to meet with Vice President Pence during his recent trip to the region - the administration's already put tens of millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinians on hold. And Trump says he will continue to use American funding as a bargaining chip in hopes of bringing Palestinians to the table. INSKEEP: Doesn't this emphasize, though, that the United States has stepped back somewhat from its old role as what was seen as an honest broker or an effort to be an honest broker between Israelis and Palestinians? HORSLEY: Certainly, the Obama administration tried to be the - very neutral in that relationship in a way that often got it cast as being antagonistic to Israel. Now, Trump is not trying for neutrality here. He is obviously aligned with Benjamin Netanyahu, and he was very critical of the Palestinian leadership. INSKEEP: Now, what did the president have to say when he met with the prime minister of Britain, Theresa May? HORSLEY: This was much less of a mutual admiration society meeting than his session with Netanyahu. There has obviously been some tension between these two leaders - for example, in their handling of terrorism. Earlier this month, the president canceled his planned trip to London. He said he was unhappy with the location of a new U.S. embassy there, though there have also been reports that Trump is trying to avoid protests if he does travel to the U.K. He and May downplayed those differences today. They stressed their special relationship that the countries have long enjoyed. Trump said the U.S. and the U.K. are joined at the hip when it comes to military cooperation, and he also said they'll be talking about bilateral trade. That's something the U.K. is eager to see as it begins its withdrawal from the European Union, a move that, in a way, foreshadowed Trump's own economic nationalism. INSKEEP: And that could be a very, very long discussion, indeed. Scott, thanks very much, really appreciate it. HORSLEY: Good to be with you, Steve. INSKEEP: NPR's Scott Horsley is in Davos, Switzerland, where President Trump has arrived and where he delivers a big speech tomorrow. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Travel to China, and you might hear American music in the mall. Listen to Paul Simon, and you might hear sounds of South Africa or Brazil. Music from different cultures can feel universal. NPR's Rebecca Hersher reports on researchers who asked if it really is. (SOUNDBITE OF DRUMMING) REBECCA HERSHER, BYLINE: This research begins, fittingly enough, with two scientists, Sam Mehr and Manvir Singh, getting their freak on in the middle of the night. SAM MEHR: (Laughter) You know, when we were, like, in the depths of building this project from scratch, like, Manvir and I would be in my office at, like, you know, 1 in the morning, like, dancing around to, like, crazy songs. HERSHER: Mehr is a cognitive scientist at Harvard. And back in 2014, he and Singh were grad students. Both were interested in music, but they had a problem. To study music from around the world, you need a database of world music. There are plenty of music databases these days, but they're skewed towards stuff we know. (SOUNDBITE OF STEVIE WONDER SONG, "SUPERSTITION") HERSHER: So on nights and weekends, Singh and Mehr systematically built a new database called the Natural History of Song. MANVIR SINGH: We split the world into 30 subregions. And then from every word region, we collected a dance song, on a healing song, a love song and a lullaby. HERSHER: The database has 128 songs that you're not going to find on Spotify, songs from small societies like the Igloolik Inuit and Nanai. MEHR: It's like a treasure hunt. HERSHER: Armed with their database, they set out to test a theory that music is universally understandable. Doesn't matter who you are, this theory says, if you hear a dance song, you'll know it. Mehr and Singh did a very simple experiment. They had people from 60 countries take a listening survey online. For example, they might hear 14 seconds of this Micronesian song. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG) UNIDENTIFIED SINGERS: (Singing in foreign language). HERSHER: And then answer questions like... SINGH: To what extent do you think this song is used for dancing? HERSHER: Or for comforting an infant - or expressing love - or healing someone. When they analyzed all the answers, they found people couldn't pick out a love song or a healing song very well. But... SINGH: People were really good at lullabies and dance songs. That means that people all around the world have a similar conception of what a dance song should sound like or what a lullaby should sound like. HERSHER: Like, maybe lullabies everywhere have simpler structures and slower tempos. (SOUNBITE OF SAMI LULLABY) UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Singing in foreign language). HERSHER: Mehr says he expects their finding will shake up music research. MEHR: To some people in the field, this is somewhat controversial. It suggests that there are some universal features to these songs. HERSHER: But he says that shouldn't be upsetting to people who love the diversity of world music. MEHR: Even though these commonalities are there, there's still this insane amount of variety across cultures. And to us, that's what made a lot of this music really, really fascinating to listen to was like - oh, yeah, this is definitely a dance song. But like, God, it sounds amazing. Like, what are they doing? SINGH: It kind of reinforces our finding. Like, Sam and I are sitting there listening to, like, an Australian dance song that was recorded in 1940. And we are, like, bugging out and loving it. (SOUNDBITE OF YOLNGU DANCE SONG) UNIDENTIFIED SINGERS: (Singing in foreign language). HERSHER: Rebecca Hersher, NPR News. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: After a mass shooting in this country, there are all kinds of questions about how the shooter was able to get a gun. Courts have long prohibited certain people from owning guns, like felons and people with domestic violence convictions. But in practice, the criminal justice system rarely checks to make sure guns have actually been surrendered. NPR's Martin Kaste has a story about one city trying to change that. MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: In a coffee shop in downtown Seattle, two police officers have come to see the barista. They take him outside, and they serve him with a temporary protective order filed by his girlfriend. ELLEN KERNAN: Don't have any more contact with her - no calls, emails, text, nothing. OK? UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Yeah. KASTE: So far, this is pretty normal. But then Officer Ellen Kernan starts grilling him about weapons. KERNAN: Do you have any guns? UNIDENTIFIED MAN: No. KERNAN: Nothing? UNIDENTIFIED MAN: No. KERNAN: OK. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I have no weapons. KERNAN: Do you have a CPL? UNIDENTIFIED MAN: What's that? KERNAN: Concealed pistol license. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Oh, no. KERNAN: OK. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: No. KERNAN: So... UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I've never even handled a gun. So... KERNAN: OK. KASTE: They're asking him about a gun because his girlfriend says he has one. So a court has told him to surrender it temporarily. But this is the kind of court order that often gets ignored. In 2016, there were 875 gun surrender orders here in King County. And of those 875, only 52 people actually turned in guns - which is why there is now this new effort to send cops out to follow up in person. KERNAN: But absolutely don't have anything? UNIDENTIFIED MAN: No. KERNAN: OK? OK. KASTE: The problem is, if someone insists he doesn't have a gun, the cops are often stuck. SEAN HAMLIN: I don't know who to believe. I don't know. KASTE: That's the other officer on this call, Sean Hamlin. It's no simple matter, he says, figuring out whether someone owns a gun. The state's firearm purchase records are incomplete. Full of holes is how one cop describes them. So Hamlin says their next move probably depends on what the girlfriend says. HAMLIN: If she has specific allegations of - I saw this gun, he always has this gun on him, or he always hides it under his pillow when he sleeps at night - more likely than not, we would get that search warrant signed by the judge, and we would go do it. KASTE: Whether to get a warrant or whether to even follow up on a gun removal order, that's a decision made in this high-rise conference room. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Was anything else on today's calendar that we wanted to talk about? UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Yeah. KASTE: This is the heart of Seattle's new gun removal effort. It's an unusual collaboration between city and county prosecutors and law enforcement. They're going about gun removal in a whole new way, which is getting some national attention. What they do is review the list of gun surrender orders that come out of the courts every week, and then they target the most ominous ones. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: She had also called 911 to report the stalking. So I assigned one of my detectives to work on that case to make sure that we could charge on it because then we have leverage to make sure that he turns in all of his firearms. KASTE: Leverage - around this table, you hear that word a lot. And that's because this work often consists of just convincing people to give up their guns. City prosecutor Chris Anderson says that can mean just calling the gun owner's family. CHRIS ANDERSON: We call people's moms. We call their aunt. We call their uncle. And we call everybody that we're able to talk to. And we explain to them, look, he's not just a risk to the victims, he's a risk to himself. And it's just better if we have the guns. KASTE: The laws prohibiting certain people from owning guns are not new. What is new here in Seattle is this strategic effort to enforce those laws. And it's working if you judge it by all the guns that are stacking up in the police evidence room. And so far, the gun rights movement seems OK with that. ALAN GOTTLIEB: We've had no complaints from anybody in the public that King County has violated anybody's rights. KASTE: Alan Gottlieb is with a group called the Second Amendment Foundation. GOTTLIEB: We also don't want guns in the hands of prohibited people. And so as a result, I think what the county is trying to do is good. We just want to make sure it's done right. KASTE: For many gun control advocates, this is now looking like the most workable strategy - emphasize improved enforcement of existing gun laws. Even states with permissive regulations, such as Wisconsin, have recently made it easier for police to take guns from domestic abusers. The research has shown how effective this is in preventing violence, especially in the first hours after an incident. (SOUNDBITE OF KNOCK ON DOOR) KASTE: And that's what Seattle Police Sergeant Dorothy Kim is doing right now, knocking on the door of a woman whose boyfriend was just arrested for domestic violence. Kim wants to convince the girlfriend to turn over her partner's gun before he posts bail in a few hours. DOROTHY KIM: But it gives you guys also a chance to kind of cool off and make sure everyone stays safe. And that's even the point of trying to get the weapon before he's released. It's better for law enforcement. It's better for you. It's better for him, really. So... KASTE: The girlfriend doesn't need convincing. She hands over his semiautomatic rifle. The officers check it. HAMLIN: And it is definitely not loaded. KASTE: And soon they're out on the street with the rifle in hand. Sergeant Kim says she realizes this is probably temporary. Domestic violence victims often drop charges eventually. And if the boyfriend escapes conviction, he'll get the rifle back. But Sergeant Kim says she feels better knowing that right now, while emotions are running high in that apartment, the gun is out. Martin Kaste, NPR News, Seattle. (SOUNDBITE OF SOUVARIS' "PIBNO") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: All right. we're going to shift our focus now over to Thailand. The generals who seized power there in 2014 are promising a quick return to democratic rule. Those generals are still there. As Michael Sullivan reports from Bangkok though, time may be running out because of the deputy prime minister's affinity for expensive timepieces. MICHAEL SULLIVAN, BYLINE: If only he'd worn sunglasses at that Cabinet meeting on the lawn last month, then maybe Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwan wouldn't have raised his arm to shield his eyes and expose his problem. PAUL CHAMBERS: You could see this huge watch, this gaudy ring, right there. SULLIVAN: And the photo of that bling quickly went viral says Paul Chambers, a lecturer at Naresuan University. The watch - a very expensive Richard Mille that Prawit had failed to declare on his assets list. Social media sleuths then discovered a slew of watches on Prawit's wrist in the past few years - 25 and counting, including Patek Philippes and Rolexes. Total value - more than a million dollars, all undeclared and all a bit much on a civil servant's salary. The pugnacious Prawit was unrepentant. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER PRAWIT WONGSUWAN: (Speaking Thai). SULLIVAN: He initially told reporters he didn't remember where the watches came from or why it was even their business. A few days later, he changed his tune and said he'd borrowed them from friends. THITINAN PONGSUDHIRAK: This is whitewash, and people are not buying it. SULLIVAN: Thitinan Pongsudhirak teaches at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University. THITINAN: He's on kind of a political death row. Certainly, he's untenable. It's a matter of when, to me, that he will have to resign because these watches, he can't shake them off. SULLIVAN: Thitinan also believes it won't end there. THITINAN: The watch saga, I think, will pave the way for the downfall of this government and the change of government. It's a kind of a fuse that has lit a powder keg of dissent, frustration. The watch scandal is becoming that catalyst. SULLIVAN: And it couldn't have come at a worse time for General-turned-Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who's eyeing staying on as an unelected prime minister when and if new elections are held. So why can't Prayuth just fire Prawit? Politics. CHAMBERS: I think Prayuth probably already took his deputy prime minister aside and said, look, you need to control yourself. But I don't think Prawit cares. SULLIVAN: Paul Chambers of Naresuan University. CHAMBERS: Prawit has a lot of power and a lot of influence in the army and in the National Legislative Assembly and among many other civilian and military bureaucrats. So Prayuth can't just say you're out. SULLIVAN: Unlike Thitinan, Chambers thinks Prawit and the military will weather this storm and the investigation by the National Anti-Corruption Commission. But Thai civil society, long cowed by the military after the coup, isn't backing down on this one. And the watch saga has left many Thais wondering what the other military leaders in the Cabinet have to hide. Longtime civil society activist Srisuwan Janya. SRISUWAN JANYA: (Speaking Thai). SULLIVAN: "General Prawit's case shows that the military government protects their own," he says, "that they're not serious to solve the problem of corruption. They don't have the morals" he says, "to run the country." But they do have the guns and a new military-drafted constitution that ensures their continued influence in Thai politics long after long-delayed elections are finally held. But Srisuwan Janya is worried, worried in a way he hasn't been for a while. SRISUWAN: (Speaking Thai). SULLIVAN: "If Prawit stays," he says, "and if elections are postponed again, it could prompt another uprising against the military" he says, "like the one in 1992." "This is a dangerous time for Thailand," he says. And he's not joking about Prawit's watches. For NPR News, I'm Michael Sullivan in Bangkok. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: It's Friday and time for StoryCorps. Dr. Jenna Lester's grandmother was one of the first African-American nurse practitioners in New York. A generation later, Jenna's mother Sharon Brangman became a doctor. And she tells Jenna it was her own mother's determination that set her on the path. SHARON BRANGMAN: I was probably about 10 years old, and I had already decided I was going to be a doctor. But the guidance counselor put me into typing, home economics. And I came home with my books. And grandmother was like, oh, no way. And I remember she went up to the school and said, I want my daughter transferred, so she could go to college. JENNA LESTER: Tell me about your medical school experience. BRANGMAN: There was one professor. He would take a picture of an old Negro League baseball player holding a bat and start talking about the muscles using black dialect. He would show us Playboy centerfold when he was talking about anatomy. And when you were taking a really hard test, he would walk behind, linger over your shoulder. And he had this horrible pipe. You'd hear a little puff sound and smell the smoke come over you. And he would do that to all the black students. So this was the classroom. And I remember my mother telling me it doesn't matter if the teacher likes you or not, your job is to learn. I mean she didn't go to college. But if she had come up in a different era, I think she would have been the first physician in the family. Was there a moment growing up when you realized what I did? LESTER: Well, I remember knowing you were a doctor. I guess, my earliest memory is when you came to the first grade classroom to dissect cow hearts. BRANGMAN: Oh, yeah, that's right. LESTER: And then you cut them open, and you were like showing us the valves and the different chambers of the heart. And I was like, wow, this is so cool. The typical person who has a long line of doctors in their family are like these often white men that I sit next to in class whose father, grandfather, great-grandfather were doctors. And it's cool to be a part of the same thing, but that looks very different. To realize all the things that you had to go through and that Grandma had to go through to get me to where I am today, I feel like I'm working for a little bit more than just myself. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) MARTIN: That was Sharon Brangman and Jenna Lester at StoryCorps in New York City. Jenna is finishing her residency in dermatology in California. Their conversation will be archived at the Library of Congress. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Critics of President Trump's business activity are trying again to stop it. The president continues to own his global business long after taking office. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: His critics say that creates massive conflicts of interest and violates two clauses in the Constitution. Last month, a judge in New York dismissed a lawsuit saying the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue. INSKEEP: But yesterday, a similar lawsuit received a friendlier response from Judge Peter Messitte at a preliminary hearing in Maryland. NPR's Peter Overby reports. PETER OVERBY, BYLINE: The plaintiffs here are the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia. Their lawsuit alleges that Trump is violating the Constitution's Emoluments Clauses, which bar the president from personally profiting from his dealings with foreign governments or even U.S. state governments. Here's Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh after the hearing. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) BRIAN FROSH: The fact is Trump is taking money from foreign governments. He's taking money from the United States that he's not entitled to. And he is also receiving payments from states all that violate his oath of office. OVERBY: One major point of contention involves Trump's D.C. hotel. The plaintiffs say it's stealing business from other metro area venues because it's where big spenders can influence presidential decision making. The Justice Department is defending President Trump. DOJ lawyer Brett Shumate said the lawsuit amounts to an abstract political disagreement with the president and much speculation by the plaintiffs. He said Maryland and D.C. were trying to infer competition between Trump's hotel and others around D.C. and he said the plaintiffs haven't suffered any harm that justifies a lawsuit. In legalese, they don't have standing to sue. Judge Messitte seemed to urge the plaintiffs to amend the suit in ways that might make it more likely to succeed. He finally told D.C. Attorney Loren AliKhan it's your call, not mine. Messitte said he would issue a ruling, quote, "as soon as I can." That probably means about 60 days. Here's how D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine assessed the hearing later. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) KARL RACINE: We came into this case confident about our standing, and we leave this courthouse even more confident. OVERBY: The stakes are high. If D.C. and Maryland could get standing, they'd be able to seek discovery of financial records of Trump's Washington hotel and other properties as well. What they ultimately want is a court order telling the president to divest himself of his financial empire, the kind of court order no president has ever faced. Shumate said divestiture wouldn't stop people from spending money at the Trump hotels, but the plaintiffs hope it would separate the president from the profits. Peter Overby, NPR News, Washington. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: News this morning out of South Korea. A fire broke out in a hospital emergency room there and killed at least three dozen people. NPR's Elise Hu has more. ELISE HU, BYLINE: So far, investigators don't know what started the flames, but they can speak of the fire's casualties. Most of the people killed were sick and elderly patients, the Sejong Hospital director says. One nurse, one doctor and a nursing assistant were also killed. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) SEOK JEONG-SIK: (Speaking Korean). HU: "I am truly sorry. I'm sorry for the patients and their caretakers," Director Seok Jeong-sik said. At the scene in the southeastern Korean town of Miryang, investigators are poring over the scene of the fire that spread fast from a main stairwell and took two hours to put out. Fire Chief Choi Man-woo briefed reporters. CHOI MAN-WOO: (Through interpreter) When I arrived at the scene, the flames and smoke were so severe, the sky was almost dark. HU: Choi said his crews rushed to transfer patients to nearby facilities, but many died after the moves. With the death count near 40, this tragedy is already among the deadliest fires in South Korean history. Elise Hu, NPR News, Seoul. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: We've got these reports out this morning saying President Trump tried to fire special counsel Robert Mueller from the Russia investigation. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Here is the story as written by The New York Times. You will recall the president fired the FBI director last May. In an interview, he then linked the firing to the Russia investigation, and that led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to probe Russia's role in the 2016 election. Then by June, the president was ready to fire Robert Mueller, too. He ordered his White House counsel to get it done, but Don McGahn said it was a terrible idea and said he would resign first. MARTIN: Again, all that according to a report first in The New York Times, then The Washington Post. NPR's justice correspondent Ryan Lucas is in the studio with us this morning. Also, NPR's White House correspondent Tamara Keith is on the line. Good morning to you both. TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Good morning. RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Morning. MARTIN: All right, Ryan. Let's start with you. Tell us what we know. What did President Trump ask and why? LUCAS: First off, I have to say that NPR has not confirmed this report, but what The Times is saying is that as reports started to surface last summer that Mueller was looking at a potential obstruction of justice case, Trump began to argue internally that the special counsel had possible conflicts of interest. There were a number of things that that Trump was looking at. One would be Mueller's one-time membership at a Trump golf course in north Virginia - Northern Virginia. Reportedly, there was a dispute about fees, and Mueller left the club - also Mueller's connection to a law firm that was representing Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. And then the third kind of big piece here is that he was arguing that because Trump had interviewed Mueller to possibly replace James Comey... MARTIN: Right. LUCAS: ...That that presented a third possible conflict of interest. MARTIN: So just to review - he was saying that Robert Mueller couldn't do his job properly because there was a spat over golf club fees and that he once represented or worked for a firm that represented his son-in-law, which would have made him more disposed to being favorable to him, you would think. INSKEEP: And some of this we know. Some of this was said. The complaints were made publicly at the time. What The New York Times has added here is just that the president tried to act on his complaints. LUCAS: That's right. A lot of these arguments about possible conflict of interest are things that we have heard from the White House over time. MARTIN: And so at the center of all this is this question of obstruction of justice. You say this is when the president really started to wage this personal war against Robert Mueller because Mueller was seizing on how the president had fired James Comey. LUCAS: That's right. A lot of this does go back to the question of Comey's firing and our understanding of it in the public. And the timeline is important here. Remember, Comey was fired on May 9. Several days later, word leaked out that Trump had asked Comey to lay off Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. MARTIN: Right. LUCAS: Flynn was under FBI investigation. That helped prompt the appointment of Mueller. That was on May 17. Comey then testifies in early June before Congress, provides all these details under oath about interactions that he had with President Trump - the requests for loyalty, requests to have Comey go easy on Flynn. So by mid-June - mid-June - we're talking three weeks, a month after Mueller was put in the job - there were already questions publicly about possible obstruction of justice. MARTIN: All right. Tamara Keith's on the line, too. What is the White House saying about these reports this morning, Tamara? KEITH: So White House lawyer Ty Cobb has said that they are declining to comment out of respect for the office of special counsel and its process. However, President Trump has commented. He was walking into the World Economic Forum in Davos this morning, surrounded by a massive scrum of reporters and photographers. And he was asked about the New York Times report. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Why did you fire Robert Mueller? Why did you want to fire Robert Mueller? PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Fake news, folks. Fake news. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: What's your message today? TRUMP: Typical New York Times fake stories. KEITH: We should say... MARTIN: We've heard that from him before. KEITH: Yeah, we have heard that from him before. He has called a lot of things fake news that are, in fact, not fake. He then went on to say that the crowd at Davos was tremendous. Quote, "It's a crowd like they've never had before at Davos." MARTIN: We've also heard that from him before at different events. INSKEEP: (Laughter) Biggest crowd in history. MARTIN: Biggest crowd ever. KEITH: Period. MARTIN: So, Tam... KEITH: Yes. MARTIN: ...President Trump has said that he is looking forward to talking to Mueller's team under oath. He said this just a couple days ago to reporters, right? I mean, this was - this is a shift that he, all of a sudden, is game to do this. How is this latest revelation going to play into that conversation, to that interview? KEITH: Well - and so there has - he has been shifting back and forth on this. He had previously said he would talk to investigators. Then he said, we'll see. We'll see. We don't know. And now he's saying, I'd love to do it. But it's up to my lawyers. And what we know is that his lawyers are in the process of negotiating with Mueller's team the terms of such a conversation. You know, the other interesting thing is that, yesterday, early in the day before all of this came out, Trump's legal team sent me this document that listed all the various ways that the campaign and the White House have been cooperating with the Mueller investigation, including turning over thousands of pages of documents that they point out are related to James Comey and Michael Flynn and also that more than 20 White House personnel, including eight people from the White House counsel's office, have sat - they say voluntarily - for interviews with Mueller's team. MARTIN: Plus, there's this new public line that the White House and President Trump - is just defending himself, that there's somehow a difference between obstructing the investigation and just standing up for himself under this pressure. KEITH: Right. President Trump in that meeting with reporters earlier this week says, I'm fighting back, fighting back. And now you say it's obstruction. MARTIN: Right. So, Ryan, what is this news that - according to The Times, that President Trump tried to get rid of Robert Mueller - how is that going to change the investigation, if at all? LUCAS: Well, it doesn't change Robert Mueller's investigation. This is stuff that Robert Mueller would already know. Mueller, as Tam said, has interviewed 20 people with ties to the White House. He's interviewed White House counsel Don McGahn, who is one of the chief players in this story. MARTIN: Right. LUCAS: He's interviewed former chief of staff Reince Priebus. He interviewed Attorney General Jeff Sessions last week. So Mueller's team is moving ahead methodically. MARTIN: Regardless. LUCAS: Right. INSKEEP: And one other thing to keep in mind from this story is it's an example, as reported by The New York Times, of a presidential staff trying to manage the boss. And in fairness, it's not the only White House staff ever to try to do this. But you have Don McGahn saying to the president, I'm not going to do what you want me to do. And later in the same story, as the president continues getting upset over time, The Times says the president's lawyers tried to keep Mr. Trump calm by assuring him that the investigation was close to ending. MARTIN: Real quick, Tam - president's going to give an address at Davos. What's he going to say? KEITH: So when he's in the United States, he's all about America First. When he's overseas, it's America First but not alone. And that's what this speech is going to be. MARTIN: NPR's Tamara Keith and NPR's Ryan Lucas for us this morning. Thanks, guys. KEITH: You're welcome. LUCAS: Thank you. MARTIN: All right. We're going to remember a moment in the standoff that led to a recent government shutdown. Many lawmakers, remember, wanted a deal on immigration. They still do. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he couldn't tell what legislation President Trump would actually support. INSKEEP: Now the White House has specified what it will accept. The proposal would offer legal status for people brought to the United States illegally as children. It would also offer a path to citizenship for up to 1.8 million people who would qualify. The plan also demands lots and lots of money for a border wall. MARTIN: NPR's congressional correspondent Susan Davis is here. Hey, Sue. SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: Good morning. MARTIN: What's the opening bid in this plan? DAVIS: There's four major components to what the White House is seeking. First is that path to citizenship that would include the 800,000 people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and everyone that would qualify for that program, which is how you get to that 1.8 million figure. MARTIN: Right - because to be a DACA recipient, you had to go through paperwork. DAVIS: Precisely. MARTIN: And there's lots of people who didn't. So this would encompass all of them. DAVIS: They want $25 billion upfront to build a border wall system. And they're seeking dramatic reductions to legal immigration, specifically policies that govern family-based immigration and a diversity visa program that allows slots for up to 50,000 people to come into the country every year. MARTIN: Do Democrats like this? DAVIS: Democratic Congressman Luis Gutierrez is a Democrat from Illinois. He put out a statement in regards to the wall in which he said, it would be far cheaper to erect a 50-foot concrete statue of a middle finger and point it towards Latin America. MARTIN: OK. INSKEEP: (Laughter) OK. DAVIS: Democrats don't like the wall. They've never liked the wall, but the wall is also something they've been willing to trade. The issue that's going to be the hardest piece of this puzzle to solve is the legal immigration point. MARTIN: Right. DAVIS: It's really the killer for Democrats. I also think it's very important to know that in the context of legal immigration, this is not a traditional Republican vs. Democrat argument. In the White House - in calling for dramatic reductions in legal immigration, also goes against a lot of Republican orthodoxy. Traditionally, the business community and other allies support legal immigration. Most mainstream economists say it's beneficial, if not necessary, to U.S. economic growth. MARTIN: We should also point out that not all Republicans are on board with this idea, too - the idea of essentially giving what they call amnesty to the so-called DREAMers. DAVIS: That's - in the Senate, there is a lot of support for what the president has outlined. The tougher hurdles always have been in the House. What the Republican leaders in Congress had been asking for is the White House to outline what they want because in order to get a vote, they really do need Republicans to believe that this is President Trump's immigration proposal... MARTIN: Right. DAVIS: ...To win over a lot of those reluctant Republicans. MARTIN: So what happens now. What dates do we look forward to here? DAVIS: The date that the administration is saying is March 5. That's when he's called for the end of the DACA program. So they'd like to have something to enact by then. MARTIN: All right. NPR's congressional correspondent Susan Davis laying out the White House's new immigration proposal. Thanks so much, Sue. DAVIS: You're welcome. (SOUNDBITE OF LAKEY INSPIRED'S "FAST LANE") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Parts of Paris are under water. Flooding is submerging roads, closing parts of the subway and forcing museums to move artwork to higher floors. So what's it like by the riverside? Here's NPR's Eleanor Beardsley. ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: OK. I've come down to the Seine River. And here, where I often walk along the river, by the houseboats... (SOUNDBITE OF WATER SLOSHING) BEARDSLEY: ...Is completely submerged. And there is a swan swimming right in front of me. The Seine has risen nearly 19 feet above its normal level, and the city is collectively holding its breath to see if the river will rise above the 2016 flood level of 6.1 meters, or 20 feet. After a solid month of rain, rivers across France are overflowing their banks. And nearly half the country is on flood alert. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: (Speaking French). BEARDSLEY: Television news is dominated by the flooding. In the Marne valley, people have been evacuated from villages. Tens of thousands are putting their furniture up on cinder blocks. Boat traffic on the Seine in Paris and upstream has been stopped, but people stand on a bridge, watching the roiling waters below. NATSARENO MONTIS: (Speaking French). BEARDSLEY: Italian Natsareno Montis works in Paris. He says the climate is changing in Europe, and people have to wake up. Two major floods in two years is crazy, he says. Overconstruction and industrial farming have also made the soil less porous. Parisian Pierre de Potestat has come out to watch the river. Despite the damage, he thinks there's something beautiful about the wildness of it all. PIERRE DE POTESTAT: I like the seagulls, you know. When the river gets bigger, maybe more seagulls come from the sea. BEARDSLEY: The Seine is expected to peak Friday night sometime after midnight. Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep with a New Jersey couple who wouldn't give up. They were about to be married by a judge when the groom's mother had an asthma attack. She was taken to the women's room causing a dilemma. The couple could get married without the mom or lose their slot for the wedding and have to wait. They innovated. If the mother could not reach the wedding, the wedding could reach her. Judge Katie Gummer adjourned to the bathroom and married the couple right there. You're listening to MORNING EDITION. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: The White House has now specified an immigration plan that President Trump will accept. And isn't that a change, Sue Davis? SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: It is. There was a lot of frustration on Capitol Hill not knowing where the president was. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Republicans were waiting to see what the president would support. And Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said it is like negotiating with jello. INSKEEP: This is part of the reason they had this train wreck that ended in the government shutdown the other day. DAVIS: Correct. INSKEEP: They couldn't figure out what the president wanted. Sue, we should mention, covers Congress for NPR News - NPR's Susan Davis. So what will the president approve? DAVIS: The president and the White House have released a proposal that has four main items in it. The first is a path to citizenship for up to 1.8 million people. This includes the 800,000 people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. But it would also apply to everyone who would qualify for that program, which is how you get to 1.8 million. INSKEEP: All those people brought to the United States illegally as children and - are at least eligible for this status, OK. DAVIS: Right, these are the people you often hear referred to as DREAMers. He's also asking for a lot of money for the wall. They want $25 billion upfront for both a border wall system and more money for immigration law enforcement. And they want tougher crackdowns on legal immigration - specifically on family-based immigration policies and a visa lottery program that gives slots to 50,000 people a year to come into the country. INSKEEP: OK, lots to discuss here - and, of course, the idea is to somehow get something through Congress before a deadline that's coming up for DACA recipients, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. First, the path to citizenship - this is actually more than President Obama was able to grant DACA recipients. It goes farther because it talks about eventual citizenship for people brought illegally. Will the president's own party buy this? DAVIS: He has a significant amount of support for this idea in the Republican Party and in a place where it matters - in the United States Senate. Even immigration hard-liners like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas have said he can get on board for this proposal as long as it has these legal immigration reductions. That is going to be the debate. You know, Democrats have conceded they are willing to give up a little bit of what money for the wall even if they hate the wall, right? That's the horse trade they've been willing to do. Legal immigration is very controversial. Democrats don't believe you need these crackdowns. And neither do a lot of traditional Republican allies. The business community in this country, long allied with the Republican Party, has long advocated for legal immigration because they say it's good for the U.S. economy. INSKEEP: Let's be clear what we're talking about here. Legal immigration - so if you reduce that, you're essentially saying too many foreigners are coming into this country - too many outsiders. We don't like it for cultural or economic reasons. And we want to reduce that. That is the proposal on the table. DAVIS: It is. And that's why Democrats like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi put out a statement very critical of this proposal and saying that it was, in her words, quote, "part of the Trump administration's unmistakable campaign to make America white again," which shows you how the reception is among Democrats. If they can't resolve this part of this puzzle, it's going to make a deal very difficult. And I think that's why there's still a lot of hope on Capitol Hill they can get a deal. But the pessimism that they can thread the needle on all these issues is certainly there. INSKEEP: The question is can you get some Republican and Democratic votes even though lots of Republicans and Democrats hate something in this measure. DAVIS: I think that is, unfortunately for everyone involved, often the key to compromise. INSKEEP: Sue, thanks very much. DAVIS: You're welcome. INSKEEP: NPR's Susan Davis. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: It was hard to watch, and it was hard to pull away - that courtroom scene in Michigan. Dozens and dozens of women confronting the man who abused them. This week, Larry Nassar was sentenced to up to 175 years in prison. He's the former team doctor who sexually assaulted more than 100 gymnasts over several decades. As NPR's Tom Goldman reports, advocates are asking tough questions now about why this happened in an Olympic sport again. TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Over seven harrowing days, the victim testimony was gripping. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) EMILY MORALES: I was affected by Larry. He did hurt me, and he hurt hundreds of other young women. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) ALY RAISMAN: Larry, you abused the power and trust I, and so many others, placed in you. And I am not sure I will ever come to terms with how horribly you manipulated and violated me. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JORDYN WIEBER: I'm angry with myself for not recognizing the abuse. And that's something I'm struggling with today. GOLDMAN: In a Michigan courtroom, gymnasts Emily Morales, Aly Raisman, Jordyn Wieber and dozens of others pulled the curtain back on an often hidden subject. NANCY HOGSHEAD-MAKAR: Those victims gave the world a masterclass in what victim trauma looks like. GOLDMAN: Former Olympian Nancy Hogshead-Makar already knew what it looked like. HOGSHEAD-MAKAR: I wrote an article in 2012, and the title of the article was "Olympic Athletes Are Not Well-Protected Against Sexual Abuse." GOLDMAN: Hogshead-Makar won three gold medals in swimming at the 1984 Olympics. She's now a civil rights attorney who's been dealing with the issue of sexual abuse in club and Olympic sports for the past eight years. HOGSHEAD-MAKAR: Larry Nassar has 150 victims. There are 100 swim coaches who are banned that triple the number of victims that Larry Nassar had. GOLDMAN: She's angry, she says, that the U.S. Olympic Committee, which oversees all the Olympic sports, hasn't, in her mind, been more assertive in laying out basic policies to protect athletes. HOGSHEAD-MAKAR: Here's how you need to train your coaches. And here's how you need to train the kids. And here's how you need to train the parents. And here's how you need to hire people. Until they're willing to be a leader and take a stand against athlete abuse, then we're going to continue to have these problems. GOLDMAN: Hogshead-Makar says the committee's chief executive, Scott Blackmun, hasn't been that leader. Others are hesitant to talk openly and to off-the-record conversations with NPR. Sources who've worked in and around the committee agreed. The USOC hasn't done enough to hold the Olympic sports accountable. One person said when Blackmun took over in 2010, the mantra between the USOC and the sports became one team. Working together became more important than the USOC policing the sports and making sure the athletes well-being came first. The USOC has its defenders. One source close to the organization says Blackmun has been very involved with the issue of sexual abuse of athletes including investing in the Center for Safe Sport, which launched last year. The committee has ordered what it calls an independent investigation of the Nassar case. Critics hope the USOC moves toward being proactive rather than reactive when it comes to protecting athletes. Nancy Hogshead-Makar wants to push lawmakers on the issue with a petition on change.org... HOGSHEAD-MAKAR: That asked Congress to weigh in and to make it clear to the Olympic Committee that they do in fact have this responsibility to address sexual abuse. GOLDMAN: Congress did take some action last year. And next week, the House will vote on a bill that reforms the way Olympic sports organizations handle the issue of sexual abuse. Tom Goldman, NPR News. (SOUNDBITE OF SMIKA'S "CORAL") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: You know what has happened to the phone over time. You know, years ago - old days - 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it was just a phone. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Right - a phone. So now it's also a watch a camera a map a way to shame your friends into paying you back for the dinner the other night that they... INSKEEP: (Laughter). MARTIN: ...Did not pay for. INSKEEP: And so much more. NPR's Sonari Glinton is at the big auto show in Detroit and finds that the same thing is now happening to cars. SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: The options for a new vehicle are kind of like a diner menu of features. Lincoln will connect you with a concierge. And Mercedes - the car knows you're on a windy road and will help you control your steering into the curve. Subaru has a built-in dog ramp. And Honda is focusing on your parenting skills. MICAH MUZIO: Honda has done so much clever stuff by integrating technologies that aren't just cool and techie but really make the job of parenting easier. GLINTON: Micah Muzio is with Kelley Blue Book. He's the father of a toddler, and he showed me around a Honda Odyssey to make his point. MUZIO: So when I say make parenting easier, I mean, as the driver - you know, we have had a representative up front there. Say hi, Davis Adams. DAVIS ADAMS: Hi, Davis Adams. MUZIO: That's good shtick. Should we roleplay? GLINTON: OK. So you'll sit in the back seat. MUZIO: OK. OK, all right. GLINTON: So I'll sit in the middle row? MUZIO: So I've positioned myself in the third row. And I am a fussy, fussy toddler, and Davis would like to keep tabs on what I'm doing. GLINTON: Oh and I'm looking - I just realized there's a camera that's inside the car. And Davis is pinching it, and he's seeing my bald head. (LAUGHTER) GLINTON: And he can zoom back. And you're in the third row, and you can see you making obscene gestures (laughter). MUZIO: So what's great about that is that when you're the driver, you're pointing the exact opposite direction of where your children are. And that is a great way that, rather than taking his gaze completely away from where he's driving, he can look at the screen right in the middle of the dash there and see. How many fingers am I holding up, Davis? ADAMS: You're holding up two, Micah. MUZIO: Look on the lower left side. You see what it says on the lower left side of the screen? GLINTON: Cabin Talk. MUZIO: Yeah. Davis, you want to explain that? ADAMS: Cabin Talk allows you to use the microphone in the front of the car and broadcast your voice to the back of the car. So if you want to parent from the front seat without having to raise your voice or something like that, you can do that right from here without having it too crazy. MUZIO: Don't you want to hear that from back here? Let's really roleplay. Oh, no. I'm being fussy and disagreeable. Davis, discipline me. ADAMS: Micah, don't make me come back there. MUZIO: Yes, sir. GLINTON: Here's something interesting. Many car companies have been fiddling with the layout of the interior of cars, lighter materials that will allow you to change the configuration of your minivan or your SUV really quickly. MUZIO: One of the things that I really like about the second row in the the Odyssey is that it's got something called Buddy Mode. Can I demonstrate Buddy Mode to you? GLINTON: By the way, he's always kind of like this. MUZIO: OK. No, no, no, no. You got to sit in here for this. OK. GLINTON: OK. MUZIO: So watch what I'm going to do right now. OK. Whee. So I've now slid immediately next to Sonari, making him very uncomfortable. But what's great about this is that it - you can keep them in separate positions in case, you know, the kids are fighting. And what's wonderful about this technology is that this is the kind of stuff that's super easy to use. And mothers and fathers are going to be more attentive and safer when they drive. That's fantastic. GLINTON: Don't make me come back there. Sonari Glinton, NPR News, Detroit. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DRIVE MY CAR") THE BEATLES: (Singing) Baby, you can drive my car. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Between 2010 and 2016, the United States military tallied more than 5,700 reports of gross human rights abuses by the military of Afghanistan. That's according to a report out this week from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: The abuses include the routine enslavement and sexual abuse of underage boys by Afghan military commanders. Senator Patrick Leahy wrote a law requiring the Pentagon to stop funding foreign military groups who commit human rights abuses. But in Afghanistan, that has not happened. INSKEEP: The Pentagon explains this by citing language tucked into a funding bill called the notwithstanding clause as justification. Notwithstanding other issues, the funding continues. David Greene spoke with Senator Leahy about the inspector general's report. And we should warn you, the details in this interview will be disturbing to some. PATRICK LEAHY: I can't imagine walking down Main Street - certainly in any town in Vermont - and say, how would you like to have your tax dollars spent to support a military unit that will take young boys, dress them up as girls and then use them as sex slaves? That's exactly what's happening. DAVID GREENE, BYLINE: Well, so your law has been on the books for years now. And it's supposed to address these very situations, cutting off funding for units where there are human rights abuses. Why hasn't that happened here? LEAHY: I don't know. You know, we've used it in a number of countries where it has improved the conduct of their military greatly. Here, they're using a vague part of the law saying, oh, notwithstanding. But I don't think that they realize the United States ultimately gets blamed for this. It becomes a talking point for our enemies. They say, the United States is paying for the people who are committing these abuses instead of us being able to say we found these abuses and we cut off aid until the government stopped the abuses. GREENE: Well, the exception that the Pentagon has used, the notwithstanding clause, can you explain what that is? And I wonder if it's something that you supported at any point. LEAHY: You know, anytime you have legislation, it goes through all kinds of negotiation. And the notwithstanding authority was intended to be only rarely used - usually in the middle of a battle or something like that. It was not to be used as a broad understanding of a way - well, we'll ignore this. We've got this law. But you go ahead and do everything you want to do. You do the most outrageous thing you want to do, extrajudicial killings and everything else. And don't worry - we'll keep sending you U.S. taxpayers' dollars. GREENE: But the notwithstanding clause - is that something you supported when it came before Congress? LEAHY: It went through on the understanding that it would be rarely ever used. GREENE: OK. LEAHY: They also found - SIGAR, the special... GREENE: Special inspector general, yeah. LEAHY: ...General has found that DOD never gave adequate guidance to its troops for reporting abuses and that it was just using notwithstanding to get around reporting them. Now, we are not made safer because some of the Afghan troops are raping little boys. And so we ought to think of our own U.S. troops and say, we don't tolerate this. GREENE: What should Congress do at this point? Can you change the law to make sure that the Pentagon does more to monitor these abuses? What are you asking for? LEAHY: We don't have to change the law. Remember, the Leahy Law only cuts off U.S. aid to foreign security forces if their government fails to take steps. If you want our tax dollars, then you're going to have to follow at least our values. GREENE: Senator Leahy, thank you so much for your time. It's always good talking to you. LEAHY: Thank you very much. Good to be with you. INSKEEP: He spoke with our own David Greene. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: OK. The music industry honors its best this weekend. It's Grammy time. But a new study reveals a persistent gender gap in the industry. USC's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative did the study and found that more than 90 percent of Grammy nominees in recent years have been men. STACY SMITH: We're really seeing an epidemic of invisibility, particularly in songwriting and producing. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Stacy Smith is one of the heads of the study. And they didn't just look at the Grammys. They also looked at the 600 most popular songs since 2012. Again, the evidence suggests a heavily male-dominated industry. SMITH: When it comes to songwriters, only 12 percent are female. And perhaps most egregiously, only 2 percent of 651 producers were women, and only two of those producers were women of color. INSKEEP: And if you make the focus a little narrower and just look at the songwriters who churn out hit after hit after hit, well, the pool becomes even more male. SMITH: There are nine male songwriters that are setting the agenda for popular culture across a fifth of the most popular songs over the last six years - nine men. I think consumers should know this. And I think there should be concern that such a narrow slice of humanity is responsible for and driving our ideas in music. MARTIN: Reading a study is one thing, but we also wanted to get the perspective of someone who has felt this disparity firsthand. HEBA KADRY: I mean, of course, we are a minority. But I think the Grammys are not an indication of what's actually really happening in the music industry and the diversity and how much better it is now. INSKEEP: Heba Kadry has a job making songs sound great. Her job title is mastering engineer. She works in Brooklyn. KADRY: Since I first started, you know, there really weren't that many women in studios. But, you know, really, in the last five years or so - maybe five to eight years - like, I'm seeing, like, the trend is switching. And I think it's because, you know, women are kind of fed up, and they're kind of taking matters into their own hands. A lot of them are producing their own records. MARTIN: That's not to say that she still doesn't face uphill battles in getting work, though. KADRY: You know, anytime you're in a room with a bunch of people who are considering hiring you, there is this immediate assumption - like, who do you manage, or whose girlfriend are you? Or, you know, they don't think of you as, like, potentially a person who knows what they're doing. And so you feel like you kind of have to prove yourself twice as much as males. INSKEEP: No matter the talent of women producers or engineers or songwriters, Kadry says major labels - the hit-makers - still go with people with whom they're comfortable. KADRY: They usually go for their - like, their Rolodex of, like, the same dudes. You know, I think it's when the artist has enough clout to be like, you know what? No, I want to work with this person - then can the tides really change. MARTIN: Kadry says the facts remain. The industry is still not hiring enough women. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: We're following news this morning related to the Russia investigation. The New York Times and The Washington Post are reporting that last June, President Trump ordered special counsel Robert Mueller to be fired. But White House counsel Don McGahn, who would've carried out that order, refused, and he threatened to quit. So Trump backed down. The president had this reaction today from Davos, Switzerland, where he's attending the World Economic Forum. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Fake news, folks. Fake news. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: What's your message today? TRUMP: Typical New York Times fake stories. MARTIN: NPR justice reporter Ryan Lucas has been following this. He joins us in our studio this morning. Hey, Ryan. RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Good morning. MARTIN: What more can you tell us about what the president did or did not do when it comes to Robert Mueller? LUCAS: Well, first off, NPR has not confirmed this report. But what The New York Times and Washington Post are saying is that, basically, as word kind of emerged last summer that Mueller was looking into a possible obstruction of justice case, Trump and people on his legal team began exploring what they argued were possible conflicts of interest that Mueller might have. They looked at Mueller's one-time membership at a Trump golf course in Northern Virginia - reportedly, there was a dispute about fees there and Mueller left the club; Mueller's connection to a law firm that represented Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. And then they also looked at this idea that because Trump had interviewed Mueller as a possible replacement for James Comey, that that also might present some sort of conflict of interest. Now, according to the Times, Trump ordered McGahn in June to fire Mueller. McGahn refused and refused to tell the DOJ to do so, the reasoning being that getting rid of Mueller would be this kind of catastrophic mistake for the administration. It would bring down this massive political firestorm on the administration and would raise, ultimately, more questions about obstruction of justice. MARTIN: That's what McGahn thought... LUCAS: Yes. MARTIN: ...Which is why he threatened to resign. So is this really that big of a surprise, though, because there has been a lot of chatter about the possibility of Donald Trump wanting, at least, to push out Robert Mueller? LUCAS: Trump has not been much of a fan of Mueller since Day 1. And there has been talk about this, yes, even from people very close to the president. Here's a clip from last June. This is from Christopher Ruddy. He's a longtime friend of the president and the chief executive of the conservative website Newsmax. This is him talking to PBS. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "PBS NEWSHOUR") CHRISTOPHER RUDDY: I think he's considering perhaps terminating the special counsel. I think he's weighing that option. LUCAS: Again, that was last June. MARTIN: Right. LUCAS: That's when The New York Times was saying that Trump ordered Mueller be fired. Now, the White House kind of shook up the legal team in July - so a month after this - brought on Ty Cobb to organize the response to the special counsel's investigation. Cobb has developed this more conciliatory, cooperative approach with Robert Mueller. And, in fact, yesterday, the legal team put out a document kind of outlining everything that it has done to, what it says, is cooperate with Robert Mueller. Twenty White House aides have voluntarily given interviews, they say; eight people from the White House counsel's office; nearly 30 people who had connections to the campaign. So they've taken a different approach, certainly, since June of last year. MARTIN: Right. So this all has to do with how the president handled the firing of James Comey. But at this point, what happens now? I mean, how is Congress responding to these latest allegations? They've got their own investigations into the Russia investigation happening. LUCAS: They have a whole host of investigations. Democrats have been concerned about this possibility that Mueller could be fired for a while - some Republicans, as well. There were a number of bills that were introduced on the Hill. They haven't really gone anywhere. After last night's story broke, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, put out a statement saying that firing Mueller would be - that's a red line, cannot happen. There hasn't been much of a response so far from Republicans. Much of it has basically been saying the White House says it will cooperate. We should take them at their word. MARTIN: All right, NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas - thanks, Ryan. LUCAS: Thank you. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Congressman Joaquin Castro has been listening with us. He's a Democrat from Texas who sits on the House intelligence committee, which we just mentioned. That committee has tried to investigate Russian interference. And Congressman Castro joins us from San Antonio. Good morning, sir. JOAQUIN CASTRO: Thanks for having me. INSKEEP: So The New York Times reports that President Trump as long ago as June tried to fire Robert Mueller. Is that consistent with whatever you have learned while looking into the president's conduct? CASTRO: Well, as a member of the committee, I haven't been apprised of his possible firing of Robert Mueller. But the news itself, if it's true, is very disturbing. And there is, of course, I expect an investigation going on as to his firing of James Comey. You know, we believe that - or at least I believe based on what I've seen - that he fired James Comey in part because of the Russia investigation. And so if this news is true, then that is a red line, as Senator Warner said. And I believe that, ultimately, it could be moving him closer to impeachment. Now, that said, there are many in Congress who basically, I think, are in a very protective or defensive mode when it comes to the president. So considering that, it's a very difficult thing, even if he fired Bob Mueller for those reasons, for bad reasons to protect himself. INSKEEP: Well, that's a question. When you say a red line, what would you do about it as a Democrat in Congress? CASTRO: Well, I mean, Congress should investigate it. Bob Mueller should investigate it as obstruction of justice. But I think the question that you're asking fundamentally is, what's the outcome? Is there anything that changes? And the tough part about that is that many people in Congress quite honestly, instead of doing a thorough and fair investigation of the president, really are trying to protect the president. And so the ultimate answer to what happens is still up in the air. INSKEEP: As you know, Congressman, some of your fellow members of Congress - Republicans are promoting a classified memo written by the chairman of your committee, Devin Nunes, which is purported to allege a conspiracy against President Trump and bias against President Trump at the FBI. Have you seen that classified memo? CASTRO: I have. And there's nothing that I've seen in the behavior of the FBI or anyone in the intelligence agencies that I believe fundamentally compromises the investigations that are going on or compromises the FBI. And so I think a lot of this is still part of a distraction effort by some, including, unfortunately, the chairman of the committee, Devin Nunes, again, in an effort to protect the president instead of doing a fair and thorough investigation. INSKEEP: But let's just be clear on this. I mean, there were these text messages between a couple of agents who it turned out were having an affair and kind of speaking in their own language and code and so forth. And some of those messages have been discussed. But you have seen the actual memo. And you said that you don't think there's anything that fundamentally compromises the FBI. But let's be specific. Is there any evidence in that memo of FBI misconduct that the public ought to see? CASTRO: No. I haven't seen any. And bear in mind - remember that the memo itself is basically a summary or a perspective on some highly classified source material. So the memo itself is not an original document. It's based on other evidence which is highly classified. And most of the folks on the House committee, at least, have not seen that underlying information, even though they're endorsing this memo. INSKEEP: Should the public see the memo? CASTRO: Well, the thing is if the public sees the memo, the public really needs to see the whole thing. In other words, they would have to also see the underlying material so that people can come to a conclusion themselves. Part of the challenge with that is that you could be compromising sources and methods. That's why this has been such a thorny issue for many of us on the intelligence committee but also for the FBI. INSKEEP: Is this a scam by the Republican Party? CASTRO: Well, I think that it's an effort to distract. Sure. INSKEEP: One other thing I want to ask you about, Congressman - President Trump has said that there's an immigration deal that he wants. He's specified what kind of immigration legislation he might accept. It includes, as you know, I'm sure, a path to citizenship for up to 1.8 million eligible people, DACA recipients - Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals - and other people who would be eligible for that status. There's also $25 billion to build a border wall and limits - greater limits to legal immigration. Could you vote for that? CASTRO: At this point, no. But I do think it's positive that the president and the White House finally put some cards on the table. For a while, as Senator Schumer indicated, it was like negotiating against Jell-O. The president is constantly shifting his position on what he wanted to see in an immigration bill. So they finally laid some things out on the table. I see this as a first offer that we can go back and negotiate on. But in that offer, he's still holding the DREAMers hostage to a laundry list of hardline immigration requests. INSKEEP: Congressman, there's been lots of discussion of DACA. There's been lots of discussion of funding for the wall. But there's also this limit on legal immigration. In the few seconds we have left, I'd just like to ask about that. It's been fiercely criticized on the Democratic side - reducing immigration. But is there a case to be made for it - that the United States absorbs an awful lot of immigrants, that there is some stress and pressure to that, and from time to time, it's OK to cut back somewhat? CASTRO: I think that it's fair to look at it. I mean, you know, every decade or every few decades, I think it's fair to the United States - that the United States look at its immigration policies. But these policies have also been invaluable to the success of this country and to immigrants in the United States. So we shouldn't just change them lightly. INSKEEP: Are you willing to make that change - to cut legal immigration to get other things that you want? CASTRO: Well, right now I have - in looking at that whole proposal, it's not something that I could support right now. But it's certainly something that we could talk about. INSKEEP: Congressman, thank you very much. CASTRO: Thank you. INSKEEP: That's Joaquin Castro of Texas. (SOUNDBITE OF GOLD PANDA'S "COMMUNITY (FORT ROMEAU REMIX)") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: We have the story of an American trying to manage China. Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law, took a vital role at the start of the administration. China's ambassador seized on that connection meeting Kushner again and again. Evan Osnos reported on the meetings for The New Yorker and finds the Kushner meetings to be a symptom of a larger issue. China, he says, came in with clear goals while Kushner did not. EVAN OSNOS: What he thought he could do was to cut through what he calls the machinery of government, by which he means the bureaucracy - the diplomats, the people who have been working this relationship for decades. And he wanted to try to come to a quick breakthrough in the relationship. INSKEEP: I'm just trying to figure out what that means. What did he want to accomplish on behalf of the United States? OSNOS: Well, he came in with more of an empty plate. The Chinese came in with a full plate. They knew exactly what they wanted. The Chinese wanted to have a summit between Xi Jinping and President Trump as soon as possible. They said as much. And Jared Kushner became the leading proponent of that idea within the White House. And he said look. It's important for them to build a personal kind of chemistry. Let's put aside the hard issues - the substantive questions about trade, about human rights. And let's just get a summit. And that's what they did. They arranged a summit at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. And the Chinese were very satisfied with that ambition. But frankly, there were a lot of people in the U.S. government who were less happy - diplomats, people who really follow the relationship closely - because they said that if you just do a photo-op, then you're really satisfying China's objectives. China wants this because it shows that Xi Jinping's a great player on the world stage. And it also helps him at home politically. It makes him look strong to see the American president not raising these hard questions - things like trade. INSKEEP: So we're talking about Jared Kushner, one individual, who wants to do the right thing but, in your reporting, didn't really know what he wanted - didn't know what to ask for, and Chinese officials who knew exactly what they wanted to ask for. Is that a metaphor for the U.S. and China writ large right now? OSNOS: I think it is. In many ways, the Trump administration came into office believing that it was going to do things differently in all regards. The result of that was that they were coming in unarmed, ill-equipped to be able to deal with the really serious diplomatic counterpart. INSKEEP: They knew what they didn't want. They didn't actually know what they did. OSNOS: And China was very clear about pursuing its objectives. INSKEEP: OK, that leads to another question then. Is China better at planning for the future than the United States is? OSNOS: At the moment, there's no question the United States is struggling to plan for the future. And by that, I even mean a month ahead or two months ahead. INSKEEP: Sure, we just had a government shutdown ended by a three-week opening of the government. OSNOS: And the Chinese look at that as bewildering. What they're able to do, I think, that the United States struggles to do now is to put aside these immediate parochial political concerns and to identify - or at least agree upon what are the long-range challenges. In China's case, long-range challenges are economic, demographic - they're going to have a huge number of retirees and not enough people in the workforce - and things like the environment and climate. And in the United States, where we have our own set of problems, we're struggling even to identify them on a common basis. INSKEEP: Now, that's an interesting point. One of the reasons that it's so hard even to keep the government open is because there are competing visions for what the United States should be, and they don't overlap maybe as much as people would like them to. OSNOS: That's right. And in China, we should be blunt. You know, it's an authoritarian system in which there is one vision of what the future can look like. And that vision is the one that is adopted and presented by Xi Jinping. So there are tremendous stresses and problems that come with that - human rights abuses, abuses of the court system, things that prop up the Communist Party in ways that it wouldn't otherwise have. But what they are able to do is to see that their collective future is a collective future. They have to chart a path. INSKEEP: Evan Osnos, thanks for coming by. OSNOS: My pleasure, thanks for having me. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Good morning, I'm Rachel Martin. After heavy flooding this past August, the mayor of New Orleans ordered that all the drains in the city get a good cleaning. And as you'd imagine, there was all kinds of gunk jamming up the drainage system. But there was something uniquely New Orleans in there too. City workers removed 93,000 pounds of Mardi Gras beads - 93,000 pounds. These are, of course, the colorful plastic necklaces everyone throws around during the annual celebration, which is just a couple of weeks away. It's MORNING EDITION. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Last summer, President Trump reportedly ordered the firing of Robert Mueller, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation. This is according to news this morning in The New York Times and The Washington Post. The revelation comes as Mueller and his entire Russia investigation have been under attack in recent days from Republican members of Congress and other conservatives. Here's Republican Senator Ron Johnson talking about Robert Mueller on our show yesterday. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST) RON JOHNSON: Listen, he's probably perfectly qualified for his investigation. But now that this thing has expanded into possible - you know, for sure biased possible corruption at the highest levels of the FBI. He would not be qualified to investigate that. He's just too close. He has too many conflicts of interest. MARTIN: We're joined now by Noah Rothman. He writes for the conservative Commentary magazine. Noah, thanks so much for being with us this morning. NOAH ROTHMAN: My pleasure. Thanks for having me. MARTIN: First off, what do you make of these news reports saying that President Trump tried to fire Robert Mueller? ROTHMAN: Well, it comports with stories that we heard at the time. Allies close to the president were in the media laying the groundwork for Robert Mueller's removal or perhaps a presidential move against the Justice Department in order to facilitate that. It did not occur, and the story kind of died. But these revelations suggest that we were closer than ever to some sort of a conflict between Donald Trump and the Justice Department. MARTIN: It hasn't been just the president, though, who has been maligning Robert Mueller. Several Republicans have been engaged in what I think can be described as a fairly concerted effort to discredit not only Robert Mueller and the investigation but the entirety of the FBI. Would you agree with that characterization, and what do you think is the effect of that? ROTHMAN: I would agree. I think this is a big shift from earlier in the year when those stories began to emerge that the president was thinking about making a move against the Mueller investigation. We heard Republicans making efforts to box the president in, including entertaining the prospect of legislation that would prevent the president from doing something that would be very politically damaging to his administration, including people like Lindsey Graham and Senator Grassley, who entertained that notion and sent, you know, brushback pitches against this president. That sentiment seems to have disappeared. Over the course of the last year, something has taken hold among Republican legislators and the Republican base that seems convinced that this president is a victim of a concerted effort behind the scenes by members of the FBI to sabotage his administration. MARTIN: We heard some of that yesterday. We heard that clip from Senator Ron Johnson. He was on our show talking about this, quote, "secret society" inside the FBI, which he says was potentially holding secret meetings off-site. He's since tried to walk that back. But, I mean, how damaging do you think that line of argument is? ROTHMAN: I think it's been incredibly damaging. This has been a humiliation for not just Senator Johnson but other members of the Republican conference in the House who got out way in front of - over their skis on this story and suggested the conclusion that they were implying outright, which was that there was a concerted conspiracy, a shadow organization within the FBI, indicated - exposed by these anti-Trump texts from a former member of the counterintelligence division of the FBI who ended up on the Mueller probe for about six weeks. And the suggestion was, outright from people like Representative Bob Goodlatte, that this was a conspiracy - using that word. And we've since seen a lot of these texts in their appropriate contexts. And it seems as though this was really overblown to the point now where you have to wonder whether or not some credibility has been lost by these Republican members. And if you're a Republican and a conservative, you should be furious over this because Republicans and conservatives only have so many advocates. And when they sacrifice their credibility over narratives like this - and it's not the first time this has happened - you're losing an advocate. Republicans should be furious. MARTIN: So you're saying this isn't the first time this has happened. You see a pattern of Republicans seizing onto specious narratives right now? ROTHMAN: I do. And it began on the very first day of the Trump administration when former press secretary Sean Spicer was compelled to go out in front with a narrative that the inauguration was the most-watched inauguration of any presidential inauguration, a statement he now says he regrets making because it was demonstrably false even at the time. Trump campaign officials have insisted that crime in this country is trending up, not down - contradicting federal statistics - and then, when the president got in office, credited Trump for ending a crime wave that never existed. The notion that Donald Trump was robbed of a popular vote victory as a result of illegal immigrant voters resulted in the creation of a commission to investigate this notion, which then, summarily, he quietly dissolved when it realized that there was very little that it could prove along those lines and also that states would not cooperate with the investigation because it was legally dubious. These sorts of things sap credibility. MARTIN: But what - why... ROTHMAN: And they're entirely designed to protect this president. MARTIN: So that was my question - clearly, Republicans who are seizing on these, as you call them, false stories - many of which are demonstrably false - they're just putting all their eggs in the Donald Trump basket. They believe that the risk of their own credibility - it's worth it to align themselves with him. ROTHMAN: It is. And it's a tragedy because it's not as though these aren't based on issues that are real. Violent crime is on the rise. For two consecutive years, we've had violent crime on the rise. And it's incumbent Republicans to say that because it's primarily located in Democrat-heavy urban centers, and Democrats are not interested in engaging on that issue. Voter fraud is a real thing. There are convictions all the time. Democrats are insisting that this is a myth, etc., so forth. We - Republicans need advocates for their point of view. And similarly, unmasking is a real issue. The prospect of the abuse of FISA courts is a real issue. And Republicans are the only ones who seem concerned about that sort of thing. So when Republicans sacrifice their credibility for dubious narratives designed only to protect this president and help him win a news cycle, they are making a serious sacrifice that conservatives should not tolerate. MARTIN: Noah Rothman - he's an associate editor at Commentary magazine and the author of the book "Unjust: Social Justice And The Unmaking Of America." Noah, thanks so much for your time this morning. ROTHMAN: My pleasure. Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF MAMMAL HANDS' "BOREAL FOREST") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: We're focusing this morning on reports that President Trump tried to fire special counsel Robert Mueller last June. The New York Times broke the story, saying the president was forced to back down from this idea when the White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to quit because of it. In a moment, we'll get reaction from, Davos, Switzerland. NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley is covering the president's visit there. First, though, we turn to NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucus in the studio this morning. Hey, Ryan. RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Good morning. MARTIN: Let's start with what we know. What did President Trump ask and why? LUCAS: Well he asked for White House counsel Don McGahn to push out Robert Mueller, the special counsel. NPR has not confirmed this. This is New York Times, The Washington Post reporting. But it basically - reports surfaced last summer that Mueller was exploring a possible obstruction of justice case, could reach into Trump's past business dealings. Trump began to argue that Mueller had a conflict of interest that should rule him out from overseeing this investigation. Talk of a golf course relationship that Mueller had and dispute over fees. This was a Trump golf course. MARTIN: Membership fees, yeah. LUCAS: Exactly. Mueller's worked for a law firm that represented Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law - and that Mueller had been interviewed to possibly replace James Comey. These were things that Trump saw as a possible conflict of interest. MARTIN: All right. So at the center of all this remains this question of whether the President obstructed justice when it came to how he dismissed James Comey, right? LUCAS: Right. A lot of this ties back into Comey, at least in our understanding of it. And the timeline is important here. Comey was fired on May 9 of 2016. Several days later, word came out about the memos that Comey kept of his interactions with the president. Comey said that the president asked him to lay off the investigation into Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. That helped prompt the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel. That was on May 17. Comey testifies in early June under oath before Congress about these interactions. So by mid-June, you know, a month after Mueller was put in the job, there were a lot of questions in the public about possible obstruction of justice. And there was a lot of word from the Hill that Mueller shouldn't be touched at this point. MARTIN: Right. And, of course, all this happened in the summer of 2017. So does this revelation change anything about the investigation moving forward? LUCAS: Not for the special counsel, no. He's interviewed all the key players in this episode, including Don McGahn, the White House counsel, other folks in the counsel's office and other senior White House officials. So he already knows what we're just learning. But this fits into a broader story that's basically emerged in public reports that president and senior officials were taking steps that could hamper the investigation and fit into this - all fits into kind of a broader possible obstruction of justice case. MARTIN: All right. NPR justice reporter Ryan Lucas. Thanks, Ryan. LUCAS: Thank you. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Now let's go to Davos, Switzerland, and NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley, who's traveling with the president. Hi, Scott. SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve. INSKEEP: OK. So The Times lays out a pretty specific narrative here that the president ordered Mueller fired, that the White House counsel pushed back and said, no, I'd rather resign than do that. Has there been any specific response from the president to this? HORSLEY: Steve, White House allies are downplaying this Times report. They are understandably trying to keep the focus on what they hope will be a positive economic message from the president here in Davos today. Trump himself was asked about the report as he made his way into the conference center, and he brushed it off, calling it fake news. Now, this is not the first time Trump and his aides have denied that he tried to fire the special counsel. Just a couple of days ago, we heard Trump say he is eager to be interviewed by Robert Mueller. And, also, he said he hopes the special counsel's investigation will be fair. INSKEEP: So not a specific response, a specific denial. Just a general claim of fake news. HORSLEY: A typical New York Times story, the president called it. INSKEEP: OK. So the president is set to give a speech there in Davos to the assembled world leaders and business leaders and so forth. And I guess you're in the room where it's going to happen. What's it like there, Scott? HORSLEY: I'm in a big auditorium that seats about 1,600 people. And, you know, the organizers here delivered sort of a subtle rebuke to the president a few moments ago. There was a video playing on the screen here that seemed to take issue with the president and his policies. The narrator intoned about the importance of promoting diversity. There was even a scene of women protesting Donald Trump in pink knit hats. So kind of a subtle dig at the fellow who's about to give a big speech just about an hour from now. INSKEEP: So that's the preliminary to the speech by the president of the United States - is video of people protesting the president of the United States? HORSLEY: Exactly. And the president himself is supposed to give kind of a mixed message here. On the one hand, he's going to be putting out the welcome mat, encouraging some of these wealthy business people to invest in the United States and create more jobs. He'll be touting the economic policies he's been pushing from tax cuts and deregulation. But he's also going to be delivering his own sort of rebuke on trade. And just earlier this week, of course, we saw the White House impose stiff new tariffs on imported washing machines and solar panels. We expect the president to say he supports free trade but to argue that it must be fair and reciprocal. The president's aides say they believe that's the best way to shore up the international economic system that Trump himself has often seemed contemptuous of. INSKEEP: So Scott, other than showing the video of the Women's March in the very auditorium where the president's going to speak, what kind of reception is he getting there? HORSLEY: He has gotten a generally, at least, polite reception. The president hosted a dinner last night with European business leaders and went around the table, and many of them had kind things to say about his economic policies. And some of them talked about their own plans to invest in the U.S. He also met this morning with Paul Kagame, the chairman of the African Union. Of course, the African Union demanded an apology a couple of weeks ago when Trump was reported to have described African countries in very crude and vulgar terms during an immigration meeting in the Oval Office. There was no talk of that today. In fact, the president just talked about trade and cooperation with Africa and said he was honored to have Kagame as a friend. INSKEEP: And Kagame didn't have much to say? HORSLEY: He also - he certainly didn't talk about the crude comments of the president. He also talked about fostering cooperation between the U.S. and Africa. INSKEEP: NPR's Scott Horsley in Davos. Thanks, Scott. HORSLEY: Good to be with you, Steve. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: President Trump took a shot at selling himself to the global elite today. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You are national leaders, business titans, industry giants and many of the brightest minds in many fields. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: That's how the president described his audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, today. He was in Davos to say the U.S. is open for business. His overseas trip comes while there are new revelations back here at home about how firmly the president may have resisted the special counsel investigation into his campaign and possible links to Russia. The New York Times reported this this morning. And that may have been on his mind today. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) TRUMP: And it wasn't until I became a politician that I realized how nasty, how mean, how vicious and how fake the press can be - as the cameras start going off in the back. (LAUGHTER) MARTIN: That phrase about fake news, it's a line he used often in the 2016 campaign. And just as in 2016, the cameras remained focused on the president, just like they did before. INSKEEP: Just as they did before. There is much to discuss here, and we'll talk it through with NPR's Gregory Warner, who's in Davos. Hi there, Gregory. GREGORY WARNER, BYLINE: Hey there, Steve. INSKEEP: Also NPR's Tamara Keith, who covers the president. She's here in Washington. Tam, good morning to you once again. TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Good morning. INSKEEP: Greg Warner, we heard a little polite laughter there when he made his remark about the press turning the cameras away. What was it actually like in the room overall? WARNER: Well, there was threats of some kind of protest, some kind of walkout. That definitely didn't happen. The one moment of audience response other than the one you mentioned was a few boos, but it wasn't boos for the president. It was boos for the introductory speech. When the speaker, Klaus Schwab, said, your strong leadership can be open to misconceptions and misinterpretations - people didn't like that. INSKEEP: Oh, this is someone addressing the president of the United States and trying to give him a friendly interpretation, and people didn't like that. WARNER: The most friendly possible, you know, opener. And it's very much the reception that this has been about. It's, you know, the community here has bent over backwards to say, look, don't worry what was said in the past. We want to hear from you now. We want to hear a message. INSKEEP: Although our colleague Scott Horsley, who's also there in Davos, noticed that one of the introductory videos to this event included images of Women's March in Washington, D.C., protests against the president. WARNER: You know, that has been the fundamental contradiction. I think when I talk to people here, nobody really wants to say anything - most people don't say anything positive about President Trump. They want to express their anti-Trump bona fides. However, when you look at how he's treated and how he's talked about, other than directly, I mean, there's, you know, stories - sessions will stop. Panelists will stop mid-sentence. People will queue up an hour and a half just to get a selfie with him. And, I mean, the reason is the incredible boost in the global economy. I mean, the record attendance here, which - the price of a membership ticket has now gone from $500,000 to $750,000. There was no blink in that. There is a lot of credit that people give Trump for the stock market boom. So you know, it's funny. In the speech, he said the stock market is smashing. We added 7 trillion in new wealth. But a lot of that 7 trillion went to the people in this conference, the global elite. INSKEEP: So a mix of resentment and appreciation and some contradictions that had to be managed within the president's speech as well. And let's listen to some of that. Of course, President Trump has said that he favors a policy of America First. He's attacked other nations for unfair trade and sending too many immigrants. But here he is at Davos reaching out to the world, and he tried to harmonize those two ideas. Let's listen. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) TRUMP: America is the place to do business. So come to America, where you can innovate, create and build. I believe in America. As president of the United States, I will always put America first, just like the leaders of other countries should put their country first also. But America First does not mean America alone. When the United States grows, so does the world. American prosperity has created countless jobs all around the globe. And the drive for excellence, creativity and innovation in the U.S. has led to important discoveries that help people everywhere live more prosperous and far healthier lives. INSKEEP: President Trump speaking today in Davos, Switzerland. Tamara Keith is with us here listening in Washington. And Tamara, as I listen to that, well, I'm thinking about a bit of history. I'm thinking about the Marshall Plan, the idea of enlightened self-interest, that the U.S. said that helping other nations will ultimately help the United States. Is this the opposite idea being promoted by the president? KEITH: You could argue that, certainly. And... INSKEEP: Other countries are being told, help us. It'll be good for you. KEITH: Right, that what's good for America is good for the world. And one fascinating thing that's happened during the president's time at Davos is, you know, one of the first actions he took as president of the United States was to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, this multi-nation trade deal. And at Davos, he's been saying, well, you know, I'd be open, if it was a better deal, to maybe renegotiating it. You know, we could do, you know, one-on-one deals. Or we could maybe just renegotiate with everybody - which is fascinating and definitely a change from what he had said before. INSKEEP: Because there was this long process that resulted in an agreement that the president pulled out of. KEITH: Yeah. But here's the thing - the rest of the world has kind of moved on. It's like a relationship. There's a breakup. And now President Trump is like, America is back. We'd be game for this relationship. And the rest of the world is like... INSKEEP: You want to get dinner? You want to get coffee? KEITH: ...We've moved on. MARTIN: Yeah. I mean, clearly, he said that explicitly. He actually talked about the fact that America had pulled out of the TPP. And now he's like, well, actually, if these individual countries want to make a deal, we'd consider that bilaterally - but even as a group, which is essentially what he walked away from with the TPP. KEITH: Yep. WARNER: What I think is so interesting about this open-for-business kind of message - I mean, here at Davos, people think of it as panels talking about shared global - climate change and shared futures and things like that. But if you go outside, just outside the panels about globalism, you find a promenade where, one after another - India house, Ukraine house, Indonesia pavilion - everybody is saying we're open for business. We're the best place to invest. And President Trump's language was exactly that - we are competitive. Again, now is the time to bring your business to the United States. We have the best colleges. He sounded like somebody out on the street in Davos, not somebody inside - you know, up on the magic mountain. I think what's so different is that's not how American presidents usually speak here. INSKEEP: Although he did add some tough language as well, and let's listen to just a little bit more of that. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) TRUMP: We cannot have free and open trade if some countries exploit the system at the expense of others. We support free trade, but it needs to be fair. And it needs to be reciprocal because, in the end, unfair trade undermines us all. The United States will no longer turn a blind eye to unfair economic practices. INSKEEP: Gregory Warner, when you're in Davos hearing people from around the world, do you hear a lot of willingness from other nations to give the United States better trade terms? WARNER: I mean, I think there's the contradiction you're exactly talking about. I mean, trade - what the president said is - you can't argue with it. When you trade with somebody, you should try to make sure that you get a good deal. And his statement, America First does not mean America alone, you know, when the U.S. grows - that's what people did want to hear. But the fact is that, you know, fair and reciprocal trade, when he's talking about that, that's a contradiction with what he's asking for when he asks for support with Iran sanctions and ISIS and a de-nuked Korea. Because what I'm hearing from ambassadors here is that they are already building up their defense systems. Canada filed a WTO case against the United States - and the TPP partnership, of course. So there's a sense in which the ship is moving without America, and we need to figure out how to make it alone without America. And that means less influence for America in the world. INSKEEP: Right. KEITH: And, you know, what's not clear is what the president really, truly means by fair and reciprocal trade because it hasn't been tested yet. There are negotiations going on regarding NAFTA, the free trade agreement, right now in North America. And we don't know the result. INSKEEP: So I want to make sure that we talk about the awkwardness underlying this, which is a New York Times story that we mentioned a few moments ago - a New York Times story stating that back in June of 2017, President Trump gave the order to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel who's investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. And he was only dissuaded from that because his White House counsel said no, I'm not going to pass on that order. I will resign first. And the president backed away, according to the Times. How's the president responding to this, Tamara Keith? KEITH: According to the Times and some other publications - NPR has not confirmed it ourselves. INSKEEP: Right. KEITH: The way the president responded is the way he responds to a lot of things. He said that it's fake news, that The New York Times is fake news. And so you know, the president has in the past said that a lot of things are fake news that aren't actually fake. But this is a remarkable moment. INSKEEP: How much pressure - having covered this White House from the beginning, how much pressure is the White House, is the staff, perhaps the president himself - under at this moment? How much do they feel it? KEITH: Well, here are some numbers. Twenty White House staff have been interviewed by Robert Mueller's team. That's a lot of people. So you know, every few days, you're going to have one of your colleagues going in to talk to investigators. And of those people, eight of them are in the White House counsel's office. And the White House counsel is the one who, according to these reports, refused to fire Mueller. INSKEEP: Don McGahn. OK. Tamara, thanks very much, really appreciate it. KEITH: You're welcome. INSKEEP: That's NPR's Tamara Keith. We also heard from NPR's Gregory Warner in Davos. Thanks to you. WARNER: Thank you. INSKEEP: And Davos, of course, is where President Trump told the world the United States is open for business today. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: One of the nation's most prominent advocates for reproductive rights is stepping down. After more than a decade, Cecile Richards is preparing to resign as president of Planned Parenthood. Richards has been at the forefront of the debate over abortion that has become more politically divisive in recent years. Here she is speaking before members of Congress back in 2015. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) CECILE RICHARDS: It is unacceptable that in the 21st century, women in America are routinely harassed for accessing a legal medical procedure. MARTIN: NPR's Sarah McCammon joins us now to talk about this. Hey, Sarah. SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: Hello. MARTIN: What does Cecile Richards' departure mean for Planned Parenthood and the larger abortion rights movement? MCCAMMON: Well, it comes after, you know, what's been kind of a hard year for the movement. The election of Donald Trump as president came as a surprise to many who hoped to see Hillary Clinton elected as the first female president. She, of course, is an advocate of abortion rights. And abortion opponents have celebrated several victories under Trump, both in terms of policies to restrict abortion rights and his appointment of conservatives to the courts. But abortion rights advocates tell me, while they face challenges, it's also an encouraging and exciting moment for multiple progressive causes. Trump's election has been a rallying point. We've seen a lot of energy and organizing on the left around women's rights - think of the Women's March, more engagement from the Democratic base in the 2017 elections in Virginia, for example. So Cecile Richards leaves Planned Parenthood at a time when there is concern but also optimism. MARTIN: Why is she leaving? I mean, what's the public - what is she saying publicly about why she's leaving, and then why is she really leaving? MCCAMMON: Yeah, well not saying publicly all that much so far, though she is 60 and she's been with the organization for almost a dozen years - since 2006. I've been talking to some of her friends and allies. And one of them, Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, told me that Richards has been really instrumental in leading not just Planned Parenthood but the progressive movement over this past year against the Trump administration. CHAD GRIFFIN: Cecile Richards is someone who is admired by millions and feared by those who dare stand in her way. And she has brilliantly brought together progressive leaders. MCCAMMON: And Griffin says within days of the election of Donald Trump, Richards convened a group of these leaders to strategize and get ready for the next year. She's been doing that for the past year. And apparently, she sees this as the time to move on from Planned Parenthood. MARTIN: So just because of the nature of her work, she's obviously a controversial figure in American culture and American society. What are abortion opponents saying about her resignation? MCCAMMON: Right. There's always been a lot of criticism of Cecile Richards and Planned Parenthood from anti-abortion rights groups. And largely, they're celebrating. They're glad to see her go. Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America described her legacy - Richards' legacy of leading Planned Parenthood, the group that provides about a third of the nation's abortions - she described that as sad. And Nance says she hopes Planned Parenthood will move in a new direction. MARTIN: Do we know what she's going to do next, Ann - Cecile Richards? Ann - I almost said Ann because her mom - famously, Ann Richards was the governor of Texas. Right? MCCAMMON: That's right. Her late mother was Texas Governor Ann Richards. And that is a possible direction she could go. I've heard some speculation that maybe she'll run for office, either in New York, where Planned Parenthood's based, or in her home state of Texas. She could continue her political activism that had been part of her entire career. And I'm also hearing there may be opportunities in academia. Whatever she does, I know - her supporters are telling me they will continue to support her and imagine she will continue to be a leader in the progressive movement. MARTIN: All right, NPR's Sarah McCammon. Thanks so much, Sarah. MCCAMMON: Thank you. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Two thirds of Americans are exposed to extreme stress in childhood - divorce, a death in the family. And this early adversity, if it's experienced in high doses, can greatly increase the risk of cancer and heart disease later on. In the short term, it can also make it incredibly difficult for children to focus and thrive in schools. Dr. Nadine Burke Harris is founder of the Center For Youth Wellness in San Francisco. She's also written a new book called "The Deepest Well." It's all about childhood stress and what to do about it. Cory Turner of the NPR Ed team reports. CORY TURNER, BYLINE: In a minute, we're going to visit a school that's part of this growing movement to understand and treat child trauma. But first, it's hard to appreciate just how destructive this early stress can be without a quick lesson in how our brains are supposed to respond to stress. So here's Burke Harris with a metaphor from her book. NADINE BURKE HARRIS: Imagine you're walking in the forest and you see a bear. TURNER: Like this one. (SOUNDBITE OF BEAR ROARING) TURNER: Immediately, your brain's amygdala sounds the alarm, and your adrenal glands start pumping out stress hormones. (SOUNDBITE OF HEARTBEAT) BURKE HARRIS: Your heart begins to pound. Your pupils dilate. Your airways open up. (SOUNDBITE OF HEAVY BREATHING) BURKE HARRIS: And you are ready to either fight that bear or run from the bear. TURNER: Fight or flight. If you think about it, fighting a bear is a terrible idea, so the amygdala also sends a message to the super-rational part of your brain that says... BURKE HARRIS: So we're just going to turn you down. Just shh - be quiet - right? - because now is not a time for thinking. TURNER: Instead, the alarm center activates a part of the brain called... BURKE HARRIS: The noradrenergic nucleus of the locus coeruleus... TURNER: Translation? BURKE HARRIS: ...The part of the brain that's responsible for - I don't know karate, but I do know ka-razy (ph). TURNER: Finally, the brain tells your immune system to bring the inflammation - just in case that bear gets its claws into you. Now, normally, all this shuts off as soon as the danger passes. But if the young brain goes through too much stress, well, this shut-off starts to short-circuit, constantly sending kids into fight-or-flight mode. Just imagine you're a child in school and small things like a noisy cafeteria or a teacher just asking you to sit down feel like this. (SOUNDBITE OF BEAR GROWLING) TURNER: It's exhausting - and not just for the child. Imagine being a teacher in a school where student stress is common and where poverty makes it even worse. In fact, Burke Harris says in many low-income classrooms, it's not one or two students who have had high doses of stress. It's most of them. BURKE HARRIS: If you had that many kids in a class and they all had epilepsy, what would you be doing? It seems unfair - right? - because we're talking about a neurotoxin. TURNER: And that neurotoxin can mean a lot of disruptive behavior. Small things can trigger big feelings. Students in stress can also have trouble paying attention and staying focused. Traditionally, schools have responded to these behaviors with punishment. But there's a growing movement to understand student trauma and plan for it. CHARLES CURTIS: He got shot Saturday. Cousin got shot; friend got killed. So essentially, he had a whole dice game get shot up. This all happened the day after he buried his grandmother, his primary caretaker. TURNER: Charles Curtis is the psychologist at Ron Brown College Prep, a public high school in Washington D.C. Last year, I spent hundreds of hours at Ron Brown, where teachers talk about student trauma every day. In the moment you just heard, Curtis was running a staff training on how to handle disruptive behavior. He was also prepping teachers for the return of a ninth-grader who had just experienced enormous tragedy and stress. Curtis reminded his colleagues to be patient. If the student is defiant, don't raise your voice or get in his face. CURTIS: That'd be crazy. Like, yo, this man just went through God knows what. He's in a safe space, and I just made that uncomfortable for him. So let me be thoughtful. TURNER: In short, a teacher can be the bear or the one thing that keeps the bears away - a safe, nurturing caregiver. Then English teacher Schalette Gudger chimed in. Embracing students' trauma, she said, means putting their needs first. Yes, they need to learn, but they also need to feel safe. SCHALETTE GUDGER: Like, some of them are so on edge that they literally do not sleep at night. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Yeah. GUDGER: So if you need a break - like, if you're comfortable enough here to put your head down, baby, by all means, rest - because this may be their only space to rest. TURNER: At Ron Brown and an increasing number of schools, when students can't cope in class, they can also go to a reflection room. And when fight or flight leads to actual fights, suspension is a last resort. Instead, students sit down with staff to unpack their mistakes and talk through coping strategies for the next time a bear shows up in class. Cory Turner, NPR News, Washington. (SOUNDBITE OF POOLSIDE'S "NEXT TO YOU") (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IT'S HER LOVE") MARY GAUTHIER: (Singing) When the darkness draws near... SCOTT SIMON, HOST: This is Mary Gauthier's voice, but the words and themes are an artistic partnership. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IT'S HER LOVE") GAUTHIER: (Singing) And I'm shackled, chained to my fear. SIMON: Mary Gauthier is an accomplished singer and songwriter with nine albums. But her new project, "Rifles & Rosary Beads," springs from her work with the group SongwritingWith:Soldiers, which pairs musicians with veterans. Mary Gauthier joins us now from Nashville. Thanks so much for being with us. GAUTHIER: It's a pleasure. Thank you. SIMON: And we're also joined by one of her collaborators, U.S. Army Sergeant Joshua Geartz, who joins us from member station WBFO in Buffalo, N.Y. Sergeant Geartz, thank you for being with us. JOSHUA GEARTZ: Hi, Scott. Thank you. SIMON: Mary Gauthier, what drew you to this project? GAUTHIER: Well, I was invited to do a retreat about four-and-a-half years ago with SongwritingWith:Soldiers. And as I sat and listened to the stories I was told, it just moved me to the core. And something clicked in my heart and in my brain, and I knew this is (laughter) - I have stepped into something incredibly beautiful. SIMON: Sergeant Geartz, tell us, if you could, about your service. I gather you enlisted in 1999. GEARTZ: Yes, sir. I joined in November of 1999 and served to November of 2004. I was a military police officer, and I deployed to Kosovo in 2000 and in Iraq in 2003. SIMON: And you suffered an injury in Iraq, didn't you? GEARTZ: Yes, sir. My vehicle that I was driving was struck with a roadside bomb the night before I left the country. SIMON: I'm going to ask you to bear with us now as we listen to part of the song you and Mary wrote, which describes pretty vividly what happened to you. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STILL ON THE RIDE") GAUTHIER: (Singing) Got holes in my eardrums, bruises and clots, double vision and my stomach's in knots. Got pain in my fingers. I hurt from my head to my toes. I wake up feeling like I'm 90 years old. GEARTZ: From the blast itself, I sustained traumatic brain injury. I have cervical stenosis and spinal stenosis. I have partial paralysis in my legs. And dealing with all of those brought me into a really dark place where I had attempted suicide in 2014. Fortunately, it didn't work. SIMON: Well, I'm glad you say fortunately. GEARTZ: I realize now how blessed I really am. And sitting with Mary kind of made me look at it different - gave me a different perspective instead of, why me? You know, why am I still here, and he's gone? I kind of look at it now as my second chance - not only for that, but now I get to live for him, too. SIMON: You refer to him - your best friend who lost his life. What happened? GEARTZ: I lost him to a vehicle accident. I was supposed to be in the vehicle with him. And at the last minute, I actually made him stop in the middle of the road and let me out. Just like anyone else that goes through a hardship, you know, you play the what-if game. My experience with Mary and SongwritingWith:Soldiers had taught me not to dwell on that. But, you know, not what-if, what-if but now what? (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STILL ON THE RIDE") GAUTHIER: (Singing) I shouldn't be here. You shouldn't be gone. But it's not up to me who dies and who carries on. SIMON: Mary Gauthier, what was Sergeant Geartz like when you first met him? GAUTHIER: When I first met Josh, he was in a lot of pain. It was pouring off of his being. And when we sat down to write, it was scrambled eggs for a while. Trying to connect the dots was so hard because Josh has been through so much. But when we stumbled into this notion that a dead soldier is a guardian angel and maybe guardian angels are dead soldiers still doing their work in protecting us, it reframed the story of Josh's loss. And I think the power of songwriting is we can take a story of trauma and rework the ending. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STILL ON THE RIDE") GAUTHIER: (Singing) And me and my guardian angel, we're still on the ride. SIMON: Joshua Geartz, did you ever say to Mary, I can't talk about that or that's too personal or, please, I'd rather not? GEARTZ: No, that never happened. I ended up - during our songwriting session, I ended up telling Mary things that I had never told anyone - I mean, family members, my wife. No one knew. And here I am with a stranger, and I was able to tell her everything. GAUTHIER: I think each veteran's soul has something that it needs to say. I know from my own personal traumas, it's very hard to know what that is. But when I'm watching someone else struggle, it's not as confusing for me because it's not my struggle. So I can I can help identify that. SIMON: May I ask what the two of you learned from each other? GAUTHIER: Well, I've learned our soldiers are so much like everybody else. They're just put into an extreme situation. GEARTZ: I've learned that being honest and open about yourself isn't as scary as it seems and that it's OK to have faith in people again. SIMON: Your faith in people was also a casualty of war? GEARTZ: Yes, sir. SIMON: You know, there's some people that consider this a cliche, but thank you for your service. GEARTZ: Thank you for your support. SIMON: U.S. Army Sergeant Joshua Geartz and Mary Gauthier. Thank you, Mary, very much for this interview, too. GAUTHIER: Thank you both. (SOUNDBITE OF MARY GAUTHIER SONG, "BULLET HOLES IN THE SKY") SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Scott Ferdowsi is 16 years old, hasn't figured out what he wants to do with his life. That worries his Iranian-American parents who believe their son lacks drive - grit - and doesn't take advantage of the opportunities they work so hard to give him. Hoping to find his purpose in life, Scott quits his perfectly good summer internship, high-tails it to Washington D.C., the city of ambitious young people working as bartenders and servers on their way to being lobbyists and legislators. "Down And Across" is the debut novel for young adults from Arvin Ahmadi. He joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us. ARVIN AHMADI: Thank you for having me. SIMON: Does he lack grit, or has he just not found something to fall in love with a little? AHMADI: He doesn't know. And that's the thing. And that's kind of how I fell upon grit. It's this inspirational idea that the No.1 indicator of success isn't your IQ or where you come from, it's grit, your ability to persevere. SIMON: Tenacity might be - yeah. AHMADI: Sure. Tenacity, persistence. But it's also kind of terrifying, especially if you have this track record of trying different things or giving up. SIMON: Scott's given up a lot, hasn't he? AHMADI: He has. He's tried every club at school, switches his future path every five seconds. He can't quite nail down what that future path will look like. SIMON: His name at birth was Saaket. Tell us about his name, how he changed and about his family. AHMADI: Sure. So Scott is Iranian-American. His parents are Iranian immigrants. And Saaket in Farsi means quiet. And he ends up going by Scott from a young age. And that, to me, was because I think so many of us, especially children of immigrants - children who look different - hated being different. And so Scott from an early age - you know, he decides to go by an American name because that's a way of making himself less different. SIMON: And tell us about his parents. I loved his parents. AHMADI: Yeah. Well, his parents are tricky because the opening scene is an argument between Scott and his dad, you know, who he finds to be overbearing. And his dad is trying to compromise. And Scott, of course, takes that little bit of compromise that his parents are leaving him home alone for a few weeks, and he abuses it. He runs away from home. And I think that's the struggle with his parents. SIMON: Any of you in your character? AHMADI: No, no, not at all (laughter). Now the story... SIMON: That wasn't the answer I was expecting. AHMADI: No, the story is very autobiographical. I mean, it was inspired when I saw a real-life TED Talk by a real-life professor, Angela Duckworth, about grit. And it inspired me, and it terrified me. And so I created this fictional version of her and had Scott run away to meet her. SIMON: I've read that Scott, as you originally drafted him, wasn't an Iranian-American youngster. AHMADI: That's correct. When I first started writing "Down And Across," Scott was Jack, and he was not Iranian. And then I - you know, eventually, I made him half-Indian and half-white so that I could inject some of my experiences in there, the son of immigrants. And you know, finally I decided - screw it. I'm going to make this an authentic story about my experiences growing up and struggling with failure and my future path. SIMON: You struggled with failure? AHMADI: Yeah, which is funny to think about because I was, like, your classic overachiever in high school. SIMON: Yeah. AHMADI: I grew up in Northern Virginia. I went to a local magnet school, Thomas Jefferson. And I participated in every club and went to a good college. But no, deep down, I constantly had impostor syndrome. I think it was this constant uncertainty about my future. And I think we're seeing more stories like that in a lot of different mediums - how, on the surface, a person may appear one way but underneath the surface, they're are a lot more complicated and there's this self-doubt. SIMON: Yeah. Well, that's one of the oldest stories in the arts, not to mention YA... AHMADI: Of course. SIMON: ...literature, isn't it? Yeah. AHMADI: Right. But it's not a story that we saw very much among diverse folks - among marginalized folks, among women, among people of color, people from different sexualities. So I think we're getting those classic stories now but repurposed in a diverse sense. SIMON: As a parent, I don't want to approve of a youngster who deceives his parents and runs away. But all of that being said, he shows a lot of grit in doing that, doesn't he? AHMADI: He does. And I wouldn't advise running away either. I gave it a shot when I was a teenager, and I only lasted 12 hours. And... SIMON: Twelve hours? AHMADI: (Laughter) Yeah, I ran away from Northern Virginia to Dupont Circle, so I didn't even make it very far. I... SIMON: Twelve hours - that's 12 blocks, too, or is it... AHMADI: No, I mean, I just hopped on a Metro bus. SIMON: Forgive me - when you got home, did your parents even know you'd run away (laughter)? AHMADI: They did. And you know why - you know how they did? Because I had left a window open. I - you know, I could've have used the door and closed the door. SIMON: Yeah. AHMADI: But because I was a dramatic teenager, I escaped through the window and left it open so they knew I had run away. But no, I admire Scott's tenacity. And I think it's a lesson for us all that we're shaped by experiences and that we should be willing to take risks - maybe not necessarily running away, especially as teenagers, but do things outside of our comfort zone. SIMON: Arvin Ahmadi - his debut YA novel is "Down And Across." Thanks so much for being with us. AHMADI: Thanks a lot, Scott. (SOUNDBITE OF PRECIOUS FATHERS' "PRAIRIE TRAIN") SCOTT SIMON, HOST: We've heard a lot in recent years about the struggles of honeybees, how their numbers are down. So environmentalists have rallied to their aid - even helping people to set up their own beehives. But this bothers a lot of ecologists who say that honeybee hives aren't natural and they don't help the environment. In fact, they may harm it. NPR's Dan Charles has the story. DAN CHARLES, BYLINE: Honeybees are amazing and adorable. And they suffer when people spray pesticides or mow down wildflowers. Biologist Jonas Geldmann at the University of Cambridge started to notice that among environmentalists, the honeybee has become a cause. JONAS GELDMANN: Lots of conservation organizations are promoting buying local honey and even promoting sponsorships of honeybees and that kind of stuff. So that increasingly annoyed me. CHARLES: It annoyed him because honeybees are not exactly part of nature. They were originally imported from Europe. Beekeepers keep them by the millions to make honey and pollinate crops like almonds. They're agricultural animals, like sheep or cattle. But there are thousands of other bee species living in the wild, hiding away in the ground or in hollow plant stems. Researcher Nigel Raine has a whole array of them in his laboratory at the University of Guelph, in Canada. Each one's impaled on a pin. Many are tiny. Rein says gardeners often assume they're flies. NIGEL RAINE: If you sit down and say, no, that's a small solitary bee, you know, that's a metallic green one - when you show them metallic green bees in their yard, they're kind of like - wow, that's amazing. CHARLES: A lot of wild bees are in real peril. Some species have disappeared. And when flowers are scarce, like when an orchard stops blooming, farmed honeybees and these wild bees end up competing with each other for food - for pollen - making it harder for the wild ones to survive. Basically, Jonas Geldmann says a healthy environment needs bees but not honeybees. This week, he published a commentary in the journal Science trying to spread the word. GELDMANN: The way we're managing honeybees in these human-kept hives has nothing to do with nature conservation. CHARLES: Scientists who study bees actually know this already, but they struggle with how to talk to the public about it. MARLA SPIVAK: We're on a learning curve, all of us. CHARLES: This is Marla Spivak, a bee researcher at the University of Minnesota. SPIVAK: It's like honeybees were our portal in - the door in to much larger issues - just conservation issues in general. CHARLES: Honeybees helped people understand why it's important to have more land covered with wildflowers and trees and free of pesticides. This helps honeybees and wild bees. SPIVAK: My preference is to not pit one bee against another. I would prefer to live on a planet where there are bountiful flowers to support all of our bees. CHARLES: But the bee that needs our help most may be that tiny green bee in your garden and not the honeybee. Dan Charles, NPR News. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: A diphtheria outbreak is worsening in Bangladesh in what's rapidly become the largest refugee camp in the world. The camp is home to some of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people who fled Myanmar since August last year. NPR's Jason Beaubien reports. (SOUNDBITE OF BABY CRYING ) JASON BEAUBIEN, BYLINE: The waiting room at the Samaritan's Purse diphtheria Treatment Center in the Balukhali refugee camp is packed. The room isn't really a room. It's just some benches under a tarp awning. ANDY DOYLE: Yesterday was a very busy day for us. We saw 117 patients came in to be screened. That's the most we've seen in any given day. BEAUBIEN: Dr. Andy Doyle is the medical director for this tented field hospital. This facility only treats diphtheria, an airborne bacterial infection that can be fatal. So the very first thing the staff members do is make sure the patient really has diphtheria and not just a bad cold. DOYLE: It's not something we see in the West. Or most of us - all of us from the West that are working here never saw this disease until we got here a week or two ago, and now we're experts on it. BEAUBIEN: It's not seen in the West because almost everyone is vaccinated against it. Doyle says diphtheria turns out to be pretty easy to identify. The patients have high fever or a sore throat, often a runny nose and a severe inflammation in the back of their throat. DOYLE: Sometimes they get swelling in their necks, especially in the younger children. And their neck itself will get really big. It's called a bull neck. And those are the signs that the airway is in impending danger, and that's what we look for. BEAUBIEN: And that's how diphtheria kills. The person's throat swells up, and eventually they can't breathe. As of the middle of January, there've been nearly 5,000 reported cases of diphtheria in these camps and 33 deaths. The refugees are packed together in makeshift shelters. Toilets and water wells have been randomly dug all over the camps, often side by side. The poor sanitation in the camps plus the extremely low vaccination rates among the Rohingya have allowed the disease to flourish. diphtheria can often be treated with antibiotics. But if the person's airway is in danger of being blocked, they're given an antitoxin via an intravenous drip. The treatment has the potential to spark a fatal reaction. DOYLE: For the entire administration of the medication, which can take anywhere from four to six hours, that nurse will sit at that bedside the whole time monitoring, watching for the slightest hint. And they've gotten really good at picking up the very subtle signs that an allergic reaction's about to start. BEAUBIEN: In a ward in a big, white tent behind the reception area, Nur Aysia Begum is on hour No. 2 of the treatment. She's one of the more than 650,000 Rohingya refugees who arrived in this camp over the last five months to escape what the U.N. has called a campaign of ethnic cleansing by the Myanmar military. Her mother, Nayna Khatun, says they feared they'd be killed by the soldiers if they stayed. Now their family of seven lives in a small bamboo and plastic shelter and relies on international food aid to survive. NAYNA KHATUN: (Foreign language spoken). BEAUBIEN: When her daughter got sick, Khatun says she was worried because she didn't have any money to pay for a doctor or medicine. All of the treatment, however, at this Samaritan's Purse clinic is free. Marcella Kraay, a project coordinator with Doctors Without Borders, says this refugee situation is extreme in many ways. MARCELLA KRAAY: We've had a big measles outbreak, and we've also had the biggest diphtheria outbreak in - you know, that the world has seen in a long time. BEAUBIEN: Kraay says back in Myanmar, the Rohingya lacked access to even the most basic immunizations. KRAAY: What we can see is that the refugee population - specifically the Rohingya - had very little access to health care. BEAUBIEN: Humanitarian groups have launched a massive campaign to try to immunize nearly a million people in and around the refugee camps against diphtheria and other vaccine-preventable diseases. But it will take several rounds of these immunizations before the Rohingya will have adequate protection against diphtheria. Jason Beaubien, NPR News, Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Police departments across the U.S. are using electronic databases to store intelligence on gang activity. These databases have been heralded by police as a crime fighting tool. But some activists in Chicago claim they do more harm than good. Immigrants in particular say the city's list is full of errors. And in some cases, they lead to deportations. From member station WBEZ, Odette Yousef reports. ODETTE YOUSEF, BYLINE: Fifteen years ago, the Chicago Police Department started gathering information about gangs electronically. It was the next big thing at the time for police departments. The idea was to store gang intelligence in one centralized system. MICHAEL MARTIN: It allows us to reduce violent crime, to identify the most active gangs and gang members. YOUSEF: Michael Martin is with the Midwest Gang Investigators Association and teaches at the National Gang Center based in Florida. He says today, most U.S. law enforcement agencies use some sort of database to track gangs, and they help with analyzing trends and prosecuting cases. MARTIN: But we have to do this stuff, right? We have to ensure that we're protecting people's rights when we're doing this. Otherwise, the community's not going to trust us. YOUSEF: In Chicago, that trust is eroding. Over time, Chicago's list has grown to include almost 65,000 people that the police consider gang-affiliated. More than 95 percent are African-American or Latino. Young activists say that police are irresponsibly and disproportionately labeling young men of color as gang members. And the information is leading immigration agents to those who are undocumented. Luis Pedrote Salinas says this is exactly what happened to him seven years ago. LUIS PEDROTE SALINAS: They arrested me for an unopened Bud Light beer can. And just because of that, they picked me up. Then I was getting deported. YOUSEF: Pedrote is an undocumented man from Mexico. He says he was getting into his car in a neighborhood that Chicago police were targeting for gang activity. They stopped him and spotted the beer can in his car. They arrested him. The case was never prosecuted. But that arrest has had long-lasting effects for Pedrote. SALINAS: He said that I self-testified to be a Latin King. But I didn't testify nothing. YOUSEF: Pedrote says he's not in a gang. But in Chicago, there's no official process to get off the database. And for Pedrote, the most frustrating thing is that he thinks being on the list killed his eligibility for DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy that protects some migrants who are brought to the U.S. as children. SALINAS: We knew they denied me because of the gang allegations. YOUSEF: Pedrote is suing the Chicago Police Department. And because of that, it won't comment on his claims. But the department did recently make an extraordinary admission in a separate but similar case. It said that even though it had labeled another undocumented man a gang member, it had no evidence to back that up. That cleared the way for the man to apply for a visa that he hadn't been able to get because of the label. Despite this, Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson still largely considers the database reliable. EDDIE JOHNSON: I think that, you know, any facet of life that we deal with - there may be errors. YOUSEF: The department says in court filings that changes to the database would be unworkable. But Michael Martin says databases should regularly be purged of wrong information. Otherwise, people's civil rights might be violated, and departments could eventually be forced to dismantle their databases. Martin says that's what happened to Minnesota's statewide database several years ago. And more recently, the Portland, Ore., police department also discontinued its gang database over the same concerns. For NPR News, I'm Odette Yousef. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Bailey Holt and Preston Cope were murdered in their high school this week. They were both 15 years old. But has the news of students being murdered in their school lost the power to shock and sober us? Sixteen students, all between 14 and 18 at Marshall County High School in Kentucky, were shot by another student, also 15, who opened fire in their school on Tuesday. Bailey Holt and Preston Cope were two great people, their friend Gabbi Byers said on Facebook. It hurts knowing we won't be able to share the laughs anymore. And Jason Holt told WKRN in Nashville of his daughter, she was an angel here on earth. That's how parents feel about their children and their souls. To report that two students were murdered in their school was once the kind of story that would dominate the news of a week. And to be sure, the deplorable deaths and bright lives of those two youngsters have received intense attention. But the killings in Kentucky were the 11th school shooting of the year, and the first month of the year is not over. There have been about 300 school shootings in the United States since 2013. And while we may remember some of the names of places where students died - Santa Monica; Roseburg, Ore.; Rancho Tehama Reserve, Calif. - and many of the names of those who died, those harrowing statistics suggest school shootings now occur at the rate of almost one per week. If another school shooting takes place next week, we may be shocked and saddened all over again but not surprised. School shootings have become commonplace. News organizations now know who to call for reflections on how families and towns can try to contend with loss and grief and counsel and care for sad and traumatized students. And of course, we know who to call to hear from those who dispute even the most modest regulation on guns. We have had to make those calls time and time again. Many U.S. schools now have routine drills on how to take shelter if a gunman bursts into their school. Parents may worry if those drills do more to prepare or panic their children. But it's hard to say training to hide from a shooter doesn't make as much sense as fire drills when the tragic and outrageous fact is that more youngsters are injured or killed in school shootings each year than in school fires. The fear of children dying in their classrooms has become an everyday fact of our lives. But have we stopped being shocked? (SOUNDBITE OF SONNA'S "KEPT LUMINESCE") [POST BROADCAST CORRECTION: In the audio, as in a previous Web version, we incorrectly say that at least 16 people were shot in addition to the two fatalities. Not all of those who were injured were shot.] SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Send an alert. Missing - dozens of bison. Last seen together, two holding pens at Yellowstone National Park. Authorities say the animals escaped when someone used bolt cutters to open up a fence. As Yellowstone Public Radio's Nate Hegyi reports, the park wants to find out who's responsible. NATE HEGYI, BYLINE: It's a windy and unseasonably warm winter day in Yellowstone National Park in Montana. Spokesperson Morgan Warthin is standing in the middle of a massive empty valley. MORGAN WARTHIN: Yellowstone is, like, so big. Where do you begin to look? HEGYI: She's searching for any of the 52 bison that were set free in mid-January. That's when the National Park Service discovered their holding pens had been broken into. Now the bison are scattered across an area larger than Delaware, and officials have launched a criminal investigation to find out what happened. RICK WALLEN: I didn't believe it when I was first told. HEGYI: That's park bison biologist Rick Wallen. He says finding these animals won't be easy because there are literally thousands of bison in Yellowstone. And the only thing that sets the escaped animals apart is a tiny ear tag, which can be hard to spot from long distances. WARTHIN: Bison, in the wintertime, are incredibly furry animals. And so the fur, being so thick, covers up those tags. So it makes it very difficult to find the tag. HEGYI: Before the bison went missing, Yellowstone Park officials hoped to send them to a nearby Indian reservation in Montana. It was part of an effort to help the animals avoid what's become an annual and controversial slaughter of bison from Yellowstone. See, over the past decade, the park - under court order - has sent hundreds of bison to be killed almost every year because nearby ranchers fear the animals could infect their cattle with a disease called brucellosis. It can cause pregnant cows to abort their young. However, there's never been a confirmed case of bison passing on brucellosis to cattle in the wild. Biologist Rick Wallen says the fear is exaggerated. But ranching is also big business in Big Sky Country. So the park service hoped they could save some bison otherwise headed to slaughter by first quarantining them and then creating a new herd on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. The animals lived in the holding pens for more than a year while the park service worked with Montana and the USDA to get the pens approved as a quarantine. Then, Warthin says, someone cut the fence. WARTHIN: A lot of hard work was put into testing these animals. And all that work, all that effort is gone. HEGYI: Now the question is who allowed these animals to escape. Rick Wallen says he suspects animal rights activists could be involved. WALLEN: Folks that hate seeing wild bison contained in fenced facilities. HEGYI: Folks like Chris Hurley, a coordinator with the Buffalo Field Campaign. Hurley's got a bison patch on his jacket with e pluribus unum written underneath. He says his group had nothing to do with the animals' escape. CHRIS HURLEY: Something like that from the campaign would be kind of detrimental to anything we're trying to achieve. HEGYI: That being said, he's kind of happy someone cut the animals loose. Hurley says all Yellowstone bison should roam free. HURLEY: Once they're inside of that facility, they're never going to be wild animals again. After years of domestication and being fed and being watered just to be shipped to end up on lands behind a fence somewhere is just insulting to this, which is our national mammal. HEGYI: Park officials say they've spotted some of the missing bison more than five miles away from the holding pens. But they won't round them up like cattle because it's too far away. Instead, they hope the bison return on their own. For NPR News, I'm Nate Hegyi in Mammoth Hot Springs, Wyo. (SOUNDBITE OF POOLSIDE'S "NEXT TO YOU") SCOTT SIMON, HOST: The fallout continues over the Larry Nassar sex abuse scandal. USA Gymnastics said on Friday that its entire board of directors will resign. More than 150 women have testified that Nassar, former doctor of the U.S. gymnastics team, sexually abused them while he was supposed to be treating their injuries. We wondered how families of younger gymnasts may feel about this story, and we sent WAMU's Selena Simmons-Duffin to a training center in Silver Spring, Md. SELENA SIMMONS-DUFFIN, BYLINE: It's a busy weeknight at Silver Stars. Inside the huge gymnasium, toddlers tumble, and the serious older kids run drills. The walls of the lobby are lined with sparkly new leotards. Parents and babysitters chat or work and fend off requests for popsicles. There's a cooler cruelly placed right outside the gym. UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Ice cream. Can you buy one of those? UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: It's going to melt all over. SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Most parents here are willing to talk - even about Nassar and this difficult moment for USA Gymnastics. Sari Weiner has been bringing her 6-year-old daughter here on and off for about three years. SARI WEINER: I've always thought that the competitive nature of the sport is extremely messed up. I think it is just like unconscionable how long it went on and how nobody spoke up about it. But if my daughter is, like, compulsively doing cartwheels all over the house, I'm going to put her in gymnastics for as long as she's having fun. SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Many of the parents here are enthusiastic about gymnastics. Their kids get to work off energy, gain confidence. CARA ALTIMUS: I still really love it for my daughter. SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Cara Altimus brings her 3-year-old here to get stronger and have fun. She's been following the Nassar story but says it doesn't really feel connected to her experience at Silver Stars. But there was actually an issue here over the summer. A father put a small spy camera in the bathroom. ALTIMUS: I thought the studio handled it very well. So there was a lot of communication, and their staff has re-upped their training on community safety of children. SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Most parents I find in the waiting area are like Altimus. Their kids are little and here to play. Parents of the competitive gymnasts who are here multiple times a week mostly just drop them off and come back when practice is over. But there are a few who stay. VALENTINO IORDACHE: My name is Valentino Iordache. It's Romanian - so gymnastics, Romania (laughter). SIMMONS-DUFFIN: His daughter made the team USA Gymnastics level 1, where they learn the skills they'll need to compete. To him, the sexual abuse scandal isn't about gymnastics, and that's what he told his daughter. IORDACHE: I told her that there are crazy people in this world, and she needs to know about it. Gymnastics has nothing to do with a bad incident here or there. SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Lowrey Redmond's 8-year-old daughter is on the same team. For her family, the Nassar story has been a big deal. LOWREY REDMOND: My oldest daughter, Adele, gymnastics is her life. She's kind of a mature 8-year-old, so I knew that she could handle talking about some of this. I didn't tell her the details. She knows that a lot of girls and women stood up for what's right and they're gymnasts just like her. And her first reaction was - Mom, that's really cool. SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Her 5-year-old daughter Mabel does gymnastics at Silver Stars, too. So they're here a lot. REDMOND: I thought maybe I would be worried about this being systemic and, you know, our girls are never going to be in a safe place. But it's up to all of us to keep coming into the gym and making the adults in charge - hold them accountable. Hi. SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Mabel walks up to Redmond as we talk. She's ready to go home while her sister stays to practice for another hour. They bundle up and head out into the cold evening. REDMOND: Does Adele love gymnastics? MABEL: Yes. REDMOND: What about you? MABEL: Yes. REDMOND: Yes. SIMMONS-DUFFIN: They're a gymnastics family, and she won't let Larry Nassar take that away from them. For NPR News, I'm Selena Simmons-Duffin in Silver Spring, Md. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: The New York Times reported this week President Trump wanted to fire special counsel Robert Mueller in June, just a month after he began to lead an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. White House counsel Don McGahn said he would resign if the president did that. Now this report has since been matched by reporting from The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and other news organizations. The White House denies the reports. Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, has called for the firing of Mr. Mueller many times. And he joins us now. Representative Gaetz, thanks so much for being with us. MATT GAETZ: Good morning. SIMON: And why do you think Mr. Mueller should be fired? GAETZ: Well, I think there have been a number of instances when bias has been demonstrated within the Mueller probe; also, the manner in which the team has been put together, the relationship between Mr. Mueller and Mr. Comey; and then finally, some of the details of the intelligence memo that we hope is made public this week would seem to indicate that no prosecution could ever be brought from the Mueller probe. And thus, its utility has been outlived. SIMON: Could you cite a single example of bias? GAETZ: Sure. Andrew Weissman, the No. 2 member of the Mueller probe, attended the Hillary Clinton election night party. You would think with all the talented prosecutors to be asked throughout the federal system, we could likely assemble a team without having to pick the people who were engaged in the 2016 election to the extent that they would be at one of the candidates' election night parties. SIMON: Well, I mean - A, I don't know that; B, so he attended a party - I mean, public officials, like reporters - for example, I think in many ways, like representatives in Congress, who are supposed to be capable of independent and unbiased judgment when it comes to doing their jobs. GAETZ: But members of Congress don't end up prosecuting people. And, you know, when you're dealing with a prosecution and potentially, you know, here, with the president the United States being investigated, I would think that you would want to avoid even the appearance of bias. And here, the bias seems to be significant. It's also laid out in the text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. SIMON: Now... GAETZ: Those were two people on the Mueller probe. And their bias I don't think is disputable. SIMON: Well, I've read a lot of those text messages. They have personal opinions. But nothing in those text messages suggests that they were bringing any kind of bias to their official duty, which is what counts. GAETZ: Well, that's not true. They talked about an insurance policy. And when you talk about, you know, people being an insurance policy against a presidential victory for Donald Trump, that would seem to indicate not only a personal belief but an actual plan... SIMON: I... GAETZ: ...To turn that belief into some... SIMON: I... GAETZ: ...Sort of official action. SIMON: I thought that was an ironic comment. But let me ask you overall - if the president were to bounce Robert Mueller now, wouldn't this fit a pattern of obstruction of justice? GAETZ: I don't think the president should fire Robert. But I think the attorney general should. I think that, you know, the concerns that many people have expressed, both on the Republican and Democratic side, that the president making that decision would be unwise and would certainly create concerns within sort of the fundamental fabric of our democracy - I would agree with that. I think that's the attorney general's job. SIMON: Well - but even if the attorney general did it, wouldn't that seem to suggest that he's trying to cover up the facts, that there's something to hide? GAETZ: Absolutely not. The attorney general could fire Robert Mueller and could, you know, assemble a team of people... SIMON: The attorney general has agreed to recuse himself, we should remember. Right? GAETZ: And that's also a pretty poor decision in my opinion. I don't think there was any legal basis for that recusal. I also don't think there really is a clear understanding of what that recusal covers or doesn't cover in the questioning that we did of the attorney general... SIMON: Oh, I'm sure it would cover him not firing Mr. Mueller. I mean, I'm not a legal expert. But you recuse yourself from those events, and it would seem to me that guarantees it. I'm afraid we're out of time. I'm sorry to step on you, Mr. Gaetz. But I do thank you very much for joining us in a busy week. GAETZ: Thanks for having me. SIMON: Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: There'll be a rare sight at the Winter Olympics next month in South Korea. Both Koreas will march in under a unified Korean flag. But the day before the Olympics begin, a military parade is set to happen in North Korea. What does one symbol say about the other? We're joined now by Jung Pak, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution Center for East Asia Policy Studies. Thanks so much for being with us. JUNG PAK: Thank you for inviting me. SIMON: And let's start with the Olympics. That moment when the unified flag, if you please, walks in and teams from two Koreas - is it just a show, or does it mean something more? PAK: It depends on who you ask. For the South Koreans who have been really eager to have a successful Olympics and for the president, Moon Jae-in's administration, who has really pushed for better ties to North Korea, this will be a big success for them in terms of getting the North Koreans to participate, to march under the joint flag and to mitigate any potential North Korean provocations that could have happened during the Olympics and ruin the whole atmosphere. But in terms of applying maximum pressure on North Korea and getting them to denuclearize, this is just a minor blip on the radar. SIMON: And what do we make of the military parade in North Korea just before? Is that a way of saying we don't mean it, or what? PAK: Absolutely. I think - you know, I've been likening the North Korean participation in the Olympics as kind of like "The Wedding Crashers," where they just storm in, guzzle everybody's champagne, other people's food and then they're going to leave a mess behind. And nothing they've said since Kim Jong Un's New Year's address has suggested that they're going to be talking about their nuclear weapons program at all. In fact, they've not had any pressure from South Korea or anybody in terms of talking about nuclear weapons. SIMON: Well - and that brings up a question. And I feel the need to ask it every now and then - why does North Korea want nuclear weapons? What's their overall strategic goal? PAK: Their strategic goal is to have this for deterrence, for prestige and finally for a course of diplomacy. And, you know, I think while primarily these weapons are for defensive purposes, I think we have to be very mindful of the possibility that Kim Jong Un has offensive aspirations, such as creating conditions that would be conducive for reunification on his terms. SIMON: Well, follow that up, please - because when you talk about the fact that they might have a motive to use them offensively how - what would that scenario be? PAK: So one of the things that the North Koreans have been demanding is that the U.S. leave the Korean peninsula. As you know, there are close to 30,000 U.S. service members based in South Korea. And why they want the U.S. to be off the Korean peninsula is so that they can continue to poke and prod and start creating conditions where they can use the nuclear weapons to prevent the U.S. from intervening in any attempts for North Korea to try to reunify. And I don't mean that they're necessarily going to be using nuclear weapons but that there are other means of creating conditions. SIMON: Has time run out for the United States to somehow prevent North Korea from having a nuclear arsenal? PAK: We're definitely - the North Koreans are definitely farther ahead than, let's say, where we were 10 years ago or even five years ago for that matter. And I would say that the options have probably diminished as a result of that. But I still do think that there's plenty of runway for us to shape Kim Jong Un's behavior. SIMON: What options does the U.S. have? PAK: Sanctions are a key part of maximum pressure campaign that the Trump administration has been advancing. And sanctions have never been as tough - tougher than now. They're broad. They target sectors. They try to cut off North Korea's efforts to earn hard currency to support their economy and their nuclear weapons program. And there is anecdotal evidence that the North Koreans are starting to feel the pinch. And I think the Olympic outreach is in part a sign of the fact that they're feeling the pinch of sanctions and that they saw outreach as a way to try to get South Korea to agree to loosen sanctions implementation or try to lure South Korea away from the maximum pressure campaign. SIMON: Jung Pak, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution Center for East Asia Policy Studies. Thanks so much. PAK: Thank you. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: President Emmanuel Macron says his government is working on a new immigration and asylum law that French Parliament will vote on this spring. But already critics say such measures betray France's human rights traditions and run counter to the values that Macron embraced during his campaign. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports from Paris. ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: In a gritty neighborhood in northern Paris, a couple dozen migrant men are standing around eating hot bowls of soup handed out by charity workers. Amar Zakaria says he fled Sudan when the government started attacking his Nubian ethnic group. The 30-year-old says his whole family has been scattered. AMAR ZAKARIA: Some in Kenya, some are in South Sudan - all of them are now suffering a lot. South Sudan is a hell. So I decided to go through Libya to take the boat. I was lucky because I made it. BEARDSLEY: President Macron says his government wants to help people like Zakaria by expediting the asylum process for those fleeing war and persecution. But to do so, Macron says refugees must be distinguished from those simply fleeing economic misery. So as of last month, authorities are allowed to carry out ID checks inside emergency shelters. The measure has provoked outrage from humanitarian leaders. Kenneth Roth is the director of Human Rights Watch. KENNETH ROTH: Nobody should use an emergency shelter as a place to enforce the law. Even undocumented migrants should be able to go to a shelter or a hospital or a school - you know, have their basic necessities met without worrying about having their identity checked and facing possible deportation. BEARDSLEY: A handful of members of Macron's En Marche party recently joined the Catholic church and union leaders to pen an open letter critical of the president's migration policy. The signatories said migrants who had faced exploitation and even torture are now having their freedom and dignity violated in France. While Macron declared that migrants must be housed in proper centers and no longer sleep on the street, police have been filmed destroying migrant encampments and slashing their tents. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: If you want to destroy our tents, so why don't you want to give us houses? BEARDSLEY: Prominent author and filmmaker Yann Moix is making a documentary about migrants in the northern French town of Calais. Moix says he's shocked by the difference between the Macron who told the United Nations that France would speak for those who have no voice and the president he sees today. YANN MOIX: (Through interpreter) He should explain why, only an hour and a half from Paris, defenseless young people and even women are humiliated and tear gassed. There are Afghans who've read Victor Hugo, and that's why they come to France. And we beat them. BEARDSLEY: In a speech to police in Calais this month, Macron said the mistreatment of migrants would not be tolerated. But he also thanked the police for what he called their remarkable job protecting French citizens. PRESIDENT EMMANUEL MACRON: (Speaking French). BEARDSLEY: "Day and night, you are mobilized so that others can live normal lives," said Macron. Some critics say Macron is implementing policies that are harsher than those of his right-wing predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy. But migration specialist Catherine de Wenden doesn't think Macron has taken a turn to the right. She says the new president believes he is making the French asylum system more efficient. CATHERINE DE WENDEN: So he's saying we have to respect the Geneva Convention on refugees. We have to respect the human rights for all aspects of family reunifications, the rights of children and all that. But there is no special attention to those who try to enter as economic migrants illegally. And so we have to repatriate them. BEARDSLEY: The problem, says de Wenden, is that in many countries, there is both political oppression and an economic crisis. So it's increasingly difficult to define who is an economic migrant and who is a refugee. Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: By the way, there was a great escape on the grounds of the Paris zoo this week. Around 50 baboons made a break out of their enclosure and more or less took over what's called the Grand Rocher, a big, fake mountain that's in the center of the zoo. Officials closed the zoo so the baboons wouldn't encounter any zoo-goers. Baboons can be temperamental when stressed - by the way, like Parisians - and as a zoo official told reporters, they're stronger than us. Zookeepers, vets and police armed with tranquilizer darts rushed to the scene, but no darts were necessary. The dominant male baboons reportedly led their packs back to their enclosures. Officials are trying to discover how they escaped. Why would the baboons make a break for it? Well, with respect for one of the world's great zoos, it is still a zoo. And the baboons are kind of marooned in the middle of Paris, knowing that just over the Grand Rocher, there are meringues, macaroons and tarte Tatin. Wouldn't you make a break for it? SCOTT SIMON, HOST: The Olympics are a once-in-a-lifetime event for most of the athletes and their families who make it there. Now we'll introduce you to a woman who's headed to her seventh Olympics next month in South Korea. She is not a competitor but the U.S. team's mom - at least that's how she was introduced to Colorado Public Radio's Rachel Estabrook. RACHEL ESTABROOK, BYLINE: At the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, hundreds of athletes come for specialized coaching. Some live here year-round. It's a sprawling campus with gyms for specific sports and an Olympic-sized pool. Near the dorms, above the dining hall - that's where you find Sherry Von Riesen. VERONICA DAY: Hi. SHERRY VON RIESEN: Hello, dear. How are you? DAY: I brought friends. ESTABROOK: Von Riesen is short and grandmotherly, her office blanketed in photos and thank-you notes. Skeleton athlete Veronica Day walks in, and Von Riesen hands her some papers to sign. VON RIESEN: (Laughter) Just so I can pay you. ESTABROOK: Aspiring Olympians jet all over the world to compete. And when they come back here to this training home, Von Reisen looks out for them. She makes sure their rooms are clean, finds their misplaced passports or, like with Veronica Day, gives them inspiration. DAY: A rock? What's this for? ESTABROOK: Since the Sydney Games in 2000, Von Riesen, the team mom, has handed out these little stones in plastic baggies wrapped up with a slip of paper. VON RIESEN: The only requirement is I'm required to read it. DAY: OK. VON RIESEN: Creation of power - clarity in thinking and amplifies your energy and thoughts. DAY: I dig it. I'll take it with me down the track. ESTABROOK: The messages aren't just about the next competition. She says they're a lifelong lesson. VON RIESEN: Whatever the rock they pick, that's what they need. And I will see the athletes 10 years from now. And they'll all say, I still got my rocks. ESTABROOK: Being the sage of the training center is not in her actual job description as athlete services coordinator. Neither is saving them from their worst fears. But she does that, too. JIMMY MOODY: This is how you know Sherry cares about you. ESTABROOK: Fencer Jimmy Moody recalls this one day he was walking to the cafeteria after a tough workout, totally worn out. MOODY: And Sherry ran down to stop me. ESTABROOK: See, Moody has a thing about clowns. MOODY: I'm not going to say I am afraid of clowns. I have a very human aversion to clowns. ESTABROOK: That day, McDonald's had brought its mascot to the training center. Von Riesen knew Moody would freak out and intercepted him. MOODY: And she's like oh, my God - Jimmy don't go in. And I was like, what's happening right now? And so she saved my life. It was amazing. ESTABROOK: Moody guesses that the team mom could write a few books full of stories that she won't share on the radio, but she does give some hints. VON RIESEN: I've had a lot of them cry on my shoulder. Right before the Games, it gets very stressful. And I'll tell the athletes to come in, shut the door. And they can lay it at my feet - yell and scream at me, stomp, do whatever they need to do - 'cause I'm not taking it home. ESTABROOK: The advice she gives most often is to believe in themselves. She can tell the ones that have the ultimate drive to win, but she knows they won't all be champions. VON RIESEN: Medals are great, too, but they all will come away with something amazing. ESTABROOK: And Von Riesen will be in South Korea for whatever happens. After all, she's their rock. For NPR News, I'm Rachel Estabrook in Denver. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: The U.S. government rumbled back to life this week after a brief shutdown. President Trump brought his America First message to Davos. The White House began to outline an offer on an immigration deal. And The New York Times dropped another reportorial bombshell. Our Ron Elving is here to talk with us. Thanks very much for being with us, Ron. RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good morning, Scott. SIMON: And so bring us up to date on what we know about that New York Times report, which has since been, I think, added to by a number of other news organizations, about this drama between Trump and Mueller. ELVING: They're reporting that in June of last year, the president told his White House counsel to fire Robert Mueller. Now, of course, that's the special counsel appointed by the Justice Department to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election. And, of course, the Justice Department did that because Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey, who had been investigating that interference. So the Times and other news organizations have reported that the president was incensed at learning that Mueller was going beyond the Russian interference allegations to possible collusion with the Trump campaign and going beyond that to investigate whether anyone in the White House had attempted to interfere with the investigation. And, of course, that would be a crime known as obstruction of justice. SIMON: Yeah. And there is - we should remind ourselves, historically, there's a pattern that investigations begin in one avenue and sometimes wind up in another, don't they? ELVING: Yes, indeed. The cover up, as they say, is often worse than the crime. SIMON: Tell us a bit about Don McGahn, the White House counsel. He's a compelling and colorful figure, sometimes, isn't he? ELVING: Yes, not a household name, at least not until this week. He is an interesting individual, however. He's a partner in Jones Day, which is one of the nation's leading law firms. He is a former member and, in fact, chairman of the Federal Election Commission. He was appointed there by President George W. Bush. Now, well before he worked for President Trump, he also worked for a number of other Republican presidential candidates during the 2016 cycle. And we should mention that he is regarded as a world-class expert in campaign law and especially in campaign finance law. And may I also add he is quite an accomplished rock electric guitar player, has fronted a band that did Guns and Roses covers quite well and has a remarkable collection of electric guitars? SIMON: That's what I meant by colorful. This adds to the crisis Republicans are confronting in the country, doesn't it? ELVING: Yes. It would seem to amplify that crisis at this point. We don't know why this particular leak came out just at this particular time or who the four people The New York Times is relying upon might be. Some people are speculating on Twitter that Trump's own inner circle may have wanted this out at this time to show the president just how much negative reaction there would be if he fired Mueller and maybe to persuade him to stop thinking about doing it. SIMON: What about all this attention that the Devin Nunes memo has gotten - this mystery memo? ELVING: There's been a tremendous amount of that attention and energy, especially in conservative media and talk radio. You heard the congressman from Florida on your own program earlier this morning talking about this. And it purports to show that the FBI is harboring a conspiracy against the president, a secret society as they call it. And this was supposedly composed of agents who had been investigating Hillary Clinton and later investigating Donald Trump in the 2016 cycle. And it supposedly also includes some information about secret sources of the FBI, which is why it hasn't come to light as yet. There are reasons not to expose those kinds of sources. And in the end, it may be more useful to the president's camp if it stays in the realm of rumor than if we actually got to see it. SIMON: And then the president, in the middle of all this, flew off to Davos. NPR's Ron Elving, thanks very much. ELVING: Thank you, Scott. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Donald Trump took office a year ago with the vow to throw out trade deals he found unfair to the United States. Then he took the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP. It was part of his America First policy, which he lauded yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Mr. Trump was well received at that meeting of world leaders in the titans of industry, but his protectionist message has its critics. One of them is Philip Levy, an economist who served in the George W. Bush administration. Mr. Levy is now with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and joins us from there. Mr. Levy, thanks so much for being with us. PHILIP LEVY: It's very good to be with you. SIMON: And let's start with the president at Davos. He said there's never been a better time to do business in America. That seemed to go over pretty well, didn't it? LEVY: Yes. It was part of his talk, which was very much a sales pitch. And so he was peddling tax cuts and regulatory reform. And I think for business people, those are quite welcome. SIMON: But you have great reservations about his policy overall. LEVY: I do. And I think that many of the world leaders who were listening were perhaps unpersuaded because with this president especially, there can be a gap between what he says on occasion and how that translates into policy. SIMON: Well, the president has said - and, in fact, I want to quote, if I may, Gary Cohn, who heads the National Economic Council - that "America First doesn't mean America alone." And the president just signaled that he's certainly open to bilateral trade agreements. LEVY: He has. And yet he's done a number of things on the international scene which are very worrisome. You mentioned the withdrawal from the TPP. I think you have a lot of countries trying to see what he means by all this rhetoric and watching closely the NAFTA renegotiations. And those have been very problematic. We just had some new protection applied to solar cells and washing machines this week. Plus, there's concerns about things he's doing with the World Trade Organization. So if you look at the rhetoric that he deployed at Davos, it was probably the friendliest spin towards trade that we've heard from him. The question is how that's going to translate into new policies. SIMON: Well, as you see it, Mr. Levy, what does the U.S. lose by not being a TPP member? Because as the president sees it, it's the other countries who lose out. LEVY: Yes, although oddly enough, the president for the first time said, we might join the TPP if it turns out that it's in everybody's interest. I think it is in everybody's interest. And the TPP countries have tried to hold the door open for us. You ask, what do we lose by not being there? We lose this chance to shape the rules of the global trading system in our favor and to get all the benefits that come from crafting a global trading system that has been very beneficial to the United States over the years. SIMON: You do understand, I'm sure, that there are a lot of Americans throughout the country who feel that that beneficial trade has maybe come at the cost of their jobs as labor relocates overseas to places where the labor pool might be cheaper. LEVY: I certainly understand that sentiment. And I in no way sort of downplay the difficulties that a lot of Americans have had. The really important thing, though, is that we're careful in how we explain those difficulties. Are those difficulties because of trade agreements, or are they because of changes in technology, for example, in the manufacturing sector? To me, perhaps the most telling statistic is if you look at the share of the U.S. labor force in manufacturing, it's not a - went on a fairly steady downward trend starting in the mid-1960s. You can stare at that graph, and you don't even see a blip in the mid-'90s when NAFTA or the latest, you know, round of global trade talks came online. SIMON: Philip Levy, senior fellow with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, thanks so much for being with us. LEVY: It's been a pleasure. Thank you. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: It's the height of the season for the social set in Palm Beach, which does not include BJ Leiderman, who writes our theme music. But at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump's private club, there are some holes in the schedule. It's long been a favorite venue for fundraising galas, but some 20 charities have moved their events elsewhere following Trump's controversial remarks after last summer's white nationalist march in Charlottesville. NPR's Greg Allen reports the cancellations have created an opening for groups not concerned about being associated with the Trump name. GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: It's been 10 years, Terry Bomar says, since he held a fundraising gala at Mar-a-Lago. His group Young Adventurers provides guidance, mentoring and travel opportunities for young people in need of direction. A close friend who was part of the group died, and Bomar said he was discouraged until he talked to Elizabeth Trump Grau, the president's sister. TERRY BOMAR: And Elizabeth Trump said, you had the best event of the year when you had it before. Why don't you have another one? Don't let your charity stop. Just don't stop now. You did some great things. You'll do some great things. And she said, I'll help you if you need me to help you. ALLEN: The event last night was small as Palm Beach galas go - about 275 people, half the size of big events like the Red Cross Ball, one of the many charities that severed ties with Mar-a-Lago. Bomar was pleased. The turnout was better than expected. The Trump family, he says, are great people, and he was happy to have the opportunity to hold his event at the height of the season. BOMAR: When those others pulled out - the big boys pulled out - it opened up doors for me. That's why I'm having it in the middle of January instead of in October. UNIDENTIFIED SINGER: (Singing in foreign language). ALLEN: Attendees sipped sparkling wine and munched on fried shrimp. President Trump wasn't there. He was on his way back from Davos. First lady Melania Trump had been at Mar-a-Lago but reportedly left before the ball Friday evening. Large photographs of the couple graced the stage, however, and a portrait of the first family was up for grabs in the silent auction. Patty Schechter says she's a snowbird who's new to Palm Beach, and she was ecstatic at the opportunity to see Mar-a-Lago. PATTY SCHECHTER: The first thing I said was it's a mini Versailles. And then I also said fit for a king, and it's good for our king because I love Donald (laughter). Love our president. ALLEN: That was the prevailing opinion for this group - Palm Beach residents who could afford a $600-a-plate ticket. As one attendee said, for a lot of people here, that's like taking a quarter out of their pocket. Giving to charities, wearing tuxedos and formal gowns, attending lavish galas are what the well-heeled do here in Palm Beach. Several said they were disappointed organizations like the Salvation Army and Susan B. Komen canceled. Joe Korff, looking dapper in a white dinner jacket, said he's been to many fundraisers here at Mar-a-Lago. The charities, he believes, overreacted. JOE KORFF: I think in saner times, they would have not done what they did, but they did. And so we're here, and we're not there. This is the greatest venue known to man right here. ALLEN: Maybe so, but this year, dates still appear available. The next fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, for a charity associated with the Christian Broadcasting Network, isn't for three weeks. Greg Allen, NPR News, Palm Beach, Fla. UNIDENTIFIED MUSICIAN: (Playing stringed instrument). SCOTT SIMON, HOST: This year's nasty flu season has become deadly. The virus has spread across the country and shows few signs of slowing down. It's even getting worse in a lot of places. NPR health correspondent Rob Stein joins us. Rob, thanks so much for being with us. ROB STEIN, BYLINE: Oh, sure. Thanks, Scott. SIMON: And just how bad is it now? STEIN: It's pretty bad, Scott. The flu experts at the CDC had expected the flu season would have peaked by now. But that hasn't happened, unfortunately. And it looks like the flu may be starting to ebb in some parts of the country like in California. But it's still really intense in 49 states from coast to coast. You know, the CDC has this flu map that lights up red in the bad places. You look at it - it's blazing red coast to coast. SIMON: How did it get this bad? STEIN: Well, there are several reasons. The first one is that flu season started early. So that just gives the flu germs more time to make more people sick. But the big reason is the type of flu that's the dominant strain this year. It's known as H3N2. And historically, it's a really bad actor. It tends to make more people sick. When they get sick, they tend to get sicker. And therefore, they're more likely to end up in a hospital and even die from the flu. SIMON: And it has struck that part of the population known as baby boomers even more than some others. Why is that? STEIN: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, this year, like every year, the group that's getting hit the hardest is the elderly. They're the ones that are ending up in the hospital more, and they're dying more. But No. 2 this year is the baby boomers. They're right behind the elderly in terms of, you know, how frequently they're, again, ending up in the hospital. Health experts don't really know why. They think it might have something to do with the mix of viruses and that the baby boomers haven't built up enough immunity against them this year. So they're number two this year, pushing down young children to number three. But that said, it's important to note that at least 37 kids have already died this year from the flu. SIMON: There has been so much emphasis in recent years on the importance of vaccines. Shouldn't they be helping? STEIN: Yeah. And the vaccines probably are helping. But the - another evil thing about this H3N2 strain of the virus is that it tends to mutate when the vaccine's being produced, when it's being manufactured. And unfortunately, that happened again this year. And so it's kind of a mismatch for the vaccine. And it's not providing as much protection as the vaccine otherwise would. Now, that said, people still should get vaccinated because any protection is better than none. It does protect it better against the other strains. And if there's another wave of flu that happens this year, we still have lots of time for the vaccine to protect people. SIMON: Is there something people can and should be doing now to protect themselves? STEIN: Well, you know, in addition to getting their flu shots, you know, anybody who gets sick, they should stay home so they don't spread the flu around. You know, and there's a lot of commonsense things people can do, you know, things your mother is always telling you to do - wash your hands a lot. Don't touch your eyes and your nose and your mouth when you're out in public. SIMON: NPR's health correspondent Rob Stein, thanks so much. STEIN: Oh, thank you, Scott. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: To Honduras, where President Juan Orlando Hernandez has been sworn in today for a second term amid protests. Thousands of demonstrators have clashed with soldiers and police to protest that inauguration. There has been ongoing unrest in Honduras since the November election, which was marred by allegations of election vote fraud. The U.S. has recognized the Hernandez victory despite those concerns. We're joined now by Carlos Dada of the Latin American digital news site El Faro. Carlos, thanks for being with us. CARLOS DADA: Hi, Scott. Thanks for having me. SIMON: And you are in Tegucigalpa, the capital. And I understand you've been out, and you've you've seen the demonstrations on the street up close, haven't you? DADA: Oh, yes. You can see them from almost anywhere in the city. And there is a cloud of tear gas over the whole city. I think there's no way to escape the pungent odor. They've been throwing tear gas - I mean the security forces - since yesterday night. So the air is pretty much full of it. SIMON: The protests began because of the election results. And help us understand exactly what happened. Early vote totals initially showed Mr. Hernandez's opponent, Salvador Nasralla, ahead in the polls. But then the government announced there'd been a glitch in the count, right? DADA: That's correct. That's where the accusation of overwhelming fraud comes from because electoral tribunal is controlled by the president. And when the opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla was ahead on the vote with 57 percent of the recount, the system went down. And when it came back up, the president was ahead again. SIMON: And so a lot of people distrust those results? DADA: A lot of people - and that includes most of the international community. There was no chief of state represented today in the swearing-in ceremony, which - I think there's been a long time since the last time a Central American president was sworn in without the presence even of his colleagues from the region. SIMON: Now, we should remind ourselves about the coup that occurred in 2009 because that happened when the president then of Honduras declared that he was going to run for a second term. And then that was ruled illegal. Let me get you to pick up the narrative there. DADA: I actually think, Scott, that this is a consequence of that coup d'etat. The political crisis never actually disappeared. And there's a lot of similarities between this crisis and that one back from 2009 for example. They both began with the ambition of power of two presidents that want to get re-elected against the constitution - back then, Manuel Zelaya; now Mr. Hernandez - but also the determination of the army to exercise repression against the protesters and, of course, intervention of the United States to determine the outcome and the useless complaints by the Organization of American States about violations of the democratic rule back in 2009 because of a coup d'etat, now because of claims of an electoral fraud. SIMON: And I guess we should understand the United States and Honduras have a mutually successful relationship on some issues, don't they? DADA: Yeah, especially on the fight against drug trafficking. Honduras is a bridge. Most of the cocaine that goes to the United States travels through Honduras. So the United States - the main point of the agenda with Honduras is the fight against drug traffickers. And this government has been able to extradite some of the lords of the drug traffickers. Also, I have to say, Scott, that in the hearings in a New York courthouse, a lot of Honduran officers - security officers and members of Mr. Hernandez's government - have been mentioned as complicit with the drug trafficking. SIMON: Carlos Dada is the director of the news site El Faro, speaking with us from Tegucigalpa. Thanks so much for being with us. DADA: Thanks for having me, Scott. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: The entire USA Gymnastics board will resign. That's just one of a string of resignations since the trial of the team doctor Larry Nassar. And this week, of course, he was sentenced up to 175 years in prison for sexually abusing gymnasts who were under his care. NPR's Tom Goldman joins us. Tom, thanks for being with us. TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Hi, Scott. SIMON: This has set off a chain reaction of resignations and examinations that seem pretty late in coming, don't they? GOLDMAN: That's always the way, isn't it? The examinations come late. And of course, they might've been avoided if people in positions of power were honest and exhibited common sense and courage along the way. But yeah, the resignations are coming fast all in the past few days. As you mentioned, the USA Gymnastics board will resign on the orders of U.S. Olympic Committee head Scott Blackmun, who wrote a letter saying, you do it by next Wednesday or I will decertify USA Gymnastics as a national governing body of the sport. Michigan State hit hard. Larry Nassar worked there for 20 years and is accused of committing sexual abuse crimes there. This week, the university president, Lou Anna Simon, resigned. The athletic director announced he's retiring, although this isn't a gold-watch retirement, certainly. SIMON: Yeah. Among so much else that just pierced my heart of the women who spoke in court, Aly Raisman said, quote, "I have represented the United States of America in two Olympics and have done so successfully. And both USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic Committee have been very quick to capitalize and celebrate my success. But did they reach out when I came forward? No." GOLDMAN: Yeah. That's a pretty searing, you know, part of the searing testimony that was given in a courtroom. And this raises a really important question about these organizations - whether they did enough. There's a lot of criticism that they didn't, and there's a lot of ammunition for that criticism. The Indianapolis Star, which broke this thing wide open in August of 2016, reported for many years USA Gymnastics didn't tell law enforcement or other authorities about sexual abuse allegations against gymnastics coaches. You mentioned what Aly Raisman said about the USOC. The USOC is the overseer of Olympic sports. And where was it? Why didn't the committee intervene or take the kind of strong action we saw this week with Scott Blackmun's demand that USA Gymnastics board resign? And then, regarding Michigan State, ESPN's "Outside The Lines" reports that as far back as 1997, athletes began telling multiple Michigan State officials that Larry Nassar was sexually assaulting them under the guise of medical treatment. Nassar kept his job there until September 2016. All these organizations, Scott, say they didn't know what was happening over the years with Nassar. There are multiple investigations planned. And we hope to know the truth when they're done. SIMON: Are there changes necessary at the individual gymnastics club level, as well? GOLDMAN: Yeah, I think so. And you hope changes happen all the way up and down the scale with organizations - you know, and all the way down to, you know, the most important part - parents, athletes, coaches. You know, everyone should report allegations and should feel safe doing so. Athletes and parents should be vigilant and vet, as best they can, coaches and doctors and other team officials. And organizations need to put in positions of power - excuse me - people who will make smart, ethical decisions and understand that exposing wrongdoing quickly and openly will never hurt your company or your product as much as covering it up will. SIMON: You know, we do have 25 seconds left. The Winter Olympics are about to open in South Korea. This, once again, damages the integrity and appearance of the Olympic movement, doesn't it? GOLDMAN: Oh, I think it will. And I'm sure the U.S. Olympic Committee is bracing for the onslaught of questions, especially this week leading up - the week leading up to the games, when you have thousands of journalists looking for stories. This has become a global event, and they will be asked about it. SIMON: Tom Goldman, thanks so much. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: We turn now to a photojournalist who is trying to make poverty more visible to America, where it's both very common and often overlooked. The last four years Matt Black who is an associate member of Magnum Photos has been working on a project called "The Geography Of Poverty." He's traveled about a hundred thousand miles across 46 states. Some of his photos appear in the current issue of Time magazine. Matt Black joins us now from Valley Public Radio in Clovis, Calif. Thanks so much for being with us. MATT BLACK: Thanks for having me, Scott. SIMON: What do you see in the landscape of America that sometimes calls out to you? BLACK: What I see is this wide gap, this perception gap between, you know, these mythologies of America that we like to tell ourselves, that it's a land of opportunity and so on and, you know, the lived experiences in so many communities, you know, across the - across the country. I mean, the fact of the matter is in the growing gap between rich and poor in this country is consigning people to a fate that is largely inescapable. If you are born poor in America today, you are likely to die poor. If you are born rich, the same. SIMON: I'm going to ask you about a couple of images, if I could - try and describe them as best I can. A snowy landscape, a tattered fence, a very sparse tree, a man in a snow jacket and then a dog who looks very hungry. And it makes you wonder if the man in the snowsuit isn't hungry, too. BLACK: Yeah, I took that photograph on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation just south of Standing Rock as I was following a horseback commemoration of the Wounded Knee Massacre. It takes place over the course of several weeks in December in the height of, you know, the freezing temperatures across the Dakotas. You know, again it's these pockets of America that are left out of the narrative, are left out of the stories that we like to tell ourselves about our country. SIMON: Let me ask about another image in here. Two, four, six, eight - looks like - old, beaten cast iron pans against a weathered wall. Are they open paint cans? And everything in the picture just looks weary. Do you remember that? BLACK: I do. That's in Rome, Miss., a few miles up the road from Drew in Sunflower County in the delta. And, you know, one of the things I heard repeatedly on the section of this trip that took me through the South was that, you know, these communities really were kind of the front line during the civil rights movement 50 years ago. But many of the benefits of that era and of that movement went elsewhere. SIMON: You know, I went through your images Mr. Black. And - I say this with great respect for your artistry - they reminded me of the ones you can see from James Agee's and Walker Evans' "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," which is considered one of the great works of American nonfiction. But of course they took those pictures during the Depression. You are taking your photos in the midst of what's supposed to be a great economic success story and recovery. BLACK: Well, the recovery is not, you know, evenly distributed across the country. There still remains, you know, large swaths of America where, you know, opportunities do not exist. SIMON: What have you learned in this project about what it means to be poor in the United States? BLACK: You know, to me in the end, poverty is not really an economic question. It's a question of power. Who gets their needs met? Which communities get their needs met, and which communities don't? And that's what I'm attempting to photograph here - is not poverty in an objectified sense but poverty in the sense of a lived experience. OK, what is it like to be here? What is it like to have your reality surrounded by these certain kind of totems of power, social power. Is your street paved, or is it not? Do the streetlights work, or do they not? When you go downtown, are four of the five businesses on a certain block - are they shuttered and closed? What is the effect upon people's sense of self, a community's sense of self and so on? All these glimpses kind of - that you catch out of the corner of your eye but that form the environment of living or growing up or, you know, experiencing America from the bottom, from the most brutal bottom. SIMON: Matt Black - his project is called "The Geography Of Poverty." Some photos appear in the current issue of Time magazine. Mr. Black, thanks so much for being with us. BLACK: No, thank you for having me. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Every year along a stretch of coast in southern Tunisia, hundreds of bodies wash up on the shore. They're the bodies of migrants who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea as they tried to reach Europe. They pay smugglers to board ill-equipped boats or rubber dinghies and take a terrifying journey that can last for days. NPR's Ruth Sherlock has spoken with one Tunisian who's taking it upon himself to try to give these men, women and children a certain dignity in death. (SOUNDBITE OF WAVES CRASHING) RUTH SHERLOCK, BYLINE: The sea is angry here at this time of year. It swells and growls in a show of its power. And it's this tide that pulls the bodies in to shore. Waiting for them is local man Chamseddine Marzoug. CHAMSEDDINE MARZOUG: (Through interpreter) It drags everything in from 50 miles away. SHERLOCK: The dead are migrants, a lot from as far away as Nigeria or Syria, who drowned at sea as they tried to reach Europe from North Africa. MARZOUG: (Speaking Arabic). SHERLOCK: Marzoug earns his living as a mechanic. But he's also become the person the authorities call when they find a migrant's corpse. "Those calls come often, sometimes, once a day," says Marzoug. The U.N. migration agency says that more than 33,000 migrants have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean in the last 18 years. Here in Zarzis, the local municipality used to dispose of the bodies that washed up, sometimes dumping several in a single hole in the ground. But Marzoug and the local Red Crescent aid group where he volunteers managed to secure a small plot of land for a cemetery. MARZOUG: (Through interpreter) When I see these people washing up on the shore, I feel that life has rejected them. So why should we reject them? Why should we reject giving our African brothers a proper burial? SHERLOCK: It's a makeshift operation. Marzoug often washes the bodies on the beach where they're found, bloated and tangled in seaweed. And he borrows a van from a friend at the Red Crescent to take them to the burial site. To get there, you have to go far out of town. (SOUNDBITE OF CAR DOOR CLOSING) SHERLOCK: We've driven down this dirt road and past olive groves. And we've arrived at a place that looks like the middle of nowhere. There's a sign that says cemetery for the unknown, and it's written in six different languages. Walking to the grave site, there's mounds of sand to indicate the individual graves. MARZOUG: (Through interpreter) A mother and son were together in the world, so they should lie together in death. SHERLOCK: Marzoug's kneeling by a grave of a mother and child, a boy no older than 5. He laid them to rest with their heads side by side. A small Lego block is carefully embedded on the top of the little boy's sandy burial place. Marzoug tries to give identity to each of the simple graves. A red geranium flower's on one. Shelves decorate another. He takes us to see the plaque on the only grave in the cemetery with a name. MARZOUG: Rose Marie, Nigeria (speaking Arabic). SHERLOCK: She died in May of last year on an overcrowded boat that carried 126 migrants. A man on that boat visited her grave and told Marzoug what he knew about her life. MARZOUG: (Through interpreter) He told me she was a teacher in Nigeria. And there, she had a child who passed away. She lived a hard life there. SHERLOCK: Marzoug says he's buried 75 people just in the last year. He thinks about the unfairness of their situation in life and of their loved ones. MARZOUG: (Through interpreter) All of these people that I buried here are people who were living in homes. And their parents were waiting to hear back from them, to hear a letter that they're OK. Instead, they died on these boats of death. SHERLOCK: Despite all the danger, two of Marzoug's own sons have made this journey to Europe in a desperate search for work. He didn't know they were going before they boarded a smuggler's boat. But they made it safely. MARZOUG: Elias (ph). SHERLOCK: Elias. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) SHERLOCK: As we talk about them, he gets an alert on his phone. It's a video from his older boy, Firas, that shows him cooking a Tunisian meal at his home in Paris. (SOUNDBITE OF PILOT LIGHT POPPING) UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Laughter, speaking Arabic). MARZOUG: (Speaking Arabic). SHERLOCK: Marzoug believes they were aided on their journey by the spirits of the dead here. MARZOUG: (Through interpreter) I dreamt that it was these souls in their graves who prayed for my sons to reach safety because they don't want me to feel pain their parents felt. (SOUNDBITE OF SHOVEL DIGGING) SHERLOCK: Before we leave, Marzoug prepares an empty grave that waits to be filled. Now the cemetery is almost full, so he's trying to raise money to buy more land to make space for new graves. Ruth Sherlock, NPR News, Zarzis, Tunisia. SCOTT SIMON, HOST: At least 95 people are dead and 158 wounded in Kabul, Afghanistan, today after a suicide bomber drove an ambulance loaded with explosives past a security checkpoint. The Taliban has claimed responsibility. We're joined now by Andrew Quilty, a freelance photojournalist who's in Kabul. Mr. Quilty, thanks for being with us. ANDREW QUILTY: Pleasure, Scott. SIMON: And I gather you were in a carpet shop a few hundred feet down the street when this happened. What can you tell us? QUILTY: Yeah, that's right. It's a street named Chicken Street. And it's well known as being a popular place for foreigners to go. At least it was a couple of years ago before the majority of them left the country or were barricaded behind security cordons. And so it's very heavily populated by store owners and shopkeepers and so on. And it was in the middle of the day and was shoulder to shoulder with - you know, even to walk down, it was - you would have to sort of negotiate your way past people. So it was very crowded in the area. SIMON: Yeah. I know Chicken Street. But tell us what you saw at the site of the bombing. QUILTY: When I heard it, I came out from the store, and I immediately saw people running from the direction of (unintelligible) the smoke billowing into the air. So I walked in the opposite direction towards the smoke. And the closer I got, the more damage there was - obviously, broken windows further away from it - and then closer to it, you know, cars on fire and completely crushed by the force of the explosion. And then at the ground zero of the site, you know, a number of bodies that was in the immediate vicinity - I saw probably 12 to 15, all, you know, really just mangled and - you know, almost as if they were melted together. It was just a pile of bodies - you know, most of them dead, some of them still alive. I even told one man who was trying to make a phone call, you know, in this morass of bodies. And then all around, there was, you know, the usual chaos that infuse these attacks - security forces running around with their weapons drawn, general chaos, smoke and noise, car alarms, and, you know, small explosions of oxygen tanks and petrol tanks exploding. And, you know, within a few minutes, you have these - I guess you'd call them first responders - rushing in to take the injured and the dead away. There happened to be a hospital very close to the site of the attack, which is presumably how the ambulance laden with the explosives was able to gain access to the area. And so a lot of the worst affected were taken on foot to this hospital. They quickly became overwhelmed, and ambulances had to transfer the wounded from there to other nearby hospitals. SIMON: And I guess we should note - we just got half a minute left, Mr. Quilty - of course, just days ago at the Intercontinental Hotel, where 22 people died, conditions in Kabul seemed to be quite unsafe and perilous at the moment, even more than usual, don't they? QUILTY: Yeah, it seems like that. I mean, it ebbs and flows, the security situation here. But certainly, the past week has been a particularly bad one. And, of course, as is often the case, it's been the civilians in Kabul who have borne the brunt of it, despite what the targets may or may not have been. SIMON: Andrew Quilty in Kabul, thanks so much. QUILTY: Pleasure, Scott. Thank you. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Some Israelis and Palestinians find themselves united against a common foe, the Greek Orthodox Church. It's one of the most powerful and ancient churches in Jerusalem and one of the biggest property owners, too. In recent years, Greek Orthodox Church officials have quietly sold off properties to private investors. And that's upset people on both sides of the city's divide, as NPR's Daniel Estrin reports from Jerusalem. DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: Many churches - the Russian Orthodox, the Vatican, the Armenians - have staked out land in Jerusalem for ages. This latest controversy dates back to 2005, when Palestinian hotel manager Abu Walid Dajani woke up to a phone call by a reporter. ABU WALID DAJANI: And they told me, your hotel has been sold. So I said, what are you talking about? ESTRIN: He was the manager. But the hotel was owned by the Greek Orthodox Church. A local newspaper had reported the church secretly sold the hotel to an Israeli settler group seeking to expand Israeli control in the contested city. In Jerusalem, the Greek Orthodox Church leaders are Greek, but the local congregants are Palestinian. And they protested the sale. The head of the local church, the patriarch, was ousted. But now the new patriarch is under fire. (SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST) UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting in Arabic). ESTRIN: Palestinians yelled traitor and threw eggs at his motorcade as he entered Bethlehem this Christmas. The church has recently admitted to selling prime real estate in Jerusalem and Israel to anonymous investors. It says some of the buyers are Israelis and Jews. Palestinian officials like Hanna Amireh have denounced the sales. HANNA AMIREH: I'm concerned because these are the property of the church. And this property diminishing year after year. We don't want this land to be sold to - let's say, to our enemy. ESTRIN: Israelis are concerned, too. NAVA BAT ZUR: I feel myself that I was betrayed by the church. ESTRIN: Nava Bat Zur's apartment sits on church land. And the church sold it out from under her. BAT ZUR: I'm living here. Why shouldn't they give me the right of the first refusal? ESTRIN: She says her property value dropped drastically because of the uncertainty about the new landowners. Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos has gone on the defensive in this video message in November. (SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO) THEOPHILOS III: Every day, we face false accusations, suspicion and slander. Enough is enough. ESTRIN: The patriarch has traveled to meet the pope, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prince Charles in the U.K. and other leaders to seek their support. Church officials defend their property sales and say they use the money for schools and other church services that serve the local community. Church land has made people nervous for a long time here. ISRAEL KIMHI: It is sensitive to see the amount of land which is owned by others. ESTRIN: Former city planner Israel Kimhi he says he drew up a map of church lands in the '70s. But the Israeli government wouldn't let him release it then. Now the recent sales have stirred up the issue. KIMHI: And after so many years, they do not sell the land. Suddenly, they sold the land. So this is the big change. ESTRIN: And some people are worried other churches that own land in Jerusalem could be tempted to sell off property in majority-Palestinian areas to Israelis or maybe the other way around, fueling the Israeli-Palestinian tug of war over the Holy Land. Daniel Estrin, NPR News, Jerusalem. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: The FBI has been embroiled lately in a controversy involving one of its agents and a Justice Department lawyer working on the investigations during the 2016 presidential election cycle. Some Republicans say that the FBI is tainted with prejudice against President Trump, while Democrats are defending the bureau as too professional for politics. So we thought we'd ask for a little lookback at the bureau's history with a man we call professor Ron. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GARCIA-NAVARRO: You may know him as NPR's senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving. RON ELVING, BYLINE: If you grew up in the United States anytime in the last 100 years, these letters meant crime, drama and excitement. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "DIE HARD") ALAN RICKMAN: The FBI. ELVING: But you didn't have to wait until Alan Rickman said it like that in 1988's "Die Hard." You saw those letters on page one of the paper, heard them on the news, saw them at the movies... (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Now for the first time, you will see the real, the authentic, the fascinating inside story of the FBI. ELVING: There were primetime network TV shows. (SOUNDBITE OF TRUMPETS PLAYING) UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: The FBI. ELVING: And in the new century, we've had New Age FBI agents Scully and Mulder guiding us into the realm of the unknown. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE X-FILES") GILLIAN ANDERSON: (As Dana Scully) Mulder, I've seen it. ELVING: The pop culture image of the bureau has often cast its agents as super-cool superhumans immune to the emotional weaknesses of the rest of us. And the bureau has long promoted a self-image of professionalism and political neutrality. At the same time, it has long operated in the real world of political objectives, enforcing national policies created by politicians. It has had enormous power. And from time to time, it has been exposed for overreaching and abusing that power. Much of the dark side of the story eminates from one man, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972 - nearly half a century. Hoover was not only the man at the helm, but seemingly had no check on his power and authority. President Johnson declared Hoover FBI director for life in 1964. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) LYNDON B. JOHNSON: I have just now signed the executive order exempting you from compulsory retirement for an indefinite period of time. ELVING: But in a sense, the bureau had politics in its DNA all the way back to its creation in 1908. That was when Teddy Roosevelt wanted to hire some professionals who could read balance sheets and expose the practices of corporate monopolies. The original Bureau of Investigation chased spies in World War I and then got into trouble when it went after Americans with unconventional ideas, as well. Later, it got a black eye in the Teapot Dome scandal in 1924, which was when Hoover took over. Hoover brought down high-profile gangsters like John Dillinger and, later, some Nazi spies. But along the way, his agents in World War II also arrested innocent Japanese Americans who resisted going to internment camps and persecuted other citizens and activists suspected of disloyalty in the Cold War era. There were times when the FBI practiced disruption of both the Ku Klux Klan and the civil rights movement in the South. But in the 1960s, Hoover's counterintelligence program, shorthanded as COINTELPRO, featured a sustained attack on the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and a variety of anti-war protesters, feminists and black power groups such as the Black Panthers. Hoover had earlier conducted a purge of federal employees suspected of being gay or lesbian. In the 1970s, a Senate investigation of the FBI's activities exposed many of the excesses of this time. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: That have freely employed the tactics of snooping, sabotage and other forms of skullduggery and harassing civil rights, black liberation and leftist groups. ELVING: It was also in the 1970s that one FBI official named Mark Felt played a crucial role as the anonymous informant known as Deep Throat. He was the man who helped The Washington Post expose the Watergate scandal that eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. In more recent decades, under a succession of directors, the bureau strove to live down the reputation of the Hoover years and rehabilitate itself. It can be argued that the bureau, once the exclusive bastion of white males, has changed as it's come to look more like the rest of the country. Most in the FBI were glad to recede from the political spotlight until, in the last presidential election cycle, director James Comey was tasked with investigating candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Comey has since heard himself blamed for Clinton's loss and since been fired by President Trump last May. That firing is now part of a larger investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, the man who was Comey's predecessor as director of the FBI. Ron Elving, NPR News, Washington. (SOUNDBITE OF MANNHEIM STEAMROLLER'S "THE X-FILES THEME SONG") LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: The newest season of "RuPaul's Drag Race" on VH1 has just begun. It's an all-star season. And the show has never been more popular. Each week, the queens perform in front of RuPaul and a panel of judges for a spot in the Drag Race Hall of Fame and $100,000. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "RUPAUL'S DRAG RACE: ALL STARS") RUPAUL CHARLES: You need to show that your charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent is bigger, fresher and better than ever - hashtag #AllStars3. Gentlemen, start your engines. And may the best all-star win. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And just a warning to our listeners, expect some fresh language ahead as we sashay through the drag queen vernacular. Emmy-Award-winning host RuPaul Charles joins me now from our bureau in New York. Welcome to the program. CHARLES: Hello. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Hello (laughter). So give us a snapshot. I guess no spoilers. But what's in store this season? Lots of fan favorites are back. CHARLES: Yeah. You know, these kids have already been through the process. So they have an idea of what they're in for. So it's always interesting to see what they've learned from their first experience and what they're going to bring to this all-stars experience. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Some people may not know this. But drag can vary dramatically based on where a queen grows up and what her strengths are. There are comedy queens and pageant girls and stunt queens and queens who do a lot with very little. How do you choose what to showcase in these different traditions? CHARLES: Well, the cast is an ensemble. So we want to represent as many of those genres as possible. Now, when the show first started out, we couldn't do certain genres because they were a little bit too out there for your average viewer or someone who's new to the art of drag. So as the show has progressed, we've been able to introduce different genres that people may not be familiar with. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Like what? CHARLES: Well, when we initially started the show, we didn't do gender f-word, which is what I started out doing, which was smeared lipstick and a ratty wig and combat boots and really sort of a protest to the male-dominated culture that we live in and also a protest to the synthetic femininity that we all live with. But when we had Sharon Needles on - she was in the fourth season - she had the personality to usher that mentality into our competition. So it was because of her we've been able to allow other girls who possess that quality onto the show. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. And in an NPR interview with Sasha Velour, last season's winner, Sasha said a lot of people still, quote, "expect drag queens to be masculine out of drag and hyper-feminine in drag." But this seems to be changing. CHARLES: Drag isn't just - isn't about just looking like a woman or not looking like a man. It's an expression of shapeshifting. And we all have that ability to shape-shift and to - listen. You've heard it before. We are all God in drag. Now, most people can't accept that concept because it's too big a concept for them to accept. And they feel more comfortable where the roles are assigned to them, and they don't have to think that much. So the whole drag thing - it's a huge concept. It's not just, oh, look how pretty I am. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I have a bone to pick, though. One of the contestants performs her routine in dance flats in the episode that I saw. And she gets called out by the judge, who is looking for heels. And I feel like I have to take a stand here. I feel that queens should also be free from the tyranny of heels. I want to know where you stand on that. CHARLES: Well, I'll tell you where I stand with it. Flats are for quitters. I mean, it's as simple as that. (LAUGHTER) GARCIA-NAVARRO: Oh. That hurt. That hurt. CHARLES: Well, life is difficult. Life hurts. Life is not easy. You have to decide if you're going to be a winner or a quitter. (LAUGHTER) GARCIA-NAVARRO: Oh, my Lord. As you mentioned, I guess the drag scene has always been a place that pushes boundaries, specifically with identity. And there's so much talk now about labeling communities correctly so that they're seen and understood. How does that come into play in the show? You've had your first openly trans contestant. Where does the show fall in that conversation? CHARLES: Humans like to put things in a box, so they can assimilate them and go, oh, OK. I got you now. But the truth is, in this life, you don't really have to understand everything, you know? And that's - there's such freedom in that. And I know that people who are artistic understand this very well. Like the concept of God - I don't have to know what God is. I don't have to think of it as a male or a female. I just know that there is something I can sense. There is something. And I don't have to know what it is. And the same is true with gender and - I mean, I said it earlier. We are all God in drag. You don't have to choose anything. You could be whatever you want. And no judgment. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right. But many, I think, in the younger generation feel that, actually, it's important to have labels. It's important for those labels to be recognized. What is a transgender person? What is a queer person? CHARLES: Recognized for who, though? I mean, you know, if you know who you are, who does - what does it matter? You don't want to give your power away to anyone else. They're not seeing me. It's, like, who cares if they see you? If you see you, that's all that matters, Dorothy. You had the heels on. Just click them. Click them, girl. Well, why didn't you tell me I had to click - all I had to do was click my - because you wouldn't have believed me. You had to find out for yourself. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Does that mean that it's not important to have there be a discussion and a recognition? CHARLES: Listen. I've been to the mountain top in this whole realm of things. I've been - lived in the outside - in the fringe for years. The truth is - and every ascended master will tell you the same thing. You create your life. GARCIA-NAVARRO: What's your advice, then, to, you know, people coming up in this? What do you tell them? CHARLES: It's the same story as the beginning - from the beginning of time. Know thyself. Understand what you really are, not your - the clothes you're wearing or what some pronoun someone is calling you - because, you know - start from the inside. Know yourself. Be yourself. Do what you want to do, just so long as you don't hurt anybody else. It's very simple. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I do want to ask you one more thing. In a recent New York Times article, several queens mentioned it's hard to get club bookings these days without having been on your show. And I think that's obviously a testament to the show's success. But you are now, I guess, a queen-maker. So what do you say to queens trying to make it in the drag scene who haven't been on your show? CHARLES: You better get your act together, girl. You better step it up, honey. You better get up on this show. Listen. This is - it's business. This is not some democracy. Just because you have a pair of cha-cha heels and a pussycat wig - that you deserve - that's an ego thing. Everything's going to be fair. It's like, you know what? Let me tell you something, kids out there listening. Life is not fair. Life is not easy. You have to work for it. And if you're not willing to work for it, you will fade away. And listen. All the challenges on our show are based on what I've done in my 35-year career - from radio to television to designing clothes to producing and writing - whatever, whatever. I do whatever it takes. That is the lesson not only for drag queens but for everyone who wants to be on this planet and wants to survive. You got to put the work in. You got to work. You better work. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Thank you so much for joining us. RuPaul Charles, host of "RuPaul's Drag Race" on VH1 - that was amazing. CHARLES: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SUPERMODEL") CHARLES: (Singing) You better work - cover girl - work it, girl. Give a twirl. Do your thing on the runway. Work - supermodel. You better work it, girl - of the world. Wet your lips... LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: At NPR, our science reporters try to translate big ideas into less nerdy concepts for our audiences. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories, a team of visual strategists is doing something similar. They're creating art projects that help the public understand their various space missions. Drew Tewksbury has the story. DREW TEWKSBURY, BYLINE: At the lush Huntington Botanical Gardens near Pasadena, there's a mysterious metallic structure nestled among the palm trees. It's 17 feet tall and curled like a nautilus shell. Walk inside, and you'll hear this. (SOUNDBITE OF THE ORBIT PAVILION SOUNDS) TEWKSBURY: It's called the Orbit Pavilion. And it was created by a team of artists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Each sound is triggered by a tracking signal of 19 orbiting satellites above earth. DAN GOODS: And so all day long, they move all around you, it's much like listening to a bird, you know, sort of fly across the sky. And in this particular case, it's satellites that are helping us understand the Earth. TEWKSBURY: That's Dan Goods, who leads the visual strategy team at JPL's nearby headquarters. They call it the Studio at JPL. GOODS: It's artists, designers, makers, thinkers helping come up with the ways of telling the public about what NASA does, as well as helping scientists and engineers think about the future. TEWKSBURY: His team has made travel posters for planets in distant galaxies. They've simulated Jupiter's churning atmosphere in a small room. And they once drilled a hole in a grain of sand, then displayed it with six rooms filled with sand to give a sense of how tiny we are in the vast universe. We met in a wood-walled JPL conference room lined with the paintings of stern-faced former directors, including the one who hired him. GOODS: The director of JPL gave me a six-month opportunity, and that was 14 years ago. What I find is that a lot of really creative people here - we think in similar ways. You know, we're always trying to experiment. We're trying to ask big questions and see where our experiments take us. It's been an amazing place. It's like a playground for nerds here. TEWKSBURY: Projects like the Orbit Pavilion are meant to engage the public, but many of the teams' art experiments are on the highly secure JPL campus. These pieces are made to reinvigorate scientists who may not get feedback from their projects for months or even years. Here's an example. During its mission to Jupiter, NASA's Juno space probe made a brief pass near Earth in 2013. So Goods hatched a plan. Ham radio operators from around the world would team up and contact the spacecraft. GOODS: We ended up getting thousands of people all around the world to all signal at exactly the same time. And we had them say hi. (Imitating Morse code). You know, Morse code. (SOUNDBITE OF MORSE CODE BEEPING) GOODS: We got the data back, and we could actually hear them. But when you hear the sound, it's beautiful because it really is these thousands of people from around the world all working together to do something. And it says hi. TEWKSBURY: Goods takes me to the studio. It's a nondescript trailer where his team works. DAVID DELGADO: It doesn't have the same water feature. TEWKSBURY: The place is packed with stuff - remnants from projects, architectural models, plans and images pinned up on every conceivable patch of wall. Goods' longtime collaborator, David Delgado, is working on a project on a NASA satellite that tracks changes in water on Earth. DELGADO: We have water that's melting from the glaciers up in Greenland and going into the ocean. So just to get a sense of where we are - I mean, how much water are we using? What's going to happen in the future? Rising sea levels - we're building a digital water feature that will show the flow and movement of water around the earth. TEWKSBURY: They haven't decided what final form that the project will take. But the goal of these artists is not so different than the mission of JPL scientists. They aim to inspire a sense of wonder and encourage the public to think about the universe and our place in it. For NPR News, I'm Drew Tewksbury. (SOUNDBITE OF MELODIUM'S "AURORA BOREALIS") LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: In the 2012 best-selling novel "Me Before You," an idealistic, young English woman named Louisa Clark becomes the caretaker of a wealthy businessman left paralyzed from a motorcycle accident. They fall in love. Then tragedy strikes. Louisa is left to pick up the pieces. The story was a breakout hit for journalist and author Jojo Moyes. Not only did she write a sequel but also the screenplay for the 2016 film "Me Before You," which starred Emilia Clarke from "Game Of Thrones." Now Louisa's story continues in the upcoming novel "Still Me." Author Jojo Moyes is here to tell us more about it. She joins me from the BBC in London. Good morning. JOJO MOYES: Good morning. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So this novel picks up from the second book in the series, where Louisa is able to find love after a loss. So tell us where Louisa goes now. MOYES: Well, she heads stateside. The book is set in New York mostly, where she goes to work for a new family. She essentially goes to work as the companion to a rich man's wife but, as with all these things, soon discovers that her role is not quite what she thought it was. But it's also just about her struggle to maintain her relationship with Ambulance Sam, who's still in the U.K., but also identity and Louisa really working out who she is out of the shadow of these amazing men. GARCIA-NAVARRO: The people Louisa's working for, as you mentioned, is a businessman and his new, young, second wife from Eastern Europe. That sounds like it could have been a walking cliche. And yet you do humanize these characters. They are complicated. Tell us about the wife, Agnes. MOYES: I'm glad you said you thought she was complex because she doesn't always behave in a way that you might admire. But I sort of hope that she behaves in a way that you might understand. And that's what I really enjoy doing with characters - is making them flawed human beings who make mistakes and get things wrong. But essentially, you might like them anyway. GARCIA-NAVARRO: You show in the book how women struggle in this very elite environment to be sort of perfect, to be accepted. MOYES: Exactly. I mean, I think, you know, my husband is always amazed by the subtlety of the ways that women can put each other down. It's like a language. It's like a dog whistle, you know? Only dogs can hear it. Well, only women can hear these subtle kind of put-downs. GARCIA-NAVARRO: We all know what is being signaled. Yes. Sometimes it escapes men, but we always know. MOYES: Exactly. Exactly. He says, but she was just being helpful. And I go, yeah. (LAUGHTER) MOYES: In general, the book is about women actually supporting each other. But I do think in those very rarified strata, there is a inherent competitiveness and suspicion of newcomers. And that's what Agnes finds - that although she adores this new husband of hers, and from the outside her life looks like a fairy tale, from the inside, it's a very different story. She's not accepted by the rest of the family. She's not accepted by the new social circle that she finds herself in. And she's also alienated from her own social circle because her problems are all luxury problems, as far as they can see. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'd like to know how you researched that world. Did you talk to people that work with the super wealthy like Louisa does in the book? MOYES: I did. And, also, I visited. I like, as an ex-journalist, to try as far as possible to actually step into the shoes of the kind of people that I write about. It's really about the kind of blood flow around those buildings as well. It's like how stuff comes in and goes out... GARCIA-NAVARRO: It's like an ecosystem - yeah. MOYES: It really is. And that's what really fascinated me. I wanted the building to be as much of a character as the people themselves. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. You talk about how, like, they're never alone. There's always just people coming in and out, delivering flowers, gardeners, bringing food, wine. It's... MOYES: Well, I guess this is one of the things that really struck me. The really fundamental difference is this thing of living life under observation. The super rich just kind of have to live lives that pretend that that's not happening. And there's an inherent tension in that that I find really interesting as a writer. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. And, of course, Louisa's all of a sudden thrust into the center of the story where she gets this intimate look at somebody else's life. And she's involved in that marriage in a way. MOYES: Yeah, because the key thing about this stuff is that they end up holding people's secrets. And this is one of the lessons the chauffeur tries to teach Louisa very early on. You know, you see everything. You hear everything. You say nothing if you want to survive. And that's the thing that Louisa perhaps isn't naturally best suited to. (LAUGHTER) GARCIA-NAVARRO: No. She is very chatty. A lot of your novels are anchored by people in different class situations. It's been a thread throughout this entire series. Louisa's a working-class woman. She finds herself with rich men. Will, obviously, in the first book - Josh in this book is also of a different class. Do you think the problems of class lends itself to stories about romance? MOYES: To write interestingly about love and romance, you need tension running through a story. And for me, the really interesting tension in modern life is about the haves and the have-nots. You know, we live in an increasingly polarized society. And when you're in somewhere like Fifth Avenue, it becomes really, really blatant, from the doormen that you pass on the street to, you know, the people getting into the limos outside. It's almost its most naked form. And that I find fascinating. And I suppose the reason I wanted to stay with Louisa is because I think a lot of people just identify with her because she's an ordinary, everyday person who effectively gets thrown into fairly extraordinary situations. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Is there going to be more Louisa? Are you going to stick with her? MOYES: You know, I think this is it. I'm really sad to say that because I love writing her. And she's such an easy character for me to write because I feel like I inhabit her very, very easily. But I don't want people to get bored of her. So the only way I might revisit her are or to sort of stop myself getting sad about is maybe to do a short story sometime in the future. But I think as far as long form goes, this might be the end. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, we wish her well (laughter). And we wish you well. Jojo Moyes - her new book is "Still Me." It comes out on Jan. 30. Thank you so much for coming on the program. MOYES: Thank you so much, Lulu. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TAKE ALL THE TIME YOU NEED") OH HONEY: (Singing) You are sweet as a honey bee. I just can't... LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: And time now for the Call-In. (SOUNDBITE OF CORDUROI'S "MY DEAR") GARCIA-NAVARRO: This week, we're talking about gentrification. Middle-class people move in. Property values and rents rise. Things change and improve but not for everyone. Roslyn Williams has lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant for years. She watched her neighborhood change. ROSLYN WILLIAMS: For example, there's a Waldorf school down the block from a public school. And this Waldorf school, of course, is for those gentrifiers that are not interested in integrating or being part of the public school system. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Angel Poventud bought his home in Atlanta, Ga., in 2011 for $14,000. Now he says they're going for as much as 400,000. ANGEL POVENTUD: We do really have this potential to displace everybody that's here now. And, really, even in the next five or 10 years, myself could get displaced. GARCIA-NAVARRO: It's that displacement that often changes communities of color. We're going to take a closer look now at one of those neighborhoods in Los Angeles County. It's called Inglewood, and it's been mostly black for decades. Here's Anna Scott from the podcast There Goes the Neighborhood. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST) ANNA SCOTT, BYLINE: You can't see it looking around this street of single family houses, but home values here went up more than 15 percent in the past year. ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN: Five is kind of a handful. SCOTT: Writer Erin Aubry Kaplan (ph) shares a home here with five dogs. She says her neighbors worry that even more black residents will leave. KAPLAN: I got an email from my neighborhood Listserv - some, you know, someone just sent out a message - don't sell your house. Don't sell your house. Stay put. SCOTT: Thirty years ago, Inglewood was about 50 percent black and 40 percent Latino. Since then, those numbers have flipped. It's hard to pinpoint one reason. In the past, black residents left to escape high crime and failing schools. Now it's rising housing costs. KAPLAN: If we're out of here, there's really nowhere in LA County to go. It's just too expensive. SCOTT: We've been talking to black residents in Inglewood about the changes. By LA standards, Inglewood is still relatively affordable. Even though home prices have gone up, you can still find a house for less than $500,000. But the city has made new development a priority. The biggest project is a $3 billion NFL stadium. It will be home to the LA Rams and the Chargers. WOODROW CURRY: From here, you can actually see construction on the new stadium site. SCOTT: Woodrow Curry (ph) rents an apartment nearby and started a group called Uplift Inglewood. Their goal is for current residents to share in the new amenities. CURRY: I mean, our city in general has experienced so much disinvestment. Now that we're seeing investment coming in, we want to be able to take advantage of those investments, right? We see it as we want a home court advantage. SCOTT: The stadium plan includes new shops, restaurants, and thousands of new apartments and townhomes. Curry wants some of those designated for people with lower incomes. But new money coming in is already creating winners and losers. Anna. HENRY MANOUCHERI: Hi. SCOTT: Nice to meet you. MANOUCHERI: Nice to meet you, too. SCOTT: I met up with one of the winners, real estate investor Henry Manoucheri at his office. His company is called Universe Holdings. They're like bloodhounds for undervalued property. And they've sniffed it out in Inglewood, where they now own seven buildings. MANOUCHERI: Inglewood looks like a great buy. SCOTT: Because it's just a short drive from the area known as Silicon Beach, where hundreds of tech companies have opened offices. Manoucheri predicts those jobs will mean more tenants and higher rents for years to come. MANOUCHERI: We look at this as a growth stock. We think there's a lot of room to grow because we're starting at the ground level. SCOTT: As black neighborhoods gentrify, often, there's a racial change, and they become whiter often. I guess I wonder just what you think about that and how you think about your role in gentrification. MANOUCHERI: I think it's nice that the area gentrifies because people learn to coexist amongst other racial types. SCOTT: And for those priced out... MANOUCHERI: If people can't elevate themselves economically by working harder and getting better jobs, there's going to be no choice for them but to move to the less affluent neighborhoods. STEPHANIE WARREN: I can no longer afford this high rent. SCOTT: Stephanie Warren (ph) used to live in one of Manoucheri's buildings. Her rent went from about $1,200 a month to more than 2,000. So we met at a doughnut shop close to her new place, which took her months to find. She says it's hard not to see the changes through a racial lens. WARREN: Because the feeling that we really have there is they're trying to get the black people out because the new residents that was coming was younger white couples. I know a lot of African-Americans don't make that much money like that. SCOTT: According to census data, black families in the U.S. possess just 5 percent of the wealth of white families. Then again... LEROY CLEAVON: I'm into construction, so I have been making a lot of money in the last year and a half off of this. I ain't going to lie. SCOTT: Leroy Cleavon (ph) is also African-American. On Sundays, he comes to this Inglewood parking lot to race radio-controlled cars. (SOUNDBITE OF RADIO-CONTROLLED CARS RUNNING) SCOTT: My colleague Saul Gonzalez talked to him there. SAUL GONZALEZ, BYLINE: So for you it's good. Bring the boom on if there's a boom. CLEAVON: Bring it on. Bring it on. Now, it's going to price the poor people out. You know, you got to give and take somewhere. SCOTT: Inglewood's mayor, James Butts, who's African-American, says there isn't any deliberate plan to push out black residents. Whoever can afford to buy in Inglewood should. But back at Erin Aubry Kaplan's house, she says race always plays a part in who wins and who loses. Her home value is going up, but it's also changing the community. She can't think of an LA neighborhood that's gotten the benefits of gentrification, the new shops or restaurants, and stayed largely black. KAPLAN: Populations expect certain amenities when they live there. It's kind of - you know, it's the American sense of entitlement I guess. And we've never been able to share on that, and that's real equality. When you move somewhere, Trader Joe's comes to you. That's equality. SCOTT: She calls it retail justice. It's not the same as racial justice, she says. But it's a kind of equality she'd like to see here in Inglewood. OnChanera Avenue, I'm Anna Scott for NPR News. (SOUNDBITE OF CORDUROI'S "MY DEAR") GARCIA-NAVARRO: Anna's story is part of a collaboration between member stations WNYC and KCRW and the NPR Cities Project. When you hear a report like that, what goes through your mind? JOHN SCHLICHTMAN: How complex this issue is. I hear keywords such as disinvestment, devalued, reinvestment, revalued, retail justice. I mean, these are all very important things that have quite a history to them. GARCIA-NAVARRO: John Schlichtman is an urban sociologist at DePaul University. He's also co-author of the book "Gentrifier." He told us more about the history of those words and why you can't decouple race from gentrification. SCHLICHTMAN: Race is, at its heart, a class issue. A gentrifier is a middle-class person who moves into a disinvested context at a time when other people are doing the same. And that has a huge effect on the fabric - the economic fabric, the political fabric, the social fabric. And that effect occurs regardless of the racial, religious, class background or, you know, class upbringing of that individual. But they're entering into a context in which that devaluing occurred through decades and decades of unjust policies - defunding by the government, redlining, racial covenants, blockbusting. And so in order to consider just reinvestment, there has to be an eye towards the disinvestment, the devaluing. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what is the responsibility of the gentrifier, though, that comes into one of these communities? SCHLICHTMAN: So we hear a lot about gentrifier guilt, but that guilt is felt because there is a perception that someone is benefiting from an unjust gap. The first question I ask in regards to gentrifier guilt is, what is the just context for a middle-class housing consumer? Is it the suburb? Is it the devalued neighborhood? Is it the bottom of a middle-class enclave in the city that has never had the devaluing? Is that the just context? And so, number one, I would argue that we have painted ourselves into a corner because of our history in the United States, where there isn't a just housing choice. GARCIA-NAVARRO: What advice do you have for people moving into these neighborhoods and people already living there? SCHLICHTMAN: You can't behave your way out of gentrification, right? So I just want to say that off the bat. But you can be a kind person. Much of the pain that occurs as a result of gentrification is the result of people who move into neighborhoods, and they're imagining a future neighborhood. So no, supporting businesses that are currently existing - that's not going to stop gentrification, but it is going to - it is going to make people like you more, right? So I think people need to own - people need to own where they live. Don't say you can't live somewhere else - if you're middle class. Of course you could live somewhere else. You could live in that suburb that isn't gentrifying, but there's other things that you're looking for. You're looking for class diversity, a racial diversity, an ethnic diversity. You're looking for restaurants. You're looking for a specific type of architecture. So be honest about your housing choice. And finally, this needs to be fought with large-scale things. We need to put pressure on our city governments as a community to not put profit and investment as the No. 1 priority. It can be balanced with other priorities of community. (SOUNDBITE OF CORDUROI'S "MY DEAR") GARCIA-NAVARRO: John Schlichtman wrote "Gentrifier" along with Marc Lamont Hill and Jason Patch. (SOUNDBITE OF CORDUROI'S "MY DEAR") GARCIA-NAVARRO: Next week on the Call-In, Super Bowl Sunday is coming, but football has had a bumpy year. The past few NFL seasons have been mired in controversy from findings about concussions and brain damage to protests on the field. Have you changed how you watch football as a result? Call us at 202-216-9217. Please tell us your name, where you're from, and a phone number, and we may use it on the air. That number again - 202-216-9217. (SOUNDBITE OF CORDUROI'S SONG "MY DEAR") LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: There are times when we can connect surprisingly deeply with a stranger and then never see them again - a missed connection. We've been trying to help some of you connect with people you've been trying to find. Turns out we're not the only ones doing that. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Through interpreter) Every day, I get on Zwolle, and you get on in the city of Ladenstat. And every day, we look at each other. And when you get off the train at Amsterdam South, sometimes, you'll say something very softly, like a greeting. Should we maybe have a conversation with each other some time? GARCIA-NAVARRO: This message is one of hundreds found on a Tumblr operated by Dutch Railways. GERJAN VASSE: My name is Gerjan Vasse, and I work for the Dutch Railways. And there, I work for the department of communications. We saw in the research that one-third of our travelers flirt quite frequent. So why won't we just facilitate this? GARCIA-NAVARRO: So because of all the flirts, they created a program called... VASSE: Hartkloppingen. In English, it's called Heartbeats. GARCIA-NAVARRO: It's been around since the 1990s. Back then, the messages were printed on free train magazines. They were extremely popular. In 2008, they moved Heartbeats online - missed connection posts from over 2000 miles of railways. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Through interpreter) We sat on the balcony of a train from Amafurt to Eutrich. I had fries with peanut sauce, afraid that it would stink up the whole train. You had a mullet, just came from a singing bowls concert. I think you're pretty. I thought it was way too short, the time we chatted. Want to catch up? GARCIA-NAVARRO: Fries with peanut sauce. Hmm. Rail spokesman Vasse says the message board is the extent, though, that they'll play Cupid. VASSE: We are not a dating site. The connecting part - people really got to do that themselves. GARCIA-NAVARRO: With or without their help, Vasse says, about 4,000 relationships a year start on the Dutch Railway. Last year, they hosted three marriage ceremonies with the hope for more in 2018. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HEARTBEAT") BUDDY HOLLY: (Singing) Heartbeat - why do you miss when my baby kisses me? Heartbeat - why does a... LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: And it's time to play The Puzzle. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GARCIA-NAVARRO: Joining me as always is Will Shortz. He's puzzle editor of The New York Times and WEEKEND EDITION's puzzle master. Will, good morning. WILL SHORTZ, BYLINE: Good morning, Lulu. GARCIA-NAVARRO: The Grammys are on tonight. Are you going to watch? SHORTZ: I'm more of an Oscars guy. I always watch the Oscars. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. Yeah. SHORTZ: I don't usually watch the Grammys. What about you? GARCIA-NAVARRO: No. I also like the Oscars. But, you know, I always go for the fashion and then stay for the awards. SHORTZ: (Laughter) There you go. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Remind us of last week's challenge. SHORTZ: Yes. It came from listener Tom Arnold of Eugene, Ore. I said take the name of a conveyance in seven letters. Drop the middle letter. And the remaining letters can be rearranged to name the place where such a conveyance is often used. What is it? Well, the answer is gondola and lagoon. GARCIA-NAVARRO: This one was a big hit. We got over 500 correct responses. And our randomly selected winner is from outside of this country, Michael LeBlanc from Ontario, Canada. Congratulations. MICHAEL LEBLANC: Thank you. Merci. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Michael, I heard another game show helped you figure out this week's puzzle answer. Walk me through it. LEBLANC: Well, I did have a fair list of means of conveyance but nothing that's coming through. I was watching "Wheel Of Fortune." And a background scene of Venice showed a gondola. And it just - the lightbulb went off. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. That's great. Do you have a question for Will? LEBLANC: I just was curious if there were any other means of conveyance that worked that weren't the actual answer that the - that you were looking for. SHORTZ: Yeah. I didn't hear of any. And NPR is pretty good about giving me alternative answers. So this one seemed to be unique. GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Are you ready to play The Puzzle, Michael? LEBLANC: Yes. GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Take it away, Will. SHORTZ: All right, Michael. I'm going to read you some sentences. Each sentence has two blanks. Put a word starting with up in the first blank. Move the up to the end, and it becomes a familiar phrase that goes in the second blank to complete the sentence. For example, if I said Jane was visibly blank to have been blank on such a terrible blind date, you'd say she was visibly upset to have been set up on such a blind date. So number one, the coach was surprisingly blank after his team had been blank so badly. First word starts with up, and then you get a phrase that goes in the second blank. LEBLANC: Upbeat. SHORTZ: There you go - after they had been beat up so badly - good job. LEBLANC: OK - upbeat to beat - yeah - got it. SHORTZ: There you go. Number two - get ready. The musician's new tune played on the blank piano is coming blank. LEBLANC: Upright and right up. SHORTZ: It's coming right up. That's correct. An outlaw gang rode into the Wild West town with the blank being they completely blanked the place. Here it is again. An outlaw gang rode into the Wild West town with the blank being they completely blanked the place. LEBLANC: I need some assistance with this one. It's not coming. SHORTZ: Yeah. Yeah. I'll tell you that - with the upshot being they completely shot up the place. LEBLANC: Oh, OK. SHORTZ: All right. Here's your next one. The child's unusual blank by the parents is a matter the child's therapist keeps blank. And think of a synonym for rearing. The child's unusual blank by the parents is a matter the child's therapist keeps blank. LEBLANC: Upbringing and bringing up. SHORTZ: That's correct. The cost of my house's blank was so high, I was always frantically working to blank with bills. LEBLANC: Upkeep and keep up. SHORTZ: Good job - the teller tried to blank her principle of treating everyone kindly even during the bank blank. Here it is again. The teller tried to blank her principle of treating everyone kindly even during the bank blank. LEBLANC: Uphold and hold up. SHORTZ: There you go. The unexpected snowstorm blank the family's vacation plans. And they blank staying at home. Yeah. That's a tough one. I'll tell you. It's that snowstorm upended their vacation plans. And they ended up staying at home. LEBLANC: Oh, OK. All right. SHORTZ: Here's your next one. Even a slight blank in an ailing economy is nothing to blank your nose at. LEBLANC: Upturn and turn up. SHORTZ: That's right. And here is your last one. A fine blank young person is always blank for his or her ideals. LEBLANC: Upstanding and standing up. SHORTZ: Nice job. That was the hardest one, and you nailed it. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Good job. For playing our puzzle today, you'll get a WEEKEND EDITION lapel pin as well as puzzle books and games. You can read all about it at npr.org/puzzle. Michael, what member station do you listen to in Canada? LEBLANC: 98.3 WCM - not zed but Z. (LAUGHTER) GARCIA-NAVARRO: And that's out of... LEBLANC: Sault Ste. Marie. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Michael LeBlanc of Ontario, Canada, thank you for playing The Puzzle. LEBLANC: Thank you. GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Will, what's next week's challenge? SHORTZ: Yes. It comes from listener Stuart Portnoy (ph) of Arlington, Va. Name a famous actor, first and last names. The last name is a well-known brand. Drop the last letter of the first name, and you'll get the kind of product it's a brand of. Who is it? So again - famous actor - first and last names - the last name's a well-known brand. Drop the last letter of the first name. And you'll get the kind of product it's a brand of. Who is it? GARCIA-NAVARRO: When you have the answer, go to our website, npr.org/puzzle, and click on the Submit Your Answer link. Just one entry per person, please - our deadline for entries is this Thursday, Feb. 1 at 3 p.m. Eastern. Include a phone number where we can reach you at about that time. And if you're the winner, we'll give you a call. And you'll get to play on the air with the puzzle editor of The New York Times and WEEKEND EDITION's puzzle master, Will Shortz. Thanks so much, Will. SHORTZ: Thank you, Lulu. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Washington is abuzz with talk of a mystery memo drafted by the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee. The classified document is even being kept in a secure room, where few have seen it. Conservative Republicans claim the memo contains damning information about special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Democrats call it a deliberate distraction. We are joined this morning by U.S. Representative Jim Himes, Democrat from Connecticut. He's a member of the House intelligence committee. And he has, apparently, seen the memo. Thank you for coming onto the program this morning. JIM HIMES: Good morning. GARCIA-NAVARRO: What can you tell us about this memo put together by House intelligence committee Chairman Devin Nunes? HIMES: Well, sadly, this memorandum - and I have read it - is just the latest installment in the long campaign to try to delegitimize the FBI and the Department of Justice and Bob Mueller. It makes allegations that are unfounded. It's full of factual inaccuracies. And if it's ever released, even people who are not familiar with the information will see that. And, of course, most interestingly, it makes reference to very highly classified things that nobody has seen. So in some senses, it's unverifiable. You know, I guess one of the best ways to think about this memorandum is that when asked, Devin Nunes refused to share this memo either with the DOJ - or the Department of Justice - or the FBI - the very people accused in the memo, or with the Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence committee. So that tells you a little bit about his level of confidence in the allegations that are made. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Apparently, Democrats are drafting their own memo in response to this memo. So now we're going to have dueling memos? What's in that one? HIMES: Well, we haven't completed it yet, but it will be a memorandum which points out the factual inaccuracies in the original one. Again, it's a bit sensitive because in - there's sort of an evil genius to this first memorandum because it does make reference to very highly classified intelligence that almost nobody has seen. But in as much as we can, we'll try to lay out the facts around these acquisitions - sorry, these allegations. And, again, just make the point that, you know, along with, you know, the belief that there was wiretapping of Donald Trump, you know, that there was improper unmasking - this is the latest in a steady stream of unfounded allegations designed to undermine the FBI in particular. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'd like to understand a little bit about what the committee, at this point, is doing in the House that is investigating collusion between Russian operatives and the Trump campaign. It's been nearly a year. Have you found an - evidence of any crimes? HIMES: Well, we certainly found plenty of concern. You know, whether these things rise to the level of crimes would ultimately be a decision for the Department of Justice to make. You know, Congress doesn't prosecute crimes per se. But what we have... GARCIA-NAVARRO: Republicans, though, say they've done an exhaustive search, and the smoking gun just isn't there. HIMES: Well, the investigation is far from done. And we have interviewed dozens of people. There have been connections established, people who - many of which are known - you know, Don Jr. happily indulging a meeting where the Russians were to provide him with information. We're not done yet, so it's a little early to speak of conclusions out of the investigation. But, again, this is - you know, this memo is sadly a distraction. You know, the investigation itself is actually being run pretty well by a Republican congressman named Mike Conaway, who's doing, I think, a fair job at getting through the work we need to do. GARCIA-NAVARRO: But is the committee broken at this point? I mean, the proceedings have been contentious. The process is frequently politicized. I'm assuming, at this point, you're not talking over drinks with Devin Nunes. You know, should it be scrapped? HIMES: Well, no, it shouldn't. This is too important a topic to scrap. And as I told you, you know, the investigation is proceeding... GARCIA-NAVARRO: There's the Senate. Mueller's doing his own investigation. HIMES: Well, it's important that Mueller does his own investigation, of course, because he comes at this from a criminal angle. Again, he's very interested in investigating individuals to see if there were crimes committed. Our mandate is much broader - in other words, really understand what the Russians did, really understand if there was any contact or collusion. So there are different investigations. Both are important. Yes, the committee has gotten tense lately... GARCIA-NAVARRO: Wait... HIMES: ...Which is sad but, you know... GARCIA-NAVARRO: We'll have to leave it there. HIMES: We need to proceed - yeah. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Congressman Jim Himes speaking to us from his home in Greenwich, CT. Thank you. HIMES: Bye-bye. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: This month, the Pentagon is rolling out its first new strategic plan in 10 years. The move is away from fighting terrorism and instead calls for more weapons in order to match Russia and China. This includes nuclear weapons. The shift in policy is reflected in the document known as the Nuclear Posture Review. It calls for building smaller nuclear weapons that could be used against foreign aggressors not just in response to a nuclear strike but also potentially to a cyberattack. That frightens many. Here is former Secretary of State George Shultz, who served under Presidents Nixon and Reagan, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) GEORGE SHULTZ: One of the alarming things to me is this notion that we can have something called a small nuclear weapon and that, somehow, that's usable. GARCIA-NAVARRO: We are joined in the studio by Alexandra Bell. She is senior policy director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation here in Washington. Good morning. ALEXANDRA BELL: Thanks for having me. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So the idea behind a lower-yield nuclear weapon is - what? - that it would kill fewer people? Does it have a particular tactical advantage? What's the argument for them? BELL: The idea is that it would be more usable, that our largest nuclear weapons and our arsenals would somehow deter us, that we wouldn't want to cause that much damage. So we need these smaller options to convince countries that we will, in fact, respond to aggression. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Explain to me - when we talk about a smaller payload, what exactly does that mean? BELL: Honestly, the best example I can give you were the bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that were both under 20 kilotons. Twenty and under is what we consider a low-yield nuclear weapon. So it's smaller than a lot of the weapons we have in our arsenal. But it is still a city destroyer. GARCIA-NAVARRO: The Trump administration says that we are seeing Russia, China expand their arsenals. And shouldn't the United States be doing the same? BELL: We, like the Chinese and Russians, are investing in our nuclear weapons stockpile. The United States should not be buying into an idea that the expansion of a nuclear arsenal is somehow in our interests. I think George Shultz was warning lawmakers, warning policymakers. As a Cold warrior who was a part of a massive expansion of nuclear weapons and then eventually walking away from that potential threat, he's telling people not to do this. And I'm hoping that lawmakers will listen to him. We've already tried low-yield, small nuclear weapons. At one point, we even had a nuclear weapon called the Davy Crockett, which is effectively a nuclear bazooka. We've gone down this road before, and we decided against it. There's no reason to repeat past mistakes. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'd like to get at something else that the Nuclear Posture Review changes. And that is when the United States would use a nuclear weapon. Can you talk a little bit about how that posture has changed? BELL: It's actually incredibly alarming that the Trump administration is putting forth the idea that we could use nuclear weapons in response to a cyberattack. There are cyber threats out there. We should be dealing with them. But a nuclear weapon is not the answer. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Basically, it says that the threshold is lower for firing a nuke. It's not just if someone fires one at us that we would fire back. It's now, let's say someone launches a sort of asymmetrical attack on the United States. Then we could use these weapons in response. BELL: That is the theory. The Trump plan actually puts multiple options on the table - nuclear weapon in response to a chemical attack, to a biological weapons attack, to an attack on civilians without a real description of where that threshold is and really widens the options for President Trump to use nuclear weapons. GARCIA-NAVARRO: This obviously is a proposal - the Posture Review. It's not exactly - it's a blueprint of what the administration wants, as opposed to something that's already done. They need to get the money for it. And this is something that obviously takes place over years, not months. So what's been the response? BELL: I think Congress is going to view a lot of these proposals, particularly the new nuclear weapons, very skeptically. Modernizing our current arsenal is already expected to cost us about $1.2 trillion over the next 30 years - adjusted for inflation $1.7 trillion. So now the Trump administration is coming in, saying, not only do we want you to pay for that. We want these new things. We don't even know what they would cost or the possible consequences. It's, I don't think, going to be politically palatable among people who are already a little concerned about Trump and nuclear weapons, nor will it be attractive to budget hawks. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Alexandra Bell of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Thank you so much. BELL: Thanks for having me. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Stargazers are in for a special treat later this week. A super blue blood moon will light up the sky in parts of the Western Hemisphere in the wee hours on Wednesday. NPR's Windsor Johnston reports. WINDSOR JOHNSTON, BYLINE: Stargazers will be able to view a supermoon, blue moon and a total lunar eclipse all within a 24-hour period. Derrick Pitts, chief astronomer at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, says it's the first time in more than 150 years that this triple effect will come together. DERRICK PITTS: The first one that people will most immediately notice is that the moon will be full. In addition, that full moon happens to be at one of its closest points to Earth for the entire year. Now, that turns it into a supermoon. JOHNSTON: Pitts says science enthusiasts will also be treated to a blue moon, the second full moon in a single month. PITTS: The first full moon was Jan. 1. And we're just squeezing in this second full moon on Jan. 31. That's a little rarer. In fact, this instance of having two full moons in one month happens about every 2.7 years. JOHNSTON: And finally, there will be a total lunar eclipse often called a blood moon, when the moon turns a reddish-copper color as it passes through the Earth's shadow. PITTS: Folks on the West Coast of the United States will get to see the maximum amount of eclipse. And so if you're over there on the West Coast, you're in a good spot. JOHNSTON: Pitts says that's as long as it's not a cloudy morning. Windsor Johnston, NPR News. (SOUNDBITE OF PENGUIN CAFE'S "THE FOX AND THE LEOPARD") LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: A change might be coming to the Army - that is, a change of uniform. The Army may revive its signature World War II dress uniforms known as the pinks and greens. It would be an alternative to the blue Army service uniform - or ASU - soldiers wear for official events. Meghann Myers is a writer for the Army Times. And she's been following this sartorial story. Hi, Meghann. MEGHANN MYERS: Hi. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So tell me - what do the pinks and greens look like? MYERS: So they are a - sort of an olive-drab, olive-green jacket. And then the pinks part of it comes from these brown pants that have, like, a little bit of a mauve undertone - and then brown leather shoes. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And why are they doing this? MYERS: So about a decade ago, the Army decided they had too many uniforms. They wanted to slim things down. And so they pared it down to the camouflage uniform that you wear in combat and in garrison, as well, and then the blue service uniform. And that was supposed to be for formal events and for official events. And they're looking toward bringing the pinks and greens back because the sergeant major of the Army and some other senior officials feel like the ASU is very formal. It might be nice to have an in-between uniform. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Business casual, if you will. MYERS: Yes - something that would be your business suit. And then the casual part of it would be you can take the jacket off, and there's a short-sleeve, button-up shirt underneath. GARCIA-NAVARRO: There have been prototypes developed of these new uniforms. And they've made some adaptations from what the originals look like. Tell me about that. MYERS: So they started out with sort of just a straight jacket that kind of hit at the hip. And the feedback was that soldiers really wanted a slightly longer jacket, like, almost, you know, like, a little bit of a skirt coming out from the hip and then a belt. The belt was really important. So the latest update of that has the belt added. And then the women also said they wanted their jacket to look like that. They wanted to wear a male tie, which is unusual. Usually women wear, like, kind of a little crosshatch-looking tie. But they wanted to wear a long, male tie. And they wanted a pencil skirt. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Were the women and the men in the military polled about this? MYERS: Yeah. From different ranks, they had people come in and look at the uniforms or hats, you know, sent the prototypes to them and said, what do you like? Is this comfortable? And what would you like to see? GARCIA-NAVARRO: So they get some sartorial input. MYERS: Right. There's a lot of backlash, you know, when the Army makes a decision, and they don't get soldier buy-in. So they were very careful to make sure that they ran this by the people who are going to be wearing it. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right. These uniforms are basically a throwback, though, to sort of the golden era of the military. Do you think they'll resonate with today's public or just feel sort of maybe a little bit of something from a bygone time? MYERS: That's the idea. With the blue ASU, the Army tried to - it was kind of supposed to be a throwback to the Civil War or to the Revolutionary War when soldiers wore navy-blue jackets. But it wasn't and hasn't been very recognizable to the public. Everyone knows what a Marine looks like. You know what a sailor looks like. Officers wear those nice dress whites. But that ASU wasn't as recognizable. And I think part of the idea behind this is that people have seen movies. They recognize what a World War II-era soldier looked like. And so there's a lot of - yes - public admiration for seeing the guy in the olive-drab suit. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And when are they going to make the decision? MYERS: There's supposed to be a decision this spring - so within the next few months. I think, though, the last bit of it is the sergeant major and a couple of models that he has who are wearing prototypes have been going around to events, going to Capitol Hill, getting, you know, Congress and the lawmakers to sign off, to give their stamp of approval and then, in the next couple of months, make a final decision about mass-producing it. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Meghann Myers of the Army Times, thanks so much. MYERS: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF BOOKER T. & THE M.G.'S' "GREEN ONIONS") LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: More people around the world are traveling for vacation and for business, but fewer are coming to the United States. New data released by the U.S. Travel Association shows that in the first seven months of 2017, there's been a 4 percent decline of international travelers coming here. The United States Commerce Department is predicting that trend will reverse. But for now, it's causing a lot of worry in the U.S. travel industry. Joining me is David DuBois from a newly created group called the Visit USA Coalition. Welcome to the program. DAVID DUBOIS: Good day. It's my pleasure to be with you. GARCIA-NAVARRO: We should start by saying that this decline in international travelers to the U.S. isn't new. It started happening in 2015. But this past year, we saw a more pronounced dip. Walk us through the numbers. DUBOIS: Well, as you mentioned the first six months of 2017 saw a decline of around 4 percent compared to the same timeframe the previous year. So we have a big opportunity in front of us. And thus, the Visit USA Coalition has formed to try to be proactively supportive of stopping the market share decline and letting people know around the world how wonderful our country is. GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'd like to parse out a little bit of the data. Numbers from July 2017 show that inbound travel from the Middle East is down 40 percent, 32 percent down from Africa, 15 percent down from South America, which has got to hurt certain regions like Florida. DUBOIS: Oh, my goodness. Absolutely. And we want to be more welcoming. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Some people have called this recent decline the Trump slump because of the shifting immigration policies of the United States like the travel ban, the rhetoric of the president calling certain countries bad names. Do you think that that is contributing to this? DUBOIS: Well it's not helpful by any means. To extend the perception and reality that we're welcoming here, I just spent seven days in China, had very interesting conversations with our members in China. And I'm heading to Dubai, the Middle East on Sunday. GARCIA-NAVARRO: What are they telling you when you go to China and when you go to the Middle East about why they're not coming here? DUBOIS: Well, you know, they're watching BBC, CNN, Fox. They're watching all kinds of different networks, and they can hear a lot of the rhetoric. We want the administration, whether it's Vice President Pence or President Trump, to now get out there and say, hey, we're a wonderful destination for travel. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. Your group is working with the Trump administration to attract more visitors. And ultimately, the president is this country's biggest brand ambassador. So what's your message to him? DUBOIS: Well, we're starting with the vice president's office. We're trying to set up meetings with the Trump administration. And all of the great messaging that we've developed with the Visit USA Coalition being launched just a couple of weeks ago is certainly to let them know that we want some real positive statements to come out not only about business but about travel. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So the message is one thing, but there is a practical thing, which is that getting visas to the United States is a lot harder now. How do you attract new visitors to the country if it's harder to get permission to come here? DUBOIS: Great question. The visa waiver program, which has been in place for many years, continues to be improved. More countries are added to the visa waiver program. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So visa waiver program allows the citizens of a certain country to come here without actually going through the procedure of having to go to a consulate, applying for a visa, paying fees. It's like what we have with the United Kingdom, for example, whose citizens can come here and just show up at the airport and be allowed in after questioning. DUBOIS: Right. And we need to change the name because waiver means that it's just opening up to everybody, and I know that recommendation's in place because it's not a waiver. These folks are vetted better than almost any other system that allows international travelers into our country. So yes, we have to make it easy for people to come. GARCIA-NAVARRO: David DuBois from the newly created group called the Visit USA Coalition, thank you so much. DUBOIS: My pleasure. Have a good day. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: This past week, the more than 160 women and girls who were abused by former gymnastics Dr. Larry Nassar saw justice served. But while he has been sentenced to up to 175 years in prison, many questions remain. How could these horrific assaults go on for so long? And who turned a blind eye? A warning to our listeners - some parts of this discussion are upsetting and graphic. John Barr's been reporting on these questions for ESPN's "Outside The Lines" and on the structures that may have protected Nassar at USA Gymnastics and at Michigan State, where Nassar operated his sports medicine practice. John Barr joins us now. Thank you so much. JOHN BARR: My pleasure. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So I think the question on everyone's mind is, how was Nassar allowed to keep working and getting referrals? There were investigations over the years. There was even a Title IX investigation at Michigan State. Athletes began telling officials at the school about the abuse beginning in 1997. And yet here we are. BARR: The reality is this man was surrounded by a network of enablers for more than a quarter century. It began when he first started as an athletic trainer back in the late '80s. And it went all the way up until he was caught back in September of 2016. Of course, we all know now Rachael Denhollander was the first woman to publicly accuse him of sexual assault during a medical exam. And her report led to a flood of similar complaints. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right - use this word a network of enablers. Does that mean that there were people who knew what he was doing and helped him? Or does it mean that there were people who simply did not believe the evidence that they were presented with? BARR: I think it's both. Take one example - John Geddert, the head coach of the 2012 U.S. Olympic team. John Geddert and Larry Nassar were inseparable. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, I think a former athlete described them as the perfect storm. BARR: Yeah, because the gymnastics world, when you get to the elite level, is so incredibly demanding. And these young women - young girls, really - are pushed to the limit. They get injured. But they also get broken down mentally. And John Geddert was recently suspended by USA Gymnastics. You know, we know that he was reported for assault and battery. But we also know that he allowed Larry Nassar in the backroom of his first gym, Great Lakes Gymnastics, in the '80s, and then his gym that he recently was suspended from, Twistars, for more than 25 years. It wasn't just... GARCIA-NAVARRO: Does he say that he knows? BARR: Well, the - one of the plaintiffs has alleged that she was being digitally penetrated in the backroom of Twistars and that John Geddert walked in when it was happening. And the young woman had just a towel draped over her as Larry Nassar was performing this, quote, unquote, "procedure." And John Geddert made a comment that her back must really be hurting. Now, does she definitively know that Geddert knew what was happening to her at the time? No, she does not go to that level. But there were a number of gymnasts who reported Geddert for assault. And oftentimes, it was Larry Nassar who would step in and vouch for him at those moments when his profession - when Geddert's professional career was in jeopardy. GARCIA-NAVARRO: They were covering up for each other, essentially. BARR: They were covering up for each other, essentially. GARCIA-NAVARRO: It's alleged. BARR: It is what's been alleged. But it's sort of symbolic of how Larry Nassar's career went. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. I'd like to look at something else. During the FBI investigation, some victims and families were apparently asked to keep quiet by Steve Penny, the president and CEO of USA Gymnastics at the time. BARR: Yeah, that's right. We know that in June of 2015, Maggie Nichols was speaking with Aly Raisman - who's been on two gold medal-winning teams - at the Karolyi Ranch. Maggie Nichols' coach overheard, and they were talking about what was going on during the exams with Larry Nassar. And the coach, Sarah Jantzi, was concerned enough that she reported it to USA Gymnastics. It was more than a year before the FBI actually got around to interviewing many of these gymnasts. So the big question is, when USA Gymnastics finally did go to the FBI, what did USA Gymnastics report to the FBI? Because if they reported that young women were being abused during medical exams, well, you would think that the FBI would jump all over that. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right. BARR: But that's not what happened. GARCIA-NAVARRO: How does all of what we know add up to an ingrained system that protected Nassar, as opposed to young athletes? The support and encouragement to trust this man was so widespread that some of the abuse even occurred while parents were in the room. BARR: Yeah, and it's pretty chilling to hear young women and their parents describe that. He was very adept at grooming not only the young women but their parents. And he would position his body in such a way and drape a - oftentimes, a sheet or a towel over the gymnast or other young women that he was treating in such a way that the parent couldn't get a full view of what it is he was doing. And many of these survivors are - were young women who had never had a sexual experience. They're in there with a doctor who's got walls plastered with Olympic memorabilia. So their sense was, surely, this can't be sexual because my mom's in the room, you know? That's how they processed it at the time. And frankly, many of these women didn't really fully come to understand this as abuse until late 2016, when Larry Nassar's name was plastered all over the news. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And coaches were telling them that these were legitimate procedures. BARR: That's right. But, you know, I've interviewed four women who reported Larry Nassar to either athletic trainers or coaches at Michigan State in the late '90s. Under the Michigan reporting laws, they are mandated reporters. They're mandated to report sex abuse, and they didn't. GARCIA-NAVARRO: We've just seen the board of USA Gymnastics be forced to resign. Who's left in place that is under the cloud of suspicion? BARR: Well, Kerry Perry is the new president and CEO of USA Gymnastics. She took over from Steve Penny, who was - who left the position after much criticism for the way he handled this. There's going to be all new faces at USA Gymnastics. And - but, you know, the reality is this. You know, you can implement every policy you want implemented. If it's not followed, if it's not policed, you know, this could happen again. GARCIA-NAVARRO: John Barr, reporter for ESPN, thank you so much. BARR: You're welcome. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: And now to Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are looking over a new immigration proposal. The White House released the plan late last week that includes a path to citizenship for so-called DREAMers and limits on legal immigration, as well as funding for what it calls a border wall system. But if the goal was to put something in this deal for everyone to love, it's also giving people on all sides of the debate something to hate, too. NPR's congressional correspondent Scott Detrow is closely following the immigration debate. And he joins us now. Good morning. SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Good morning. GARCIA-NAVARRO: So President Trump will have an opportunity to make a big pitch for his immigration plan when he delivers the State of the Union address on Tuesday. What are we expecting to hear? I'm assuming not American carnage. DETROW: That's right. The White House is framing this as a bipartisan speech, a salesmanship speech. Expect him to talk about what he wants to see in an immigration bill - $25 billion for the wall and border security. And a lot of changes to legal immigration in exchange for a path to citizenship for people in DACA and people eligible for DACA - about 1.8 million people altogether. So the White House is saying President Trump, in addition, is going to be a lot of - doing a lot of selling, making the argument the economy is doing really well. And he's playing a big role in that. Of course, the framing that this is going to be a bipartisan speech assumes that there will be messaged discipline, that President Trump will stick to the script. And I'll just say that this morning, he's arguing the economy is doing well by getting into a Twitter argument with Jay Z. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right. The plan does have money to build a wall system - this immigration plan. And that's an important term because it's not just a wall - and many other elements of border security and immigration enforcement. That was expected to be the tough part for Democrats to swallow. But instead, the Democrats seem to be focusing on the limits of legal migration. DETROW: Yeah. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer recently said this week that funding for the wall is off the table as far as Democrats are concerned. But all along, Democrats have said they're happy to trade more money for border security for protections for people in DACA. There's two reasons why Democrats are upset about these legal immigration changes. First of all, they feel like they're being asked to give up a lot in exchange for not that much compared to more broad bipartisan immigration bills from previous years that talked about a path to citizenship for millions and millions of people as opposed to the relatively small pool of people in DACA. They feel like this is an unfair trade compared to what they could get out of it. Secondly, I think Democrats are just increasingly suspicious of White House motivations on this issue in particular. They - like, all the rhetoric coming from President Trump, from aids like Stephen Miller. And they say, we just don't trust your motivations here. I mean, Nancy Pelosi, who's usually very respectful of the presidency, put out a statement saying these latest plans from the White House are part of their plan to make America white again. And I think that says a lot. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Let's look at the Republican response. The president is proposing, as we mentioned, a path to citizenship, not just legal status for the immigrants known as DREAMers. It seems like a lot of Republicans think this is a bridge too far. DETROW: Yeah, especially in the House. A lot of conservative Republicans in the House just don't want to see any path to citizenship for anyone who's in the country illegally. I think a lot of that depends on the State of the Union because this is something that House Republicans feel firmly about. But in the past, on many issues, they've proven to move when President Trump says something's important to him. They've been happy to defer to the president, who they like and who's very popular with their base. So if President Trump goes and makes a hard sales pitch for this specific plan the White House is backing, maybe you could see some softening on that. Otherwise, they could really disrupt any deal that comes through the Senate. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And just briefly, Feb. 8 is less than two weeks away. I can't even believe that. DETROW: (Laughter). GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's the deadline for Congress to come together on this immigration deal and avoid another government shutdown. What's the plan? DETROW: I think the plan - Congress loves a deadline. I think that it's realistic to expect the hard negotiating not to happen until much closer to Feb. 8 or maybe even beyond it. GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. NPR's congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, thanks for being here. DETROW: Thanks for having me. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Vicente Fox made history in Mexico when he became the first president to break 71 years of one-party rule. These days, the former leader is taking aim at the U.S. president on Twitter and on air. And now Vicente Fox has also written a book called, "Let's Move On: Beyond Fear & False Profits." And he joins me now in our studios. Welcome to the program. Bienvenido. VICENTE FOX: Thank you, Lulu. Muchisima gracias. And it's a great book. GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter). FOX: I want to be very humble, but it's a strong message. I'm building bridges instead of walls. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. Well, you've made a lot of news here with your attacks on President Trump. What is the message of this book? FOX: Well, the message is the importance of the relationship between Mexico, United States and Canada - really, NAFTA - the North American region. And I think it's key and crucial that we keep ourselves united and that we keep being the largest consumer market in the world. And we have to be clear that this is the region that must lead the world. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right now, of course, President Donald Trump is in discussions to renegotiate NAFTA. He's also threatened to possibly even do away with it. Those negotiations have been quite tense. He says that the United States has a disadvantage with NAFTA because of an enormous trade deficit with Mexico, which is not doing any favors to the economy of the United States. FOX: It's not enormous. It's not the largest. China is much larger deficit - same as Europe, same as Germany. As a matter of fact, United States has a deficit with every single economy that it trades with. So the business of United States is not to have a surplus in trading. It's much more important to have opportunity to participate in all those markets around the world. GARCIA-NAVARRO: You're very blunt in this book, as you have been in real life, on your opinions on President Trump. And you write, (reading) why do I care so much about the United States and Donald Trump? Well, what would you do if your neighbor's house were on fire? Would you sit there and watch just because it's not your house, or would you try to help? Your words. My question is, what do you hope to achieve? A former Mexican president taking shots at the sitting American leader may offend many of the people you hope to persuade. FOX: No. What I want to attain is this strength that we can only have through partnering with the United States. What we trade the United States and Canada is approaching now a trillion - a trillion - this is a million millions of dollars of trading, which makes us very strong - the region. Now, what I don't want to see is this weakening. What I don't want to see is United States building a wall. What for? GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, the president says at least one reason is that your country is going through a vicious drug war. 2017 was the worst year on record for homicides. Over 29,000 people were murdered. One could argue that the country that is on fire is Mexico and not the United States. FOX: Yeah, but again, that's always - Trump lies, lies mostly in the right figures. Twenty cities in United States have much higher crime rate. And over 120 nations throughout the world have higher crime rates than Mexico. So we are not a land of criminals. We are not rapists. And he's totally confused. And I don't know why he's always... GARCIA-NAVARRO: You don't have a problem with the drug cartels? FOX: Oh, yes, we do have. But the drug cartels are here in the United States. The headquarters of the drug cartels are American cartels that import the drugs through Mexico coming from Venezuela. And the main reason for that drug to come here is this mammoth drug market in the United States. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Don't you think that border security is an issue. I mean, it also - I have been down... FOX: Absolutely. GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...To that border, and I've heard on the Mexican side of the border how they also want better security. FOX: Absolutely, yes. We are not against United States building a wall. If you want to build a wall, waste your money. It's not our case. What we are absolutely against is this stupid thing of Trump that Mexico is going to pay for that wall. Finally, he understands that we are not paying for that wall. That wall is going to be paid by U.S. taxpayers. And I asked U.S. taxpayers, are you willing to take out of your pocket $25 billion to build a useless wall? GARCIA-NAVARRO: Since you've been very public about your opinions, and you've written this book, are you - do you have any plans to meet with anyone in the administration? FOX: I want to be very constructive. And yes, I have told Trump, any time you're ready to apologize to Mexicans for what you told about us, I'm willing to sit down with you in that range and fix whatever we have to in this relationship. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Vicente Fox, former president of Mexico and author of the book "Let's Move On: Beyond Fear & False Profits." Muchisima gracias. FOX: Thank you very much for this opportunity. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Philadelphia has the highest opioid death rate of any major American city. THOMAS FARLEY: We had about 1,200 overdose deaths in the last year. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Thomas Farley is the Philadelphia health commissioner. FARLEY: By comparison, at the worst year of the AIDS epidemic, there were 935 deaths in Philadelphia. So this is a crisis of truly historic proportions, probably a public health epidemic that's biggest in the last century. GARCIA-NAVARRO: A health crisis, Farley says, that demands an innovative solution. This past week, the city greenlit plans for a privately run supervised drug injection site - a clean, safe space where drug users can shoot up under watch of a doctor or a nurse who can revive them if they overdose. If it opens - and it's still in the early stages - Philadelphia would be the first U.S. city to allow one. FARLEY: What we want to do is for every person who is addicted to opioids - get them into treatment. But we recognize that there are going to be some people who simply will not go into treatment. Heroin gives you a better high than methadone does. And so for those people, we don't want them to die. GARCIA-NAVARRO: An injection site comes with plenty of controversies - fears of normalizing drug use, questions about federal law enforcement and if they'll look the other way, backlash from the neighborhood where the site ends up. For some guidance, Philadelphia has looked to another city, Vancouver, Canada. They have several government-funded supervised injection sites. The first, named Insite, opened in 2003. MARK LYSYSHYN: You know, we have weeks where they're reversing 120 overdoses per week. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Dr. Mark Lysyshyn is one of Insite's medical health officers. He says the supervised injection sites have never had a fatal overdose in their facilities in the 15 years they've been open. So what does one of these sites look like? LYSYSHYN: It looks a little bit like a health care facility. They would check in at the front desk. And they would be given a number. They'd be eventually called in the injection room, assigned a booth. And then at the booth, they would prepare their own drugs using sterile, harm-reduction supplies that we provide. They would use their drugs under the supervision of registered nurses. And then if they were to experience an overdose, they would be resuscitated using oxygen, naloxone and other methods. And then after they'd finished using the injection room, they'd move to a chill-out area where they could be observed for a little bit to make sure they don't have a delayed overdose. And then they could grab a juice or a coffee and then go back about their day. GARCIA-NAVARRO: And I've read that some users come in three or four times a day. LYSYSHYN: Yeah. I mean, we hope that users will come to the site for all of their injections. And so people who are using heroin on a regular basis typically inject two to three times a day. And so they will often come to the facility for all those injections. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Part of the criticism in this country, at least, has been about whether or not this is just simply enabling long-term drug use. What is your view? LYSYSHYN: Well, I mean, what it's enabling is people to stay alive. And so you can't access treatment, or you can't go into recovery if you're not alive anymore. So it allows people to stay alive and get to a place in their life where they can contemplate treatment. Not everybody does that, but some people do. GARCIA-NAVARRO: What would you say the challenges are because you've had this long experience? For a city like Philadelphia that is considering opening these facilities, what would you say is the biggest challenge? LYSYSHYN: Well, I think there are a lot of challenges. But, you know, there can be challenges from local businesses or people who live in the area, police. But what we found here in Vancouver is that all of those groups come to support these facilities once they open because they do improve community order. They - you know, they don't increase crime. And they do help people who currently need a lot of help in these neighborhoods. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Plans for a safe injection site in Philadelphia are moving forward. Health Commissioner Thomas Farley says they will be one piece of a larger strategy. FARLEY: There's a lot of work we need to do to put this in place, including engaging local folks in the planning. But what we've basically said is we think that this is something we should pursue as a way to save lives. GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was Philadelphia's health commissioner, Thomas Farley, and Dr. Mark Lysyshyn, a medical health officer at Vancouver Coastal Health. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: Only 28 days into the new year, and already there have been 11 school shootings across the nation in elementary, high school and college campuses. The most recent and deadliest one happened just this past week in western Kentucky at Marshall County High School, where two students were killed and 18 were injured. Chris McDonald is a pastor in Marion, Ky. It's about 40 miles away from the site of the shooting, but kids from his church play sports against the kids from Marshall County High. This past Wednesday, Pastor McDonald held an evening vigil for the community at his church. CHRIS MCDONALD: Everybody's very heavy-hearted, you know, praying for the victims and praying for the families of the ones that lost children. And I just basically encourage the people that were there that this was not something that God calls and that we need to keep our faith in God and look to him for answers. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Pastor McDonald spoke to his congregation about the shooter, too. MCDONALD: I just encourage them. You know, it's not a time to hate the young man that did this. You know, obviously, he's needing - he needs something. And love's a good place to start. GARCIA-NAVARRO: The shooting in Marshall County was the 10th school shooting this year. Two days later, in Mobile, Ala., a gun was fired in a high school, though no one was injured. That shooting brought the total this year to 11. Pastor McDonald says... MCDONALD: You know, it's kind of one of those deals when you hear about it 10 states away, it's scary. But when it's the next county over, it's a whole different deal. GARCIA-NAVARRO: As the community continues to mourn, Pastor McDonald says his door is always open. MCDONALD: You know, we help a lot of people in a lot of different ways. And, you know, we're here to help in any way we can. GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's Pastor Chris McDonald of the Life in Christ Church in Marion, Ky. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: The man who changed our relationship with furniture, Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad, yesterday died at his home at age 91. Kamprad his start at age 5 selling matchbooks. He founded Ikea at 17 using money given to him by his father for doing well at school despite his dyslexia. His true genius and the world's curse was when he came up with the idea of the customer building their own furniture. He was inspired when he saw an employee remove the legs of a table to fit it into a customer's car. And then the flat-pack furniture business was born. His life wasn't without controversy. He called links he had to the Nazis during World War II the greatest mistake of his life. The hard-working Kamprad drove a modest Volvo and called himself thrifty. So if you're sitting on the floor this morning, trying to build a piece of his furniture, you can call yourself thrifty, too. DAVID GREENE, HOST: This month, California became the world's largest jurisdiction with broad legal access to marijuana. Adults in this state can now buy marijuana without a doctor's prescription. But as Sarah Varney reports, obstetricians here are worried about pregnant women getting the wrong message. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Please, Mommy. SARAH VARNEY, BYLINE: Two-year-old Maverick Hawkins sits on a red, plastic car in his grandmother's living room in Nevada City, a picturesque town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. His play pal Delilah Smith snacks on hummus and delights over her Princess Peppa stuffie. COMPUTER-GENERATED VOICE: I'm Princess Peppa (oinking). VARNEY: It's playtime for the kids of the provocatively named Facebook group Pot Smoking Moms Who Cuss Sometimes. Maverick's mother, Jenna Sauter, started the group after he was born. She was 22 at the time and feeling lonely and depressed. JENNA SAUTER: I didn't want to have to, like, hide who I was, you know. I wanted it to be, like, you know, friends who I could be open with, you know, and be like, well, I do this, I do this, I enjoy going into river. I like to maybe smoke a joint at the river. VARNEY: There are nearly 2,600 members now in the Facebook group. Marijuana is offered up as a harmless remedy for everything from morning sickness to postpartum depression. Delilah's mom is Andria Smith. She's 21 and a week away from her due date with her second child. She bristled recently at a doctor's suggestion that she take half a Norco, a powerful pain pill, for her back pain instead of smoking pot. ANDRIA SMITH: She's like, well, we know more about Norco and blah, blah, blah, and we don't know that much about marijuana. I was like, my kid can count to 10 before she was even 2, and I smoked pot through my whole pregnancy. She's not stupid. VARNEY: Smith is not smoking in her third trimester because she doesn't want her baby to test positive for pot. The drug's psychoactive compounds cross the placenta, exposing the fetus to at least 10 percent of the THC that the mother receives. It's unclear how many pregnant women in the United States use marijuana. They may be reluctant to tell their doctors since it's considered child abuse in at least 24 states. But studies show a sharp jump in pot use among pregnant women. Dr. Dana Gosset, an obstetrician at the University of California, San Francisco, says marijuana adversely affects how a baby's brain develops. DANA GOSSET: Children who have been exposed to marijuana while growing in the womb have poorer performance on visual-motor coordination, visual tasks. VARNEY: Like catching a ball or solving puzzles. GOSSET: They may have behavioral problems at higher rates than other children by the age of 14, and interestingly, they are at greater risk for initiating marijuana use, and that is biologically plausible because the effects of the THC in the brain may actually prime that child for addictive behavior, not just to marijuana but potentially to alcohol as well. VARNEY: The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists warns breastfeeding moms to avoid pot exposure since some amount of THC passes into the baby. But to Andria Smith's conviction that her daughter Delilah is just as smart as her peers, studies show that children exposed to marijuana in utero don't score worse on reading or math as they get older. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Phew. VARNEY: Back in Nevada City, the play date of Pot Smoking Moms Who Sometimes Cuss, has moved outside. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: All right. Where were we? UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: I want up. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: You want up? VARNEY: Sauter says parents are uncertain if they'll get in trouble using pot now in California. Indeed, child protection laws in most states remain at odds with liberal marijuana laws. Sauter and Andria Smith both had babies who tested positive for THC just after birth and were visited at home by county social services. Though now they never smoke in front of their children. Sauter says some moms on her Facebook page won't go to the doctor even when they're sick. SAUTER: They don't want to get tested, and that's dangerous. I mean, you got to be honest because if, like, something does go wrong, we got to know. VARNEY: Obstetricians don't endorse mandatory testing of pregnant women or newborn babies for THC over concerns that women could be jailed or their babies taken away. But with recreational cannabis now legal in eight states, physicians like Gosset are worried that young children whose brains are rapidly developing will inhale pot smoke in their homes and come to know the world in an altered state. I'm Sarah Varney in Nevada City, Calif. GREENE: And Sarah is with our partner, Kaiser Health News. DAVID GREENE, HOST: All this year, we are looking at the events of 1968 that continue to shape our world today. It was 50 years ago this week when thousands of North Vietnamese troops and their Viet Cong allies launched an audacious attack sweeping into cities throughout South Vietnam, even slipping through the gates of the American embassy in Saigon. This was a stealthy, coordinated attack that became known as the Tet Offensive. NPR's Tom Bowman reports that the offensive solidified American opposition to the Vietnam War and began the slow erosion of trust that Americans have in their government leaders. (SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE) HOWARD PRINCE: What I saw was probably the most intense ground fighting of... MIKE DOWNS: We didn't know exactly where the enemy was and which direction he... JIM COOLICAN: We were under fire - under heavy fire. TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Howard Prince and Mike Downs and Jim Coolican were all young American officers caught up in the fight of their lives. They were in the city of Hue, the old imperial capital north of Saigon. It was the bloodiest battle of the Tet Offensive and also the entire war. And it all took American officials completely by surprise, says author Mark Bowden. MARK BOWDEN: You had the incredibly rose-colored reports coming from General William Westmoreland - who was the American commander in Vietnam - assuring the American people that the end was near, that the enemy was really only capable of small kind of ambushes in the far reaches of the country. BOWMAN: But then came Tet. Enemy troops breached the U.S. embassy grounds in Saigon. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Viet Cong snipers and suicide commandos were holed up inside the embassy compound. BOWMAN: Back in Washington, Lyndon Johnson called his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, and asked for an explanation. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) LYNDON JOHNSON: What was your evaluation? ROBERT MCNAMARA: I think it shows two things, Mr. President - first, that they have more power than some credit them with. I don't think it's a last gasp action. They will remain a substantial force. BOWMAN: A substantial force. But just six weeks earlier, a top White House official told New York Times reporter Gene Roberts the war was already over. Roberts was heading off to Vietnam, so National Security Adviser Walt Rostow gave him a tip. It was a new U.S. agricultural program Roberts recall being told. GENE ROBERTS: Which would double the rice yields in Vietnam and would win the peace now that Americans had won the war. BOWMAN: Far from winning, the Americans were barely holding on to Hue. Gene Roberts saw terrified refugees, wounded Marines and heavy gunfire. His first story said the Marines controlled just two blocks. Reinforcements were needed, not just troops but artillery. That was slow in coming. Jim Coolican, the Marine captain, said his own military superiors didn't understand how desperate they were. The Americans were badly outnumbered. COOLICAN: And the reaction we've got - and I'm paraphrasing now - but the reaction we got was that we were overreacting. This isn't that bad. BOWMAN: More reporters showed up at Hue, including some from NBC. The pictures showed a terrifying scene. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: What's the hardest part of it? UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: Not knowing where they are. That's the worst thing. Riding around, they're running in sewers, in the gutters - anywhere, could be anywhere - just hope you stay alive from day to day. BOWMAN: Still, General Westmoreland downplayed the situation, telling reporters the real enemy objective was a large and remote Marine base at Khe Sanh. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) WILLIAM WESTMORELAND: In my opinion, this is diversionary to his main effort, which he had planned to take place in Quang Tri Province from Laos toward Khe Sanh and across the demilitarized zone. BOWMAN: But Howard Prince, the young Army officer fighting at Hue, said Westmoreland headed backwards. Khe Sanh was the diversion. PRINCE: Westmoreland and his staff, the people who were advising him, became fixated on Khe Sanh to the point where they simply were not capable of entertaining other information. BOWMAN: Others were willing to entertain the importance of the Tet Offensive. Among them was Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchor who arrived in Hue and quickly realized he'd been deceived by his official sources back in Washington. What Cronkite saw on the ground led him to say it was time for the U.S. to end the war. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) WALTER CRONKITE: The only rational way out then will be to negotiate not as victims but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could. BOWMAN: Johnson is said to have told an aide - if I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America. And maybe more than that. Bowden says Tet spurred not just a lack of trust about Vietnam policy but a more general disregard for government officials that continues to this day. BOWDEN: On the heels of Hue, on the heels of Tet then came the Pentagon Papers, came the Watergate break-in - you know, a series of kind of catastrophic events in terms of the public's perception of its own leaders. BOWMAN: A month after the Tet Offensive, Johnson went on TV and said he would press for peace, stop the bombing in North Vietnam. Then he dropped his own bombshell. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JOHNSON: I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president. BOWMAN: Howard Prince watched it from his hospital bed in Texas recovering from wounds he suffered at Hue. PRINCE: I was ready to throw a bedpan at the television set because, to me, what that was was an admission of defeat and the denial of the sacrifice that all those young men have made and that I had made. BOWMAN: The Tet Offensive was an American military victory, says Prince. And Johnson should've taken the fight to North Vietnam, gone after the enemy safe havens in Laos and Cambodia. PRINCE: We're doing the same thing today with the Taliban in Afghanistan. We're allowing you to run over into the borderlands in Pakistan and do the same thing. BOWMAN: Bowden agrees that even today there are military parallels to what he wrote in his recent book, "Hue 1968." BOWDEN: We often find ourselves mired in situations where we don't have the cultural understanding. We don't have the historical understanding. We can't gain the support of the people, whether it's in Iraq or Afghanistan. And it stems from a kind of an arrogance and a general ignorance. BOWMAN: For his part, Mark Downs, another young Marine officer, will only say he and his men did their best. This week, Downs will remember those from Fox Company who were killed or wounded. DOWNS: The killed were - I think, he was a PFC, Stanley Murdock, D.I. Collins, a corpsman by the name of Gooslin (ph). Doc Gooslin had been in the Army... BOWMAN: Their names are carefully written in a small notebook he carried during those days a half century ago. Tom Bowman, NPR News, Washington. (SOUNDBITE OF GLENN CARTER'S "(SITTIN' ON) THE DOCK OF THE BAY") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Americans with health or pension benefits commonly get them through their employers. So what to do now that so many people have no steady employer? We have reported on this program that about 20 percent of American workers are contractors. The people who pay them have no long-term obligations to them, and that is creating demand for some benefits system of some kind that is not tied to a single employer. NPR's Yuki Noguchi examined one possible model, a program targeted at drivers for hire in New York. YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Somehow, in the gridlock of Midtown Manhattan, I locate the driver I've arranged to meet. Are you Howard? HOUCHANG GOLZARI: Yes, ma'am. NOGUCHI: Hi. I'm Yuki. GOLZARI: Nice to see you. NOGUCHI: His real name is Houchang Golzari, an Iranian immigrant in his 70s. As his Town Car crawls through traffic, Golzari explains he'd worked as a programmer in the medical industry three decades ago. That was the last time he received health care, unemployment insurance and other benefits through an employer. GOLZARI: They paid me for everything, but then they don't need you. They say, bye, get out. NOGUCHI: Now as a contractor, Golzari pays his own way. Then last February an uninsured driver hit him from behind, damaging his car, his neck and back. Does your back and neck still hurt? GOLZARI: Not now, thanks God to a very nice, beautiful physical therapy which I had. NOGUCHI: And thanks also to The Black Car Fund, a state-mandated worker's compensation insurance program that covers medical care and lost wages for drivers injured on the job. Golzari doesn't fret over the medical bills that arrive in the mail. GOLZARI: It's not my problem. I have been covered, which I am very happy. I look at is as my benefits. NOGUCHI: The Black Car Fund is, for now, unique to New York state, whose legislature created it in 1999. It's funded by a 2.5 percent consumer surcharge on each ride, and it covers about 125,000 drivers statewide, whether they're contractors for Uber, Lyft or more traditional taxi or limousine services. Golzari says he thinks this system should exist everywhere for all kinds of contract workers. GOLZARI: I think they should have it all over the country because this is a good thing. NOGUCHI: He's not alone. Other states, notably Washington and New Jersey, are considering bills mandating the collection of fees for all kinds of freelance services which would then be used to pay for those workers' benefits. Setting up such a system means wrestling with the logistical challenges - who pays into it, and how? Who's covered, and for what? Many experts believe The Black Car Fund offers some answers. ALASTAIR FITZPAYNE: It's really a first of its kind, innovative model. NOGUCHI: Alastair Fitzpayne is director of the Aspen Institute's Future of Work Initiative. He says the fund's effectiveness stems from the fact that it is mandated by the state and that it enjoys the taxi and limousine industry support as a fair, equitable way to solve a problem for the workers. Ira Goldstein is chief executive of The Black Car Fund. IRA GOLDSTEIN: I think it's absolutely the right model. I think because it's working on a surcharge, it works for the part-time driver. It can be used to expand to additional benefits, as well. NOGUCHI: In addition to workers' compensation, the fund offers death benefits. It pays drivers to attend defensive driving and wellness seminars, and it plans to offer vision care and telemedicine to encourage drivers to get checkups. The size of New York's driver population has ballooned in recent years, Goldstein says, but the changes have not affected the fund's fiscal efficiency. The nonprofit fund raised its rates only once in 18 years. It is the rare government program that, because of changes in how people work, has become increasingly relevant, and now lawmakers and industry leaders often come to Goldstein seeking advice. GOLDSTEIN: I think in that way it was so revolutionary and ahead of its time, really, when you think about it that this was 2000 and now we're talking about 2018, and it's now a national issue and it's a national problem that people are trying to find a resolution to. NOGUCHI: Democratic Congresswoman Suzan DelBene of Washington State agrees. SUZAN DELBENE: Our economy is changing, and in many cases our laws and policies have not caught up with the way the economy works today, let alone where it's headed towards the future. NOGUCHI: DelBene, along with Virginia Democrat Mark Warner in the Senate, introduced a proposal to give grants to cities, states and nonprofits devising new ways of delivering benefits. DelBene says many workers are falling through the cracks and on to public assistance. DELBENE: The reason that we've heard from mayors and cities and states is because they're already feeling some of those pressures and understand how important this issue is today and how much more important it's going to be going forward. NOGUCHI: Eventually, she says, she hopes there will be many models like The Black Car Fund but that serve many more workers. Yuki Noguchi, NPR News, New York. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: For most children, staying healthy means staying on schedule for immunizations. That's also true in adulthood, but many people just don't get them. Turns out, this is not such a hard problem to address. Here's NPR's Patti Neighmond. PATTI NEIGHMOND, BYLINE: Researchers looked at the effectiveness of reminders like this. JULIE JACOBSON VANN: Telephone, letter, postcard, text message, auto dialer. NEIGHMOND: Julie Jacobson Vann with the University of North Carolina headed the research. She says these reminders meant 8 percent more people got vaccinated. Now, that may not sound like a lot, but... VANN: Given that everybody needs vaccinations, or almost everyone, it can mean a huge difference in the number of people that get vaccinated. NEIGHMOND: Literally millions of people when you consider the size of the U.S. population. As for the most effective reminder... VANN: The old-fashioned personalized telephone call where somebody personally calls someone and lets them know about the benefits of vaccinations and invites them to come in and get vaccinated. NEIGHMOND: People who got these were nearly twice as likely to get vaccinated compared to those who got no reminders. The next best reminder - snail mail or a text message. The results of the study are published in the Cochrane review. Now, in the U.S., most children get their vaccines except when it comes to the flu. And among adults those 65 and older who are at risk of severe complications from the flu often don't get the shot. Vanderbilt University infectious disease specialist William Schaffner says that's unfortunate because now there are two vaccines custom designed to work better for older patients. WILLIAM SCHAFFNER: As we get older, we become more physically frail, so does our immune system. It doesn't work as well. But these vaccines that are formulated for people age 65 and older give more punch to the immune system. NEIGHMOND: And then there's the 50 to 64-year-old population - less than half of them get the flu vaccine. Take Marian Smith. MARIAN SMITH: I usually always get it - not this year. I missed the flu shot this year. NEIGHMOND: Smith is 58 years old. She says logistics at work made it difficult. Will she still try to get the shot? Probably not, she says. SMITH: Of course, you could get it right here at the grocery store. But I just didn't get it. I don't know. I can't tell you why. NEIGHMOND: Maybe a nudge from her doctor might have done the trick. As it is now, researchers say, most doctors don't send out any immunization reminders. Patti Neighmond, NPR News. (SOUNDBITE OF TEEN DAZE'S "BY LOVE") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: This happens a lot when Congress faces some tricky problem. A few members form a little bipartisan working group with a catchy name. DAVID GREENE, HOST: That's right, like the Gang of Six. There was the Gang of Eight - this is how long I've been covering politics - I remember the Gang of 14, like, more than a decade ago. INSKEEP: Wow. And some of these gangs were focused on immigration policy. And here we are with Congress stuck on immigration policy again, and there's another gang. GREENE: Yeah. They're calling themselves the Common Sense Coalition. This is about two dozen senators who want to reach a deal before a deadline next week. Meanwhile, President Trump is preparing his State of the Union address for tomorrow night. And meanwhile that comes after reports that he tried to fire the special counsel, Robert Mueller, last summer. This is Senator Lindsey Graham speaking yesterday on ABC News "This Week." (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THIS WEEK") LINDSEY GRAHAM: I'm sure that there will be an investigation around whether or not President Trump did try to fire Mr. Mueller. We know that he didn't fire Mr. Mueller. We know that if he tried to, it'd be the end of his presidency. So at the end of the day, let Mr. Mueller do his job and see if we can fix a broken immigration system. GREENE: OK. Graham trying to focus on fixing a broken immigration system, but what is that going to take? INSKEEP: NPR's Domenico Montanaro has been posing that question. Hey there, Domenico. DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve. And I have to say, lucky for you this is what I like. INSKEEP: (Laughter) It's what you like? GREENE: Oh, a Grammy reference. That's good. MONTANARO: Politics. INSKEEP: OK, it's politics. (Unintelligible) just talking about politics, of course. GREENE: That's right. That's right. INSKEEP: OK, immigration, immigration. The president said the other day, hey, I'm willing to give - and this is focused on people who were brought to the United States illegally as children - DACA recipients and those eligible for that status. Hey, I'm willing to give those folks a path to citizenship, although it would take some years. But he also wants lots and lots of money for a wall on the border and limits to legal immigration. Is that beginning to look like the basis for a deal, Domenico? MONTANARO: Well, it's a basis of what President Trump wants to start as a deal, but frankly, it's held up right now. You know, it's safe to say that what the president proposed is not likely to pass Congress. If something does pass, it will have to be changed and negotiated. And there are a couple groups that are trying to work with the president or at least work together to bring something to the president. INSKEEP: You know, those gangs that we mentioned tended to be on the Senate side where people are a little more bipartisan. But let me just ask - if anything were to get through the Senate on immigration, are House Republicans who are - who include many hard-liners on immigration - are they willing to vote for anything remotely like this? MONTANARO: Well, as you allude to, the Senate has a history of having passed some bipartisan legislation on immigration in the past. In 2013, 68 senators voted for a comprehensive overhaul of the immigration - of immigration in this country. Of course, it didn't get through the House. The House does have, you know, a couple of groups that are trying to work together - Will Hurd from Texas, who has a border of 820 miles in his district - the longest border of any district in the country - and Pete Aguilar, a Democrat from California, have about 53 co-sponsors for their legislation, which is more narrowly tailored to those DACA recipients and so-called DREAMers. INSKEEP: Oh, so the question is go big, go narrow, don't go at all. One other thing, though - we heard Lindsey Graham say of President Trump, if he tried to fire Mueller, the special counsel, it would be the end of his presidency. But it would only be the end in the short-term if Congress impeached him. Are there enough Republicans willing to say they're going to stand up for Robert Mueller in that way? MONTANARO: Not at this point. They're even split on whether or not they should pass legislation to protect Mueller. So it would have to be something catastrophic for the president - for Republicans to really start to act. It's really going to depend on the midterms in 2018. INSKEEP: NPR's Domenico Montanaro - Domenico, I'm glad it's what you're like. MONTANARO: (Laughter) Thank you. INSKEEP: Take care. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) INSKEEP: In Russia, protests took place around the country Sunday. Thousands marched against what they see as a lack of choice in the upcoming presidential election. GREENE: Yeah. Alexei Navalny called for these protests, and he's considered one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's biggest critics. And during these protests yesterday, Navalny was arrested. INSKEEP: NPR's Lucian Kim is covering this story from Moscow. Lucian, what is the protesters' objection to the presidential election? LUCIAN KIM, BYLINE: Well, Alexei Navalny was denied registration as a candidate in the presidential election, and that's why he's calling now for a boycott. People are - he's saying that by participating, people are basically supporting unfair elections and that they should simply withdraw that participation. INSKEEP: Lucian, having observed Vladimir Putin for years as you have, is it clear to you that Putin's goal here would appear to be an election with only one choice or only one real choice - him? KIM: Well, in some sense, that's what his last two re-election campaigns were like. There are usually an assortment of familiar faces, most of them not particularly serious as far as the opposition candidates are concerned. Vladimir Putin doesn't participate in debates out of principle. So in some ways, yeah, it's much more like a referendum. Given this choice, he always, you know, comes out looking like the best - the best candidate. INSKEEP: The best candidate because he's virtually the only candidate. So this is what Navalny was protesting against. And we mentioned that almost the moment he showed up at this rally in Moscow he was arrested. Where is he now? KIM: Well, he was released later Sunday evening, and no charges have been pressed against him yet, although his lawyer says it's likely he'll be charged later perhaps for organizing an illegal rally because in Moscow, they had not received permission for this rally. But I think just almost just as dramatic - David mentioned earlier about it all starting with sort of building this - building this national campaign, and he used YouTube, and he was broadcasting - I mean, his people were broadcasting live about the protests. And police on camera broke into his anti-corruption foundation office. They said there was a bomb threat and disrupted - tried to disrupt this broadcast. But they - since this had happened already - since this had already happened once before, they were broadcasting from an alternative, secret location. INSKEEP: Oh, so they continued to get their message out. Well that's another bottom-line question. Despite the restrictions, keeping him out of the media, despite the arrests and other disruptions of his protests and events, is it your sense that lots of people know who Navalny is, that his message gets out in a sense? KIM: Well, state media does ignore him, and it's true that Navalny still presents a pretty narrow demographic - urban, young, educated, middle class. I think the fear in the Kremlin is that this Navalny movement could begin to snowball since the economy isn't doing very well and there's a lot of frustration with corruption and simply the rigid political system. INSKEEP: NPR's Lucian Kim in Moscow, thanks very much. KIM: Thanks, Steve. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) INSKEEP: A string of recent events underscores that Afghanistan's war remains profoundly serious and deadly. GREENE: Yeah, that is very true. Both the Taliban and ISIS are carrying out attacks in Afghanistan. The targets have included a major hotel, also the offices of the aid group Save the Children. A suicide bombing on Saturday killed more than a hundred people, and today, another assault. This is one on a military academy in the capital. INSKEEP: NPR's Diaa Hadid has been monitoring all these attacks from Islamabad, Pakistan. Hey there, Diaa. DIAA HADID, BYLINE: Good morning. INSKEEP: What happened to the military academy? That's going right at the heart of the security apparatus. HADID: The military academy - so it seems that in the early hours of this morning, ISIS gunmen and suicide bombers tried to penetrate the academy, and local reporters say they were stopped at the gate, and there was a gun battle there, and that killed 11 security personnel. INSKEEP: So when you take that attack and you pair it with the other attacks that David mentioned - and some of them are linked to ISIS, some of them are linked to the Taliban, but they're happening in this very compressed period of time - what do people think is going on? HADID: So there's a few theories, and one of them is is that people think there's literally competition between ISIS and the Taliban for followers and for attention. And the easiest way they can do that is by conducting these large-scale attacks in Kabul. That's particularly true for the Taliban because over the past few months, it's been ISIS who was conducting the biggest attacks in Kabul, and it was believed that they were luring away low-level Taliban to its ranks. And so part of the Taliban's resurgence now may be a way showing its own followers like, hey, we're here and we're also doing these things. INSKEEP: So each of these groups is trying to sharpen its brand in Afghanistan. HADID: It's believed to be. Yeah, it's one of the theories behind why there's been so many attacks in Kabul. But the other thing is just that there's been so many drone strikes in rural areas, and it's much easier, unfortunately, to operate in a crowded, urban environment where security is so much more problematic to deal with. Remember, the Taliban used an ambulance laden with explosives to detonate in the middle of a busy street. That's an incredibly difficult thing to stop. INSKEEP: You just alluded to drone strikes. You're saying that in a rural area where there aren't as many people, the United States military, which is assisting Afghanistan, would feel more confident targeting militants. There might still be a mistake and civilian casualties, but there is a bit of a clearer shot. Let me ask about one other aspect of this very quickly, if I can. The United States has been putting extra pressure on Pakistan to crack down on militants who may take shelter in Pakistan across the border. The U.S. even cut off some aid to Pakistan. How's that working out? HADID: Well, it's - you know, I've been speaking to analysts about this, and they say it's unlikely to change much about Pakistan's defensive posture. Analysts here say Pakistan needs some sort of leverage in Afghanistan, however violent. And this is imbedded in the military structure institutionally, and it might be very hard to change that. INSKEEP: Afghanistan - leverage in Afghanistan, meaning the Pakistanis want to have militant groups working for them in Afghanistan, even if it's counterproductive (ph). HADID: Some sort of leverage. INSKEEP: Diaa, thank you very much. HADID: Thank you. INSKEEP: That's NPR's Diaa Hadid in Islamabad. (SOUNDBITE OF DEEB'S "FLUID DYNAMICS") DAVID GREENE, HOST: Good morning. I'm David Greene. This is the story of a $300,000 Ferrari that was parked outside a Florida hotel. A guy was trying to impress a girl, so he asked the valet for his key, and he took a spin. Police pulled him over and said he had difficulty operating the Ferrari, which isn't surprising because it didn't belong to him. The actual owner is now suing the hotel. The driver was arrested for stealing a car, which he denies because he was handed the keys. You're listening to MORNING EDITION. DAVID GREENE, HOST: And we’re turning now to Russia where there were large anti-government protests on Sunday. Thousands of people were marching across the country, calling for boycotts of the presidential election in March. Now, leading these protests was Alexei Navalny. He’s one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s biggest critics. During the protests yesterday, he was arrested, along with some 200 other people. And let’s talk about this with NPR’s Lucian Kim, who is joining us from Moscow. Hi, Lucian. LUCIAN KIM, BYLINE: Good morning. GREENE: So start, if you can, with reminding us how these protests came together in the first place. KIM: Well, Alexei Navalny, who has now become Russia's most prominent opposition leader, was denied registration as a candidate in the upcoming presidential election, and that's after spending more than a year campaigning. So he called for a boycott. He said, by participating, people are supporting what are, in fact, unfair elections. GREENE: So he's arrested almost from the moment he shows up at the - at a rally in Moscow. What happens to him now if he's in custody? KIM: Well, that's right. He was kind of bundled into a police bus almost the moment he showed up at the Moscow rally. He was later released. No charges have been brought against him yet, but it's likely he will face charges of organizing an illegal rally. I think just as dramatic is that police yesterday were breaking into the offices of his anti-corruption foundation. That's where they were broadcasting live on YouTube from around Russia's regions. But this had actually already happened before, so by the time the police got there, they were just broadcasting from an alternative, secret location. GREENE: OK, so Navalny has a presence on YouTube and social media. He's got, like, a sizable following. He's sending a message that people should boycott this election in March, but does any of this pose a threat to Vladimir Putin? KIM: Well, you know, state media pretends that none of this is happening. Vladimir Putin even refuses to mention Navalny's name in public. But it's important to note that Navalny does still represent a pretty narrow demographic - it's urban, young, educated, middle class. But I think the Kremlin thinks that there's a danger that this - that Navalny's movement could really snowball if there is some kind of catalyst. The economy is still limping along, poverty is quite widespread, and there's a lot of discontent with corruption. GREENE: OK, so the Kremlin is taking the opposition movement seriously. I mean, it's not just something that can be ignored. KIM: Well, they're acting like they're ignoring it, but it's clear from the way that they're reacting that, you know, it has spread some reason for concern. GREENE: OK. Speaking to NPR's Moscow correspondent Lucian Kim a day after protests in Moscow, during which Alexei Navalny, the young opposition leader, was arrested. And we'll be following this story as we head towards the presidential elections in March. Lucian, thanks. KIM: Thanks, David. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Pop singer Bruno Mars swept last night's Grammy Awards. Many people expected hip hop - and Latin music to dominate. Instead, Bruno Mars received the honors for album, song and record of the year. Here's NPR's Mandalit del Barco. MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: Bruno Mars' danceable funk hits "24K Magic" and "That's What I Like" had him accepting six Grammys in all. (SOUNDBITE OF 60TH ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS) BRUNO MARS: Look at me, Pop. Look at me. I'm on the - I'm at The Grammys right now. DEL BARCO: Mars beat out hip-hop superstar Jay-Z, who got eight nominations and won none of them. He did take home the honorary Founders Award. Mars also beat Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar who was nominated seven times and picked up five, including best rap album. (SOUNDBITE OF 60TH ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS) KENDRICK LAMAR: From the jump, I thought it was about the accolades and the cars and the clothes, but it's really about expressing yourself and putting that paint on the canvas for the world to evolve for the next listener and the next generation after that. You know what I'm saying. DEL BARCO: The winners stayed away from politics during their acceptance speeches, but the show had many pointed, scripted moments. Lamar opened the ceremony with a giant image of the American flag surrounded by soldiers and dancers in red hoodies who collapsed to gunshots as he rhymed. He was momentarily and deliberately interrupted by comedian Dave Chappelle. (SOUNDBITE OF 60TH ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS) DAVE CHAPPELLE: And I just wanted to remind the audience that the only thing more frightening than watching a black man be honest in America is being an honest black man in America. DEL BARCO: Chappelle went on to win his own Grammy for best comedy album. Perhaps the best comedic moment of the night came during a pre-recorded skit in which celebrities auditioned to read the audio book of Michael Wolfe's inside look at the Trump White House. Hillary Clinton even made a surprise cameo to try her hand reading "Fire And Fury." (SOUNDBITE OF 60TH ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS) HILLARY CLINTON: He had a longtime fear of being poisoned - one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald's. Nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade. DEL BARCO: Politics featured prominently in the second half of the telecast. U2 performed outdoors with the Statue of Liberty in the background. The band was introduced by singer and songwriter Camila Cabello who spoke in support of the children of undocumented immigrants. (SOUNDBITE OF 60TH ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS) CAMILA CABELLO: We remember that this country was built by dreamers for dreamers chasing the American dream. DEL BARCO: Cabello said she was proud to be a Cuban-Mexican immigrant born in East Havana. (SOUNDBITE FO 60TH ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS) CABELLO: And all I know is, just like dreams, these kids can't be forgotten and are worth fighting for. DEL BARCO: Cabello also joined Cyndi Lauper and dozens of women onstage to perform with Kesha on her song "Praying" written about her alleged abuse at the hands of her producer. (SOUNDBITE OF 60TH ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS) KESHA: (Singing) I hope you find your peace falling on your knees, praying. DEL BARCO: Introducing Kesha, singer Janelle Monae called out the music industry. (SOUNDBITE OF 60TH ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS) JANELLE MONAE: We say time's up for pay inequality. Time's up for discrimination. Time's up for harassment of any kind. And time's up for the abuse of power. DEL BARCO: The final performance of the night came from rapper Logic who ended this way. (SOUNDBITE OF 60TH ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS) LOGIC: Black is beautiful. Hate is ugly. Women are as precious as they are stronger than any man I have ever met. And unto them I say stand tall and crush all predators under the weight of your heart that is full of the love they will never take away from you. DEL BARCO: And he honored the very countries President Trump recently disparaged - all the beautiful countries, Logic said, filled with culture, diversity and thousands of years of history. Mandalit del Barco, NPR News. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "1-800-273-8255") LOGIC: (Singing) I've been on the low. I been taking my time. ALESSIA CARA AND LOGIC: (Singing) I feel like I'm out of my mind. LOGIC: (Singing) It feel like my life ain't mine. Who can relate? I've been on the low. I been taking my time. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: An American imprisoned in Iran is temporarily free. Baquer Namazi was given four days out of prison while being treated for a heart condition. He is 81 years old. He's the father of another U.S. citizen, Siamak Namazi, also imprisoned on vague charges of spying. Because both are Iranian-American, Iran recognizes them only as Iranians and has been turning aside calls for their release. Babak Namazi is on the line from Dubai. He is the son of one prisoner, the brother of another. He joins us once again via Skype. Welcome back to the program. BABAK NAMAZI: Hi, Steve. INSKEEP: How's your father doing? NAMAZI: It's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking to hear your loved one in pain and in such poor health. And you feel so helpless. Him having little energy, him sounding so weak really horrifies me. I'm just desperate. INSKEEP: How hard was it to win even this little bit of fresh air? NAMAZI: Nothing has been easy for the past two years. Both my father and my brother have been under very stressful and difficult conditions. I feel, after a long time, that we've seen a very dim light in the tunnel. It's sad to say this, but - that my father being hospitalized has risen some hope for us. But I fear for his life. And I feel any return to prison would ultimately lead to his death. He's been hospitalized on four occasions in the past year. He's already lost 30 pounds, had a pacemaker installed. And now, on this last hospitalization, it was due to a severe, life-threatening drop in his blood pressure. I don't know what else it takes for the Iranian government to show compassion and not return my 81-year-old father back to these horrific conditions. INSKEEP: Now, officially, it's just four days out. Have you heard any unofficial sense that the government might reconsider that and let him stay out longer? NAMAZI: We've been told the stay will be only through Thursday. INSKEEP: And that's it. NAMAZI: Well, I'm praying. I'm hoping. I'm hanging onto the thought that humanity will prevail and no one is that cruel to return someone to prison under these conditions. INSKEEP: What are you hearing from the Trump administration, which has called for the release of political prisoners in Iran? NAMAZI: The Trump administration I've been engaged with ever since the administration came to office. And I'm thankful for what they've done so far. Obviously, my father and my brother are both still in prison, so I do hope that - both that the U.S. government will redouble its efforts, spare no efforts to get my family out, especially my dad under these conditions right now. The United Nations has been very engaged, which I'm very grateful for. And I do (unintelligible). And I hope that that engagement - we're desperate for that engagement to continue, and we're desperate for all the help we can get to get my father out and keep him out of prison - and also my brother Siamak as well. INSKEEP: Do you believe that there are some elements of Iran's government working within the government to get your father and your brother released? NAMAZI: It is difficult for me to speculate what's going on. Again, in the darkest of times, you still try to hang onto humanity and that people will do the right thing. So I still want to hope that there are those in Iran who want this injustice to end and they want my father not to be - his life not to be endangered any further than it has been already. INSKEEP: We've been listening to Babak Namazi, whose father and brother were convicted on charges of spying in Iran. Thank you very much. NAMAZI: Thank you, Steve. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Is special counsel Robert Mueller's job under threat? According to The New York Times, President Trump wanted to fire Mueller as head of the investigation into Russian election meddling. The president relented after the White House counsel threatened to resign over the president's order. Still, senators introduced two bipartisan bills last year aimed at protecting any special counsel, not just Mueller, and one of those senators is Richard Blumenthal of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He's a Democrat. He joins me on the line. Senator, good morning. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: Good morning to you. GREENE: So I just want to be really clear here. The president does not have the direct authority to fire a special counsel. Is that right? BLUMENTHAL: The president has no direct authority. He would have to go through the deputy attorney general who has taken over that authority after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself. GREENE: Right. BLUMENTHAL: But there have been frequent threats and now a report that he actually tried to do so. GREENE: Do so - we're looking back over the summer, The New York Times reporting. But I just want to play - you mentioned the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Last month, he told the House Judiciary Committee he did not think Mueller should be fired and said that he was feeling no pressure from the White House. Let's listen here. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) ROD ROSENSTEIN: I am not going to be discussing my communications with the president, but I can tell you that nobody has communicated to me a desire to remove Robert Mueller. GREENE: So I just want to be real clear here. Why do you think that the special counsel needs protection right now? BLUMENTHAL: This remarkable report is stunning, absolutely chilling, in raising the possibility of a constitutional confrontation and crisis similar to what the country saw during the Watergate massacre in the Watergate years. And so we need to avoid it. It is a crisis that must be avoided, and the threat is immediate and urgent. The legislation has already had a hearing. There's bipartisan support for it. And we should move forward to a vote. GREENE: You say bipartisan support. I mean, you had - your Republican colleague, Thom Tillis, introduced another bill to protect Mueller alongside yours. He now says he's no longer lobbying aggressively for that legislation since, you know, that the chatter, at least according to him, about Mueller being fired has sort of died down since the summer. Do you really feel like you still have Republican support for some sort of bill? BLUMENTHAL: The chairman of the judiciary committee, who really is the key figure here, said on Friday that he was open to considering this legislation. And I think the sense of Republicans is that no rational person, no reasonable president, would embark on this self-destructive course of firing the special counsel, but Donald Trump has demonstrated that he is not always rational and that he can be impulsive. This report may be only one of a number of times he's considered firing the special counsel. There may well have been a middle person here conveying the order to Don McGahn, the White House counsel. And we need to pass this legislation before there's a catastrophe to deter the president from this kind of really catastrophic course that would put our constitutional system in jeopardy again. GREENE: Your committee, I mean, has been investigating, doing its own investigating into Russian election meddling. Do you know anything that we in the public don't know that leads you to believe that President Trump is making an effort to fire Robert Mueller? BLUMENTHAL: There are certainly indications beyond the public record. But the public record is powerful enough because the tactics have also included threats, intimidation, attempts to impede that investigation by Republican defenders of the president in the Congress, the denunciations of the FBI and law enforcement of Mueller's team and Mueller himself, indicate a concerted, coordinated effort to intimidate and perhaps interrupt this investigation. And this report, really remarkable in The New York Times and then confirmed by The Washington Post, may indicate simply the tip of the iceberg in terms of what the president has said and done. And we need to pass this legislation to deter him and send a message that... GREENE: You're saying you know there is stuff beyond - there's stuff beyond the public record that you know of. BLUMENTHAL: I think that the public record is powerful enough. There is perhaps other indications in the records of the intelligence committee or the judiciary committee, but the public record is more than sufficient. GREENE: Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senator, we appreciate your time this morning. BLUMENTHAL: Thank you. DAVID GREENE, HOST: A special court of arbitration is considering the fate of 39 Russian athletes. All of them were banned from the Olympics for life for doping. They are now appealing, and some hope to compete at the upcoming Winter Olympics. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: This morning we have the perspective of a man who is sure the athletes are guilty but thinks that their punishment misses the point. Grigory Rodchenkov lead Russia's doping operation. He later fled the country, testified against the athletes and is in the United States Witness Protection Program because of fears for his safety. His lawyer, Jim Walden, says Rodchenkov feels some sympathy for the athletes even though he gave powerful evidence against them. JIM WALDEN: So Dr. Rodchenkov, in his affidavits, talks in explicit detail about his personal involvement in covering up the doping. He wasn't personally involved in administering the drugs to the athletes, but he was the one that devised the cocktail of drugs that made it very, very difficult to detect them. So he had a front-end role, and then he had a back-end role, meaning that some of the athletes were taking the drugs during the Olympic Games, and other athletes had stopped them relatively recently. So it required them to secretly substitute clean urine, and all of the athletes had provided clean urine in advance to the lab in Sochi where the Games were held. INSKEEP: Can your client, from your conversations with him, imagine any circumstance in which some of these athletes might deserve to have their bans overturned on appeal? Maybe there was an individual where the doping wasn't so bad, or he didn't dope at all, or didn't quite realize what was going on or has shown great remorse since then. Anything at all? WALDEN: I think Dr. Rodchenkov's perspective is that many of the athletes were over-punished and the Russian Federation was under-punished, meaning that some of the athletes certainly participated very enthusiastically in the doping program, but there were certainly other athletes that had little choice, as he had little choice, to participate in the system. So whether they should be banned for life, I mean, that is an incredibly harsh punishment. And so on the flip side, the Russian Federation wasn't even fully banned for a single Olympic game. Many of their athletes participated in Rio. Many of their athletes are going to participate in the upcoming Winter Olympics. And the IOC even left itself room to lift the suspension of Russia so that their flag could fly at the Winter Olympic Games in South Korea coming up soon. INSKEEP: Are you saying that these appeals going on now are not touching the most important issue at all? WALDEN: The appeals that are going on touch an important issue, but definitely not the most important issue. The most important issue is the weakness of the International Olympic Committee when it comes to large, powerful countries on whom they depend to host games. And you can see the difference between the way that they've treated Kuwait on the one hand and Russia on the other. Kuwait, the infraction that they allegedly committed, was not nearly as serious as Russia's and yet they've been fully banned from the Olympics for the past two and a half years. Russia organizes the most prolific doping conspiracy that the world has ever seen and yet gets to compete at some level in the very next Olympic Games. That sort of unequal justice, the IOC has to do something about it, or else the Olympic ideal is dead. INSKEEP: Is that different simply because Russia is a bigger and more powerful country? WALDEN: Certainly the fact that they're big and that they host many games for both the Olympics and international federations plays a role, but it's hard to believe with how brazen they've been that there's not some aspect of corruption going on here, that either someone has been compromised or someone's taking money. And so I think that it is really very important for criminal authorities to look into these international federations more deeply and root out endemic corruption or expose blackmail schemes, or else these sorts of terrible decisions are going to be made again and again and again. INSKEEP: Lawyer Jim Walden. He is the attorney for Gregory Rodchenkov. Thanks very much. WALDEN: Thank you very much, Steve. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Poland is pushing through a bill that would make it illegal to blame the country for atrocities committed during World War II. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says this sounds like a Holocaust denial. So Israel has summoned a Polish envoy to Israel in protest. NPR's Daniel Estrin reports from Jerusalem, where talks with Poland are expected to begin sometime soon. DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: As part of an ongoing campaign by Poland's nationalist leadership to defend the country's role during the Holocaust, a new proposed law says whoever publicly accuses the Polish nation of being complicit in Nazi crimes can be jailed for up to three years or fined. The government says Poles were victims of the Nazis and heroically resisted them. But now Israeli officials are protesting the bill. They say the story is more complex. While thousands of Poles have been recognized for helping Jews during the Holocaust, there were Poles guilty of aiding the Nazis, says Michal Maayan, deputy spokesperson for Israel's Foreign Ministry. MICHAL MAAYAN: We know that the mechanism and the death camps were German. But there is a lot of evidence of Polish people that were aiding in the killing of the Jews. ESTRIN: The Polish government has long rejected the use of phrases like the Polish death camps, calling it misrepresentative. Both Polish and Israeli scholars hope the bill will not have a chill effect on historical research in Poland. MAAYAN: If you create an atmosphere where it's harder to research, and people are more timid to discuss what happened in the Holocaust, that might, in turn in the future, lead to bad elements such as Holocaust denial. ESTRIN: Israeli officials say the timing of the proposed law is unfortunate. It passed a vote by the lower house of the Polish Parliament on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Now Israel has summoned Poland's deputy ambassador and says Poland has agreed to begin an immediate dialogue about the bill. Daniel Estrin, NPR News, Jerusalem. (SOUNDBITE OF THE BEST PESSIMIST'S "MY LONG GOODBYE") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. A Rhode Island lawmaker wants to eliminate outdated laws. John Edwards says the laws built up over centuries. It's illegal to test the speed of your horse on a public road. A driving law from 1916 says you must make an audible signal honking or shouting if you pass someone. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: On your left. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Whoa. INSKEEP: Dueling is still banned in Rhode Island. And it's illegal to interfere with Navy torpedo practice, which, come to think of it, sounds like a good idea. It's MORNING EDITION. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: A president with a talent for seizing the nation's attention with a tweet gets that attention at much greater length this week. President Trump delivers the State of the Union address to Congress. It's any president's chance to set the national agenda, although it comes at yet another moment when an investigation of election meddling may be setting the agenda for the president. Matthew Continetti is going to talk this through with us. He's editor-in-chief of the conservative publication The Washington Free Beacon. Good morning. MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Good morning. INSKEEP: Thanks for coming by. So the president led up to this moment by floating his version of what could be an immigration deal. Does he have a real opportunity here? CONTINETTI: Probably not. I think the gulf... INSKEEP: (Laughter) OK. Thank you very much for coming by. I appreciate it. CONTINETTI: (Laughter). INSKEEP: No, no. Go on. CONTINETTI: No. The gulf between the Trump administration and the Republicans in Congress - the House Republicans - and the Senate Democrats, I think, is too large to be a bridge by compromise anytime soon. So I think what the president was doing was, one, saying that he is willing to actually amnesty the DREAMers and a large population of them - 1.8 million - in exchange for certain reforms to the immigration system, which the Democrats don't seem willing to provide. INSKEEP: Well, let's talk about that. What you describe as amnesty, people would use other words, of course. We're talking about a path to citizenship for people who were brought to the United States illegally. And the president put citizenship on the table in his proposal the other day. Are you telling me that House Republicans particularly just aren't going to go there? CONTINETTI: Well, I think House Republicans would actually be receptive to something that the president laid down in exchange for the other reforms - right? - the money for the wall, the money for additional enforcement and the changes to the actual legal immigration system. But because that probably won't happen due to the Senate Democrats being unwilling to adopt those reforms, I think it's basically a dead letter. INSKEEP: In 2013, there was immigration reform that passed the Senate and never got anywhere in the House. Is that a possibility here? CONTINETTI: Doubtful because... INSKEEP: You really think that if it gets through the Senate at all, the House is going to go for it? CONTINETTI: Well, I don't think it's going to get through the Senate. INSKEEP: OK. CONTINETTI: (Laughter) So there's no reason for the House to worry. And the reason is that the politics of immigration have changed even from 2013. Remember, there was a great sense in 2013, basically promoted by President Obama, that immigration was key to his re-election campaign and that he owed it to Hispanic voters to do an immigration reform. INSKEEP: And Republicans felt that they were going to lose a generation of voters if they didn't do something. Some Republicans felt that way. CONTINETTI: Some did in the Senate. Right. And so that's how you got the Senate bill. But, of course, one of the architects behind the scenes in basically derailing the Senate bill was Stephen Miller, who now, of course, is President Trump's top adviser on domestic policy, including immigration, at the White House. So I think that in itself - that personnel move - shows how the politics of immigration have shifted in a more - in some way, widening the debate to include not only people who want to increase immigration levels and provide a path to citizenship to people who arrived here illegally. But also, it now includes people who actually want to not only clamp down on illegal immigration but also begin to restrict legal immigration. INSKEEP: Well, that is becoming something of a third rail here, as well, isn't it? Can you adjust the number of people significantly who are allowed in the country legally? That could be another stopping point. CONTINETTI: Well, I mean, if it's a third rail, then President Trump and Senator Tom Cotton and Senator David Perdue have jumped on it and with interesting results, actually, because some of the polling that's coming out is showing that, actually, Americans are more receptive to their positions than one might have thought. INSKEEP: Let me ask about the Russia investigation. Of course, there have been New York Times and Washington Post stories that show President Trump trying to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and beyond that, just repeatedly, repeatedly trying to get the Justice Department to stop the investigation, trying to derail the investigation. Democratic Senator Mark Warner said on All Things Considered the other day there seems to be a pattern here that is not a pattern of someone who doesn't have anything to hide. Is the president acting guilty, whatever the facts that may be? CONTINETTI: Whatever the facts may be pretty important, I think. INSKEEP: Yeah. But is he acting like someone who's guilty? CONTINETTI: I think the president has acted as someone who didn't want the investigation to happen. Now, is that because he's hiding something, or does he believe, rightly, that it's negatively affecting his presidency? We have to wait for Robert Mueller to release his findings to actually see what happened. Now, some of the news that's coming out suggests that among those findings may be Robert Mueller's conclusion that the president may have obstructed justice. INSKEEP: Matthew, thank you very much. CONTINETTI: Thank you. INSKEEP: Matthew Continetti of The Washington Free Beacon. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Africa's leaders are meeting for the first time since President Trump made derogatory comments about the continent. This is the 30th meeting of the African Union, taking place in Ethiopia. And the talk has focused on unity, also fighting corruption. But Trump's words also hang over the gathering. Here's NPR's Eyder Peralta. EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: The first day of the African Union Summit starts with the welcoming of Rwandan President Paul Kagame as the body's new chairman. (APPLAUSE) PERALTA: Despite criticism that Kagame's government is repressive and authoritarian, he has become one of the most influential leaders on the continent, admired for bringing Rwanda out of the genocide into a relatively prosperous period. In his acceptance speech, Kagame says Africa has to industrialize and do it quickly. (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) PRESIDENT PAUL KAGAME: We are running out of time. And we must act now to save Africa from permanent deprivation. PERALTA: His solution is a pan-African vision, a united Africa where people can move freely across borders. And by the end of this year, Kagame wants to finalize a continental free trade agreement. (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) KAGAME: We will send a tremendous signal in Africa and beyond that it is no longer business as usual. (APPLAUSE) KAGAME: Our people deserve a brighter future. PERALTA: Of course, it was not lost on anyone that this talk of cooperation and an ascendant Africa was being held weeks after President Trump is said to have trashed the entire continent. Moussa Faki Mahamat, the AU Commission chairman, clearly referenced Trump in his speech, saying the international community is made weaker by, quote, "growing national selfishness and the trivialization of xenophobia." MOUSSA FAKI MAHAMAT: (Foreign language spoken). PERALTA: "We should express our concern," he says, "and recommit to solidarity, tolerance and mutual respect. It is," he says, "essential for the survival of humanity." The bulk of the summit, however, concerned the fight against corruption. Presidents from some of the most corrupt countries in the world, including Angola and Somalia, committed to fighting against what they called a plague. Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said the fight will not be easy because, he says, corruption fights back. Eyder Peralta, NPR News, Addis Ababa. (SOUNDBITE OF IKEBE SHAKEDOWN'S "SHE'S KNOCKING") DAVID GREENE, HOST: This month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions told federal prosecutors that they are free to go after marijuana businesses. So it is a lot riskier now to do business in the nine states that allow legal recreational cannabis. As Colorado Public Radio's Ben Markus reports, the immediate impact here has been on the financing. BEN MARKUS, BYLINE: Colorado sold more than $1 billion in recreational marijuana last year, but deep-pocketed investors were excited to take on something even bigger - California. SCOTT MARTINEZ: And being able to enter into that market, folks saw dollar signs in their eyes. MARKUS: Scott Martinez is a Denver attorney, and he was in the middle of brokering deals worth potentially tens of millions of dollars from a large, private equity fund. But those investments suddenly dried up when Jeff Sessions removed what little legal protections existed for the industry. MARTINEZ: And they decided it wasn't worth the risk right now. MARKUS: At about the same time, across Denver, another attorney, Sean McAllister, had an East Coast, private investment fund get cold feet on a $3 million pot deal. SEAN MCALLISTER: There's no doubt that Jeff Sessions intended to and in fact did destabilize the cannabis industry. MARKUS: By raising the probability of federal prosecution, Sessions has ratcheted up the risk for investors. The U.S. attorney in Colorado declined to be interviewed but, in a statement, said he had no plans to ramp up prosecutions. That said, the perceived risk is still enough to scare some investors away. In this busy warehouse in Denver, there's no sense that the industry is in any kind of turmoil. A woman in a hairnet pumps marijuana-laced chocolate into plastic, candy-bar molds. This is Incredibles, one of the state's largest edible cannabis producers. Bob Eschino is the owner, and he seems unfazed by Sessions' memo. BOB ESCHINO: Tomorrow, there's going to be another problem that's going to potentially shut down the entire industry. Remind me what it... MARKUS: That's a lot of risk to live under. ESCHINO: Like I say, we keep our blinders on. MARKUS: But banks don't share that risk tolerance. They'll give him a simple checking account, but they won't lend money to help him expand the business. So Eschino must rely on private financing, which is suddenly drying up. And what money is available may come with more onerous terms now. Investors have already been asking for more than interest. They want an ownership stake. ESCHINO: It's hard to sell equity now as we're still, you know, in triple-digit growth mode. MARKUS: Eschino says if this was a normal business, banks would be tripping over themselves to give him a great deal on a loan. There are about 20 banks in Colorado offering checking accounts for cannabis businesses. But now there's fear that banks may retreat from the industry too because of Sessions' memo. SUNDIE SEEFRIED: I think some banks and credit unions did have that as a trigger to exit. We did not. MARKUS: That's Sundie Seefried, the president and CEO of Safe Harbor Private Banking. She calls it that because lawyers told her there was no safe harbor for her from federal prosecution. And she says she's been looking over her shoulder for years. When Sessions released his memo, she sat down and wrote letters to Colorado's congressional delegation. SEEFRIED: And said that, you know, I don't want to put $80 million back on the streets. Can you help protect your citizens by keeping this money in the bank? MARKUS: Cannabis entrepreneurs bristle at what they say is the hypocrisy of it all. The IRS will accept their taxes and audit their books, but in almost every other normal business respect, they say they're treated like second-class citizens. For NPR News, I'm Ben Markus in Denver. (SOUNDBITE OF J MASCIS SONG, "HEAL THE STAR") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: So what happens now to immigrants brought illegally as children to the U.S. who are set to lose their protection to remain here? President Trump says he favors a path to citizenship for people who are eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. He does want a lot in return - billions for a border wall and limits to legal immigration. White House legislative director Marc Short tells CBS it's a bipartisan plan. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MARC SHORT: He's offered a very rational compromise to get it done. This was born out of many conversations with Democrats alike and Republicans to get to this point. It's actual - will help us get it done and protect us, so we don't have this problem several years from now. INSKEEP: But the president's notion is one of several ideas. A bipartisan deal has fallen apart before. And only weeks remain before the DACA program expires by the president's own order. Republican Congressman Will Hurd of Texas represents about 800 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. And he's on the line via Skype. Congressman, welcome back to the program. WILL HURD: Hey, Steve - always a pleasure to be on. INSKEEP: If the president's plan were to be brought up before the House, do you think it would pass? HURD: I think elements of it could pass the House. I'm pleased that the president further refined what he's looking for in a potential bipartisan deal. But I believe the best way forward is still a narrow solution. Fix DACA. Have some strong border security because the broader you get this thing, you start creating these coalitions of opposition to this deal. And Congress has proven over the last couple of years doing comprehensive and partisan is not the way to go. So let's try something different - narrow and bipartisan. INSKEEP: Well, let's just be really clear about what you'd want to leave in and out. Fix DACA, you said - so pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients. A little bit of border security - so maybe some sensor technology or whatever. But you're not talking about money for the wall, and you're not talking about limiting legal immigration, which the president also wants to do. HURD: That's pretty correct. But I would say our border security solution is pretty broad. We should allow the men and women in Border Patrol to have the tools that they need. Every mile of the border is different than others. And so our bill would not preclude physical barriers. But our bill is also not an appropriations bill. You know, you have authorizations, and you have appropriations. And the USA Act, which I've been working on with Pete Aguilar from California - a Democrat from California - would be the appropriations. And this allows us to vote on ultimately spending bills and things that we - possibly have already come out of the House. INSKEEP: OK. So you want to authorize better border security, which might take a variety of forms. Although, I think from talking with you in the past, you're no fan of walls, are you? HURD: (Laughter) No. I'm not. I think building a wall from sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security. But also, it's 2018. And we do not have operational control of the border. And so we should. And the technology exists where we can tell the difference between a person and a bunny rabbit coming across the border. We can deploy a small drone to track something or a threat. And then you deploy your most important resource to men and women, a border patrol. And all that information you are collecting from those sensors could be beamed back to our men and women in Border Patrol. Some folks think that we're using that kind of technology on the border now. We're not. INSKEEP: Well, let me ask about another element of this. You said that you would favor fixing DACA. And the form that fix is taking in the president's plan is an eventual path to citizenship for well over 1 million people - I believe something like 1.8 million people who might be eligible for this program. Ted Cruz, Republican senator - your fellow Republican, your fellow Texan - said that this is a serious mistake and added that the people of Texas - your state - don't support it. Is it correct that the people of Texas would not support a path to citizenship for DACA recipients and others? HURD: Most of the people that I've been talking to and dealing with in Texas do recognize the need to have some kind of legal status. And this is not providing a special pathway to folks that are in the DACA category. They can have legal status just like many other folks that are in our country - LPR, a legal permanent resident. And then you can transition from that legal permanent resident status to citizenship if you meet a certain criteria. And there should be a - you know, when you go from DACA, which is a temporary status, to LPR, which is a permanent status, you have to hit some criteria. And in the USA Act, the bill I've been working on, you know, it's one of three triggers. You've done at least two years of additional schooling from high school. You have served in the military - you know, you served a tour in the military. Or you've been working for 80 percent of the time. And so those are the things that transitions you from temporary to legal. INSKEEP: Congressman, I have to ask about one of the things that's facing your party at the moment. Steve Wynn has resigned as Republican National Committee finance chairman. He's somebody who's given to Republicans for many years in the amounts of millions of dollars. Now, he's given money to Democrats, too - he's a businessman - but lots of money to Republicans. Should your party and should elected officials in your party be giving that money back now that Wynn has been accused of sexual harassment and much worse? HURD: Well, I don't know Steve Wynn. I've never met him. And, you know, sexual harassment of any kind is unacceptable. It shouldn't be in any business. It shouldn't be in politics. And, you know, this should be - it should be very clear. And I'm glad that - you know, I'm glad that this is becoming clearer across the country in all industries. INSKEEP: But should the money be given back? HURD: I think that those entities have to make those decisions. INSKEEP: Meaning the Republican Party - your party? HURD: Yeah. I think many different organizations have potentially gotten that money. And so the various organizations need to make that decision. INSKEEP: You didn't get any? HURD: I did not. INSKEEP: OK. Congressman Hurd, thank you very much. HURD: Thank you. INSKEEP: Will Hurd of Texas. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Let's turn now to Afghanistan, where this past weekend there were more deadly attacks. ISIS is taking credit for an attack on a military base outside Kabul that left at least 10 people dead and more injured. This follows on an even more deadly attack in the center of Kabul Saturday. A hundred people were killed when an ambulance packed full of explosives blew up in a crowded street. The Taliban is claiming responsibility for that one. We're joined by Afghanistan's ambassador to the United Nations Mahmoud Saikal. Mr. Ambassador, good morning. MAHMOUD SAIKAL: Good morning. GREENE: I know it's a difficult time in your country with all this violence. Thanks for making the time for us. What is behind all these attacks? SAIKAL: Well, what is important to know that most of these attacks are plotted in Pakistan. The latest one, the attack that happened on Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, we have the father of one of the terrorists in our custody. He has just conceded that his son was in the Chaman area of Balochistan province of Pakistan, that he was trained by the Inter-Services Intelligence of Pakistan. So the important thing is the presence of the safe havens in Pakistan and whatever that motivates the intelligence services of Pakistan to destabilize Afghanistan and throughout the region. The international pressure has been helpful in the past year or a little bit less than that. The Taliban and other terrorist groups have received heavy blows from the Afghan security forces in the countryside and in the battlefield. And now... GREENE: And not just from the Afghan forces, but that the United States has been pressuring Pakistan politically, as well. SAIKAL: Definitely. GREENE: And you're saying that is helpful because there have been some who have wondered whether the pressure in Pakistan, at least temporarily, has led to this kind of violence. You're saying that you appreciate this kind of pressure and think it's a good thing. SAIKAL: Well, we have to understand the behavior of Pakistan under pressure. What would they do and how should we be ready for it? Naturally they've been defying international calls for addressing the safe havens in Pakistan. And now they are shifting the battle to the urban areas. And also with terrorist attacks, they are targeting soft targets. And also they're doing some surgical works in urban areas. And on the other hand, it's wintertime at the moment, anyway. So we need to increase the intelligence capability of Afghanistan. We need to make sure that we have the region onboard, and also we have to increase international pressure on Pakistan to give up with using this policy of violence in pursuit of political objectives. GREENE: Can I just ask, are you suggesting that this might be just a temporary reality that you have to accept that, putting pressure on may be a long-term successful strategy but that it could lead to more attacks like this in the short-term? SAIKAL: Well, generally speaking, if you compare Afghanistan today to where we were 18 years ago, we've come a long way. We've made some significant gains in Afghanistan in the field of human rights, development and even security. Yes, at the moment we do see a shift in the policy of Pakistan trying to make its mark and make sure that it remains relevant, through attacks like these. But, as I said, we need to understand, you know, once we put pressure on Pakistan, we need to understand the behavior of Pakistan under pressure and make sure that we are ready for that. GREENE: All right. Mahmoud Saikal is Afghanistan's ambassador to the United Nations joining us this morning. Ambassador, thank you very much. SAIKAL: My pleasure. Thank you. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Few things are quite so personal or so revealing as how people date. That's why we've focused all month on online dating - how we use it and how it changes us. And today, we finish that series with an American using online dating in late middle age. Her story's pretty common. A Pew survey says the number of people using online dating services between the ages of 55 and 64 has gone up 200 percent. Anna Fiehler is 56. She's a software engineer from Ohio, and she traces her history with online dating all the way back to the 1970s. Fiehler told us how she made the connection then and what happened when she logged on again decades later. (SOUNDBITE OF ANDREW BIRD SONG, "TRUTH LIES LOW") ANNA FIEHLER: I joke, I did the first Internet dating ever (laughter). I was in high school in 1978, and I ended up being a person who was assigned to work on a computer station. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: You will soon be receiving your new HP 3000 computer system. FIEHLER: ...The Hewlett-Packard 3000. There were kids from high schools logging into the same system, and we started talking to each other. And so we would talk about video games. (SOUNDBITE OF BEEPS) FIEHLER: And the big surprise for them was that I was a girl. They'd be, that's so cool. I actually made friends with a guy from another high school, and we ended up going to each other's proms. We did a lot of dancing, and the theme of the night with Bob Seger's "We've Got Tonight." (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WE'VE GOT TONIGHT") BOB SEGER: (Singing) Oh, we've got tonight. FIEHLER: So that was the slow dance that wrapped up the evening for the prom that I remember us dancing to there. After high school, I joined the military and got stationed in Great Britain. And as it turns out, my future husband was there, as well. And so we were married for almost 20 years but separated in 2013 and then were formally divorced in 2015. Particularly with my age, it was a little more challenging to meet single people. And so being so comfortable with computers, it was completely natural just to set up a dating profile and see what happened. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) FIEHLER: First, I signed up for OurTime, which is meant for folks over 50, and later tried Match.com. But then on both, it was a common problem for men in my age range to have fairly incomplete profiles. But the biggest problem was that I would get messages from men... (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) ELWOOD EDWARDS: You've got mail. FIEHLER: And they would just talk about my looks. And I was really kind of disappointed because I'd always - I'd put a lot of detail into my profile. I guess, for me, that was one of the best things about online dating, was being able to have this kind of meeting of the minds first versus going to a bar and just walking up to person based on their looks. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) FIEHLER: On St. Patrick's Day, I got a like to my profile from a person whose name I would learn was Heinz Raidel. That prompted me to take a look at his profile. And so he said he liked time machines. He put in parentheses, I'm just checking to see if anybody's reading this far. (Laughter) And that made me laugh, so I sent him a message, and I said, you have a time machine? His response was great because he said, I wish I had a time machine so I could think up a clever response to your question (laughter). We decided that we'd meet for dinner. He pulls up in his car next to me, and I remember looking over and him looking over at me and smiling. And I just knew in my head right then and there that this is going to be OK; this is going to be good. We saw each other constantly, then so we finally decided to make it official. HEINZ RAIDEL: I give you this ring. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: As a sign of my love and faithfulness. RAIDEL: As a sign of my love and faithfulness. FIEHLER: We joke around about each other. It's, like - it's still just amazing to run into each other. And he's such an amazing person. (SOUNDBITE OF ANDREW BIRD SONG, "TRUTH LIES LOW") FIEHLER: I definitely would never have met Heinz if it weren't for online dating, and I think it's a real opportunity for folks over 50. The computer and these applications aren't isolating. They're actually providing incredibly rich connections for people. And so I think you can really use this way of connecting with other folks in a way that is very enriching and can be really worthwhile. (SOUNDBITE OF ANDREW BIRD SONG, "TRUTH LIES LOW") INSKEEP: Anna Fiehler and Heinz Raidel celebrate their wedding anniversary next month. We spoke with her on Skype. Our thanks to them and more than 1,100 people who responded to our survey asking listeners about their online dating experiences. Hear all of the responses that became part of our series What Makes Us Click at npr.org/dating. DAVID GREENE, HOST: A memo - a much-talked-about memo, though a memo that has been secret, may now actually see the light of day. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Yeah. Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee voted last night to release this classified document. Though few have seen it, it is said that the memo accuses the FBI of using bad information in the early parts of its Russia investigation. Committee Chairman Devin Nunes oversaw the preparation of the memo. He once stepped aside from the Russia investigation but then launched his own investigation, which led to this memo. President Trump could still block the memo from becoming public, which is what his own Justice Department would prefer. So what do the players stand to gain or lose? GREENE: All right, let's bring in NPR justice reporter Ryan Lucas. Hey, Ryan. RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Hello there. GREENE: OK, so the $6 billion question - what is in this memo we're talking about? LUCAS: Well, it's still classified so, we don't know exactly what it says. And the interpretation kind of depends on who you ask. The base line of what we have gathered so far is that it basically alleges - Republicans are alleging kind of grave abuses by the FBI and Justice Department of surveillance powers to target the Trump campaign. And the suggestion with this, of course, is that the whole Russia probe is somehow tainted by political bias. Now, Republican lawmakers who have read the memo have presented this as kind of this epic scandal. They say this is something that the American people need to see, and that's one way to make sure that it doesn't happen again. Democrats, on the other hand - they say that the memo is essentially glorified Republican talking points. They say that they cherry-pick information from classified reports and present this sort of misleading case. And they say that it's also part of the broader GOP effort to discredit the FBI, and by extension, of course, Robert Mueller's investigation. Democrats have drawn up their own memo. It's about 10 pages long. It rebuts the Republican one. That came up for a vote as well in the committee. Republicans voted against releasing it. It may come out later, but this is really just a sign of how partisan the House Intelligence Committee's investigation and the Russia issue generally has become. GREENE: Partisan - though President Trump's own Justice Department has said releasing this would be extraordinarily reckless. So what exactly is the case against letting this thing come out? LUCAS: You mentioned the Justice Department. They have been the strongest kind of vocally coming out against this. And the case is that it would basically harm national security. The concern is that by releasing this memo, you could possibly reveal so-called sources and methods of the FBI and the intelligence community more broadly that they use to gather intelligence and conduct investigations. And those are really kind of some of the most closely guarded things that the U.S. intelligence community has. And in normal circumstances, intelligence agencies that own the classified information - in a report, we get to review it first, and this kind of sidesteps that process. GREENE: And so President Trump now gets to have the final decision on whether this thing is released. LUCAS: Yes. There's - this is all being done under this kind of obscure House rule that really hasn't been used before. But basically, the Republican memo will now go to the president. He has five days to raise objections about its release - thumbs-up, thumbs-down. If he gives it a thumbs-down, the House can overrule that. But all indications so far are that the president is in favor of releasing this. INSKEEP: Let's remember what a bizarre political moment this is. We're all discussing a memo that none of us have read and that the public has not read, and even if it were released, we would be unlikely to see the underlying raw intelligence that led to those conclusions. And so as a result, essentially, what we've got here is a political situation where we're all doing a Rorschach test and there's not even an inkblot to look at. (LAUGHTER) GREENE: Nicely put. All right, NPR justice reporter Ryan Lucas. Ryan, we appreciate it. LUCAS: My pleasure. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GREENE: OK, so tonight, President Trump is going to be giving his first State of the Union address, and he's expected to be expressing some level of optimism. INSKEEP: The president is expected to lay out how the U.S. economy is thriving and also try to sell his immigration plans. So what case will he make to lawmakers? GREENE: Well, let's ask NPR congressional reporter Kelsey Snell. Good morning, Kelsey. KELSEY SNELL, BYLINE: Good morning. GREENE: So one of the big jobs of a president giving this kind of address is usually to lay out the agenda for the year. So what are we expecting to hear in terms of what 2018 might look like? SNELL: Well, when I talk to members of Congress, what they want to hear is they want to hear guidance on immigration. They want to know where the president is. They want to hear him say it in this speech. They... GREENE: Because he hasn't been clear on that in - at certain moments. SNELL: Right. And this is something that's pressing and that they have to deal with right now. They need to get this done by March 5. There is a potential that the president could extend the deadline for DACA, and that's something that perhaps he could address in this speech. They also want more details on this plan to shrink the federal workforce that the White House has been kind of talking about. Basically, they need a vision for a policy agenda. The planning coffers are pretty empty once Congress finishes this work on the basic functions of funding the government, so this would be an opportunity for the administration to set an agenda and give Congress some guidance on what they should be doing next. GREENE: OK, so often, we hear it's almost like a laundry list of agenda items in a speech like this, but also, tone - the tone of this speech really does matter here. SNELL: Yeah. We can look back at the State of the Union - sorry, not the actual State of the Union - the address to Congress that the president gave last year, and that was very forward-looking. It was more upbeat, and it was a big change from what we heard during the inauguration, which was that big American carnage speech. And, you know, we want to know if Trump is going to be talking like he - you know, that he's going to be rehashing, that he's going to be talking positively. Is he going to be giving directions to Republicans in Congress about the way they should be talking about the victories of last year? Which is something that we expect him to spend a - quite a lot of time on - is the victories of tax reform and the victories of rolling back regulations. GREENE: What's so interesting about this president - isn't it? - is that sometimes there is this tension between the president who his base wants to hear from. SNELL: Right. GREENE: ...And the president who much of Washington wants to hear from in terms of being, you know, a unifier and a negotiator. SNELL: Yeah. That's what we kind of call Twitter Trump versus on-script or teleprompter Trump. (LAUGHTER) GREENE: Perfect. SNELL: And, you know, is this going to be Trump signaling a base strategy for the 2018 midterm elections? One thing that suggests that maybe that's the case is that his campaign arm sent out a fundraising letter last night, and it asked people to donate in exchange for having their names broadcast during a special livestream of the State of the Union. As you mentioned earlier, the State of the Union is usually a moment for a president to set an agenda and deliver a lofty plan, not a campaign moment. And that's a significant shift from that norm. GREENE: Yeah, really is. What - and what about Democrats? I mean, they'll have the stage tonight, as well. SNELL: They will. Democrats are preparing kind of a blitz of response. There will be five, and all five of them tell us a lot about how Democrats are positioning themselves in the opposition of Trump. GREENE: Five different responses from Democrats. SNELL: Yeah. So the official one will be Joe Kennedy. He's a congressman. And then there will be the Spanish response, which has now become pretty, pretty standard, and that's going to be Virginia Delegate Elizabeth Guzman. And she was part of the huge sweep of Democrats that won in Virginia last year. But from there, all of the addresses get to the left of the center of the Democratic Party. We're talking about Bernie Sanders, Maxine Waters, who will be delivering an address on BET, and former Congresswoman Donna Edwards, who will be delivering an address in the progressive Working Families Party. GREENE: All right, NPR's Kelsey Snell setting up the State of the Union tonight. Kelsey, thanks. SNELL: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GREENE: All right, we're going to turn now to Kenya, where an opposition candidate is still refusing to give up. INSKEEP: Raila Odinga lost two presidential elections. But he says there was fraud, and to protest, he is now holding his own swearing-in ceremony today. Police have been firing tear gas at Odinga's supporters. GREENE: OK, NPR's Eyder Peralta is there in Nairobi and joins us. Hi, Eyder. EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: Hey, David. GREENE: So there's music behind you. There's activity. What exactly is happening today? PERALTA: So today, Raila Odinga has said that he will take the oath of office. And we have thousands of people gathered at the big city park in Nairobi - Independence Park in Nairobi. And just to set up the kind of conflict here, the government has said that if Raila Odinga takes the oath of office, it is treason, and that is punishable by death. GREENE: Wow. PERALTA: And he says he will go along with this. And thousands of his supporters have come here to see it. GREENE: OK, so there have been two elections. The Supreme Court has made its decision. Odinga is not the winner. Why protest? And also, why take this risk if you're him, I mean, if you're being threatened with the death penalty? PERALTA: Well, you know, what people hear and what he has said is that this president is corrupt, that he has stolen multiple elections and that he has stoked ethnic divisions. And they feel marginalized. And, you know, they believe this is the moment that they've been waiting for since the independence of Kenya. They believe that two tribes in this country have dominated the political space and that it is now time for the other, you know, 30-some tribes to take over. So that's - you know, they feel marginalized, and they feel like the elections have been stolen from them. And that's at the heart of this. There's a lot of dissatisfaction with the government, and that's what you see manifested on the streets. But as you said, this oath will not be legal. This is a merely symbolic action by Raila Odinga, the opposition leader. GREENE: So is it just symbolic, or as you listen to people, do you get the feeling that this could go on for some time and really divide the country? PERALTA: I think that's hard to tell because, you know, Kenya has seen lots of political violence in its history, and it's hard to tell where this goes from here. And I don't think the people here - the thousands of people gathered here - know the answer to that. You know, I think they're also very angry what the government has done today. They shut down three of the major television stations. And so they think that they're fighting against a repressive government, they believe. GREENE: All right, a tense moment in Kenya. That's Eyder Peralta reporting for us in Nairobi, where an opposition candidate who has lost several elections, according to the courts, is saying that he is going to take his own oath of office, which the government says would be treason. Eyder, thanks a lot. We appreciate it. PERALTA: Thank you, David. (SOUNDBITE OF EVIL NEEDLE'S "CONSCIOUSNESS") DAVID GREENE, HOST: So the Trump administration has told Congress it does not need to impose new Russia-related sanctions, at least, not right now. The administration says a law passed last year that was meant to punish Moscow for meddling in U.S. elections is having an effect. Here's more from NPR diplomatic correspondent Michele Kelemen. MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: The deadline was Monday for the Trump administration to impose sanctions on anyone doing significant business with Russia's defense and intelligence sectors already blacklisted by the U.S. The State Department says it believes that the threat of additional sanctions - that is, the law itself - has disrupted several billion dollars in Russian defense deals. So officials say the law is already having a deterrent effect, and they see no need to impose sanctions. The Trump administration had other reports due Monday under CAATSA, the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. That includes the so-called oligarchs list, the names of wealthy and influential Russians who are close to President Vladimir Putin. But some experts were unimpressed by the unclassified version, which gives few details other than the names and titles of Putin's advisers. Still, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Ben Cardin, says he appreciates the administration's closed-door briefing on all of this. He's vowing to keep close watch to ensure that the Trump administration follows the law that he helped to draft. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, blasted the Trump administration for not imposing new sanctions and, in his words, letting Russia off the hook yet again. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Now, shortly before the White House announcement on sanctions, we had a talk with Michael Anton. He is a spokesman for the president's National Security Council. And we talked about some of the national security threats facing the United States on the eve of the president's State of the Union speech, which comes tonight. Our conversation turned to China, a growing economic and military power, and I asked how the president thinks of China - as a rival, as a threat, as a partner, something else? MICHAEL ANTON: I think the relationship is perhaps too complicated for there to be one phrase or one word. I mean, the two great examples that I can give you right now are North Korea and trade. So on North Korea, China is essential. Our strategy's to put maximum economic and diplomatic pressure on North Korea. China is North Korea's largest trading partner by far. Without Chinese cooperation, the strategy will be much less effective and possibly won't even work. So on the one hand. Now, on the other hand, we've got the world's largest trade deficit with China. The president has said it's unsustainable, it's got to be addressed. Inevitably as we do things to address that trade deficit and other economic differences we have with China, there will be friction in the relationship. INSKEEP: We can see projections. And, of course, who knows the future, really? But we can see projections that look five years ahead, 10 years ahead. China will have a larger economy, and there's a lot of power that comes with that. ANTON: Well, as you say, they are projections. The president will put in place policies to - I mean, nothing can be assured - but to do everything possible to assure that the United States economy remains the largest. And keep in mind, too, that if and when China ever were to surpass the U.S. economy on an aggregate basis, the per capita differential will still be enormous, and that matters. INSKEEP: Sure. One other thing, Michael Anton. You mentioned North Korea. Having had some time to think about it, has the president or the people around the president concluded that it was productive for the president to go through a number of public arguments or whatever you want to call them with North Korea's Kim Jong Un, talking about who has the bigger nuclear button, for example? ANTON: Our hope all along was that North Korea can rejoin, or, maybe it's better to say join for the first time, the community of nations by seeing the benefits of ending its international isolation. And the only way to fully end its international isolation is to denuclearize, to commit to denuclearize. And one of the things we don't want to fall into and the president definitely doesn't want to fall into is the same trap that the United States has fallen for before, where you negotiate with the North Koreans. They're not really negotiating in good faith. They secretly continue doing what they were doing, pocket the concessions you make at the negotiation, at the negotiating table, announce some kind of breach, and walk away and start the process over again. And that's what it looks like they're trying to do now. And, you know, we'll see. But, you know, in the meantime, the pressure has got to stay on. INSKEEP: How would you rate the risk of an accidental nuclear exchange involving North Korea? ANTON: The United States has got a lot of experience in dealing with these sort of command and control issues, going all the way back to the early Cold War. And this is something that the planners have been thinking about in designing systems for decades. And we are incredibly confident in our system that only the president has the command authority, and this president is absolutely committed to continuing the diplomatic and economic pressure campaign while making clear that the United States will defend itself if necessary. INSKEEP: I'll grant you that there are elaborate systems on the U.S. side because of so much experience, but this is a conflict with another nation. There are two players involved, and nobody has full control of this situation. And you have two leaders at the top who speak in apocalyptic terms on a regular basis. Does that increase the risk of an accidental nuclear exchange? ANTON: I would really - I would absolutely dispute that - on a regular basis. What you've heard the president do on a... INSKEEP: Let's say a number of times. ANTON: ...On a very handful of occasions, including at the United Nations, is make clear that what the United States deterrent, a declaratory policy, is. That's a valuable thing so that your adversaries know that they shouldn't gratuitously provoke or test you, or think they can get away with things that ultimately they can't get away with. It's good for all sides, to be clear on that. Because nobody wants a war on the Korean Peninsula or anywhere else. And, you know, I'm confident that the only way that outcome could come to pass is if it's deliberately chosen by the other side. INSKEEP: Well, you're right that a deterrent, a strong deterrent could actually reduce the risk of some accidental exchange. But do you see a risk of an accidental exchange? ANTON: By making it very clear what U.S. deterrent policy, declaratory policy is, we reduce the risk. And in the meantime, we're going to keep the pressure on North Korea for two fundamental reasons. Keep the resources out of North Korea means it has less - there's just simply less money they can spend on these missiles and on weapons. And the second reason is to bring pressure to bear on the regime and convince it this is not the right path. There's a better path. They have to choose that path. INSKEEP: Michael Anton, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. ANTON: Thank you. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. I got off a plane in Chicago last weekend, and you could see your breath. A flight attendant asked a man in a T-shirt, aren't you cold? To which he replied, I'm from Minnesota. The state is embracing its weather as it prepares to host the Super Bowl. Hoping to show that Minneapolis can be fun even in winter, the city's set up a zip line across the Mississippi River. You, too, can soar across the water, racing 30 miles per hour in the cold. You're listening to MORNING EDITION. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Kelsey Snell, as a reporter who covers Congress, do you get all excited when you have a State of the Union speech coming? KELSEY SNELL, BYLINE: Well, I would say it is an interesting display of... INSKEEP: Interesting... SNELL: Yes. INSKEEP: That's an interesting choice of words. All right. SNELL: ...Of the way that Congress and the president interact, because honestly, we don't get to see this kind of in-person interaction very often. It's when you see an inauguration or addresses like these. INSKEEP: They will virtually all be in the same room. They'll shake hands and so forth - pats on the back in the way in, the way out. Kelsey Snell, by the way, is NPR's congressional reporter, and she's here on the morning of the State of the Union speech. Is Congress - the people in the - that room - are they ready to work with this president? SNELL: Well, they are looking for guidance from this president. The State of the Union is typically a governing document, an opportunity for a president to set an agenda for the year going forward. And Congress right now doesn't have much of a map for the year going forward. They need to get some basic governing, like passing spending bills, done, and they need to do immigration. But after that, there's not a lot on their agenda that they are really planning for, and this speech could help. INSKEEP: Oh, because Republicans tried to repeal Obamacare - didn't work out. They've passed a big tax bill. Not a lot of other big ideas that seem passable are out there. SNELL: Right. There is some conversation about doing an infrastructure bill, but we don't know exactly what that would involve. And that's a difficult and expensive thing to try to do in an election year. INSKEEP: We're talking here about substance, but what about style? How much does that matter with a televised speech like this? SNELL: It says a lot to the people watching it, and it says a lot to the people in the room about the way the president views the year going forward and the year he's just had. And it conveys exactly how the president plans to campaign. This - again, it's an election year, and he's going to be working with many of - particularly, the Republicans in this room to try to keep Republican control of Congress. And the tone does a lot for that. INSKEEP: I'm glad you mention Republican control of Congress. Of course, Democrats'll be on one side of the room, Republicans on the other side. How many of those Republicans are going to be in that room, worried about their jobs? SNELL: Well, a good number of them. We've already seen a huge number of retirements, particularly among House Republicans. And we are going to watch them see whether or not this is a president they want to run with or run against. Now, that's an ongoing conversation they are having with themselves and within their districts. But a big speech like this where the president is speaking directly to the American people can help establish what his relationship is like with those voters in those districts and in those states. INSKEEP: Of course, it is the president's speech, but Democrats get a chance to respond. How will they respond? SNELL: This year, there are five that I count right now - responses. INSKEEP: Five responses. SNELL: Yes. So you have your... INSKEEP: So it's like microblogging for each individual audience - microtargeting, yeah. SNELL: Well, yeah, there is - that is a lot of what's going on here, and it says a lot about how Democrats view their chances to rebut this president and to speak to this president throughout a campaign year. Got the two more traditional responses - one is from a House member, Joe Kennedy, and the other is from a Virginia delegate, Elizabeth Guzman, who won as big 17 - 2017 sweep. She'll be doing the response in Spanish. INSKEEP: Oh, the Virginia Democrats won a lot of elections, so... SNELL: They did. The rest of those speeches, though, are really getting to the left of the center of the party. We're going to see Senator Bernie Sanders doing an address for the progressives, Maxine Waters, who kind of became internet famous in her - a back-and-forth with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin when she was reclaiming her time. She's going to be on BET. And former Congresswoman Donna Edwards will do one for the progressive Working Families. INSKEEP: Kelsey Snell, always a pleasure when you come by. Thanks very much. SNELL: Thank you. INSKEEP: NPR's Kelsey Snell. DAVID GREENE, HOST: All right, Michigan State University is only beginning the process now of recovering from a devastating scandal. This follows last week's sentencing of Larry Nassar, the former Michigan State and U.S. Gymnastics team doctor who sexually assaulted patients for decades. As we're about to hear from Michigan Public Radio's Rick Pluta, alumni, students and donors are watching to see how the school will work to restore its reputation. RICK PLUTA, BYLINE: Many survivors of Larry Nassar's abuse don't just blame him. They also blame MSU officials for failing to act even after multiple complaints. The scandal forced MSU President Lou Anna Simon to step down last week, followed by athletic director Mark Hollis, and there could be more resignations coming. The school's board of trustees has also come under withering attack for actions that seemed to focus more on limiting the school's culpability than on supporting victims. DIANNE BYRUM: My voice should've been louder much sooner. PLUTA: That's MSU trustee Dianne Byrum, who says she's learned from this horrible experience. BYRUM: The situation with Larry Nassar is reflective of the culture that needs to change on campus. PLUTA: The Michigan Legislature is now looking into the rules for impeaching MSU board members, who are selected by voters in statewide elections. It's an environment that has a lot of MSU students and alums struggling to maintain their Spartan pride. Laura Klinger lives in Milwaukee but grew up in East Lansing in the shadow of Michigan State, graduating from there in 2012 with a degree in human biology. Klinger says she owns more than a dozen Spartan sweatshirts, hats and T-shirts. LAURA KLINGER: It's just a big part of my identity. PLUTA: Laura Klinger would travel back to MSU as often as possible to catch basketball and football games. But now Klinger, who works in sexual assault prevention on college campuses, says she's done with MSU sports, and her Spartan gear will sit in a drawer. KLINGER: I'm really horrified with what my alma mater has been complicit in. PLUTA: MSU faces multiple investigations by the state, the U.S. Department of Education and the NCAA. There will likely be hearings before the state Legislature and Congress. There are at least 140 civil lawsuits filed by victims. MSU hired a former federal prosecutor to conduct an internal review, but that was focused largely on protecting the school's legal position. The results of the review have never been made public. At 50,000 students, MSU is the largest public university in Michigan and the ninth largest in the country. Matt Friedman, who advises schools on crisis communications, says MSU needs to remember why it's there. MATT FRIEDMAN: Students are the reason why the institution exists. The institution has a mission to educate the students who are paying to be there and expect to get a full education and also be safe at the same time. PLUTA: Then there's the question of how Michigan State will compensate Nassar's victims. At Penn State, the cost of the Jerry Sandusky scandal could run to a quarter of a billion dollars. Michigan State estimates its legal settlements alone could top a billion dollars. Taxpayer money makes up 20 percent of MSU's budget. There is currently a bill before the Michigan Legislature that would ban the use of taxpayer funds to pay the settlements. Many, like Laura Klinger, are watching for evidence of profound change at the school. KLINGER: I want to see everybody who was even remotely involved in this out. PLUTA: But before that, MSU's reputation will take another hit this week as Larry Nassar faces another group of victims in a final round of sentencing hearings. For NPR News, I'm Rick Pluta in Lansing. (SOUNDBITE OF BAULTA'S "DO WE LIVE TODAY?") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Next month, the United States, Canada and Mexico hold a seventh round of talks aimed at reshaping the North American Free Trade Agreement. As the latest round wrapped up in Canada yesterday, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said there's been progress, but more work is needed. President Trump will almost certainly discuss trade in his State of the Union address tonight. He has yet to take the kinds of drastic actions he promised when campaigning. NPR's Jim Zarroli reports. JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: President Trump told reporters yesterday that U.S. trade relations would be one of the big topics he'll address in tonight's State of the Union address. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The world has taken advantage of us on trade for many years, and as you probably noticed, we're stopping that. We're stopping it cold, and we have to. We have to have reciprocal trade. It's not a one-way deal anymore. ZARROLI: But it remains to be seen what new policies, if any, he will unveil. The president came to office promising major changes in trade policy. He called NAFTA maybe the worst trade deal ever signed anywhere. He said he was willing to impose sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports, and he promised to label China a trade manipulator. But Celeste Drake, trade policy specialist at the AFL-CIO, says Trump has yet to follow through on most of his threats. CELESTE DRAKE: Certainly the president's rhetoric during the campaign sounded to a lot of folks, you know, very isolationist and very protectionist. We haven't seen that. ZARROLI: Trump's most significant move was to pull the United States out of the nearly completed trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, although the president said last week he might reconsider the decision. For the most part, however, his moves have been measured. His administration has initiated investigations into whether steel and aluminum imports threaten national security. And last week, tariffs were imposed on imports of solar panels and washing machines. DAN IKENSON: I think he's beginning to learn that some of the measures that he would have impulsively instituted have - carry some pretty significant costs. ZARROLI: Dan Ikenson of the Cato Institute says Trump has had to realize that many of the actions he's threatened would have unintended consequences. IKENSON: He's learning - he's hearing from other advisers that, look, you can do this; you can pull out of NAFTA, but it's going to kill our agricultural sector, and it's going to kill our auto sector because we rely on these integrated supply chains in order to produce - to compete with Asians and Europeans. ZARROLI: Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to import more than it exports. Lori Wallach heads Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. LORI WALLACH: Hundreds of jobs have been off - outsourced. The trade deficit with Mexico and with Canada and with China is up. ZARROLI: For that reason, Wallach says, Trump will be under some pressure tonight to deliver something for his base. WALLACH: This State of the Union is a little bit of a hot seat for Trump on trade. ZARROLI: A lot of people voted for Trump because of his larger message - that global trade was somehow rigged against the United States - and they will be watching tonight to see whether he can deliver on his promises. Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York. (SOUNDBITE OF KIASMOS' "PAUSED") DAVID GREENE, HOST: Major League Baseball is phasing out a controversial logo. For years, the Cleveland Indians have used a cartoon mascot known as Chief Wahoo. Protesters have called for the team to scrap it. This was a demonstration filmed last year by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. (SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST) UNIDENTIFIED MAN: One hundred years-plus - change the name of your baseball team, and change the logo. GREENE: Now, the team will still be known as the Indians, but next year, no Chief Wahoo. From WCPN ideastream, David C. Barnett reports. DAVID C. BARNETT, BYLINE: The image in question depicts a big-toothed, grinning caricature of a Native American. The Cleveland Indians have sported it since the 1940s. Standing at the bar of the Wild Eagle Saloon in downtown Cleveland, Cody Kinn says Chief Wahoo has always been a part of his life. CODY KINN: I grew up drawing him an art class. I mean, there's much more worse mascots out there. I mean, you got the Redskins. Their mascot's way worse than Chief Wahoo. BARNETT: The Washington Redskins have also seen protests, as have the Atlanta Braves. At the nearby Winking Lizard saloon, Benita Meiser thinks there is nothing wrong with the Cleveland logo. She proudly wears her Wahoo earrings, jackets, and T-shirts without a second thought. BENITA MEISER: It was just - always been our symbol, just like bears, cats, dogs, anything else. I never really took it any other way. BARNETT: But many did. They found it offensive and racist. Protesters have regularly boycotted Chief Wahoo on opening day. Cleveland.com sportswriter Bud Shaw says he's come out against the logo ever since 1991. BUD SHAW: People swear that they don't feel it's inappropriate or tone-deaf toward Native Americans. They feel that it's something they grew up with - their - in their childhood, and they think it's a cartoon. BARNETT: Shaw says Monday's announcement by Major League Baseball was just the other shoe dropping after Commissioner Rob Manfred announced last spring that he was working with Indians management to phase out Chief Wahoo. The image will be gone from the field, but not necessarily from the gift shop, and fans can certainly still sport their Wahoo paraphernalia. Again, Bud Shaw. SHAW: Listen, I have Indians fans in my neighborhood that feel very strongly about this, that they're not racist, they shouldn't be made to feel as if they are, that this is just something that's part of their history. BARNETT: But a new chapter of that history is set to begin on opening day in 2019. For NPR News, I'm David C. Barnett in Cleveland. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Here's what happened to the FBI in the course of a single day. The bureau's No. 2 official said he's leaving; he'd been attacked by President Trump. A House committee voted to release a memo accusing the bureau of mishandling its Russia investigation. They voted to release that despite Justice Department warnings it would be reckless. Democrats contend Republicans, committed to examine Russian election interference, are now turning their attention on the FBI. NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas has been covering all this. He's in our studios. Ryan, good morning. RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Good morning. INSKEEP: So Andrew McCabe, the No. 2 official who's leaving - first, who is he? LUCAS: Well, McCabe is a long-time FBI guy. He joined the bureau in 1996, worked mob cases in New York, turned his attention to counterterrorism after 9/11, rose up through the ranks over the years and became deputy director in January of 2016. He was appointed to the position by then-Director James Comey. INSKEEP: Yeah. LUCAS: You may remember him best from - after Comey was fired, McCabe stepped in as acting director for a brief period of time. But in his job as the No. 2 official - as deputy director - he really has his - a kind of hands-on role at the bureau overseeing domestic investigations and international investigations. Of course, the two biggest investigations that we've been talking about in the past two years would be Hillary Clinton's email server... INSKEEP: Right. LUCAS: ...And, of course, the Russia investigation. And it's his role in those investigations that have really kind of attracted the ire of the president and his Republican allies. INSKEEP: What specifically bothered the president about McCabe? LUCAS: Well, there are a number of things. One, McCabe - his wife ran for a Virginia state Senate seat in 2015. This was before McCabe was deputy director. But she received campaign donations - hundreds of thousands of dollars of them - from an organization linked to Terry McAuliffe, who's a... INSKEEP: Democratic governor, a former governor of Virginia. LUCAS: And close friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton. INSKEEP: OK. LUCAS: So that's one thing that the president pointed to - and his Republican allies - alleging that McCabe somehow could be politically influenced, politically biased against the president because of his wife's ties. Now, McCabe had cleared all of this with the FBI's ethics folks beforehand. It was all aboveboard. But it has certainly been used as a way to taint McCabe's judgment in terms of his handling of both the Clinton email investigation and the Russia... INSKEEP: Is there something a little more personal than that for the president of the United States? LUCAS: Well, all of this ties back into the FBI's handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe and the Russia investigation. This is all part of what Democrats would say would be a broader campaign to undermine the credibility of the FBI and the special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference as a way to discredit and kind of raise questions about any conclusions that they may come to. INSKEEP: And we're going to talk about other parts of what is perceived as a campaign. But just to wrap up McCabe, he left yesterday. Wasn't he supposed to retire pretty soon anyhow? LUCAS: He was - we have reported since December that he was expected to retire early this year. He would likely take accrued time, leave the bureau a bit early and then use that accrued time to remain on the payroll until he's eligible for his full retirement benefits. That is basically what has happened here. INSKEEP: But was he pushed out? LUCAS: Well, as I said, this has been in the works for quite some time. He has certainly been under a lot of pressure. And, of course, Trump's FBI director, Christopher Wray, has been under a lot of pressure to make changes at the senior leadership. INSKEEP: OK. One of the other big deals here - this memo. It was overseen by Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Very briefly, what's it say, supposedly? LUCAS: Well, it alleges these kind of sweeping surveillance abuses by the FBI in the early days of the Russia investigation. We don't know exactly what it says yet because it remains classified. The committee voted to have it released. It was a straight party-line vote. Democrats are not in favor of this. Democrats have prepared their own memo to rebut the Republican document. That was not voted to be released. Republicans shot that option down. That may come back up later. But Democrats would say that this is part of the Republican campaign to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller. Republicans say that this documents these alleged abuses, and the American public needs to know about it. INSKEEP: OK, let's be clear then on what's going to happen next. It's not released yet even though they voted to do it. The president gets to weigh in. The president has, at some point, expressed approval of the idea of releasing the memo, but his own Justice Department says that would be reckless. Why are they saying it'd be reckless? LUCAS: Well, the Justice Department and parts of the intelligence community worry about the potential exposure of sources and methods in this classified document. And because they have not had a chance to review it, they don't know exactly what's in it. But the concern is that those sources and methods could be exposed, which could damage national security and ongoing investigations, as well. INSKEEP: OK. This story's going to go on and on, and Ryan Lucas'll be here to cover it. Ryan, thanks very much. LUCAS: Thank you. INSKEEP: He's NPR justice correspondent. DAVID GREENE, HOST: OK, so as you heard, a lot's swirling here as President Trump is getting ready to deliver his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress tonight. He'll be giving his assessment of the economy, also national security. And this seemed like a good time to look at the state of something else - our politics. Here's NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson. MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: If someone were delivering a speech to the American people about the state of our politics in 2018, they might begin by saying, ladies and gentlemen, the state of our politics is tribal. PETE WEHNER: There's an attitude within the American people and within our political institutions that it's my team, right or wrong. LIASSON: That's Pete Wehner, former White House aide to George W. Bush. WEHNER: People are lining up with their political tribe above virtually any other principle. LIASSON: Here's an example of what Wehner's talking about. In a Quinnipiac poll taken last week just after news reports that President Trump's lawyer had paid a porn star to keep quiet about an alleged extramarital affair, 89 percent of Republicans said it's important that a president be loyal to their spouse. Seventy-two percent of Republicans said President Trump is a good role model for children. Tribalism is related to another problem in American politics - a blurring of the lines between opinion and fact, what the RAND Corporation in a recent study called truth decay - whether it's liberals rejecting the safety of vaccines, conservatives rejecting evidence of Barack Obama's birth certificate or conspiracy theories embraced at the highest levels of government. Here's retiring Republican Senator Jeff Flake on the floor of the Senate earlier this month. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JEFF FLAKE: 2017 was a year which saw the truth - objective, empirical, evidence-based truth - more battered and abused than at any time in the history of our country at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government. LIASSON: Flake was referring to President Trump's hundreds of inaccurate statements ranging from the trivial - that he's signed more legislation than any other president in history - to the consequential - that millions of illegal immigrants voted for his opponent. If Democrats and Republicans can't agree on whether the planet is getting warmer or whether inner-city crime is going down, it's impossible to have a debate about solutions. And that's why the state of our politics - in Washington, at least - is also dysfunctional. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JOHN KENNEDY: Our country was founded by geniuses, but it's being run by idiots. LIASSON: That's Louisiana Senator John Kennedy exasperated that Congress allowed one government shutdown and may be careening toward another. Democrats and Republicans in Washington are having trouble avoiding another shutdown because the state of our politics is mistrustful. Former Democratic White House aide Bill Galston cites the annual Edelman worldwide trust survey. BILL GALSTON: What it showed is a significant drop in trust among the general public. But more notable than that was a total collapse of trust among the informed public - people who have a college education and who actually pay attention to the news. LIASSON: Trust in what? GALSTON: Trust in everything - down, down, down. And nowhere has trust and confidence fallen farther than in government. LIASSON: Galston says the mistrust is apocalyptic. GALSTON: The percentage of Republicans who view Democrats as a threat to the republic and vice versa has soared in recent years and now exceeds a majority in both tribes. LIASSON: Many Republicans felt that way about Barack Obama. Many Democrats feel that way about Donald Trump. And higher percentages of voters say they'd be disappointed if a child of theirs married someone of the opposite party. So that's the bad news about the state of our politics. But there's good news, too, because the state of our politics in 2018 is engaged - very engaged. SAYU BHOJWANI: I'm Sayu Bhojwani, and I'm the founder and president of New American Leaders, an organization that trains first- and second-generation Americans to run for local and state office. LIASSON: Not only are there record numbers of candidates from immigrant communities running for office - mostly Democrats, but Republicans and independents, too - there are double the number of women running compared to 2016. Bhojwani says some of this new engagement was inspired by Donald Trump, whether his example is positive or negative. BHOJWANI: The first and most obvious thing is that we see that it's possible for anyone to run for office, regardless of qualification. LIASSON: Not only are a record number of people running, but so far this year, a record number of people are voting, and that's a big change. BHOJWANI: We were complacent, right? A lot of people were complacent about whether their vote would matter or not. And nobody who is serious about politics or has become newly serious about politics is taking things for granted. LIASSON: Whether you're a woman or from an immigrant community running for the first time or a white, working-class Trump supporter who voted for the first time two years ago, this renewed sense of civic responsibility is the first step to making the state of our politics less broken. Mara Liasson, NPR News, Washington. (SOUNDBITE OF AHMAD JAMAL'S "LAMENT") DAVID GREENE, HOST: On this morning of the State of the Union address, we are listening to voices from across the political spectrum, and that includes Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, also a member of the Democratic leadership. I asked Senator Sanders what he is looking for from President Trump tonight. BERNIE SANDERS: What I would most like to see - I don't think we're going to get it. But what I would like to see is this president of the United States come forward and say, you know what? I apologize. I apologize for trying to divide our nation up based on where we were born or the color of our skin or our sexual orientation or our gender. And then maybe, what he can do is also read some of the campaign promises that he made to the American people when he was running for president. And he talked then about providing health care to, quote, unquote, "everybody." Maybe he can tell us how in fact he is going to lead the United States to join every other major country on earth and guarantee health care to all people. GREENE: This is going to be a year where he's going to need Democrats more than he did in the first year. Do you see places where Democrats and you can work across the aisle with him to pass a major legislation, maybe continuing the debate over health care and moving on to other issues? SANDERS: Well, he campaigned, appropriately enough, by the way, on the need to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. A couple of years ago, I proposed a trillion-dollar effort, which people thought was just so outlandish. But now that is kind of what many people are talking about. That's what he is talking about. If he is serious about in fact rebuilding, helping to rebuild our roads, and our bridges and our water systems, our wastewater plants, airports, et cetera, that is an area that people should be able to work together because everybody in Congress - everybody in America - knows our infrastructure is in terrible shape. GREENE: Senator, I'm struck that the first thing you said when I asked you about the speech, you know, is if you were going to get an apology from the president. You talked about, it's been an unusual year in your mind. Is there a risk for Democrats and critics of the president like yourself of being sort of people who are just no to Trump, are just ranting about this president and not articulating some sort of positive message that's an alternative? SANDERS: Yes. I think it's absolutely imperative that we do more than just talk about Trump day after day. And some of us have been trying to do that. Well, I have to tell you it's sometimes hard to get that stuff out through the media. But we need a positive, progressive agenda which speaks to the needs of working families and the middle class. So I happen to think that we need to move toward a Medicare-for-all, single-payer program. I think we need to raise the minimum wage to a living wage - 15 bucks an hour, and I'm happy to see communities all over this country are moving in that direction. I think public colleges and universities should be tuition-free. We need pay equity for women. We need to make sure that women can continue to control their own bodies. All of those issues have got to be in the forefront of what Democrats and progressives are fighting for. GREENE: Well, and you built a movement on many of these issues. But there's also a reality that goes back in U.S. history that when an economy is doing well, deserved or not, the current president of the United States often gets credit for it. Does Trump deserve some credit for the economy doing well right now? SANDERS: And that's a good question, but I think the same question would be asked to leaders in almost every major industrialized - credit - I think the issue right now is the world's economy is rebounding from the Great Recession of 2008, 2009. But what I worry about is, I don't want to see all of the benefits, or virtually all of the benefits, go to the top 1 percent. There are millions of people in this country who are still working two or three jobs, people who are working 29 hours a week and are not getting the benefits they need. More people lack health insurance today than when Trump first came into office. Student debt crisis is enormous - the young people who are graduating college. Those are the issues that we have got to focus on. GREENE: Your own son raised some speculation with a tweet recently, suggesting that you might be hoping to give a speech like the one Trump is giving maybe in 2021. Are you contemplating that? SANDERS: Right now, what I'm contemplating is to work as hard as I can in 2018 to elect a Democratic Congress and a Democratic Senate and to address the major issues facing the people of my state and the people of this country. That's what I'm focusing on right now, and don't let anybody tell you anything different. GREENE: And here I thought you were going to break some news right here, Senator Sanders. SANDERS: (Laughter). GREENE: Nice talking to you, as always. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. SANDERS: Thank you. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: German automakers face another scandal over diesel-powered vehicles. You may recall that Volkswagen admitted faking pollution tests to make its cars seem cleaner. Now we know that a research institute founded by three big German automakers tested diesel pollution on live subjects. The subjects were 25 human volunteers and 10 monkeys. NPR's Sonari Glinton reports. SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Volkswagen, BMW and Daimler - that's the owner of Mercedes-Benz - all issued statements that either condemn or distance themselves from studies done on their behalf by an organization called the European Research Group on Environment and Health in the Transport Sector. Now, the study's intended goal was to prove that the then-new diesel technology was clean. The monkeys watched cartoons while inhaling fumes from a Volkswagen Beetle, and the human subjects were in a separate group where they were exposed to the pollutant nitrogen dioxide. Art Caplan is head of ethics at New York University's medical school. He says these studies raise eyebrows because of Germany's history of testing on live subjects during World War II. ART CAPLAN: We expect the highest standards to be followed there because of that history. History counts. It makes a difference to our assessment of the morality of what's being done. GLINTON: An interesting wrinkle in this story is that the Volkswagen being tested was rigged to appear cleaner than it was. Caplan says there are cases where testing on human and primate subjects may be necessary, but... CAPLAN: You better be following the highest possible standards. You better address the question accurately. And in the case of humans, you better have a very solid informed consent. You better be ready to handle any adverse outcomes that do occur. GLINTON: A statement by Daimler is representative of those from the other companies. It says the research contradicts their values and ethical principles. It goes on to say that they are appalled by the extent of the studies and their implementation and condemns the experiments in the strongest terms. All three companies plus the German government say they're investigating how these studies were allowed in the first place. Sonari Glinton, NPR News. (SOUNDBITE OF FEVERKIN'S "CALENDAR PROJECT: OCTOBER") DAVID GREENE, HOST: Good morning. I'm David Greene. How many plumbers does it take to fix a toilet? That was a question worth asking on a flight from Oslo to Munich the other day. There were reportedly 84 plumbers on board, all together on a business trip, when the toilets malfunctioned. The plane turned back to Oslo to have them fixed. The head of the plumbing company said he would've loved to have helped, but he just wasn't about to send one of his plumbers outside the plane at 33,000 feet. You're listening to MORNING EDITION. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: How much progress is the United States making in the war in Afghanistan? It could be hard to tell. The Pentagon is not releasing some basic facts about the war, like the number of Afghans trained for military service or the number of Afghans killed in combat. And that is a concern for our next guest. John Sopko is the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, and he's come by our studios. Good morning, sir. JOHN SOPKO: Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here. INSKEEP: Why does it matter that we can't get basic facts? SOPKO: Well, it's hard to make determination of how good a job we're doing because if the Afghan military's not fighting that well, and there are not that many of them, we can't determine fraud, waste and abuse in Afghanistan. INSKEEP: Are you saying that even you are having trouble getting information out of the Pentagon? SOPKO: We're having trouble getting information, although we can get classified information. It's just that we cannot share it with the American people who ultimately are paying for the Afghan military, the Afghan police, their salaries, weapons, et cetera. INSKEEP: But I can see the argument from the Pentagon's point of view here. Why should we be putting out in public any information at all? The enemy gets it. SOPKO: Well, I think the enemy knows what districts they control. The enemy knows what the situation is. The Afghan military knows what the situation is. The only people who don't know what's going on are the people who are paying for it, and that's the American taxpayer. INSKEEP: Now, there are some numbers, as I understand it, that are out there. We know the number of airstrikes - U.S. airstrikes - is up - right? - and that the number of U.S. troops has also gone up. SOPKO: That's correct. That's correct. INSKEEP: ...Which is part of a tweak to the strategy by the Trump administration. Are you able to gather enough information to say in public whether it seems like the strategy's working? SOPKO: I think it's too early to tell, and I don't think anybody expected there'd be a turnaround so quickly. But again, you know, four times a year, I'm supposed to report on the status of what is going on and how good a job we're doing. We need indicators of that such as you mentioned - the number of Afghans we're paying their salaries for, how close that is to their goal, the attrition, the number of districts. And that's the information we can no longer provide the American people. INSKEEP: Now, there is one number that we now know, and you can find it at npr.org. Our colleague Merrit Kennedy reports that NPR did request and obtain a number - the number of districts in Afghanistan that the government controls. And we've got a chart here showing that number's been going down steadily. A couple of years ago, the government controlled 72 percent of districts, and it's gone down to 56 percent of districts. So it's only a little more than half of the country is firmly under the control of the government. When you return to Afghanistan, as I know you do several times a year, do you feel like you're in the middle of a winning effort? SOPKO: No. I must say that. I've been doing this now for almost six years, and it's a stalemate at best. So I don't have that feeling. And I think a lot of Afghans don't have that feeling. And what - when you needlessly conceal information from people, I think people are concerned and get suspicious that maybe it's worse than we are being told. And I can't comment, obviously, because it's classified. But that is the problem when you overclassify and needlessly classify information. It leads to suspicion. Now, just so the public knows, the information that's being withheld the last three months is information that we have reported on, sometimes going back to 10 years. So for 10 years, this information was OK to tell the American people, the American taxpayer. But for some reason, the last two quarters - the last three months - we have been unable to report it to the American people. INSKEEP: And has the Pentagon given you any specific explanation? SOPKO: No explanation at all. INSKEEP: Mr. Sopko, thanks very much for coming by. I really appreciate it. SOPKO: It is a pleasure. INSKEEP: John Sopko is the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. DAVID GREENE, HOST: All right. We're going to turn now to Kenya, where an opposition candidate is still refusing to give up. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Raila Odinga lost two presidential elections, but he says there was fraud. And to protest, he is now holding his own swearing-in ceremony today. Police have been firing tear gas at Odinga's supporters. GREENE: OK. NPR's Eyder Peralta is there in Nairobi and joins us. Hi, Eyder. EYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: Hey, David. GREENE: So there's music behind you. There's activity. What exactly is happening today? PERALTA: So today, Raila Odinga has said that he will take the oath of office. And we have thousands of people gathered at the big city park in Nairobi - Independence Park in Nairobi. And just to set up the kind of conflict here, the government has said that if Raila Odinga takes the oath of office, it is treason, and that is punishable by death. GREENE: Wow. PERALTA: And he says he will go along with this, and thousands of his supporters have come here to see it. GREENE: OK. So there have been two elections. The Supreme Court has made its decision. Odinga is not the winner. Why protest? And also, why take this risk if you're him? I mean, if you're being threatened with the death penalty? PERALTA: Well, you know, what people here and what he has said is that this president is corrupt, that he has stolen multiple elections, and that he has stoked ethnic divisions. And they feel marginalized, and, you know, they believe this is the moment that they've been waiting for since the independence of Kenya. They believe that two tribes in this country have dominated the political space and that it is now time for the other, you know, 30-some tribes to take over. So that's - you know, they feel marginalized, and they feel like the elections have been stolen from them, and that's at the heart of this. There's a lot of dissatisfaction with the government, and that's what you see manifested on the streets. But, as you said, this oath will not be legal. This is a merely symbolic action by Raila Odinga, the opposition leader. GREENE: So is it just symbolic, or, as you listen to people, do you get the feeling that this could go on for some time and really divide the country? PERALTA: I think that's hard to tell because, you know, Kenya has seen lots of political violence in its history, and it's hard to tell where this goes from here. And I don't think the people here, the thousands of people gathered here, know the answer to that. You know, I think they're also very angry with what the government has done. Today they shut down three of the major television stations. And so they think that they're fighting against repressive government, they believe. GREENE: All right, a tense moment in Kenya. That's Eyder Peralta reporting for us in Nairobi, where an opposition candidate who has lost several elections, according to the courts, is saying that he is going to take his own oath of office, which the government says would be treason. Eyder, thanks a lot. We appreciate it. PERALTA: Thank you, David. (SOUNDBITE OF THE SHAOLIN AFRONAUTS' "LOS ANGELES") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Take a number. That's the name of our occasional exploration of the world done by picking one revealing number. And here's a number for today, 70. The medical costs for homeless patients at a Chicago hospital can be 70 times higher than for other patients. Not 17. Seventy times higher. Many people have chronic medical problems, but homeless patients often end up in the emergency room simply because they want to get off the street. So one hospital is trying to treat those patients not with medicine, but by paying their rent. WBEZ's Miles Bryan reports. MILES BRYAN, BYLINE: Glenn Baker takes a lot of pride in his one-bedroom apartment on Chicago's South Side. GLENN BAKER: This is my living room, which is the most biggest part of the apartment. Over here to my right... BRYAN: Baker has pictures of his favorite superheroes hanging on the walls, and a note above the sink reminding visitors to do their dishes. He also has a scrappy yellow kitten named Simba. BAKER: It's gotten to when I come home, he lets me know when he's home. He runs and he sits at the front door, and... BRYAN: Can't have a cat in the emergency room, can you? BAKER: (Laughter) No. No, actually, I can't. BRYAN: Baker's housing has been paid for by the University of Illinois Hospital and a federal housing grant since May of 2016. He was one of 26 homeless patients often called ER super users the hospital placed in the housing. Baker, who suffers from asthma and high blood pressure among other things, says his health has gotten much better since he got a place to live. BAKER: My health maybe have improved a whole 90, 95 more percent because I don't have to worry about when it's cold outside. STEPHEN BROWN: Housing is health, right? That's kind of what we say around here now. BRYAN: Stephen Brown runs the housing project at the hospital. He says fully half of the hospital's ER super users are homeless. Just one night in the hospital can run three grand. Now the hospital pays a thousand bucks a month to house them. Brown says those in the hospital's pilot housing project have seen their health improve. And after crunching the numbers, monthly medical costs for their care are down significantly. BROWN: If we went to every hospital and said we want you to pay for the housing for 10 chronically homeless individuals, that would cost them about $120,000 a year. In doing so we would reduce the number of chronically homeless here by a third. That's major impact. BRYAN: And that's what's starting to happen. A number of other hospitals here are launching similar programs to house homeless patients. Even the city is putting money towards the idea. And Chicago isn't alone. Robert Friant is with the Corporation for Supportive Housing, a national nonprofit organization that advises hospitals on how to set up this kind of housing program. ROBERT FRIANT: Almost all of the states where we're active, and we're active in 48 states, health systems are now investing in some way so that they can help people who need rental assistance. BRYAN: Friant points to big investments by hospitals in Portland, Ore., and Orlando. His group estimates that nationwide hospitals have already invested about a hundred-million dollars in housing. Friant says for hospitals it's a win-win benefiting both patient health and saving money. FRIANT: When you look at the studies across the board, you're looking at about a 50 percent drop in emergency room use. That's not a minor savings. That's a huge savings for these hospital systems. BRYAN: Glenn Baker says even though he feels happier and healthier being out of the ER and in his own apartment, he does miss his nurse friends. He says he's taken the 45-minute bus ride to visit the emergency room a few times just to say hi. Still, Baker says his favorite part about visiting the ER now is going home. For NPR News, I'm Miles Bryan in Chicago. DAVID GREENE, HOST: A State of the Union address is often jampacked with agenda items, but here is something the White House says we will not hear tonight from President Trump - a decision on whether to release a classified memo. A Republican drafted this memo. Republicans along party lines in committee voted yesterday to release this memo, and Republicans have been highlighting it. It asserts that the FBI abused its surveillance powers to monitor a Trump campaign official while it was investigating Russian election interference. Now, President Trump will have to decide whether or not to release this memo. Its author, Republican Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, thinks it should be public. The committee's ranking Democrat, Adam Schiff of California, thinks releasing it would be a mistake. And Congressman Schiff joins us this morning. Congressman, welcome back. ADAM SCHIFF: Thank you. It's great to be with you. GREENE: It's good to have you. So why do you think this memo should not be made public? Why shouldn't the public see this? SCHIFF: Well, first of all, the memo very much distorts the underlying materials. And as the Department of Justice made clear in a letter last week, the chairman of our committee never even bothered to read the underlying materials. So it mischaracterizes the information that it won't make public. So the public is not going to be able to see how it distorts the facts. But more than that, it's not been vetted at all with the Department of Justice or the FBI to make sure that it doesn't reveal sources or methods or compromise the investigation in any way. That's the normal practice if you ever consider declassifying information. I made a motion prior to its release, or prior to the order of its release to ask the Department of Justice and FBI to come in and brief all the members of Congress on a classified basis so it could set out its concern over the accuracy or inaccuracy of the memo or any consequences that could flow from disclosure. And the majority voted not to have them come in, in fact, voted not to even read the underlying materials. And that ought to tell you all you need to know about the real motivation here. GREENE: Well, I want to ask you about some of the facts. I mean, you say we obviously don't know a lot, but one of the assertions is that the FBI and Justice Department broke the law on surveillance and wiretapped a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. I mean, can you say with certainty that that did not happen? SCHIFF: I can't comment at this point until the memo is made public on what it discusses because it's still classified, or what the underlying materials have to say. I can tell you that I've read the underlying materials. Apparently there were only two of us that have, two members of the committee. And I find the memo to be deeply misleading. We wrote for the committee a memo that sets out the accurate facts and their proper context. And, of course, not surprisingly, when we took this up the last night and the majority said that in the interest of full transparency they thought the public should see this, we moved to make our own memoranda public at the same time, and they voted that down. GREENE: So you have your own memo. What does your own memo say? SCHIFF: The memo that we wrote points out all the fallacies in what the majority put out and would now make public. We think it's regrettable that we need to go that step, but if they're going to paint a misleading picture for the country, we think it's necessary for the country to have the accurate information. But we are vetting our memo with the Department of Justice and the FBI. We want to make sure that they redact anything that they think could affect or interfere with the investigation. But the majority apparently doesn't want the country to see that, at least not until they can get this misleading document out the door. GREENE: Although, if there are competing memos, I mean, you've said that the Republican memo about what the FBI did or didn't do was partisan spin. Wouldn't yours be the same thing? SCHIFF: Well, we've actually set out the facts from the underlying materials, and we've annotated it to show where it came from the underlying materials in an effort to at least paint an accurate portrait of what's taken place. And you could certainly say, well, isn't the Democratic memo going to be just as skewed as the Republican memo? That's not always the case. There are times when one party gets it right. The problem is the public won't get to see the underlying materials, won't get to make that judgment. But that's the whole point of this GOP exercise. It's the politicization of intelligence to protect the president, to circle the wagons around the White House as Bob Mueller's investigation gets closer and closer to the president. It's a continuation, really, of what we saw at the beginning of the investigation when our chairman went to the White House claiming that he had obtained secret documents showing corruption of the Obama administration, an illegal unmasking a conspiracy, only to learn a couple days later that in fact the materials he went to present to the White House he in fact got from the White House and showed no such thing. GREENE: I don't mean to interrupt you. I just don't want to run out of time. Let me just ask you a bottom line question. I mean, are you worried that your party's resistance to releasing this memo just feeds this narrative that Democrats are actually trying to hide something here? SCHIFF: No. I mean, at this point the memo has been ordered by the majority to be released. The only thing that's being withheld are the minority views. So ironically the released memo campaign has boomeranged, and it's now the majority that is trying to keep information from the public. GREENE: OK. That is Adam Schiff, Democrat of California and the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Congressman, thanks, as always. SCHIFF: Thank you. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: OK. So we were talking with a White House official yesterday, and he says, before you ask me about the State of the Union speech, I don't know what's in the State of the Union speech. It can be hard to look ahead to the speech tonight. As with any speech by any president, whatever we learn in advance is likely to be only what the administration wants to publicize. But we can look back and learn from speeches President Trump has given before. NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith has seen a lot of presidential speeches in the past year, and she found some common themes. TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: On the surface, President Trump's speech to Congress last year, carefully crafted and read from a teleprompter, couldn't be more different from the divisive stem-winder he delivered in Alabama in September in support of former Senator Luther Strange. But get past the riff about football players kneeling during the national anthem, and there is surprising consistency. Same goes for last Friday's sober speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the message of the American carnage Trump delivered at his inauguration. What follows is the art of a Trump speech. First of all, most speeches find a way to mention his 2016 victory. Take the one in Alabama. (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And I decided, very, I think, intelligently, to campaign in the states that you have to win for the Electoral College victory that you need. You know, it's very simple, very simple. KEITH: In his address to Congress last year, it was wrapped in a certain grandiosity. But the reference to Trump's election victory was unmistakably there. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) TRUMP: The chorus became an earthquake, and the people turned out by the tens of millions, and they were all united by one very simple but crucial demand - that America must put its own citizens first. KEITH: Which leads to the second consistent Trump-speech refrain - America and Americans first. (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) TRUMP: We will follow two simple rules - buy American and hire American. KEITH: This was Trump speaking at his inauguration. (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) TRUMP: We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world. But we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first. KEITH: And here he is, almost a year later, last week in Davos. (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) TRUMP: I will always put America first just like the leaders of other countries should put their country first, also. But America First does not mean America alone. KEITH: Another element of Trump's speeches is optimism, even in his speeches that are remembered for their darkness. (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) TRUMP: And the crime, and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed... KEITH: Like the inaugural address. (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) TRUMP: This American carnage stops right here and stops right now. (CHEERING) KEITH: There's also often a nod to optimism and unity. (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) TRUMP: We are one nation, and their pain is our pain, their dreams are our dreams, and their success will be our success. KEITH: The emphasis varies, but the underlying message often does not. The language was similar in September at the rally in Alabama as President Trump addressed the recent hurricanes. (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) TRUMP: When one part of America hurts, we all hurt. We grieve over all that's been lost, but we're also inspired by the incredible strength and spirit and resilience of our people. KEITH: But Trump consistently blends talk of unity and optimism with the language of division - us against them, including immigrants. (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) TRUMP: We cannot allow our nation to become a sanctuary for extremists. KEITH: ...Democrats... (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) TRUMP: They lost the election, and they didn't know what happened. KEITH: ...The press... (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) TRUMP: Fake media, fake news. KEITH: ...The establishment... (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) TRUMP: The establishment protected itself but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. KEITH: ...And even professional football players. (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH) TRUMP: ...Because that's a total disrespect of our heritage. That's a total disrespect of everything that we stand for, OK? KEITH: And one last thing you'll find in just about every Trump speech, and we've been told to expect tonight - an exuberant touting of the successes of the Trump presidency, usually with a dash of Trumpean (ph) hyperbole. Tamara Keith, NPR News, the White House. (SOUNDBITE OF EVIL NEEDLE'S "CONSCIOUSNESS") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Three immensely wealthy companies, each with an immensely famous CEO, say they're joining together to attack health care costs. Amazon made this announcement with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan. Together, those companies will form a venture intended to improve health care for their U.S. employees by doing - what? Well, that's the part we're going to try to puzzle out with the curator of NPR's shot - Scott - Shots blog, Scott Hensley, who's here. Hi there, Scott. SCOTT HENSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve. INSKEEP: OK, so what is it these companies aspire to accomplish? HENSLEY: They have said as their goals, they want to simplify health care for their employees, make it more transparent. They want to get more value. They want to reduce costs. INSKEEP: And these are guys with big names - Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon - big-time executives. HENSLEY: Three of the most charismatic, well-known executives in the country - and I think what they've said together - they also lead companies that have a lot of consumer experience, a lot of consumer expertise - Berkshire Hathaway with Geico, for instance. Amazon, everybody knows - and then JPMorgan, one of the biggest consumer-focused banks in the world. So I think what they are going to do is bring to bear that kind of expertise through technology to help their employees shop more smartly for health care. That would be the easiest thing for them to do. Think of how you purchase things on Amazon. INSKEEP: OK. That sounds like laudable goals by people with lots of experience. But how exactly are they going to make it easier to shop for health care and bring down costs? HENSLEY: We don't know. I emailed Amazon this morning, and in less time than it took to get an Amazon package, I got a response that said, we will let the press release speak for itself. And the press release really doesn't say much more than I said for you. INSKEEP: Doesn't even the press release say, we don't know what we're going to do? We just know we're... HENSLEY: Pretty much. INSKEEP: ...Dissatisfied with the current status of things. HENSLEY: They say there is room for companies with the shared goal and the best talent to try and crack this problem. And so I think - and they emphasize technology, so they do say that. So I could imagine, for instance, a portal or something for their employees that would help them price health care before they actually do something, maybe book appointments - stuff like that. I mean, that's actually possible for them to do. Now, will that really move the needle on health care costs? I'm not sure. I think it might make for a better experience for the employees. INSKEEP: I'm glad you mentioned their employees. This is not them setting up a health care company for everybody. It's for their own employees. But it's many, many thousands of employees they can now experiment with. HENSLEY: Right, hundreds of thousands of employees. And I think if they got traction with it, why wouldn't they then figure out a way to share that with other people, whether it's proprietary technology or not? They're talking about doing this in a nonprofit version, which, you know, makes me think, well, maybe there's a way that then they would spread it. But honestly, we're speculating here. I'm speculating here based on the thinness of the press release. INSKEEP: Is there any precedent for a non-health care company to wade into the health care business and just do something effective or memorable? HENSLEY: Sure. It's happened repeatedly. And I think one of the, you know, most prominent examples is what is now Kaiser Permanente, a big provider of health care in this country, you know, started with the Kaiser shipyards and providing first workers' comp kind of care and then later more integrated health care for employees. So it is possible. And I think there is reason to think they might be able to do something. INSKEEP: And Kaiser ended up being a service that was available to just about anybody. HENSLEY: Yeah. INSKEEP: Scott, thanks very much. HENSLEY: You bet. INSKEEP: That's NPR's Scott Hensley. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: It's only a matter of days until the Super Bowl, and if you're counting down to the halftime show, this story is for you. (SOUNDBITE OF SUPER BOWL XLIX HALFTIME SHOW) KATY PERRY: (Singing) You make me feel like I'm living a teenage dream. INSKEEP: That's from Katy Perry's performance three years ago. On stage with her were two blue dancing sharks. The one on the right seemed to be in sync, while the other one sort of flailed around like he was being held in that costume against his will. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Right. So the Internet, as it does, latched onto left shark. There were memes all over social media. Our co-host David Greene took it upon himself to find the man behind that costume. DAVID GREENE, BYLINE: Hi. BRYAN GAW: Hi. Bryan. GREENE: I'm David. Nice to meet you. Left shark's real name is Bryan Gaw, and he's actually a lot smaller than the massive beast we saw lumbering around the stage that Super Bowl night. He had been a dancer with Katy Perry's touring ensemble for several years. And, we should say, no, he actually did not get fired after that Super Bowl performance. He left the road about a year ago, and today he is a stylist at a hair salon in West Hollywood. Bryan leads us out onto the sunny outdoor terrace at the salon, and he tells me about a costume change that almost prevented him from being left shark at all. GAW: Logistically we were figuring out during rehearsals, and there was a moment when they're like, you know what? They're just not going to be able to make this change. We're going to have to have somebody else do it. Well, when the boss says figure it out, figure it out. GREENE: She knew the two of you. She wanted her dancers. GAW: She knew the two of us, she had rehearsed with us. She was used to us being by her. And I think that provided her a sense of comfort. GREENE: All right. So take me to halftime. You're out there. This is the question that America wants to know. GAW: Is this the million-dollar question, what happened? GREENE: What happened? GAW: So there's a set choreography. There's also what's called freestyle choreography, or, like, you get to move around or play your character as a dancer, right? So... GREENE: Seems like a critical piece of information. You had some flexibility. GAW: You have flexibility because you are your own character. GREENE: OK. GAW: I'm in a 7-foot blue shark costume. There's no cool. There's no cool in that. So what's the other option? Well, I'm going to play a different character. GREENE: OK. Hang on. GAW: That's all it was. GREENE: This is a moment here. GAW: (Laughter). GREENE: 'Cause America, they thought you were totally flubbing this up. GAW: Yeah, totally. GREENE: What character were you going for? GAW: This is the underdog. It's an everyday person. Now, how 'bout that? GREENE: Showing you don't have to be perfect. GAW: You don't have to be perfect. Nobody has to be perfect in life. GREENE: And you wouldn't lie to me. Like, I'm looking you in the eyes right now. This - you planned this. GAW: Hundred percent. (Laughter). GREENE: You planned this character going in. GAW: Did I rehearse these actual steps to, like, my freestyle moment? Not necessarily. GREENE: So you rehearsed being a little goofy? GAW: You rehearse being a little goofy. Totally. GREENE: What we saw up there was maximum goofy. GAW: Totally. I'm on a maximum stage. (Laughter). GREENE: And so the magic of left shark was born. And it actually took Bryan Gaw a while to get used to this newfound fame. He didn't talk about all of this publicly at first, but these days, he's got a different outlook. So we started this conversation with you kind of surprising me in saying that you use this on your resume. GAW: Yeah. GREENE: Does it actually say, like, left shark? GAW: Totally. GREENE: And have you ever gotten people who viewed that as a negative? GAW: No. Actually, I don't get any negative feedback from it. If anything, people are like, whoa, that's so cool. GREENE: So is there something you want to say to the millions of people who watched you out there and thought that you just completely messed up a dance routine in a shark outfit? GAW: Don't take life so seriously. You know what I mean? Like, I was on the biggest stage in the world acting crazy, and I got a lot of press and a lot of attention for it in the most positive ways. It's great, you know? Be you. Do you. (LAUGHTER) GREENE: Well, thanks for setting the record straight and chatting with us. GAW: Yeah. Of course. GREENE: That was Bryan Gaw, aka left shark, from the Super Bowl XLIX halftime show. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TEENAGE DREAM") PERRY: (Singing) Let you put your hands on me in my skintight jeans... GREENE: What happened to the shark outfit? GAW: She still has it. GREENE: Katy does? GAW: Yeah. It's on the road right now. Somebody else is hopping around stage in the costume now, but they'll never be me. GREENE: They'll never be you. GAW: (Laughter) Yeah. GREENE: No one will ever be left shark. GAW: Yes. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TEENAGE DREAM") PERRY: (Singing) Yeah. You make me... RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: The State of the Union address is a lot about institutional traditions - right? - and norms, which are not things President Trump has had a lot of reverence for. But in large part, last night, he stuck to the script. And he had a whole lot to say. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: It was among the longest State of the Union speeches on record. The president spoke for an hour and 20 minutes or so. In modern times, only Bill Clinton went longer on two occasions in the 1990s. President Trump used some of his time pledging protection for Americans of every background, color, religion and creed. He also asked for bipartisan support for items like an infrastructure plan. MARTIN: All right, let's bring in NPR's Mara Liasson, who watched the speech last night. Hey, Mara. MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi. How you doing? MARTIN: Doing well. What'd you think? LIASSON: Well, my overall impression was that this was a very different kind of speech than his inaugural address. American carnage was the takeaway line from that speech. MARTIN: Right. LIASSON: Last night, he talked about a new American moment. It was more optimistic. He hit a lot of notes of unity. He talked about common ground. He talked about wanting to work together. There was less me, less I, kind of less narcissism in this speech. But what also struck me is that when it came to one of the biggest items - there's really only two items on his agenda this year, immigration and infrastructure. When it came to immigration, the rhetoric was just as dark and divisive as it's always been... MARTIN: Right LIASSON: ...With him. MARTIN: So let's talk about what he had to say about immigration. There was one notable moment in the address. He was talking about what he wants to do to restrict legal immigration, actually, by putting limits on migration through what some call family reunification, others call chain migration. Let's listen to this part of the address. (SOUNDBITE OF 2018 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Under the current broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives. (BOOING) TRUMP: Under our plan... (BOOING) TRUMP: ...We focus on the immediate family by limiting sponsorships to spouses and minor children. MARTIN: So those were Democrats booing there. Is that a sign things are not looking great for some kind of grand compromise on immigration? LIASSON: Right now, things are not looking great for a grand compromise. Actually, immigrants are not allowed to bring in unlimited numbers of distant relatives. And that's why you heard Democrats booing there. And according to... MARTIN: Because that was a misstatement by the president. LIASSON: Right. And according to our reporters who were in the hall, Dick Durbin, who's the Democrat who's leading his party's negotiations on immigration, he was shaking his head and mouthing no during that moment, which doesn't look like things are going too well. What Democrats are objecting to is that the president wants to restrict legal immigration. By some accounts, what he's proposing would cut it by 44 percent. But inside what the president called the four pillars of what he wants in an immigration deal, there is a smaller two-pillar deal, the wall - border security - in exchange for legalizing the kids who have gotten deportation protection under DACA, that a lot of Republicans and Democrats say they could agree to. But right now what the president is offering, I don't think there's a lot of takers for that. MARTIN: Well, let's listen to some of what he had to say about infrastructure because this is something he's talked about for a long time and kind of tried to make it more official in the address last night. Let's listen. (SOUNDBITE OF 2018 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS) TRUMP: Tonight I'm calling on Congress to produce a bill that generates at least $1.5 trillion for the new infrastructure investment that our country so desperately needs. MARTIN: Is this going to happen? LIASSON: This is something that could happen. Infrastructure has support on both sides of the aisle. It's not as hot button a cultural issue as immigration. But what the president is offering is underwhelming for Democrats. He's only offering about $200 billion of funding. The rest he thinks will be provided by states and private entities. And for Republicans, the problem is - how do you pay for it, especially after they just passed that big $1.5 trillion tax cut that adds to the deficit. MARTIN: Right. And the president also wants all that money for the wall. All right, so we're going to bring in another voice here, NPR national security correspondent David Welna, who was also monitoring the address. So David, we brought you in because there was this other big moment in the president's speech when it came to national security. He said he wants to keep Guantanamo Bay, the detention center there - he wants to keep it open. He signed this executive order to that end before the speech. But Gitmo was never closed. Right, David? So what does this actually change? DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: Well, Rachel, not a whole heck of a lot. There are 41 prisoners there today, just as there were the day that Trump took office. In fact, no new prisoners have been sent there for nearly a decade, even though Trump bragged in his campaign that he was going to load Guantanamo up with what he called bad dudes. And even though five of the Arab Muslim men who remain there were actually cleared for release by half a dozen federal agencies when Trump took office, not one of them has been released. So you know, it looks like these remaining prisoners - most of whom have been there for more than a dozen years and have never been charged with any crime, much less tried - are likely stuck there for more years to come. Now, in the executive order that he signed last night, Trump tasked Defense Secretary Jim Mattis with coming up with recommendations within 90 days about what to do with foreign fighters who've been captured abroad. MARTIN: Yeah. WELNA: Right now there are hundreds of ISIS militants in Syria and Iraq. But so far, U.S. officials have not sent any of them to Guantanamo. And I guess the question now is whether they will. MARTIN: Yeah. It was interesting also that moment the president called on one of the special guests, a defector from North Korea. He was clearly trying to emphasize the threat that the regime there still poses. And he talked about modernizing the nuclear arsenal. But I want to turn to Mara to wrap up here, Mara, because after this very long speech, there were five Democratic responses. Five - that's a whole lot. Representative Joe Kennedy spoke. He was, like, the official address. What did he have to say? LIASSON: Representative Joe Kennedy tried to make a case against Trump - without mentioning his name - based on values and morals, not on identity politics. And he tried to apply to the white working - appeal to the white working class. He was standing in Fall River in his district at a vocational - technical college... MARTIN: Yeah. LIASSON: ...Training program. And he said that the president was describing life as a zero-sum game where in order for one to win, another must lose. And he had a very positive vision of immigration. He said DREAMers are part of our story. And he said that Democrats support higher wages and paid leave for parents and affordable child care... MARTIN: Trends... LIASSON: ...And tried to present a positive vision. INSKEEP: When you say a zero-sum game, the president insisted that everybody can win. At some points in the speech last night, he talked about protecting citizens of every background, color, religion and creed. He said it's a moment of opportunity, no matter where you've come from. But that doesn't change the fact that the president, over the past year, has often embraced conflicts between racial and religious groups. MARTIN: He's tried to exploit those divisions. All right, NPR's Mara Liasson and David Welna, thanks to you both. WELNA: Sure. LIASSON: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) MARTIN: All right, Puerto Rico got one brief mention in last night's State of the Union address. INSKEEP: Yeah, the president said of hurricane survivors, we will pull through together always. Now, four months after the storm, about 30 percent of the island is without power. In other words, one third of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico has been in pre-electric times for one third of a year. As NPR first reported this week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is stopping food and water distribution to the island as of today. Florida's two senators, who represent many Puerto Ricans, called on the agency to reverse that decision. MARTIN: All right, NPR's Adrian Florido first reported this story. He's in San Juan and joins us now. So Adrian, you're reporting that FEMA is stopping food and water. Why? Why are they choosing to do this? ADRIAN FLORIDO, BYLINE: Hi, Rachel. Well, the agency says, you know, that there's just simply no need for these emergency supplies anymore - that the number of people who need them is so small at this point that local nonprofits and the Puerto Rican government can handle the demand. So what FEMA's Puerto Rico director told me when I interviewed him was that the agency was, one, no longer shipping new food and water to the island and, two, that as of today, January 31, it was also handing the supplies that remain on the island over to the Puerto Rican government and some nonprofit groups so that they can finish distributing them. I spoke with some folks at the local level, including one city mayor, who thought that that was a bad idea. A lot of... MARTIN: Yeah. FLORIDO: ...Her residents are still getting this kind of help. And many don't have electricity. They don't have jobs to go back to. So they still need this kind of assistance. MARTIN: So what's been the response to this? I mean, we mentioned that Florida senators are saying FEMA needs to reverse this. What about the Puerto Rican government itself? FLORIDO: Well, the Puerto Rican government had a very interesting response. After our story published, FEMA issued a statement. I'm sorry - the Puerto Rican government issued a statement saying that it was not aware that these were the plans, to have responsibility for distributing these supplies after the 31 nor that aid would stop coming in. So there clearly had been... MARTIN: They were in the dark. FLORIDO: ...A failure of communication here. MARTIN: So they didn't even know about FEMA's decision? FLORIDO: They knew that it was coming at some point but not that the plan was for it to begin today. And so there clearly has been, you know, sort of a failure of communication here. MARTIN: Any word from FEMA on whether or not they are going to reverse this? FLORIDO: So what they've said is they really don't think that the supplies are needed. And they also say that they will work with the Puerto Rican government, though, to provide supplies if there are instances when they are needed. MARTIN: All right, NPR's Adrian Florido in San Juan reporting for us this morning. Thanks so much, Adrian. FLORIDO: Thanks, Rachel. (SOUNDBITE OF RICH SONG, "WEST COAST/EST. LBC") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: The Federal Emergency Management Agency says it is not stopping food and water distribution in Puerto Rico after all. FEMA officials had told NPR that today would be the last for that mission, which has gone since Hurricane Maria last fall. Now, after NPR's reporting triggered a strong response from some lawmakers, FEMA says that the original announcement was a mistake. NPR's Adrian Florido originally reported this story. He's on the line from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Hey there, Adrian. ADRIAN FLORIDO, BYLINE: Hi, Steve. INSKEEP: So would you just remind us, what has this food distribution been like? What do you actually see on the streets day-to-day? FLORIDO: So it's changed over the course of the last four months since the hurricane. Originally, the way it worked was that - well, it was kind of a haphazard kind of - sort of chaotic distribution because conditions on the island were so bad. A lot of communities were completely cut off from roads and bridges and access to other parts of the island. So in the early days and weeks after the storm, a lot of times, FEMA was sending food and water into communities, like, on helicopters and basically any way that they could. You know, more recently, the process has been streamlined. So the way that it works is that FEMA distributes cases of food and water to warehouses it has spread across the island. And then municipal officials, city officials, mayors show up to these warehouses, pick up the supplies that they need and then take them back to their towns to distribute to families that need them. INSKEEP: OK. And so what did FEMA tell you specifically was happening today and why? FLORIDO: So what FEMA originally told me was that as of - well, that they were going to continue providing commodities here until January 31, until today, and that after today, their food mission would, quote, "officially shut off." And the reason was because they said there was just no longer any need for this kind of aid here in Puerto Rico. The conditions had improved enough so that they could essentially pull back. And that was what they originally said. INSKEEP: But I think your reporting has revealed there still are some people out there who say they were depending on that food. And there was a reaction from people like Florida Senator Marco Rubio and another Florida senator, Bill Nelson. Let's listen to him. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) BILL NELSON: I urge the administration to reverse this disastrous decision immediately and to continue providing the people of Puerto Rico with the help that they need as they are trying to recover from two disastrous hurricanes. INSKEEP: That was some of the congressional response. What is FEMA saying now? FLORIDO: So - right. So after this story is getting attention from lawmakers, they said, you know, actually, you know, we made a mistake. We have been planning to withdraw this aid, and we're in the process of doing that. But that date, January 31, today - that wasn't right, and we shouldn't have said that. We're still phasing this aid out, but for the time being, people on the island can and will continue to be able to get this help if they need it by continuing to go to the warehouses that we have across the island. INSKEEP: OK. So that means that people who need it can get food today, tomorrow and some point in the future, although this program is, it sounds like, still going away. FLORIDO: That's right. I mean, the agency has already stopped shipping new food and aid - food and water to the island. And they don't have plans to restart that. That's done. But what they're saying is that they still have enough on the island so that people and mayors who need it can still continue to get it and get it to their communities. INSKEEP: Are Puerto Ricans satisfied with this tweak to the announcement? FLORIDO: Well, I actually just got off the phone with FEMA before getting on the line with you. And so I haven't had a chance to assess the Puerto Rican government's and people's response, but I will do that as soon as we're done talking. INSKEEP: OK. Thanks for all your reporting, sounds like there is still more to report. That's NPR's Adrian Florido in San Juan. FLORIDO: Thanks, Steve. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Much of the nation's political energy is going to be focused on the midterm elections this year. Democrats are hoping they can take control of Congress in November. Last night, NPR's Don Gonyea was at a State of the Union watch party in Virginia, one of those places that we're going to be watching closely through 2018. He joins us in the studio this morning. Hey, Don. DON GONYEA, BYLINE: Good morning. MARTIN: Tell us where you were exactly and why you chose that spot to watch the president's speech. GONYEA: So I was in Northern Virginia. These are the Washington, D.C., suburbs. They're growing. They're becoming more diverse - lots of jobs connected to the federal government. And all of that has made Virginia much more friendly to Democrats over the past decades. Obama carried it twice. Clinton carried it in 2016. And in 2017, what looked to be a tight governor's race was won easily by the Democrat. MARTIN: All right, you talked to Republicans and Democrats in Northern Virginia. What'd you hear? GONYEA: Well, let's start with that watch party. It was at George Mason University, and I was with about 15 members of the College Republicans, among them, 21-year-old Joshua Keruski. JOSHUA KERUSKI: I've been pleased with President Trump's first year in office. I think that going forward, there's a lot to work from in terms of what we've gotten so far. GONYEA: So the big fight in Northern Virginia will be for a congressional seat held by Republican Barbara Comstock. She won in 2016 but not by nearly as much as Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in her district. Again, here's Joshua Keruski. KERUSKI: I think probably the first or biggest challenge is just saying that you're a Republican in Northern Virginia. There's kind of a social stigma that goes with that. GONYEA: At another event, I talked to a local county GOP chairman, Will Estrada. He says don't underestimate the power of positive economic news. WILL ESTRADA: I personally believe that Donald Trump's policies are incredibly helping our country. But there's also no question that, among many of the voters that we're trying to win over, he's not very popular. GONYEA: Now let's hear from a Northern Virginia Democrat. Seventy-three-year-old Randy Ihara has this take on Trump. RANDY IHARA: It's been a disaster. GONYEA: He says Trump has worked to undermine democratic institutions, he's attacked the FBI and the press. IHARA: Basically, where he's divided this country - tribalized the country - there's Trump believers, and there's not. GONYEA: And Rachel, he thinks that all of that will mobilize Democrats in the midterm. But he also cautions the party won't win the House and Senate by just being anti-Trump. MARTIN: Although when you think about Northern Virginia, I mean, this is real close to D.C., just across the Potomac, so it's hard to imagine that the race is going to be any - about anything but Donald Trump. GONYEA: Exactly. And Republicans may choose not to talk about Trump but about policies instead, but Democrats will. You can bet they'll continue to hammer home that voting for a Republican is voting to give President Trump more power. It might be hard for the campaigns to ever really branch out beyond that, especially with so many big storylines still unresolved involving the president. MARTIN: NPR national political correspondent Don Gonyea for us this morning. Thanks so much, Don. GONYEA: It's my pleasure. (SOUNDBITE OF EMANCIPATOR'S "RAPPAHANNOCK") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. The Oxford English Dictionary added new words, including snowflake. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: That's not a new word. INSKEEP: It's right here on the list. MARTIN: Not a new word - billions fall in snowstorms. INSKEEP: New meaning - snowflake once meant snowflake, then a unique person with potential. Now it's commonly an insult meaning someone who's overly sensitive, thinks they're special. Kind of an ugly term, really, but, you know, it also just means snowflake, snowflake. It's MORNING EDITION. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: No matter who's president, there's a trick to the State of the Union speech. The president speaks to Democrats and Republicans in Congress, as well as the country at large, so he inevitably calls for unity, throws in some lines that bring applause from both sides of the chamber. And then the other side has a chance to respond. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut was in the Capitol and spoke with our colleague, David Greene. CHRIS MURPHY: That was not a unifying speech. There were a number of great Americans there, and I was glad to stand up and applaud for them, but in between those introductions was a ton of divisive rhetoric. We didn't get any closer to a deal on immigration or on the federal budget. We got further away. Most disappointing was the big middle section of the speech in which the president doubled down on his rhetoric demonizing immigrants and trying to make Americans afraid of people who are crossing our borders to come here to seek a better life. DAVID GREENE, BYLINE: Well, I'm glad you brought up immigration because the president - did he not offer a path to citizenship for 1.8 million Americans, including the so-called DREAMers, many of whom were brought to the United States illegally? Is that not something that you and other Democrats like? MURPHY: I think it's important that the president has proposed a pathway to citizenship for DREAMers, but the other parts of his proposal do not have the support of the United States Senate. And the rhetoric surrounding that section of the speech suggests that he's not going to be a compromise broker in the coming days and weeks. GREENE: Your party's response to the speech came from Congressman Joe Kennedy. He said he wanted to send a message to all of the DREAMers watching, quote, "we will fight for you. We will not walk away." Are you worried that that's exactly what your party would be doing - walking away from the DREAMers - if there is indeed a path to citizenship for them on the table here? MURPHY: Well, we are going to fight for them. And we think that we should pass the DREAM Act by itself. The other parts of the plan that the president talked about in particular - the border wall - don't enjoy the popular support that the DREAM Act does. Listen. We'll do our best to try to get a compromise here, but if the president thinks that he's going to get a border wall built that the American public doesn't support by using these kids as political pawns, I don't think that's the path forward. GREENE: Is there - I mean, one of the most controversial elements of what the president proposed was what he calls chain migration, suggesting limiting the number of family members who immigrants could bring into the United States. Is there some room for compromise here? Are you open to some sort of change in that policy to get a compromise? MURPHY: You know, when I listened to the president talk about so-called chain migration, which is really just a way to talk about families reunifying in the United States - And I watched Republicans stand up and applaud with glee - I wonder if they remember how they got here, how their grandparents and great grandparents very likely followed cousins or aunts or uncles who came before them. America's strength in the past has been our ability to bring family members to join other family members in the United States and to look at skills but not have it be the only determination of how you get here. And that still remains the strength of this country. GREENE: And, Senator, let me just finish with this. I mean, the response from your party tonight from Congressman Joe Kennedy - a lot of angry language accusing this President of, quote, "callously appraising worthiness," saying that the Trump ministration is "turning American life into a zero-sum game." Is that the proper tone for this moment from the Democratic Party? MURPHY: You know, I've never seen people as anxious or scared or angry as they are today back in Connecticut. And, you know, I think a lot of folks think that there's a real, you know, threat to democracy underfoot, which, you know, raises people's anxiety and also the heat and tenor of the debate. I get it. It's a very, very tough balance, one that we're trying to figure out every day. It's an unprecedented moment for all of us. INSKEEP: Chris Murphy, Democratic senator from Connecticut, speaking with our colleague, David Greene. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: President Trump has signed an executive order to keep the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, open. It was a key campaign promise, and the president made this announcement during his State of the Union speech last night. (SOUNDBITE OF 2018 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I am asking Congress to ensure that, in the fight against ISIS and al-Qaida, we continue to have all necessary power to detain terrorists wherever we chase them down, wherever we find them. And in many cases, for them, it will now be Guantanamo Bay. MARTIN: The move repeals part of the executive order signed by his predecessor, President Barack Obama, who called for the prison to be closed after he took power back in 2009. NPR national security correspondent David Welna is with us now. Hey, David. DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: Hey, Rachel. MARTIN: So President Obama tried to close Gitmo for years. He never succeeded. The prison is still open. So what does President Trump's action actually change? WELNA: Well, not a whole heck of a lot, Rachel. There are still 41 prisoners there. That's down from close to 700 during the Bush administration. And while both Presidents Bush and Obama had policies aimed at shutting the place down, Trump's executive order makes clear he has no intention of doing so. I spoke with Lee Wolosky about that order. He was Obama's special envoy at the State Department for closing Guantanamo. And he says it could have serious consequences for counterterrorism efforts. Here's Wolosky. LEE WOLOSKY: There are partners of the United States who will refuse to turn over terrorism suspects to the United States if they believe that they will end up in Guantanamo. And there are partners of ours on whom we rely to gather intelligence against extremist groups who have told us repeatedly that Guantanamo inhibits their ability to cooperate with the United States. MARTIN: You know, David, President Trump - we heard him pledge that he was going to fill Guantanamo with terrorists, so-called bad dudes. The administration, though, has actually not added any new prisoners, right? How come? WELNA: Well, you know, I think that could be because Trump has come to realize that Guantanamo has been pretty much a dead end when it comes to trying and convicting accused terrorists and that U.S. civilian courts have been a lot swifter and effective in convicting hundreds of accused terrorists. But the question now is whether he's going to add any, on the recommendation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, which he's requested. MARTIN: What happens to the detainees who are currently cleared for release? WELNA: Well, there are five of those detainees whose continued detention was found by half a dozen federal agencies, including the Pentagon, to be no longer necessary. But they were not yet transferred to another country at the end of the Obama administration, so it looks like they're stuck there along with the 36 others. MARTIN: All right. NPR national security correspondent David Welna for us this morning. Thanks so much, David. WELNA: You're welcome, Rachel. (SOUNDBITE OF STEV'S "WHILE YOU'RE FADING") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: In his State of the Union speech, President Trump made a few references to history. For the most part, he said this or that accomplishment was the best in history and that he would not repeat mistakes of the past. There is a history to the ritual of the speech itself. The first televised address came from Harry Truman in 1947. (SOUNDBITE OF 1947 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS) HARRY TRUMAN: Let us have the will and the patience to do this job together. May the Lord strengthen us in our faith. May he give us wisdom to lead the peoples of the world in his ways of peace. (APPLAUSE) INSKEEP: The State of the Union was different then. President Truman gave it in the middle of the day with little of the pomp and ceremony that we have come to expect on television in prime time. So let's ask Cokie about the history of the State of the Union address. She answers your questions about how the government works. Cokie Roberts, hi. COKIE ROBERTS, BYLINE: Hi, Steve. Good to talk to you. INSKEEP: Good to talk to you, as always. Let's get right to the questions. Here's the first one. R.G. CRAVENS: This is Dr. R.G. Cravens from Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. As part of my introductory course in American government and politics, my students would like to know which president started the tradition of an annual address to Congress. INSKEEP: Cokie? ROBERTS: That one's actually easy. It started with George Washington. He took the provision in the Constitution that says the president should from time to time give to Congress information on the state of the union and delivered the first one on January 8, 1790. John Adams continued it. But then Jefferson, who apparently did not like the sound of his own voice, started sending up written reports. That continued until Woodrow Wilson, who restarted the oral delivery in 1913. By the way, the first time the public could hear the voice on the radio was Calvin Coolidge in 1923. INSKEEP: Here's another question about the history. Let's listen. EARL ANDERSON: This is Earl Anderson from Spring Hill, Fla. How long has the opposing party been giving their response? INSKEEP: Cokie? ROBERTS: Harry Truman gave that first televised address, but in 1965, Lyndon Johnson decided to capitalize on the TV audience by moving the speech to prime time. And realizing what an audience he would have, the Republican congressional leadership asked for equal time. Senator Everett Dirksen and Congressman Gerald Ford taped a response, but it wasn't shown live, Steve. Various outlets played it over the course of a few weeks. I have to tell you my personal view is it's basically a waste of time to give a response. But the opposition can't give up the idea of prime-time TV. INSKEEP: Why is it a waste of time? ROBERTS: Because the contrast is just too great. You have the pomp of the president in the hall of the House of Representatives, and then the response is some guy in a room with a teleprompter. And when they try to jazz it up, it gets worse, whether it's Michele Bachmann looking at the wrong camera, or Marco Rubio famously grabbing for water, or the year when Democrats had real people, several of whom talked about how Ronald Reagan had made their lives better. INSKEEP: Ouch. OK, so the president has the advantage in stagecraft, but our next listener wants to know if there are times when presidents have messed up that advantage. SHAWN GALLOWAY: This is Shawn Galloway from Lenexa, Kan. What has been one of the more significant aberrations in State of the Union history? Any delays, interruptions, near misses? Any president give theirs while fighting a nasty bout of food poisoning? Thanks. ROBERTS: Well, I don't know about presidents being sick, but we do know Ronald Reagan delayed his speech in 1986 because it was scheduled for the day of the Challenger disaster. In one of Bill Clinton's speeches on health care, not the State of the Union, the teleprompter had the wrong speech. And the most ridiculed blooper was probably Richard Nixon just months before he was forced to resign saying discredited president instead of discredited present when talking about welfare. INSKEEP: Awkward. Cokie, thanks very much. ROBERTS: OK, Steve, good to talk to you. INSKEEP: That's commentator Cokie Roberts. And you can ask Cokie your questions about how politics and government work by tweeting us with the hashtag #askCokie. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Rose McGowan has been one of the loudest voices against sexual harassment inside and outside of Hollywood. She's not afraid to get in people's faces, which has made her a polarizing figure even within the Me Too movement. Now there's a TV documentary series focused on McGowan's activism. It's called "Citizen Rose." The first of five episodes debuted last night, and NPR TV critic Eric Deggans has this review. ERIC DEGGANS, BYLINE: Like its outspoken star, "Citizen Rose" offers a bold message designed to make you more than a little uncomfortable. McGowan, a star of TV shows like "Charmed" and movies like "Scream," is one of the highest-profile actresses to publicly accuse producer Harvey Weinstein of assaulting her, and "Citizen Rose" wastes no time in broaching the subject. Early in last night's special, McGowan recalls a morning meeting at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997. (SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "CITIZEN ROSE") ROSE MCGOWAN: I go in. I had an MTV camera crew following me that morning. It was supposed to be "Rose McGowan: A Day In The Life." I turn to the cameras right as I went into the hotel, and I said, I think my life is finally getting easier. And I - like, that haunted me. DEGGANS: It was at that meeting, McGowan alleges, that Weinstein raped her. She accepted a $100,000 settlement. He continues to deny sexually assaulting anyone. And she struggled as Hollywood embraced her attacker. On one level, "Citizen Rose" tells a story of slow vindication. It shows McGowan's work as an activist last year as news reports revealed allegations of sexual harassment and assault against powerful men. When McGowan meets with Ronan Farrow, who detailed allegations against Weinstein in The New Yorker, Farrow says allegations that the producer hired people to spy on McGowan seemed preposterous until he reported on them. (SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "CITIZEN ROSE") RONAN FARROW: You're like the, you know, the guy with the beard and the frazzled hair in a sci-fi movie, you know, saying like, I have the evidence here, doomsday is coming. And everyone's like, he's crazy. And then the twist is always, of course, he's completely right. MCGOWAN: Yeah. DEGGANS: But "Citizen Rose" is also the story of a victim struggling to process trauma, as in this moment, when McGowan is arguing with her mother who resists criticism that she never really talked about her daughter's rape with her. (SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "CITIZEN ROSE") TERRI: I don't ask you a lot of things 'cause you spent a lot of years talking [expletive] about me. And you didn't want to talk on the phone. And you didn't - you know, it's like, if I asked you a question, it was just like - I can't talk to someone that hates me, is how it felt. DEGGANS: "Citizen Rose" has its flaws. McGowan seems so focused on telling her own story there isn't much room for others, even when she visits another woman who has accused Weinstein of rape, Italian actress Asia Argento. Following McGowan's vow to never speak Weinstein's name, the show blurs his name in archival clips, garbles mentions of his name in audio and places a black box over his eyes in pictures, which can feel overly dramatic at times. And since the series debuted the same day as her memoir, "Brave," there are accusations she's profiting from the Me Too movement. Still, as Hollywood continues to grapple with allegations of sexual harassment and assault, "Citizen Rose" shows a woman trying to fight back by speaking up and encouraging others to find their voices, which is a pretty powerful message. I'm Eric Deggans. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: The United States Constitution says the president will give Congress periodically information on the state of the union. Some presidents take that literally and include in the annual speech to Congress a sentence that begins - the state of our union is... RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Understandably, they do not then finish the sentence with words like divided or tense. (SOUNDBITE OF 2018 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Let's begin tonight by recognizing that the state of our union is strong because our people are strong. MARTIN: The president made a case that the union is a lot stronger than before he took office. INSKEEP: NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson and NPR congressional correspondent Scott Detrow were among the many watching President Trump's speech last night. Good morning, guys. SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve. MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning. INSKEEP: So, Mara, nods to unity throughout that speech. He talked about protecting - the president did - talked about protecting everyone of every background, color, religion and creed. But was it a unifying speech? LIASSON: I think part of the speech was unifying. The rhetoric was a big change from American carnage, which was the biggest takeaway from his inaugural address. He talked about a new American moment. He offered an olive branch to Democrats, said we want to work together, find common ground. There was a lot less me and I in the speech. Even his tone of voice was calmer and more sedate. But what struck me was the paradox of the speech because when it came to talking about one of his biggest agenda items for this year, which is immigration, his rhetoric was just as dark and divisive as it's always been. INSKEEP: And let's listen to some of that rhetoric and also do a little bit of fact-checking. And I want to note there is an annotated transcript of the president's speech at npr.org, where NPR correspondents go into the president's statements, what's behind them, what's true, what's false. Great reading - npr.org. NPR's Scott Detrow helped to put that together, and he's here. So, Scott, let's start by hearing this point by the president. (SOUNDBITE OF 2018 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS) TRUMP: Under the current broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives. Under our plan, we focus on the immediate family by limiting sponsorships to spouses and minor children. DETROW: You heard booing and hissing from the Democratic side for a couple of reasons there, first of all because what President Trump said just isn't true. Currently, those visas are already limited to immediate family members. But secondly, most Democrats are just deeply skeptical of President Trump, of the White House's motivations on immigration. They're angry that the White House keeps shifting its positions on negotiations over the future of DACA. INSKEEP: Oh, there was a deal that was close to being made and then the president torpedoed it - or it was seen that way, anyway. DETROW: That's right. And he says, I want a deal. I want a bill with love. And then he comes out with a hard-line plan. But they're also just angry at the way he frames the issue, his rhetoric. President Trump regularly talks about illegal immigrants as murderers and criminals. He did that during the brief shutdown. The White House put out an ad saying Democrats would be complicit in any murders committed by illegal immigrants. He did it again last night during the speech, pointing to the parents of two Long Island girls killed in 2016 by gang members. (SOUNDBITE OF 2018 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS) TRUMP: Many of these gang members took advantage of glaring loopholes in our laws to enter the country as illegal unaccompanied alien minors and wound up in Kayla and Nisa's high school. INSKEEP: Scott? DETROW: Obviously horrifying murders. Everyone in the chamber was very upset at the specific story. But Democrats feel like, broadly, the first thing Trump talks about often is immigrants as murderers, as criminals, as people who should not be in the country. INSKEEP: Mara, what do Democrats hear when he says things like that? LIASSON: Yes. I think Democrats heard rhetoric that they feel they've heard all along from Donald Trump from the day he glided down that escalator and talked about Mexico sending rapists, when he started his campaign, to the convention. The message, as Scott said, is immigrants are coming here to kill us. And I think what Democrats heard is something that is going to make it harder to get a deal on immigration. You know, the facts are that immigrants actually commit crime at lower rates than native-born Americans. But the president wants to drastically curtail legal immigration, and that is one of the biggest sticking points in that negotiation. INSKEEP: The president did suggest that Democrats and Republicans might be able to get together for a deal on infrastructure. Let's listen to that. (SOUNDBITE OF 2018 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS) TRUMP: Tonight, I'm calling on Congress to produce a bill that generates at least $1.5 trillion for the new infrastructure investment that our country so desperately needs. Every federal dollar should be leveraged by partnering with state and local governments, and where appropriate, tapping into private sector investment to permanently fix the infrastructure deficit. And we can do it. INSKEEP: Everybody's in favor of infrastructure, Scott Detrow, but do Democrats and Republicans mean the same thing when they say it? DETROW: They do not. Infrastructure's often floated as the bipartisan idea around the corner. But the fact is, Democrats want to do it through federal government spending. Republicans want to incentivize private spending with tax cuts. And there's a deep disagreement there. INSKEEP: Mara, you get the last word. LIASSON: Yeah. I think that that infrastructure is something that theoretically could find bipartisan agreement. But the big question also is, how are you going to pay for it? INSKEEP: Mara, thanks very much, really appreciate it. LIASSON: Thank you. INSKEEP: That's NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson. We also heard from NPR's congressional correspondent, Scott Detrow. And, again, you can find an annotated transcript of the president's entire State of the Union speech at npr.org. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: All right. Let's get one view from Congress on the president's speech last night. Senator Cory Gardner's a Republican from Colorado. He has, at times, diverged with President Trump. Our co-host, David Greene, spoke with Senator Gardner just after the president's speech. CORY GARDNER: You know, I think it touched on a lot of themes that the president needed to. I thought it was a good global view and certainly a good local view when it comes to making sure our communities in this country are the focus of the benefit of congressional policies. DAVID GREENE, BYLINE: I wonder if you trust this message. I mean, in the past year, there have been so many times when President Trump has at least spoken words of bipartisanship, and then he sends a tweet or does something that seems to just really spoil that. So how much faith do you have coming out of this speech? GARDNER: I think - look at the immigration - the meetings that we've had over the past several weeks, laying out a plan, a four-part plan, to try to address the DREAMer situation. I've been part of a bipartisan working group to find a solution for the DREAMers. And I think that's exactly what we're going to see happen. GREENE: I'm glad you brought up immigration because weren't you part of that bipartisan group that went to the White House with a lot of optimism and then President Trump really blew up that bipartisan deal in a very angry meeting? GARDNER: I was at the first meeting on Tuesday that was basically covered live in a press-conference-style atmosphere. I was not at the meeting later that week that, unfortunately, some outcomes didn't turn out so good out of that meeting. But we have to get beyond the finger-pointing and the partisanship. And we need to make sure that we're moving forward on actual policy solutions. If we do that, then I'm confident we can find the right solution that makes Americans happy about what we've done on border security while also addressing children who were brought here at a very young age through no fault of their own. GREENE: But are you worried that this president might do something like that again, use a term or do something that just sort of blows up the bipartisanship that might exist temporarily? GARDNER: I certainly hope not. I think that was an incredibly unfortunate moment, and I hope that it's never repeated. But we can't let that moment define what we do over the next several months as we search for these solutions. It's too important that we get this right. GREENE: Let me ask you about the solutions. You know, the president laid out this four-part plan. One of the most controversial parts of it is what he calls chain migration. But it would limit the family members who immigrants could bring into the United States. How different is his plan compared to the bipartisan deal that you worked on? GARDNER: I think you heard the president say that there's going to be compromise and that nobody's going to get everything that they want. And I think that would include and extend to his own ideas. I do think the chain migration, as he calls it, will be the most difficult part of this discussion. But I believe where good faith people come together for a solution, we can find it. GREENE: Where are you on that specific issue? I mean, he is saying that that immigrants should only be able to bring in spouses and minors. What do you believe? GARDNER: This is going to be a negotiated point. I think as the president said, there is going to have to be compromise. Obviously, the bipartisan plan that we had developed early on addressed parents, and that was not accepted by the White House. But I think we have to maintain the ability and the willingness to negotiate with each other a solution that can actually get Democrat and Republican support out of the House, the Senate and signed by the president. Look. If we pass a bill that simply gets out of the Senate but doesn't get in the House and doesn't get on to the president's desk, then we haven't accomplished our goal. GREENE: What's your advice to the president coming out of this speech? GARDNER: I think he laid out a very aggressive economic policy, continuing to double down on reduced regulations, continuing to tout the benefits of the tax cuts that are growing this economy. He laid out some pretty bold visions when it comes to ending the defense budget sequester. And so, you know, that's something the American people are going to expect to be achieved. GREENE: Do you think he has to behave differently as a president in 2018 if he's truly going to bring this country together? GARDNER: I think the president tonight was somebody who showed the ability to lead, who showed the ability to have that statesmanship that we - this country has come to expect from our presidents. And I hope going forward this is the kind of action that we see. GREENE: Cory Gardner is a Republican senator from the state of Colorado talking to us about the State of the Union that he just listened to. Senator, thanks for the time. GARDNER: Thanks for having me. Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF YPPAH'S "SPIDER HANDS") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: President Trump addressed a profoundly divided country last night, and that includes divides within his own party, even if most Republican voters do remain behind the president. We've called upon two conservatives with different views of President Trump. Jonah Goldberg is a senior editor at National Review. He's been critical. Jonah, thanks for coming by once again. JONAH GOLDBERG: Good to be here. INSKEEP: And Chris Buskirk also joins us again. He's in Phoenix - a radio talk show host and publisher of the website American Greatness. He's been more supportive of the president, I think it's fair to say. Chris, good morning. CHRIS BUSKIRK: Good morning. INSKEEP: Thanks for joining us so early in Phoenix there, I know. Jonah, let me begin with you. Did the president do anything that you liked last night? GOLDBERG: Oh, yeah. I thought tonally, if we had seen this President Trump from this time last year, he would be having a much smoother, more successful presidency. I thought a lot of the accomplishments that he was bragging about, as much as any president gets to brag about some of these things... INSKEEP: Economy's doing well - might be... GOLDBERG: Economy doing well. We can have a economic... INSKEEP: ...Doing or not (unintelligible). GOLDBERG: ...Argument about how much presidents deserve credit for these things. But he deserves it as much as any president does on his watch. There was a lot of that kind of thing. I - the sort of bringing in these outsiders as sort of pathos or sympathy by takeout, which was begun by Ronald Reagan... INSKEEP: Calling out people in the audience. GOLDBERG: ...I thought went to another level, in part because Donald Trump himself rhetorically has a very difficult time communicating some of the emotions he was trying to evoke in the audience. So he was using these people as props. And at times, it was very moving. The North Korean dissident was extremely moving to me. The parents of various people were moving. But it just also felt over-the-top at times. INSKEEP: OK. Chris Buskirk, did the president do anything that disappointed you last night? BUSKIRK: Well, no, not really. I will tell you - and we may talk about this at greater length a little later. But I will tell you that his immigration proposal I think is a bit over-the-top. But in general, I think that he gave a good speech. I think that it was what we expected. We expected him to talk about the economy, and jobs, and the tax cut and infrastructure, a lot of things where, as Jonah says, were - you know, as much as any president, he can take credit - but looking forward to a time a little later in his presidency were his policies really will have kicked in, and he can say, look, unemployment's low, wages are rising, and more people are going back to work, and my policies were responsible for this. So no, I thought it was a good speech. INSKEEP: You said you wanted to talk about immigration. Let's do that. The plan has been criticized by both Democrats and some conservative Republicans because, among other things, the president offers a pathway to citizenship for people who are eligible for the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (ph) program. One of the critics was Warren Davidson, Republican representative from Ohio, who spoke with us after the speech. WARREN DAVIDSON: People from all over the world come here, and they do it legally. And I think it would be wrong to put any of these folks in line ahead of the folks that have followed the law and have worked hard to do it the right way. INSKEEP: Chris Buskirk, are you not willing to accept that pathway to citizenship for people in the DACA program in exchange for all the other things the president is demanding? BUSKIRK: Yeah, I think the offer that he has made really is - it's over-the-top. I think that the place for Republicans to start is a bill that was proposed three weeks ago by Bob Goodlatte in the House. That, I think, is much more reasonable. But I'll tell you what. The other part of it is, I'm honestly not that worried about it except in the purely theoretical level because my opinion at this point, cynical though it may be, is that Democrats don't want a deal on DACA. What they really want is an issue that they can cry about, that they can fundraise on, and that they can try and turn out their base with in November. What - the deal that President Trump has offered, that he floated over the past few days is very generous. It's something that rubs people like me a little bit the wrong way. But I don't think it's going anyplace because Chuck Schumer really doesn't want to pass a piece of legislation. INSKEEP: Jonah Goldberg? GOLDBERG: I think there is at least some truth to that. INSKEEP: Although, the president himself has also weaved back and forth on immigration here. GOLDBERG: Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's absolutely true that Democrats would want to use the issue of immigration, as much as they want to make progress on the immigration. And I think that probably applies to a lot of Republicans, as well. I do think that what we're seeing, though, here is something that, you know, a lot of us predicted from the - early on is that the candidate Trump - that we're going to have this giant wall; we're going to get rid of them - deportation force. The people who actually believed all of that, like Ann Coulter and some others - and really wanted that - there was no way that those people weren't going to be the most - weren't eventually going to be disappointed because that was not possible. INSKEEP: OK, so they may be disappointed by the policy, but let's talk about the rhetoric. Elsewhere in the program, we have some fact-checking by our colleagues Scott Detrow and Mara Liasson. And they were looking at some of the president's statements about an MS-13-related killing, some other things the president said. And Mara Liasson said President Trump essentially - his message is that immigrants are coming to kill us. GOLDBERG: I did not like that part. I thought that was the low point of it. It felt very much like a bloody shirt. It felt, symbolically, as a way to sort of reassure his emotional base on immigration, that I'm still really with you, even though I'm doing this thing on policy that you hate. But it felt extremely manipulative to me and exploitative. And there was a lot in this State of the Union - that the White House wanted a bill that's bipartisan - that felt more like trolling. And the discussion of immigration was among those things I think was set up to annoy the Democrats more than to bring them on board. INSKEEP: Chris Buskirk, as Mara Liasson pointed out, the president highlighted a real murder, but if you look at statistics, immigrants commit crimes less often than people who are already here. BUSKIRK: Yeah. The problem with that statistic, Steve, is that that counts all immigrants. When we - when you look at illegal immigration - there's a recent study that was done by John Lott that came out at the end of last week. Illegal immigrants - and he used a lot of data that came, actually, out of my state, out of Arizona. Illegal immigrants, in fact, commit crime, and we're not talking about immigration crime - other types of crime - at a rate that's meaningfully higher than all other people. Now, when you talk about legal immigrants - actually, it's an interesting point. Legal immigrants do commit crime at a lower rate than even natural-born citizens. That's why we need to do both. We need to fix illegal immigration, but we need to fix legal immigration as well with something like the RAISE Act. INSKEEP: Jonah, let me give you the last word here because many people will point out that President Trump is just not going to change. He hasn't changed. He continues to be the same kind of person behaving in the same kind of way. But it was a little different kind of a speech last night. Did you see any sign of change? GOLDBERG: No. Well, I mean, I don't know. It was a better speech than he gave last year. He gives good speeches every now and then. But it's like one of those construction sites with a sign that says, you know, X many days since an accident. We have X many days until Donald Trump tweets or says something that steps on his own message and that - you know, we're recording this early in the morning. Watch his Twitter feed. If it goes more than 48 hours without him doing something similar, I will be shocked. INSKEEP: Jonah... GOLDBERG: ...And pleased. INSKEEP: OK, Jonah Goldberg of National Review and the LA Times, thank you very much. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GOLDBERG: Thank you. INSKEEP: And Chris Buskirk of American Greatness, who joined us by Skype. Chris, thank you very much. BUSKIRK: Thanks, Steve. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Good morning. I'm Rachel Martin. Admit it. Yodeling is awesome. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG) UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Yodeling). MARTIN: If you've ever wanted to learn, now's your chance. A Swiss university has announced it's going to start teaching the Alpine singing style. The classes will be led by a prize-winning Swiss yodeler. They're offering both bachelor's and master's degrees. The university is limiting the program to just three or four students, so they still have to decide yodel-ay-hee-who (ph) will be accepted. It's MORNING EDITION. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: President Trump spent a lot of his first State of the Union address talking about the state of the economy. He praised the Republican tax overhaul that was passed last year. He took credit for the booming stock market and for a record number of jobs in the U.S. (SOUNDBITE OF 2018 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Since the election, we have created 2.4 million new jobs, including... (APPLAUSE) TRUMP: ...Including 200,000 new jobs in manufacturing alone. MARTIN: Is the president right? Let's ask NPR business editor Uri Berliner. He's in our studio this morning. Hey, Uri. URI BERLINER, BYLINE: Good morning, Rachel. MARTIN: Is the president right? BERLINER: Well, he's right about the number of new jobs. But jobs have been growing steadily for a number of years now. And in fact, job growth in the first year of President Trump's administration was a little bit weaker than in the last year of President Obama's administration. MARTIN: All right. So President Trump made this big show of saving more than a thousand jobs at that Carrier plant in Indiana, if you'll remember back. That plant was going to close and move the jobs to Mexico. It didn't happen. That factory has had a couple round of layoffs since then. And I say this because last night, we actually spoke with one of the employees who was laid off at Carrier. Her name is Renee Elliott. She voted for Trump in 2016. And we asked her what we - what she thought of the speech last night. RENEE ELLIOTT: I think that it was pretty pathetic that he mentioned the manufacturing jobs. I would've liked to have heard him say, I'm sorry that I didn't own up to my promises that I made to all the Carrier workers. He forgot about us, and he pretty much scooped us under the rug like it didn't happen. MARTIN: So how far has the president gotten, Uri, to making the U.S. a manufacturing powerhouse again? BERLINER: Well, some setbacks, like layoffs at Carrier, but last year was a pretty good year for manufacturing hiring. And the economy added 200,000 jobs, which is a pretty good turnaround from the previous year. MARTIN: Overall, the president - is he correct to say the economy is pretty strong right now? I mean, we know the stock market's been sky-high. How is the economy doing right now by other metrics? And how much is the president - how much credit should he get for that? BERLINER: Well, you know, economies are big, complicated things. And presidents always take credit when they're going well, and they get the blame when the economy is doing poorly. But presidents can't command the economy. They're just so complex. There's so many other things that go into an economy, things from interest rates to the psychology of employers, to consumer confidence, to what's going on overseas. So, you know, in so many ways, the first year of President Trump's economy looked a lot like President Obama's economy in terms of job growth. The stock market did well. Consumer confidence was getting a little better. But in so many ways, it's not really that different from President Obama's economy, except, perhaps, maybe in the confidence of employers. MARTIN: So what about wages? Because we've heard for years that wages have been stagnant. Last night in his State of the Union, the president said that wages are rising. Are they? BERLINER: Barely. MARTIN: But they are. BERLINER: They - barely. (LAUGHTER) MARTIN: So barely - you're saying barely. BERLINER: I'm saying barely. Wages have been stagnant in the U.S. for a really, really long time. The average worker's wages really hasn't grown much since the mid-'70s. So last year, once you adjust for inflation, the average worker's pay increased by less than one-half of 1 percent. So that's a pretty meager increase. It is an increase, but it's not - there's - it's very hard to make the case that these years and years of wage stagnation have been reversed. MARTIN: Right. All right, NPR business editor Uri Berliner breaking down the president's State of the Union address last night. Thanks so much, Uri. BERLINER: Thank you, Rachel. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: The many people watching the president's discussion of immigration last night included voters in the battleground state of Nevada. Immigrant rights activists and organizers there watched with NPR's Leila Fadel. (SOUNDBITE OF 2018 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: A new time of optimism was already sweeping across our land. LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: I'm at a watch party of a pretty diverse crowd - older, younger, black, brown and white - listening skeptically to a president they feel has made a target of people of color. (LAUGHTER) FADEL: They laugh sarcastically when the president calls for unity and later assumes credit for the record-low unemployment rate of African-Americans. (BOOING) FADEL: They boo when he calls for the end of, quote, "chain migration," by which he means the policy that allows American citizens to sponsor their families to be with them in the United States. (SOUNDBITE OF 2018 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS) TRUMP: ...Of the savage MS-13 gang. FADEL: And when he equates gang violence and then terrorism with immigrants, people here feel attacked. Genaro Marcial-Lorza (ph) is a high school student in the National Honor Society. He was brought here when he was 7, and he's a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. GENARO MARCIAL-LORZA: We're not all MS-13 members. FADEL: Did you feel like he was saying that? MARCIAL-LORZA: Yes, definitely. FADEL: Erika Castro, also a DACA recipient, says the same. ERIKA CASTRO: He's using those isolated issues to further create this fear and use immigrants as a scapegoat. FADEL: She says his plan for a 12-year pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million people who are eligible for DACA could eventually solve her problem. But in exchange, he's demanding a wall on the border, and his plans might get her parents deported. And that's why she says the political middle is disappearing. It feels personal, she says, and it feels aimed at people of color, like herself. CASTRO: This isn't normal - the constant attack on people, on our communities. So it's really hard to find a place where we can kind of come together because he's really creating that division for us. FADEL: Calena Dunbar is a first-generation American on one side and is ethnically Jamaican, Egyptian, Irish and Native American. She says the president's urging for unity was disingenuous. CALENA DUNBAR: I don't think that he wants us to unite at all. If he wanted us to unite, he would address every person's issue. He would address the issues of white supremacy alone. FADEL: While he painted immigrants as criminals or terrorists, criticized athletes who take a knee during the national anthem in protest of police killing unarmed black men, she says he completely ignored the rise in white nationalist hate groups. After the speech, organizers addressed the small crowd of about 40 people attending. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: If you need a place to come... FADEL: They urged everyone to take their anger and use it to mobilize, vote and flip seats come November. Leila Fadel, NPR News, Las Vegas. (SOUNDBITE OF ILLA J SONG, "AIR SIGNS") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Three prominent companies led by three very prominent executives say they want to shake up health care. Amazon, led by Jeff Bezos, JPMorgan, led by Jamie Dimon and Berkshire Hathaway, led by Warren Buffett, all vow to improve health care for their own employees, who number more than a million in total. The three companies are creating a new firm together to try to lower costs and more which we will discuss with Dr. Kevin Schulman, professor at Duke's medical school. He focuses on health care economics. Good morning, sir. KEVIN SCHULMAN: Good morning, Steve. INSKEEP: Do you think these non-health care companies can really do much? SCHULMAN: You know, I think that it's a really exciting opportunity. We haven't seen a lot of dramatic change in health care in the United States in in a long time. Health care costs continue to rise. We're now at almost 18 percent of gross domestic product. And health care costs have increased by about 60 percent over the last decade. And almost all of that increase is price. So people from outside see this as an expense and see this as an opportunity to really shake up the system. INSKEEP: I just want to clarify a couple things you just said. Almost 18 percent of the economy, so we're getting close to the point where 1 of every 5 dollars we make - all of us make - goes to health care. And you're saying almost all the increase is price. I think you're telling me people aren't getting any more quality for the extra money. Is that right? SCHULMAN: There's very little evidence that the quality has been improving over the last decade. And until the last couple years, there hasn't been really dramatic new technologies coming onto the market to explain these increases in cost. INSKEEP: Well, now that's interesting you mentioned technology because to the extent they laid out a plan at all, the three companies said they thought there might be a solution in technology. Is there some technological wonder that would really cut costs that much? SCHULMAN: You know, to use some jargon, we think the business architecture is flawed. So imagine that you had all your data on Amazon - on an Amazon device. When you woke up in the morning, you didn't feel well, you talk to Alexa. And she said, you know what, Steve? Maybe you should come and see us or maybe you should get your blood drawn, and I'll set up an appointment for you. INSKEEP: Oh, so the smart speaker is going to become your admitting nurse or whatever you want to call it? SCHULMAN: It absolutely could. And the backbone of this could - would have to be access to really high-quality data that you generally don't have. Your doctor has it or their health system. One of the things that they're going to have to do is work on liberating the data so these services can actually be really impactful for you. INSKEEP: So is this something that, in the end, would actually save money, would be so efficient that it'd be worth the investment? SCHULMAN: Well, I think there are other parts of the system that aren't as glamorous as that. The back end of the system, you know, administrative costs in the United States are almost 30 percent of all health care spending. When you pull out your credit card, you're paying about 2 percent transaction costs. When you pull out your insurance card, you're paying about 30 percent. INSKEEP: Wow. SCHULMAN: And so, you know, when you think about these firms - Berkshire Hathaway has insurance companies, and JPMorgan has banks - you know, could they do the back-end of health care, the part you don't see, and make that part more efficient? INSKEEP: And in just a few seconds, what do you think of the opportunity of these companies essentially experimenting on their own employees and maybe finding something that can be applied to everyone? SCHULMAN: Well, I think that's a great opportunity for them. They could really, you know, take some chances and take some risks, develop these services and then offer them to the rest of us. INSKEEP: Dr. Shulman, thank you very much. SCHULMAN: Thank you, Steve. INSKEEP: Kevin Shulman is a professor at Duke's medical school. He focuses on health care economics. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: President Trump delivered his first official State of the Union address last night in front of a divided Congress and what many see as a divided nation. (SOUNDBITE OF 2018 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Tonight, I call upon all of us to set aside our differences, to seek out common ground and to summon the unity we need to deliver for the people. This is really the key. These are the people we were elected to serve. MARTIN: So the big question - how far will the president's speech go in bringing the country together, in bringing the two political parties together? NPR congressional correspondent Scott Detrow is here along with NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Good morning to you both. SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Good morning. MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning. MARTIN: All right. So, Scott, when I was watching this, there were a lot of stone-cold faces on the Democratic side of the aisle last night. Was there anything in the president's speech that made you think, OK, yeah, yeah, maybe he can bring people together? DETROW: I think probably not. You know, President Trump did talk a lot about bringing the country together last night, about unity. But that's hard to square with the way he's carried himself day in and day out - picking fights, framing policy debates with personal insults, supporting a lot of policies that passed with not any Democratic support or just a handful of Democratic support. And I think it's hard to see one speech changing that, especially when, even though Trump did talk a lot about unity, he also referenced lots of things that are base politics like a vague mention to the controversy over NFL players kneeling during the national anthem in protest. MARTIN: Right. OK. I want to play a bit of the president's speech that stood out to me last night. This is him talking about how he sees his job. Let's listen. (SOUNDBITE OF 2018 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS) TRUMP: My duty and the sacred duty of every elected official in this chamber is to defend Americans, to protect their safety, their families, their communities and their right to the American dream because Americans are dreamers too. MARTIN: So I can just imagine, Mara, Democrats listening to that. And for the first three-quarters of that clip, they're like, yes, yes, yes - and then the last line - oh, no. LIASSON: (Laughter). MARTIN: I mean, that was not exactly an olive branch to Democrats when it comes to immigration. LIASSON: No. They didn't appreciate that diss about the DREAMers. But that was the great paradox of the speech - a lot of talk about bipartisan common ground, offering an olive branch but still the same divisive rhetoric on immigration, which is the president's top priority for the year. And this has been a constant theme with him ever since he announced his candidacy by talking about Mexico sending rapists. Last night, he talked about the MS-13 gang. He singled out parents of two girls who allegedly were killed by these gang members. The message seemed to be immigrants are coming here to kill us, and Democrats didn't like it. And Dick Durbin, who's the key negotiator for the Democrats on immigration, is reported to have said that Trump's comments about MS-13 were inflammatory. He didn't like the fact that Trump conflated DREAMers with gang members. MARTIN: Yeah. LIASSON: So this is not helpful. MARTIN: So not exactly a sign that things are coming together when it comes to the immigration debate. LIASSON: No. MARTIN: No. All right. Let's talk about what the president wanted to discuss last night, Scott. I mean, usually these addresses are used to kind of give a laundry list of everything that has gone right. So the president talked about tax cuts and how well the economy is doing. Let's listen. (SOUNDBITE OF 2018 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS) TRUMP: Small business confidence is at an all-time high. The stock market has smashed one record after another, gaining $8 trillion and more in value. MARTIN: So describe how important it is for Republicans to coalesce around this message this year. DETROW: They would love nothing more to talk about that and nothing else for the rest of the year and run on that. You know, the economy does continue to make steady progress. Republicans want to run a midterm campaign pointing out that, pointing out their tax cut bill that just passed. They've been promoting the fact that a lot of big corporations have been handing out bonuses or announcing investments and saying that's because of the tax cut. But, of course, we've been talking about many other things. The news has focused on many other things, often negative for Republicans. And that's by and large regularly because that's what President Trump chooses to talk about, to tweet about, to focus on. MARTIN: Right. We should just note - no mention of Robert Mueller last night, no mention of the Russian investigation, something that has plagued his first year. DETROW: But a lot on his Twitter feed. MARTIN: A lot on his Twitter feed, indeed. So, Mara, after the big - the main event, the State of the Union, this is the moment that then the opposition party gets to respond. And Democrats chose Congressman Joe Kennedy - a familiar name, a familiar family - of Massachusetts to give the official response. Let's listen to a clip of this. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) JOE KENNEDY: Bullies may lend a punch. They may leave a mark. But they have never, not once in the history of our United States, managed to match the strength and spirit of a people united in defense of their future. MARTIN: Now, Joe Kennedy was the official response. But, Mara, there were - by my count - I mean, there were four others, right? I mean, is it dangerous for Democrats to look fractured in this moment? LIASSON: I don't think it matters how many Democrats gave a response to the State of the Union. Joe Kennedy was the official response. And, you know, Republicans started this. They - in the era of the Tea Party, they used to have multiple responses to Obama's State of the Unions. I think the time for Democrats to be united is in 2020. Right now, they're just trying to win a lot of congressional races. But Joe Kennedy tried to make the argument against Donald Trump, without mentioning his name, based on values and morals. He tried to get away from identity politics. He was speaking in front of a group of white working-class students at a vocational technical college. MARTIN: No flub-ups? I mean, people can flub these things. He did OK? LIASSON: Oh, there's always flub-ups. This is a cursed exercise. And, of course, he sounded pretty good on the radio. On television, there were a lot of snarky comments about whether he was wearing too much ChapStick... MARTIN: Oh, come on. LIASSON: ...Or drooling. MARTIN: Tough crowd. NPR's Mara Liasson and Scott Detrow, thanks. LIASSON: Thank you. DETROW: Thank you. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Those in the room for the president's speech included Democratic Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who's on the line from his office. Senator, good morning. CORY BOOKER: Good morning. Good morning. INSKEEP: I want to pick out one line from the president's speech - quote, "African-American unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded." It appears to be true, and I also looked it up, Senator. Newark, the majority-black city where you are mayor, unemployment is way down. What do you make of that? BOOKER: Well, I appreciate him - in many themes, from our foreign policy and successes in Iraq and Afghanistan to the economy, he's taking up a lot of Barack Obama's accomplishments. We saw unparalleled growth coming out of a horrible recession when I was mayor and tremendous success. In fact, job growth was greater in the last year of President Obama than it was in the first year of Donald Trump. But a lot of the successes we're seeing - even the family he rolled out with their successful business, as if they benefited from this tax cut that hasn't even taken effect yet - their incredible growth they had this year (unintelligible) owes to a lot of the economic plans we did under the last presidency. INSKEEP: Oh, let's grant that the president - any president only has a certain impact on the economy, and it's early in the administration. But at least it can be said, he hasn't done anything to derail the economic growth. BOOKER: Well, in many ways, he has. And if you go around Newark and talk to folks, it's a time of fear. It's a time of worry. The divisiveness that he's injected into our society has really affected American culture. Remember that we've had about 85 terrorist attacks since 9/11. Unfortunately, about seven - over 70 percent of those have been right-wing, the majority of them white nationalist attacks. And here's a person that seems to fuel that kind of bigotry. In fact, the people that marched in Virginia used his language as license for the kind of evil that they were perpetrating. INSKEEP: Oh, in Charlottesville - the white supremacist rally there. But it seems the underlying message of the president is, you don't like the way that I talk, but I'm going to make you money. BOOKER: Well, again, there's much more going on in our nation that is urgent right now. And for him to do a tax cut that cost the taxpayers, cost our country $1.5 trillion, where the overwhelming majority of that goes to the wealthiest in our country under the theory that's somehow going to trickle down is massively irresponsible. And people in New Jersey, especially - a state that relied on a critical tax cut - state and local taxes - is hurting as a result of that. INSKEEP: So... BOOKER: You have people in New Jersey that are really suffering as a result of this tax bill that... INSKEEP: Senator, I want to ask about one other thing because you're on the Committee on Foreign Relations, and so I'm sure you're paying attention to this news. President Trump's administration has decided not to impose sanctions on Russia at this time for its interference in the presidential election. They say that the pressure or threats - implied threats - are enough for now, not imposing sanctions even though Congress overwhelmingly passed a law requiring them. What, if anything, are you going to do about that? BOOKER: Well, first of all, it's stunning that the United States of America was attacked with - one of my Republican colleagues on that committee called akin to Pearl Harbor - cyberattacks in the last election, ongoing attacks - cyberattacks right now. They haven't stopped. They're getting more sophisticated. And this president of United States has done what I consider is tantamount to malfeasance by not answering that attack. Putin respects strength, and we're lying down in the face of ongoing attacks. And so here you have a bipartisan bill overwhelmingly supported by Congress, and he did not use the tools in the toolbox. It's - contradicts what he said in his speech about a strong country. More important than building his wall is making sure that we have strong cyber defense because China, Russia - they cannot match us tank for tank or battleship for battleship, but they're fighting us now on the field of cyberattacks unless we fight back. INSKEEP: Hacker for hacker, they might do a little better. Just a few seconds here, Senator - what would a successful presidential candidate need to do in 2020? BOOKER: I'm focused on 2018 in November, and it's irresponsible for us to be thinking that far in advance. We've got to win back Congress, the House and the Senate, and that's what we should be working on. And folks have got to get out and vote in this nation. INSKEEP: Senator, always a pleasure talking with you. Thank you very much. BOOKER: Thank you very much. INSKEEP: Cory Booker, Democratic senator from the state of New Jersey. (SOUNDBITE OF FREDDIE JOACHIM'S "KOOL IN THE SUMMER") STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Let's follow up on President Trump's State of the Union speech. Raj Shah is on the line. He is the deputy White House press secretary. Mr. Shah, welcome to the program. RAJ SHAH: Thanks a lot for having me on this morning. INSKEEP: So the president made a number of gestures toward unifying the country. He talked about protecting people regardless of their background or color or religion. But in the same speech, he also talked about illegal immigrants killing people. There was a lot of harsh rhetoric, and here's a response to that from Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. Let's listen, then we'll talk about it. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) CHRIS MURPHY: That was not a unifying speech. There were a number of great Americans there, and I was glad to stand up and applaud for them. But in between those introductions was a ton of divisive rhetoric. We didn't get any closer to a deal on immigration or on the federal budget. We got further away. INSKEEP: Raj Shah, you are in the middle of these intensive negotiations. Why would the president throw in that rhetoric about murder and chain migration and so forth? SHAH: Well, let me just say off the gate in response to Senator Murphy - I do think it was a very unifying address. There was a lot that Democrats could have embraced. They seemed unwilling to want to. You know, I saw clips of Democrats sitting on their hands when the president talked about historic lows in unemployment among all Americans, including African-Americans and Hispanics. If that's not news you can't clap for, I don't know what there is to clap for. But on the issue of immigration, the president talked about four key issues and four key pillars of his plan that Democrats and Republicans agreed to only a few weeks ago at the White House to move forward. The president has offered a path to citizenship and legalization for nearly 2 million people here illegally. He's reaching across the aisle and offering something that Democrats can embrace and, in exchange, wants real border security, wants to end, you know, a pathway for criminal illegal immigrants to come across our porous southern border... INSKEEP: Well, I'm glad you mentioned... SHAH: ...Without - with very little security. Yeah. Go ahead. INSKEEP: I'm glad you mentioned, Mr. Shah, that he has offered a pathway to citizenship for people in the DACA program, which makes me wonder - when he uses that harsh rhetoric in the State of the Union speech, is he actually speaking to his political base, hard-liners who are against that and reassuring them he's still going to be tough? SHAH: Well, the president crafted out a pretty hard line during the campaign. He talked about building a wall. He talked about deporting criminal illegal immigrants. That was certainly part of the proposal that he introduced during the campaign, and he won the election. These are mainstream proposals that the president ran on, won on and he believes the American people - we believe the American people want. The country wants a compassionate program for people who have come here illegally as children. But they also want security. Border security is one of the most popular polled items that this president stands for. And, you know, Senator Murphy and other Democrats may not agree with it, but he's offering right now a balanced approach that many Americans would agree to. INSKEEP: One of the people watching the economic portions of the speech was a woman named Renee Elliott. And I want to hear from her next. She, along with about 500 other people, was laid off from a Carrier manufacturing plant in Indiana. And as you know, Mr. Shah, this is a plant where President Trump, before he even took office, intervened and tried to get what looked like a deal to save their jobs. Here's what Renee Elliott says now. RENEE ELLIOTT: And he can tell other people stories, that's for sure. And it just - he strikes me now as an opportunist. And I am so disgusted within myself that I believed his rhetoric and bought into it. INSKEEP: Did the president not live up to his word in the case of the Carrier plant? SHAH: Well, our heart goes out to Ms. Elliott and everybody else who's struggling to find a job in our times right now or any other times. I would say on the issue of Carrier specifically, there were nearly a thousand jobs saved from the president and Governor Pence at the time's actions - now the vice president. But on the issue of the economy, let's look at the whole nation and what the president's doing. You are having stories that we haven't seen in decades. You're having hundreds of companies make investments in the United States - create jobs, expand benefits, give workers bonuses - as a result of the tax cut bill. You're seeing unemployment at near two-decade lows, wages rising, the stock market soaring through the roof, which means more pensions and more secure savings for millions of Americans. So the economic record overall of this president and what's happened over the last year is tremendous. I mentioned African-American and Hispanic unemployment - female unemployment, unemployment record levels for veterans - is all hitting new lows. And it's a sight that we haven't seen before. And we think that we're about to boom and move forward even quicker. So we think that millions - tens of millions of Americans have a lot to be optimistic about when it comes to the economy. INSKEEP: Mr. Shah, I want to ask you about something that was not emphasized in the speech last night, and that is sanctions against Russia. As you know, Congress - everybody the president was facing - nearly all of them voted in favor of sanctioning Russia for its interference in the 2016 election. President Trump has repeatedly called that interference a hoax, and the administration says this week it's not actually going to enforce the sanctions. It feels that, for the moment, that essentially threatening Russia is punishment enough. Why not follow the will of Congress? SHAH: Well, first off, if you look at the actual report issued by the State Department, they make a compelling case for why deterrence has worked. And when it comes to Russia, this president has been tough. He has called out election meddling. You used the word hoax. He has used that to describe allegations of collusion for which there have been millions of dollars of taxpayer money spent to try to find evidence of collusion between the president or his campaign last year - or rather in 2016 - and the Russian government. Not a shred of evidence has been found. INSKEEP: OK, let me stop you for a second, though. I understand what you're saying there. But can you name an occasion on which the president has specifically and strongly said Russia interfered in the 2016 election, that was wrong, and it must not happen again, and we're going to make sure it doesn't? SHAH: Absolutely, last November in Asia. And I would encourage you to find the tape and play it. The president was specifically asked about this and asked about comments that Vladimir Putin made to him. And he said while Vladimir Putin claims he didn't interfere in the election, he believes the intelligence agencies that many in the United States have told him that he does. INSKEEP: Wait. SHAH: And also... INSKEEP: He actually said, I asked Vladimir Putin, and I asked him a couple of times. And you can't just keep asking him. That was as tough as he could manage to get with Vladimir Putin. SHAH: No - and he said he trusts the words of the intelligence agencies. Remember, there were sanctions put in place in December of 2016. We have not lifted them. And the president has done much more to hold Russia accountable. He is arming Ukraine with offensive weapons. That's something President Obama refused to do. INSKEEP: And that is surely happening? SHAH: He issued airstrikes. INSKEEP: That is surely happening? SHAH: Hang on. He ordered airstrikes. Sorry - say that again. INSKEEP: I've just got about 10 seconds. The arming Ukraine with offensive weapons - that is surely happening? SHAH: Absolutely, as with the airstrikes in Syria that President Obama refused to issue that were against Russian interests. This president's been tough, and he's going to continue to be tough. INSKEEP: Raj Shah, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. SHAH: Thank you. INSKEEP: He is the deputy White House press secretary. (SOUNDBITE OF STEV'S "WHILE YOU'RE FADING") RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: So it made sense that President Trump would use his first State of the Union address to reach out beyond his base. And yes, that meant trying to say things that might be appealing to Democrats, but it also meant trying to bridge the divides within his own party. So how did he do on that front? We're going to ask Ronna Romney McDaniel. She is the chair of the Republican National Committee, and she joins us on the line. Thanks so much for being with us this morning. RONNA ROMNEY MCDANIEL: Thanks for having me. MARTIN: Was this the unifying speech the White House advertised it would be? MCDANIEL: I think it was a unifying speech. I think the president came out extending his hand to Democrats, saying let's work together. This is a time where we can do good things for the American people. And let's put aside our differences and focus on the things where we do agree, things like infrastructure. Let's make an immigration deal. And I thought his tone was perfect. And I thought it was an excellent speech. And he's gotten rave reviews. MARTIN: So let's talk about immigration because it's far from a done deal at this point. The president did address it. And he said that - and he said it again in the address - that he wants a path to citizenship for 1.8 million people who would qualify for DACA protections. Is that something you believe a majority of Republicans can support? MCDANIEL: I think if it's in combination with border security, the ending of chain migration and the visa lottery system, that is something. It's called compromise. He also noted that this is three times more of the DACA - or the DREAMers than President Obama had given a path to citizenship for. So there is compromise there. And I think Republicans recognize that we need Democrats to pass this. MARTIN: But you don't have everybody in the Republican caucus. I mean, the Freedom Caucus members don't like this one bit. MCDANIEL: There's going to have to be some Democrats coming over and supporting as well. And... MARTIN: Because you don't assume they'll come onboard? You need the Democrats to replace them? MCDANIEL: I'm not assuming that. I think we can get them there. But we're going to need Democrats absolutely in the Senate. We only have 51 votes in the Senate. You're going to need nine Democrats to pass anything comprehensive with immigration. I'm assuming we could get some Democrats in the House. What we've seen so far is they haven't come across the aisle to work with this president. But I think this proposal is very reasonable. I think it's something that, if the president had put it out at the beginning of the year last year, they would have jumped at it. And so it's going to be interesting to see how they negotiate on this because, as far as I'm concerned, I can't imagine why they wouldn't take this opportunity to protect these DREAMers, something that they have campaigned on. MARTIN: It's also an election year, though. Midterms are coming up. And the people are going to be trying to cater to their base to get their own votes. We heard from conservative talk show radio host Chris Buskirk this morning. He said the president's proposal is over-the-top. Is there concern that this could cause the president's base to feel as if he has not followed through on campaign promises? MCDANIEL: I don't think so because he was very clear that it has to be in conjunction with increased border security, the end of chain migration and the diversity lottery. So there's give for everyone. That's recognized in the president's compromise. I think his base knows he has to work with Democrats to get this passed. And so it's going to be interesting with the Democrats because I do think the 2018 Democrat who ran on protecting the DREAMers are going to be more inclined to work with the president. But those 2020 Democrats running for president already are going to be the ones who are going to be less inclined to make a deal. MARTIN: Before I let you go, I want to ask you about Steve Wynn. He's the former finance chairman of the RNC, dismissed from that job after allegations of sexual abuse surfaced. Wynn has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars at least to Republican candidates and organizations over the year. Should that money be returned? MCDANIEL: Well, this has been such a troubling time. And the allegations are incredibly troubling, troubling enough that within 24 hours, I had accepted his resignation as finance chairman. We took swift action. MARTIN: To remove him from that post. We only have seconds left. Do you think that money should go back? MCDANIEL: Well, there's going to be an investigation. If wrongdoing is found, absolutely that money will go back. MARTIN: Although Harvey Weinstein, the Democrats - Republicans accused Democrats of not returning money from Harvey Weinstein immediately. MCDANIEL: Well, Harvey Weinstein admitted wrongdoing out of the gate. He went into rehab. He had named accusers. And so I think the circumstances are different in all of these cases, and we need to be judicious and look at that. MARTIN: Ronna Romney McDaniel, chair of the RNC. Thanks for your time this morning. MCDANIEL: Thank you. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald is her name, she has resigned. This following reports that Dr. Fitzgerald bought shares in a tobacco company a month after taking her job. For more on this story, we've got NPR health editor Joe Neel in the studio with us. Hey, Joe. JOE NEEL, BYLINE: Good morning. MARTIN: What more can you tell us about the circumstances of Dr. Fitzgerald's resignation? NEEL: Well, we know that from a report that was published last evening on the Politico website, they had obtained some documents via the Freedom of Information Act, that she bought stocks in Japan Tobacco about a month after she took office back in August. She also, during this period when she was just assuming the office, she bought stocks in a number of other companies that may have presented a conflict of interest - the drugmaker Merck, the health insurance company Humana, drugmaker Bayer and a food company. So there was a lot of questions going on about her in the first three or four months of her tenure as the CDC director about these conflicts of interest. And what appears to have happened was this publication last night of the purchase of tobacco stocks by the director of the agency in charge of preventing tobacco use... MARTIN: Right. NEEL: ...May have been - we don't know for sure - may have been what broke the camel's back. MARTIN: I mean, because so clearly, I mean, you can't have a CDC director buying shares of a tobacco company. I mean, it's not illegal, but it's absolutely inappropriate, I guess. NEEL: Yes. As one critic said in the Politico report, it certainly undermines the credibility of a public health official. Now, I should point out that Dr. Fitzgerald is a medical doctor. She had been commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health, and she had made tobacco control part of her mission while she was head of that agency in Georgia. Then she was appointed by HHS secretary - then-HHS secretary Tom Price, from Georgia, who ultimately had to resign because of the plane flights that he took, and also was involved in some stock trading that presented conflicts of interest. MARTIN: So what does it mean for the director of the CDC to resign so abruptly? What are the ripple effects of that? NEEL: Well, we'll have to wait and see. I mean, we're in the middle of a big flu outbreak. We have a number of other public health issues going on. The opioid crisis. We'll just have to wait and see. MARTIN: All right. Joe Neel, he's NPR's health editor, reporting this morning on news that Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has resigned from her job following reports that she bought shares in a tobacco company. Joe, thanks so much for taking the time. NEEL: Sure. "Rep. Bustos: Democrats Need To Better Serve Midwesterners"
"Flu Sickens Thousands Across The Country"
"While Talking About Immigration, Trump Makes Vulgar Comment"
"Republicans Begin Work On Overhauling Entitlement Programs"
"German Chancellor Merkel Strikes Deal For New Coalition Government"
"Environmentalists Warn Of Mediterranean Pollution From Lebanon Land Reclamation"
"Reproductive Freedom Lies Just Outside The U.S. Border In 'Red Clocks'"
"CIA Calendar Art Offers A Glimpse Into The World Of Spies"
"President Trump's Slur Is An Insult To America, Too"
"What's Next For Salvadorans In The U.S."
"How Political Media Reacted To Trump's Vulgarity"
"What Trump's Language Means For Immigration Overhaul"
"Detroit Kit Tests Indicate Hundreds Of Serial Rapists"
"When Prosecutors Are 'Innocence Deniers'"
"Organizing Puerto Rican Voters In Florida"
"Instagram And Shopify: How Businesses Are Targeting Your Feed"
"Russia's Underground Art Finds A Home In The U.S."
"Longtime Record Producer Joe Boyd On Albanian 'Saze' Music"
"UC President Janet Napolitano On DACA Lawsuit"
"Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin On Requiring Medicaid Recipients To Work"
"California Mudslides Latest"
"Sen. Ron Wyden On Russia Investigation"
"Why So Many House Republicans Are Retiring"
"Saturday Sports: North Korea At The Winter Olympics"
"Illinois Attorney General Candidate Robbed "
"Sports Announcer Keith Jackson Dies At 89"
"Sunday Puzzle: A Twisted Ending"
"Behind The Genius Of Guinness, Ireland's Most Popular Tourist Attraction"
"When 2 Children Are Murdered, 'The Perfect Nanny' Is Anything But"
"Author Edwidge Danticat On The Immigrant Experience"
"The GOP's Latino Outreach"
"A Border Town's Mayor On Immigration"
"The Call-In: The Nursing Industry"
"Pennsylvania National Guard Deploys To The Middle East"
"What Your Smart Devices Know About You"
"What Happens When Your DACA Work Permit Expires"
"Rep. Pete Aguilar On DACA"
"Ken Starr On Investigating A President"
"Rich Lowry Says 'Country Of Origin Matters'"
"Africans React To Trump's Vulgar Comment"
"What Border Patrol Agents Think About Immigration Policy"
"Oregonians Adapt To Pumping Their Own Gas"
"38 Minutes Of Panic In Hawaii"
"Gerrymandering In Maryland"
"Remembering A Comet-Discoverer"
"On The Hunt For Poppies In Mexico \u2014 America's Biggest Heroin Supplier"
"For Now, Sequencing Cancer Tumors Holds More Promise Than Proof"
"After A Year In Office, Questions About Trump's Foreign Deals Go On. And On "
"News Brief: Immigration Negotiations, False Missile Warning"
"'Star Wars' Musical Pencil Video Goes Viral"
"Poor Economic Conditions Spur Protests Across Tunisia "
"Trump Looks To Terminate The Diversity Lottery Program"
"A False Ballistic Missile Alert Frightens Hawaii Residents"
"Examining Activism On Martin Luther King Jr. Day"
"Outgoing Va. Gov. McAuliffe Plays Prank On His Successor "
"Seth Mandel On The Next Steps For 'NeverTrump'"
"Wave Of Capitalist Optimism Sweeps Across Paris"
"Mormon Church Leader To Be Officially Announced Tuesday"
"Democrats Are Serious About A DACA Deal, Rep. Espaillat Says"
"Budgets Suffer After A Drop In International Student Enrollment"
"Protesting Through Poetry"
"News Brief: DACA Deal Is Stalled, North Korea Talks"
"Ex-Defense Chief William Perry On False Missile Warnings"
"Northern Arizona University Researcher Studies Dog Communication"
"After Several Chaotic Days, Where Does DACA Deal Stand?"
"Police In Venezuela Say They've Destroyed A Terrorist Cell"
"Pope Francis Begins South American Trip In Chile"
"Khadija Abdullahi Daleys, Mother Of Somali Music, Dies At 82"
"A Modern-Day Long-Distance Love Story"
"Trump Adviser Krikorian Backs Shift To Merit-Based Immigration"
"Ethics Report On Trump Administration: The Most Unethical Presidency "
"Banana Drama Gets Much Attention At Australian Open"
"Koreas Hold Border Talks, U.S., Canada Hold Summit On Nuclear Threat"
"Calif. Couple Arrested After Siblings Found Chained To Beds"
"Dolores O'Riordan, Cranberries Lead Singer, Dies At 46"
"Thai Officials Want To Silence Critics, Scholar Charged With Insulting Monarchy "
"Trump Campaign Player To Appear Before Congressional Panel"
"A Government Born In Protest, Faces Widespread Protest"
"In Supreme Court, Skepticism Of Lawyer Who Overrode Client's Wish To Plead Not Guilty"
"Morning News Brief"
"Syrian Family May Have To Move Again To Escape Government Forces"
"Klingon Tourist Center Opens Next Month In Stockholm"
"GOP Pushes Plan To Keep Government Open While DACA Decided"
"Like Florida, Maryland Wants To Be Exempt From Offshore Drilling"
"New Phase Begins In Saudi Arabia's Anti-Corruption Crackdown"
"Decision By Minnesota Vikings Crushes Hopes Of Las Vegas Gamblers"
"Review: 'American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace'"
"Russia Probe: Rep. Schiff On Bannon's Testimony Before House Panel"
"Ex-Gymnastics Doctor Faces Sentencing In Michigan"
"Former CIA Officer Arrested After Exposing U.S. Spy Network In China"
"2 Ex-Naval Commanders Face Criminal Charges In 2 Deadly Collisions"
"New Jersey Has A New Law Against Droning While Intoxicated "
"Bill Changes How Congressional Sexual Harassment Claims Are Handled"
"Trump Comments Ignite Immigrants In Philly To Unite"
"Trump Raises Possibility Of Bringing Back Earmarks"
"Sen. Flake To Counter Trump's Fake News Claims In Senate Speech"
"North And South Korea Find Common Ground For Pyeongchang Winter Olympics"
"Aetna Agrees To Pay $17 Million In HIV Privacy Breach"
"From The Frontlines Of A Sexual Assault Epidemic: 2 Therapists Share Stories"
"Wes Studi On His Cherokee Nation Childhood And How He Discovered Acting"
"Majority Of Americans See Trump's First Year As A Failure"
"News Brief: HHS To Protect Religious Objectors, Trump's First Year Poll, Apple Jobs"
"Tillerson Says U.S. To Stay In Syria Indefinitely"
"Apple Says It Will Create 20,000 Jobs In The U.S."
"Andrew W.K. Takes Responsibility For Causing Speeding With 'Sonic Party Power'"
"HHS To Protect Health Workers With Religious Objections"
"Pet Blessing In Spain"
"Republicans Blame Medicaid For Contributing To Opioid Epidemic"
"Finding Your Lost Bitcoins"
"Keeping Animals Away With Deer Snorts And Dog Barks"
"Rep. Scott Perry On Threat Of Government Shutdown"
"The National Parks And Ryan Zinke"
"Sen. Michael Bennet On Immigration And Trump's Wall"
"Victims Confront Larry Nassar Over Sexual Abuse"
"1 Emoluments Clause Lawsuit Is Dismissed, Trump Faces Others In 2018"
"'12 Strong': When The Afghan War Looked Like A Quick, Stirring Victory "
"'It's Not A Fairy Tale, It's Not A Failure': A Mother At 16 Conquers Stigma With Love"
"Is That Awl There Is? Remembering The Awl And The Hairpin"
"Turnover In Trump's White House Is 'Record-Setting,' And It Isn't Even Close"
"In 'Munich,' Neville Chamberlain Gets The Best Of Hitler"
"Women's Marches Across The Country Will Focus On The Vote"
"News Brief: Government Shutdown Threat Looms, Hush Money Payments"
"Anti-Abortion Activist Wants Trump To Recommit To Campaign Pledges"
"Friendly Skies: Pope Marries Couple On A Plane Over Chile"
"Pence Begins Mideast Tour In Cairo For Talks With Egypt's President"
"House Bill To Keep Government Open Passes After Deal With Freedom Caucus"
"Trump Visits Pa. County That Has A Special Election In March"
"Elvis Collector Auctions Dixie Cup Allegedly Used By The King"
"Why Are We Only Learning About Stormy Daniels Now, Writes 'Post's' Farhi"
"In Tunisia, Self-Immolation Has Become A Common Form Of Suicide"
"DREAMers Caught Up In Efforts To Keep The Government Open"
"Prosecutor Releases New Details In Case Involving 'Shackled' Siblings"
"Clock Ticks Down Toward A Midnight Government Shutdown"
"White House: 'We Don't Want A Shutdown'"
"In 'The Alienist,' Dakota Fanning Plays The NYPD's First Woman Hire"
"How The Man In The Apartment Hit Big With 'The Woman In The Window'"
"As A Massive Garbage Dump Closes In Brazil, Trash-Pickers Face An Uncertain Future"
"Crime Is Down In American Cities, And 'Uneasy Peace' Explains Why"
"Kicked Out Of Air Force For Being Gay, Helen Grace James Wins Honorable Discharge "
"Republican Rep. Tom Cole On Government Shutdown"
"How The Shutdown Happened"
"Trump Speaks To Abortion-Rights Opponents At 'March For Life'"
"Democrat Wins Wisconsin State Senate Race In Trump Country"
"National Politics Plays A Role In South Carolina Election"
"Out Of Prison, Former Massey CEO Don Blankenship Running For Senator"
"A Dad Separated From His Daughter Resettles Across The Border After Deportation"
"California Mudslide Cleanup Presents New Problems"
"How Dangerous Is Misinformation On Facebook?"
"Musician MILCK On The Women's March"
"Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen On Shutdown"
"Blame Game Begins Over Shutdown"
"Who Stops Working When The Government Shuts Down"
"New York City Prepares For Women's March"
"A Trump Supporter And A Trump Protester Reflect On The President's First Year "
"Saturday Sports: Gymnasts Testify On Larry Nassar's Abuse"
"The Shutdown And National Parks"
"Immigration Deal Remains Sticking Point In Negotiations To Reopen Government"
"Democrats Doubt Shutdown Chaos Will Hurt Them In Midterm Elections"
"When A Tattoo Means Life Or Death. Literally"
"Read 'Em And Weep: Celebrating 35 Years Of Opera Supertitles"
"Sunday Puzzle: It Takes Two"
"Shutdown Latest"
"Shutdown Day 2"
"Explaining 'Chain Migration' Or 'Family Reunification'"
"Supporters Assess Trump's First Year"
"The Call-In: The Women's March"
"Bernie Sanders On Government Shutdown"
"The Future Of Myanmar's Rohingya Refugees"
"Building An Ice Palace In Minnesota"
"What The Government Shutdown Means For Military Families"
"Women Rally In Las Vegas On March Anniversary"
"Government Shutdowns And The CDC"
"Nassar Testimony Brings One Sexual Abuse Survivor Sadness - And Then Some Relief"
"Patience Ibrahim Thought No One Would Care About Her Story As A Boko Haram Captive"
"Calexico's Joey Burns On The Sound Of The Southwest"
"When A Reporter Gets Starstruck Over Ricky Martin"
"The GOP's Shutdown Strategy"
"My Grandmother Was Italian. Why Aren't My Genes Italian?"
"Personalized Diets: Can Your Genes Really Tell You What To Eat?"
"The Refugees Who Don't Want To Go Home ... Yet"
"'Criminal Cabal'? FBI Fears Political Attacks May Imperil Work Of Field Agents"
"Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Reflects On The #MeToo Movement: 'It's About Time' "
"Morning News Brief: Government Shutdown Enters 3rd Day"
"Bronx Zoo Has A Way To Break Your Old Valentine's Day Routine"
"Vice President Pence Stops In Israel On His Middle East Tour"
"U.N. Security Council To Hold Emergency Meeting On Turkish Attack In Syria"
"2 Sisters In Pakistan Find They Have A Lot In Common With Jane Austen"
"Politics In The News: Partial Government Shutdown"
"A Close-Up Look At Contract Workers"
"DACA Activist Weighs In On The Partial Government Shutdown"
"Decades Later, Beach Boy Brian Wilson Gets Grade Changed"
"Despite Ongoing Talks, It's Day 3 Of The Government Shutdown"
"Review: 'The Alienist'"
"Democrats Want Immigration Issues Solved Before Vote On Budget"
"Is The Partial Government Shutdown Painful? It Depends Who You Ask"
"Trump Played A Low-Key Role In Weekend Shutdown Negotiations"
"Pence: U.S. Embassy Will Open In Jerusalem Before End Of 2019"
"Will Work For No Benefits: The Challenges Of Being In The New Contract Workforce"
"Part Of Oregon's Funding Plan For Medicaid Goes Before Voters"
"News Brief: Government Reopens, Deal Goes Through Feb. 8"
"Descending On A Montana Town, Neo-Nazi Trolls Test Where Free Speech Ends"
"Frozen Ball Of Human Waste Falls From Sky"
"Trump's ICE Deportations Are Up From Obama's Figures, Data Show"
"World's Most Influential People Gather For Davos Economic Forum"
"When Dating Felt Like A Job, One Woman Hired A Matchmaker"
"Did Senate Democrats Help Or Hurt Themselves During The Shutdown?"
"Bill Cosby Makes Surprise Stand-Up Appearance Ahead Of Retrial"
"Plans Are Announced To Privatize Puerto Rico's Electric Utility"
"Officials In California Town Take Down 'Bob's House' Sign"
"Trump Signs Measure To Reopen The Federal Government"
"Oscar Nominations Will Be Viewed Through 'MeToo' Lens"
"Sen. Tammy Duckworth Talks About Her Trip To South Korea"
"Where Does President Trump Stand On The Compromise Budget Bill?"
"U.S. Promises To Help Rebuild Syrian City Of Raqqa"
"Tsunami Warning Sends Alaskans To Seek Higher Ground"
"Sessions Sits For Voluntary Interview With Mueller"
"Is There A Ticking Time Bomb Under The Arctic?"
"The Influence Of Ursula K. Le Guin"
"News Brief: Republicans Rally Behind Nunes Memo, Trump Heads To Davos"
"Rep. Meehan Denies Sexually Harassing Younger Staffer"
"Newlyweds Separated By Bureaucracy"
"You've Waited, Now It's Here: The Smartphone-Powered Nose Hair Trimmer"
"Trump To Talk Up His Economic Policies At Davos"
"Investigation Finds Troubling Behavior By Garrison Keillor"
"How Hockey Took Hold In Las Vegas"
"TV Review: 'Waco'"
"The FBI And The Nunes Memo"
"The GOP's Change On Immigration"
"Philadelphia Says It Supports Supervised Drug Injection Sites"
"Man Bites Dog"
"The Government Shutdown And Bipartisanship"
"3 USA Gymnastics Board Members Resign"
"Pakistani Authorities Arrest Suspect In Rape And Murder Of Young Girl"
"Democrats Didn't Cave On Deal To Reopen Government, Sen. Jones Says"
"Bill Would Reduce Legal Immigration And Crack Down On Sanctuary Cities"
"Gunmen Attack Save The Children Office In Afghanistan"
"'Don't Think A Robot Could Do This': Warehouse Workers Aren't Worried For Their Jobs"
"Spotify's Unusual IPO Model Will Test The Company's Strength"
"Red Cross Endorsed Top Official Despite Sexual Misconduct Claims, ProPublica Reports"
"News Brief: Russia Investigation, Turkish Military Strikes"
"Kansas Lt. Gov. Will Take Over As Brownback Leaves For Ambassadorship"
"Cabdriver Ends Up Foiling Bank Robber's Getaway "
"Trump Talks To Reporters About Russia Probe, DACA Recipients"
"Judges In Brazil Uphold Former President's Graft Conviction"
"Sundance Film Festival Opens And Our Reviewer Tells Us What To See"
"Hidden Brain: Researchers Delve Into Improving Concentration"
"Trump Tells Reporters He's Willing To Talk To Mueller Under Oath"
"North Korean Women's Hockey Players Arrive In The South To Begin Training"
"Albanian Immigrant Takes Refuge In Detroit Church To Avoid Deportation"
"New Orleans Revives 1894 Tabasco Opera"
"Veterinary Clinic In Ireland Is Looking For A Cat Cuddler"
"Trump Calls Turkey's President To Discuss Strikes In Syria"
"How Has Life In Crimea Changed Since Russia Seized It From Ukraine?"
"Sen. Ron Johnson Weighs In On Missing FBI Text Messages "
"Ex-USA Gymnastics Doctor Sentenced; Michigan State President Resigns"
"In Davos, Trump Meeting With World Leaders"
"Lullaby Or Dance Song? Listen To Global Tunes And See If You Can Tell"
"What It Takes To Get Guns Out Of The Wrong Hands"
"Will A Scandal Over Expensive Watches Bring Down Thailand's Government?"
"For These 3 Women, Medical Careers Are A Family Affair"
"Federal Judge Seems Sympathetic To Anti-Corruption Case Against President Trump"
"Fire Rips Through South Korean Hospital, Killing Dozens Of Patients"
"News Brief: Trump Ordered Mueller Fired, Trump Speaks In Davos, Immigration"
"Paris Hit By Floods"
"A Bathroom Wedding"
"Congress Responds To White House Immigration Plan"
"Gymnastics Sexual Abuse Case Puts Spotlight On Protecting Athletes"
"What's New At The Detroit Auto Show"
"U.S.-Funded Afghan Military Units Accused Of Child Sexual Abuse, Report Says"
"New Study Shows A Grave Lack Of Gender Diversity In The Music Industry"
"Report: Trump Ordered Mueller's Firing, But Backed Down"
"Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro On Mueller, Immigration Plan"
"What China Wants From The U.S."
"New Orleans Finds 93,000 Pounds Of Mardi Gras Beads In Storm Drains"
"Conservative Writer Says Republicans 'Sacrificed Their Honor' By Attacking FBI"
"Trump Reportedly Ordered Mueller's Firing"
"In Davos, Trump Calls Mueller Report 'Fake News'"
"In Davos, Trump Plays Salesman To Global Elite"
"Planned Parenthood's President Stepping Down"
"What Do Asthma, Heart Disease And Cancer Have In Common? Maybe Childhood Trauma"
"Reworking Trauma: Mary Gauthier Tells Veteran Stories On 'Rifles & Rosary Beads'"
"A Puzzled Teen Seeks Answers And Finds Crosswords In 'Down And Across'"
"Honeybees Help Farmers, But They Don't Help The Environment"
"Rare Disease Finds Fertile Ground In Rohingya Refugee Camps"
"Activists: Gang Database Disproportionately Targets Young Men Of Color"
"School Shootings Are Sad, But No Longer Surprising "
"Yellowstone Bison Release Launches Criminal Investigation"
"'It's Up To All Of Us': Parents Of Young Gymnasts Respond To Nassar Abuse Scandal"
"Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz On FBI Russia Probe"
"What To Make Of North Korea's Olympic Overtures"
"Macron's Immigration Plan For France"
"The Great Baboon Escape"
"Meet The Olympic 'Team Mom'"
"Week In Politics: Trump In Davos, Immigration, Mueller"
"Evaluating Trump's 'America First' Trade Policies"
"While Some Organizations Cancel Mar-A-Lago Events, Others Fill The Gaps"
"Flu Season Is Hitting Hard"
"Honduran President To Begin Second Term After Controversial Election"
"Saturday Sports: Fallout Continues Over Gymnastics Sex Abuse"
"'America From The Bottom': Documenting Poverty Across The Country"
"A Beach In Tunisia Where Migrants' Bodies Wash Ashore"
"Nearly 100 Killed In Afghanistan Ambulance Blast"
"Greek Orthodox Church Sells Land In Israel, Worrying Both Israelis And Palestinians"
"The Massive Case Of Collective Amnesia: The FBI Has Been Political From The Start"
"'Flats Are For Quitters': RuPaul Talks Drag, 'All Stars' And Identity Politics"
"At One NASA Lab, Art And Science Share The Same Orbit"
"A Plucky English Heroine Amid New York's Super-Rich In 'Still Me'"
"'There Isn't A Just Housing Choice': How We've Enabled The Pains Of Gentrification"
"Reconnecting Strangers On A Train, One Tumblr Post At A Time"
"Sunday Puzzle: Can You Keep Up?"
"Rep. Jim Himes On The Nunes Memo "
"The Other NPR: Nuclear Posture Review"
"'Super Blue Blood Moon' Coming Wednesday"
"Army Considers Bringing Back The 'Pinks And Greens' Uniform Of WWII"
"U.S. Travel Industry Worries As International Visits Decline"
"How Larry Nassar's Abuse Went On For So Long"
"The White House's Immigration Plan"
"Former Mexican President To Trump: 'If You Want To Build A Wall, Waste Your Money'"
"Philadelphia Plans Supervised Drug Injection Sites"
"Kentucky Pastor On School Shooting"
"Ikea Founder Dies At 91"
"Is Smoking Pot While Pregnant Safe For The Baby?"
"Military Victory But Political Defeat: The Tet Offensive 50 Years Later"
"The Future Of Benefits: A New York Program Might Provide A Model"
"Got Your Flu Shot Yet? Consider This A Reminder"
"Morning News Brief: Trump Preps For State Of The Union"
"Hotel Valet Hands Ferrari Key To The Wrong Man"
"Putin Critic Arrested In Presidential Election Boycott Protests"
"At 60th Annual Grammy Awards, Bruno Mars Dominates Major Categories"
"Iran Grants Iranian-American Prisoner 4 Days Of Sick Leave"
"Bipartisan Bills Would Protect All Special Counsels, Not Just Mueller"
"Sports Arbitration Court Considers Banned Russians' Doping Cases"
"Israel Calls Out Poland On Proposed Holocaust Law"
"A Rhode Island Lawmaker Says It's Time To Eliminate Outdated Laws"
"Immigration Expected To Be A Big Part Of Trump's State Of The Union"
"30th Meeting Of The African Union Held In Ethiopia"
"Federal Crackdown On States' Legal Marijuana Drives Private Investors Away"
"Rep. Hurd Calls For A Narrow Focus To Address Immigration"
"Afghanistan Suffers Through More Deadly Attacks"
"Dating Apps Can Help Older Adults Meet \u2014 No Time Machine Necessary"
"Morning News Brief: The FBI's No. 2 Official Steps Down"
"White House Decides Not To Impose New Sanctions On Russia"
"North Korea, China Are Expected To Come Up In Trump's State Of The Union"
"Minnesota Embraces Its Weather As It Hosts Super Bowl Festivities"
"Trump Expected To Strike An Optimistic Tone In State Of The Union Speech"
"Students, Alumni Watch As Michigan State Tries To Restore Its Reputation"
"Will State Of The Union Speech Answer Where Trump's Trade Policies Stand?"
"Indians To Remove Controversial Logo From Team Uniforms"
"After Relentless Criticism From Trump, McCabe Steps Down"
"Examining The State Of The Nation's Politics"
"Sen. Sanders Wants Trump To Apologize For Trying To Divide The Nation"
"German Automakers Tested Emissions On Live Subjects"
"How Many Plumbers Does It Take To Fix A Toilet?"
"U.S. Military Auditor Suggests The Afghan War Is Still At A Stalemate"
"Kenya Opposition Presidential Candidate Refuses To Give Up"
"ER Use Goes Down As Hospital Program Pays Homeless People's Rent"
"Rep. Schiff Criticizes Panel's Vote To Release Secret GOP Memo"
"A Year Of Trump Speeches Have Common Threads "
"Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway And JPMorgan Tackle Health Care Costs"
"The Man Behind 'Left Shark' Explains His Viral Super Bowl Moment"
"News Brief: State Of The Union, FEMA Ending Emergency Puerto Rico Aid"
"Lawmakers Respond To FEMA Puerto Rico Cutoff"
"Virginia Voters And The State Of The Union"
"New Word In The Dictionary: 'Snowflake'"
"Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy On State Of The Union"
"Trump Signs Order To Keep Guantanamo Open"
"TV Review: Rose McGowan In 'Citizen Rose'"
"Trump's Immigration Message In The State Of The Union"
"Sen. Cory Gardner On Immigration And State Of The Union"
"Conservatives Respond To Trump's State Of The Union"
"Swiss University To Offer Degree In Yodeling"
"Fact-Checking Trump's Claims On Jobs, Wages, Infrastructure"
"Nevadans On The State Of The Union"
"What Do Amazon, JPMorgan Chase And Berkshire Hathaway Have Planned For Health Care?"
"Trump's State Of The Union: Unifying Or Divisive?"
"Sen. Cory Booker On Trump's State Of The Union, Russia"
"White House's Raj Shah On State Of The Union"
"RNC Chair On State Of The Union"
"CDC Chief Brenda Fitzgerald Resigns"