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Breast Cancer Study Quantifies Risk | A study released Thursday says that women who inherit a mutation in so-called breast cancer genes have an 80 percent chance of developing breast cancer sometime in their lives. While that figure is striking, scientists warn that it remains to be determined what causes the remaining 90 percent of breast cancer cases that are not related to the mutation. Hear NPR's Joe Palca. |
IMF, World Bank Talks Draw Few Protests | Six years ago, the meeting of The International Monetary Fund and World Bank was targeted by protesters in Washington, D.C. This weekend, the streets of the capitol are quiet. What has changed? |
Japanese Fashion Trend | NPR's Eric Weiner reports that young Japanese women have taken a western fashion trend to the extreme. Platform shoes are the new craze in Japan, the only problem is that they are so high the women are falling off of them and hurting themselves. |
In Conflict With Trump Agenda, California Sets Stricter Auto Emissions Standards | California put itself on a collision course with the Trump Administration as the state's clean air agency moved forward with stricter emissions requirements for trucks and cars. |
Target Fallout Continues After Security Breach | The fallout continues for Target Corporation, whose 1,797 stores have suffered one of the largest-ever credit card breaches in the U.S. A class-action lawsuit was filed last night by a California shopper — the first of what lawyers expect to be a torrent of similar suits. In addition, Target is likely to be subject to fines by card issuers for non-compliance with payment card security standards. And then, there are the fraudulent charges to consumers, which banks may also try to recoup from the Minneapolis-based company. Target shares closed down 2.2 percent last night on the New York Stock Exchange. Retail consultant Howard Davidowitz joins Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson to discuss what the future holds for Target. Guest
Howard Davidowitz, retail consultant and founder of Davidowitz & Associates, Inc. |
ICD Begins Symposium On Culture, Globalization and International Relations | The Institute of Cultural Diplomacy just kicked off its annual symposium. This year's theme is Culture, Globalization, and International Relations over the next Two Decades. Diplomats, scholars, students and political representatives from around the world are meeting in Berlin for the week long conference. The symposium consists of three separate parts: "Defining and Understanding Culture in an International Context (Ending May 25th) "The relationship between Culture, International Relations and Globalization." (26-27 May) "Understanding Afghanistan and Central Asia: Supporting Democracy and Stability." (28-30 May) There is still time to sign up for the conferences if interested. |
'A Thousand Years of Good Prayers' | Alan Cheuse reviews <EM>A Thousand Years of Good Prayers</EM> by Chinese emigre Yiyun Li. It's a collection of stories about life in modern China and the United States. |
The Mixed Record Of Nobel Peace Prize Winners | Picking the Nobel Peace Prize winner has always been more art than science. Mahatma Gandhi was nominated five times but never won. In choosing Colombia's Juan Manuel Santos on Friday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee opted for a president who has wound down a half-century of fighting by reaching out to the FARC rebels. But the peace deal signed by Santos and the rebels on Sept. 26 was narrowly rejected in an Oct. 2 referendum by Colombian voters. It's not clear what will happen next. Santos and the rebels say they are still committed to peace and there are no signs that fighting is about to be reignited. But there are no guarantees. The Nobel Committee said this year, as it's said in the past, that the prize is both for achievements and aspirations. "Our aim is to honor the work that has been done ... and to tell to the Colombian people that we encourage you to go on through all the parties that have participated in this process," said the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Kaci Kullmann Five. In some cases, such aspirations have been realized. But the record is far from perfect. Here are notable examples where the committee's choices have, and have not, worked out as hoped: In perhaps the most prescient move by the committee, German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky was chosen in 1935 for writing about the secret rearmament program in his country. Some critics said the selection was interference in the politics of Germany, where Ossietzky had been imprisoned. Adolf Hitler was outraged and barred not only Ossietzky, but all Germans, from receiving a Nobel Prize. Ossietzky was not allowed to collect his prize and died in a prison hospital in 1938. The 1993 prize went to South Africa's Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk, who had just negotiated a deal to end apartheid amid ongoing violence. But the first all-race election would not be held until the following year, and there were fears that the conflict could escalate and derail the agreement. But Mandela won the election, the political violence ended and apartheid was relegated to history. The Nobel committee took a similar approach the following year, 1994, when it honored Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat along with Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. The prize was a recognition of the interim agreement the two sides signed in 1993 and encouragement to work out a permanent peace. But the conflict remains unresolved to this day, and Peres, the last survivor of the three prize winners that year, died just last week. In one of the most controversial choices, American Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho were named recipients in 1973 for negotiating an armistice in the Vietnam War. Two members of the Nobel Committee resigned in protest. Le Duc Tho refused to accept the prize, saying the U.S. violated the terms of the armistice. The deal led to the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces, but the war was ultimately decided on the battlefield as North Vietnam defeated the South, taking over the capital Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, in 1975. President Obama received the Peace Prize in October 2009, less than nine months after assuming office. The committee cited "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation." But critics said it was politically motivated, describing it as a rebuke to the wars waged by Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, and support for Obama's pledge to end U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama removed the U.S. combat forces from those two wars and has sought to reduce the U.S. military footprint. But he has also expanded the use of drones while bombing seven separate countries. And with just three months left in office, the U.S. military remains actively engaged in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Syria, carrying out airstrikes most every day in all three countries. The committee has the option of not awarding a prize, which has happened more than a dozen times since it was first given in 1901. The last time no Peace Prize was Awarded was 1972. |
Pope Francis Apologizes To Sexual Abuse Victims, But Still Backs Bishop | Caught in a renewed firestorm of controversy, Pope Francis apologized for remarks he made last week defending a Chilean bishop accused of covering up decades of sexual abuse. But the pontiff held fast in his support of the bishop, maintaining his innocence. "I apologize to them if I hurt them without realizing it, but it was a wound that I inflicted without meaning to," the pope told reporters on the papal flight returning from Latin America to Rome on Monday. Last week the pope accused victims of sexual abuse in Chile of slander, saying their attacks on Bishop Juan Barros amount to "calumny" because there is "not a shred of evidence against him." He added, "The day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, I'll speak." On board the flight the Pope said it was only in retrospect that he realized his words implied that victims' allegations of sexual abuse are credible only with concrete proof. "To hear that the pope says to their face, 'Bring me a letter with proof,' is a slap in the face," he said. "It pains me very much," he said, adding that "covering up abuse is an abuse in itself." However, Francis again insisted that Barros did not know about the abuses committed by his mentor Rev. Fernando Karadima. He said that to punish the bishop without moral certainty, "I would be committing the crime of a bad judge," according to Catholic News Service. Francis' words last week were the catalyst for renewed protests in Chile where several churches were fire bombed last week. They also drew criticism from the Pope's top adviser on clerical sex abuse, the Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley. "It is understandable that Pope Francis' statements . . . were a source of great pain for survivors of sexual abuse by clergy or any other perpetrator," O'Malley said in a statement Saturday. "Words that convey the message 'if you cannot prove your claims then you will not be believed' abandon those who have suffered reprehensible criminal violations of their human dignity and relegate survivors to discredited exile" O'Malley said. As NPR has reported: [Bishop Barros] has been hotly criticized ever since the pope appointed him in 2015. Barros was the protégé of Rev. Fernando Karadima, a notorious disgraced priest who served in the southern city of Osorno and who was found guilty and dismissed in 2011 for abusing dozens of minors over a decades-long period beginning in the 1980s. Karadima became the face of the church's sexual abuse scandal in Chile. And his victims say they believe Barros knew about the priest's abuse but did nothing to stop it or report it. As recently as this week, Barros has denied witnessing any abuse. |
Laid To Rest: A Proper Burial For The Poor | On a blisteringly hot summer afternoon, about 40 people gather at the Evangelico Cemetery in southwestern Albuquerque. Deacon Pablo Lefebre leads the service and begins with a prayer "Because God has chosen to call our brothers and our sisters from this life to himself," he says, "we commit their bodies to the earth, its resting place. For we are dust, and to dust we shall return." This isn't your average funeral. The light gray casket about to be lowered into the ground is filled with the cremated remains of 87 county residents. "I have buried them from fetuses to 100 plus," Lefebre says, "but I have never done this, and I feel very honored to be here today to say goodbye to those who were with us at one time." Some of the deceased were unidentified or left unclaimed by their next of kin. Others came from families who couldn't afford to reimburse the county for their remains, often spending years waiting for a final resting place. As workers begin covering the casket with dirt, Joe Sais plays the guitar and sings "Por Siempre Adios (Goodbye Forever)." Today's service is part of a new program run by Bernalillo County. It's now an annual program that pays for burials and memorial services for people whose remains have been in county possession for at least two years, waiting for someone to either claim them or pay for them. Charlie Finegan is the owner of the Riverside Funeral Home. He holds the contract with the county to provide cremation services for the unclaimed and indigent. And he played a big role in making this memorial possible. "You know, it's not just a callous process that we're going through," he says. Finegan's facility sits just next door to the funeral home and chapel. The building has gray cinder block walls and a tin roof. On the far end are two crematories. A body enclosed in a cardboard box is awaiting cremation. Finegan points to a steel shelving unit on the east end of his facility. Right now the remains of about 100 people are lined up neatly in small white boxes, waiting for their turn to be buried. Finegan says it's basic, but it helps to keep costs down, allowing his funeral home and the county to afford the things they think are far more important, like the grave site and the memorial service. This is something Pamela Hirst, who couldn't pay for a friend's burial, says she doesn't take for granted. "It is a great burden when you can't properly do what you want to do in your heart for someone that you've loved so much," she says. For Hirst, that someone was Joe Speer. He was a poet who lived his life performing and traveling the country in a green Volkswagen van. Hirst still has trouble talking about Speer. Two years ago, he died from pancreatic cancer. And for a while, Hirst says she carried around a lot of guilt because she couldn't afford to give him a proper burial. "Joe and I were minimalists," she says. "We lived in that van, and he was very concerned 'cause we didn't really have the money for caskets, and burial, and plots and stuff. And if the county hadn't been able to provide this service, Hirst says she doesn't know what she would have done. "I had no option," she says. "Get out a credit card? I don't know." But because of the service, Hirst says she finally has some closure. "I can hardly put words to it," she says. "But the value is immense for the heart and soul. The headstone where Joe Speer and the 86 others are buried reads: "We grow afraid of what we might forget. We will find peace and value through community in knowing that we belong to each other." |
Court Alters Strategy for Prosecuting White Collar Crime | Federal prosecutors were stopped in their tracks this week by a court ruling that affects one of the ways the government goes after corporate criminals. NPR's Debbie Elliott speaks with NYU business law professor Jennifer Arlen. |
Teen Tracks NASA's Amazing Mission | Space enthusiast Tanli Sun witnessed the <em>Discovery</em> launch and has been following the mission closely. Before heading off to school, Sun, 15, talks about the risky job of repairing a solar shield and the joys of one of NASA's busiest missions ever. |
Scottish MP's Accent Is So Thick It Needs Translating | Alan Brown, a member of the U.K. parliament from Scotland, reportedly is the first MP ever to be asked to provide translation for the official record. Brown jokes his American wife can understand him. |
A Moment Of Silence For Shooting Victims | President Obama paused for a moment of silence Monday to commemorate the lives of six people who died in Tucson, Ariz., this weekend, and to salute Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords who is fighting for her life. |
The New Republic: AfPak Strategies To Confuse Us All | As we now know, the Obama White House is re-examining some first-principle questions about the war in Afghanistan. How connected are al Qaeda and the Taliban? What would be the effect of ceding territory to the Taliban? How effective are drone strikes without a major troop presence to support them. The answers to the questions remain unclear. But beyond the substantive mystery, there's also a process mystery. How did the administration and the military brass come away from their first review with such different interpretations of what had been decided? The White House supposedly got sticker shock when it realized Stanley McChrystal would request 40,000 or more troops. But a number like that shouldn't have been surprising to many participants in the initial review. So what happened? I've been asking around the past few days, and here the three leading theories: 1. The Facts Changed. "One word," says Democratic Congresswoman Jane Harman of California "E-L-E-C-T-I-O-N." The Afghan elections were corrupt at best, stolen at worst. Hamid Karzai's popular legitimacy is shot. That's a real problem: A core principle of counterinsurgency holds that you need to be defending a credible government. That's change number one. Change number two is the surprising success in recent months of our stepped-up death-by-drone campaign against al Qaeda operatives in the region. The group's senior leadership has been decimated and bin Laden's henchmen appear weaker than ever. But these developments are only a partial excuse for rethinking the strategy. Even before the election, Afghans knew all too well about the Karzai government's corruption. As for the drone strikes, the issue is not how strong al Qaeda is now, but how strong it will be should the Taliban make major territorial gains. 2.The NSC dropped the ball. "This doesn't happen when you have a national security advisor," one person outside the White House--but steeped in the policy debate--recently said of the civilian-military disconnect. Obama does, of course, have an NSC man in Jim Jones. But people in and out of the administration have knocked Jones's efficacy for months. Some of those complaints may have been overstated--but the fact remains that it's the national security advisor's job to coordinate the government's foreign policy apparatus. To the extent the military and civilians weren't on the same page, Jones has to shoulder at least of some of the blame. Which is especially ironic given that Jones himself, a Marine General, was chosen in part for his ties to the military establishment. 3. Polls and Politics. The re-review of Afghanistan began at a time when Obama's poll numbers were falling, his health care plan was in jeopardy, and the media was teeming with stories about how Afghanistan could damn Obama to a fate like LBJ's, consuming his days and ruining his domestic agenda. Public support for the war itself has also dropped substantially--by late summer, approval for Obama's handling of the conflict had fallen below 50 percent [3]. And while Harry Reid may promise to support whatever Obama decides, Nancy Pelosi and other key Democrats don't seem ready to support a further escalation. Politics may seem like a crass variable to factor into a decision about war strategy. But sources tell me, and others, that Joe Biden is warning against embarking on a major military effort without strong support from the public and the Congress. That's not an unreasonable position--although a president can't let often half-informed public opinion entirely dictate his decisions about national security, of course. Ultimately, the answer probably involves some combination of all three. And, ultimately, the real answer is that this is just a hard question. Obama will have to base his decision on a rough blend of hypotheses and guesstimates — from whether a future "Talibanistan" would shelter al Qaeda to the threat al Qaeda currently poses to American security to what the different options mean for the stability of Pakistan. In war time is always of the urgency, but nothing is more urgent than making the best decision possible. |
Decades Later, New Details In Oscar Romero Death | Thirty years after the death of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, new details are coming to light about his assassination and the men behind the plot to kill him. Melissa Block talks to Geoff Thale, program director of the Washington Office on Latin America. He led a delegation to El Salvador last month to mark the anniversary of Romero's death. |
Fresh Air Remembers Pioneering Documentary Filmmaker Albert Maysles | Maysles and his late brother David made the 1976 film <em>Grey Gardens</em>, a study of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' relatives who lived in squalor in their decaying mansion. He died last week at age of 88. |
Rep. John Curtis On Hopes For The New Conservative Climate Caucus | NPR's Sarah McCammon speaks to John Curtis (R-Utah) about how his new climate caucus will educate House Republicans on how climate-focused legislation can be consistent with conservative values. |
France Remembers Leonardo Da Vinci | The exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci's works at the Louvre in Paris isn't the only way to mark the 500th anniversary of the artist's death. He spent the last years of his life in France's Loire Valley. |
Republican Rep. Rob Woodall On Trump Impeachment Inquiry | As the impeachment inquiry nears its public phase, Republicans say the procedures for the inquiry moving forward are unfair to their party and the president. Republican Congressman Rob Woodall (@RepRobWoodall) of Georgia joins host Jeremy Hobson. This article was originally published on WBUR.org. |
Tony Gwynn, San Diego Padres Hall Of Famer, Dies | Hall of famer Tony Gwynn, who spent 20 years playing for the San Diego Padres, has died. The team announced his death on Twitter, saying it was "terribly sad to say goodbye to our teammate, our friend and a legend." Gwynn, known as "Mr. Padre," flirted with a .400 batting average in 1994. By the end of the season, his batting average was .394. Gwynn earned eight National League batting titles and had 3,141 career hits, as well as an impressive .338 batting average overall. Back in April, the U-T San Diego reported that Gwynn was taking a leave of absence from his job as coach at San Diego State to be treated for cancer. In the past, he had had surgery to remove cancerous lymph nodes and tumors from his salivary glands. He had said he believed his cancer was caused by years of chewing tobacco. Gwynn was 54 years old. Update at 11:52 a.m. ET. That 1994 Season: Right before Gwynn was inducted into the Hall of Fame, ESPN The Magazine wrote a piece titled "Since Williams, No Greater Hitter Than Gwynn." That's a reference to Ted Williams, who hit .406 in 1941 and is considered the greatest hitter who ever lived. The magazine reported about how Gwynn seemed to understand batting at a cellular level: "Tony Gwynn was a master craftsman. No one understood the art of hitting better than he did. He knew his swing, the opposing pitcher, the home-plate umpire, the defense, the elements and the contours of every field better than anyone. He hit off a tee more than Vijay Singh. He looked at more film than Roger Ebert. When outfielder Al Martin joined the Padres late in his career, Martin explained that after opening his stance, he started to hit the ball to the opposite field with power, but he didn't know why. 'I know why,' said Gwynn, who took Martin to the batting cage and showed him. He knew Martin's swing better than Martin did. "That's why, on Jan. 9, Gwynn will be voted into the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility." But it also seems that Gwynn's single greatest year — 1994 — always haunted him. When the season was cut short by a strike, Gwynn was batting .394. In 1996, he told NBC News that in his mind he thought he could have taken a run at .400, which few players have accomplished. "I was squaring the ball up nicely, hitting lefties, righties," he said. "I would have given it a run. I'm not sure how I would have handled it in September. But I think I had the type of personality to handle it. We'll never know, but I have no regrets." Update at 11:46 a.m. ET. More On His Career: ESPN adds a bit more on Gwynn's career: "Gwynn, nicknamed 'Mr. Padre' for his service to both the team and the city, was inducted into the Pro Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility in 2007. His No. 19 was retired by the Padres in 2004. "He hit safely in 75 percent of the games in which he played during his career, and he batted .300 in each of his last 19 seasons, a streak second only to Ty Cobb. "He also was named to 15 All-Star teams, won seven Silver Slugger Awards and five Gold Glove Awards. His eight batting titles tied for second-most in MLB history." |
Hillary Clinton Heads for the Bank | New York Sen. Hillary Clinton raised $22 million this summer for her presidential primary campaign and reported more new donors in that quarter than her chief rival, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. A look at where the money race stands. |
At Least 70 Killed In Kiev, With Casualties Still Mounting | Fighting between police and the opposition in Ukraine continues despite attempts at diplomatic intervention. Dozens were killed in Kiev overnight, many in gun attacks shown on television. |
Perseverance Rover Delivers First Sounds From Mars | Audio recordings from Mars may not sound like much, but according to David Gruel and Roger Wiens at SuperCam, they could have a lot of scientific value. |
NASA Declares Mars Rover Opportunity Officially Dead | NASA's six-wheeled rover landed on the red planet in January 2004 for what billed as a 90-day mission. The robot was still going until a dust storm on Mars last summer killed it. |
Where Have All The Mall Rats Gone? | Cassi Yost sends this picture from her local mall in Cleveland, Tenn. She writes: Our local mall on a Saturday about 6pm ... food kiosks have closed and spaces are for lease. Barely anyone shopping, and virtually no one eating at the single food vendor. This could spell the end of our only shopping mall here in Cleveland, TN -- we may be forced to head to Chattanooga or Knoxville in days to come. |
Connecticut Attorney General Discusses Opposing Purdue Pharma Bankruptcy Settlement | NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Connecticut Attorney General William Tong about his opposition to a settlement with Purdue Pharma, which would help the company restructure into a non-profit entity. |
Movie Stardom May Await If Lohan Can Grow Up | It may seem long, long ago, but it was just 1998 when 11-year-old Lindsay Lohan — adorable and freckle-faced — made her movie debut in Disney's remake of The Parent Trap. Lohan continued with promising comedic turns in Freaky Friday and Mean Girls. Then her career started to veer off track, along with her personal life. After a string of arrests and stints in rehab, Lohan seems to be another sorry story lumped in with other girls gone wild. But Lohan is not Paris Hilton. Legendary director Robert Altman cast her along with Meryl Streep in his final film, A Prairie Home Companion. Veteran talent manager Bernie Brillstein thinks Lohan is a real talent and potentially a major star. "I don't think she's a fake, I don't think she's a celebrity," he says. "I think she's an actress who's gone wrong." Critic David Thomson agrees: "She has an energy and a gutsiness and a direct link to the camera that I think is more than the other people you might compare her with," Thomson says. Thomson says Lohan seems to be suffering from troubles that often afflict child actors who have enjoyed early success. "Most of them lost it," he says. "Most of them were terribly stranded. And it may be that she's beginning to wonder if she's terribly stranded, and doesn't care a damn, and is going to go down blazing." Thomson thinks Lohan could make the transition into adult stardom, if she gets sober. Brillstein knows that's hard for anyone but especially for a wealthy actor. He's tried — and failed — to convey the gravity of the situation to some of his own clients, notably John Belushi. "It's not only hard, it's impossible 'til they understand," he says. "And who knows if they're ever going to understand." Brillstein wonders whether anyone around Lohan will tell her to take the time she needs to get sober. Her parents appear to be unlikely candidates. Lohan's father was released from prison in March. Her mother seems to enjoy the club scene almost as much as her famous daughter. "With her family the way it is, and with her making as much money as she does, who's going to tell her 'cool it, or you'll die?,'" Brillstein asks. Brillstein says with her talent and drive, Lohan still could turn her career around. Even in her latest mug shot, he observes, Lohan looks beautiful. STEVE INSKEEP, Host: Okay. If you're thinking highways and thinking California, you might naturally think of Lindsey Lohan. Can't pick up a tabloid without news of her latest traffic mishap. The actress is only 21 years old, has been in the movies for nearly half of her life. And NPR's Kim Masters reports on Lohan's chances of rescuing her troubled career. KIM MASTERS: It may seem long, long ago, but it was just 1998 when 11-year-old Lindsay Lohan - adorable and freckle-faced - made her movie debut in Disney's remake of "The Parent Trap." (SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE PARENT TRAP") LINDSEY LOHAN: (As Hallie Parker) By the way, I'm the real Hallie. This is Annie. She was pretending to be me while I was pretending to be her. MASTERS: Then her career started to veer off track, along with her personal life. (SOUNDBITE OF NEWS BROADCASTS) Unidentified Woman #1: Lindsey Lohan arrested again. INSKEEP: Lindsey released a statement this week that says I am totally innocent. Unidentified Man #2: With Lindsey Lohan back in rehab after an arrest for drunk driving and cocaine possession... Unidentified Woman #2: Nicole's going to jail, Britney goes wild during a photo shoot, and Lindsey goes on another wild ride. Hey guys... MASTERS: After a string of arrests and stints in rehab, Lohan seems to be another sorry story lumped in with other girls gone wild. But Lohan is not Paris Hilton. Legendary director Robert Altman cast her along with Meryl Streep in his final film, "A Prairie Home Companion." Veteran talent manager Bernie Brillstein thinks Lohan is a real talent and potentially a major star. BERNIE BRILLSTEIN: I don't think she's a fake. I don't think she's a celebrity. I think she's an actress who's gone wrong. MASTERS: Critic David Thomson agrees. DAVID THOMSON: She has an energy and a gutsiness and a direct link to the camera that I think is more than the other people you might sort of compare her with. MASTERS: Thomson says Lohan seems to be suffering from troubles that often afflict child actors who have enjoyed early success. THOMSON: Most of them lost it. Most of them were terribly stranded. And it may be that she's beginning to wonder whether she's terribly stranded, and doesn't care a damn and is going to go down blazing. MASTERS: Thomson thinks Lohan could make the transition into adult stardom, if she gets sober. Manager Bernie Brillstein knows that's hard for anyone, but especially for a wealthy actor. He's tried and failed to convey the gravity of the situation to some of his own clients, notably John Belushi. BRILLSTEIN: I couldn't do it with a very close person to me. It's not only hard, it's impossible till they understand. And who knows if they're ever goi |
Cows May Provide Hope To Iraqi Widows In Fallujah | U.S. Marines are trying a new tactic in Fallujah: cattle. They're providing dairy cows to 50 women widowed in the past few years of fighting. The hope is that the cows will provide a steady source of income for the women. Marine Maj. Meredith Brown and State Department worker Jennifer Vitela talk to host Guy Raz about the project. |
Daniel Lubetzky, Founder Of KIND Healthy Snacks | Host Jessica Harris Speaks with Daniel Lubetzky, the founder of KIND Healthy Snacks, a natural food company in New York. Harris also speaks with sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. |
Senate Halves Bush Tax Cut | The Senate votes to reduce President Bush's proposed $726 billion tax cut by half. As Congress faces a $300 billion budget deficit, some Democrats have argued that there shouldn't be a tax cut, especially during a time of war. Hear NPR's David Welna. |
Mortgage Market's Impact Analyzed | Mortgage defaults precipitated one of the worst banking crises in memory. Kenneth Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard University, says debt was concentrated in a relatively small number of banks, which used very short-term loans to buy debt. |
The Navajo Nation Approves A Junk Food Tax | In an effort to curb high rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease, the Navajo Nation has imposed a first-in-the-nation tax on all junk food. Now, if you want to buy chips, cookies, soda and the like on the Navajo reservation, you’re going to pay an extra 2 percent on top of an existing 5 percent sales tax. Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson gets details from Laurel Morales, a reporter with the Fronteras Desk at KJZZ in Phoenix. Guest
Laurel Morales, senior field correspondent for Fronteras Desk, at KJZZ in Phoenix. She tweets @laurelgwyn. |
COVID-19 Has Robbed The World's Poorest Children Of Nearly 4 Months Of Schooling | In April, 9 in 10 of the world's children were out of school in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Several months later, a new report from UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank finds the return to learning has been much slower in the world's poorer countries. Researchers looked at nearly 150 countries and found: Schoolchildren in low- and lower-middle-income countries have lost almost four months of learning since the start of the pandemic, compared to six weeks of learning loss in high-income countries. One in 4 countries, most of which are low- and lower-middle-income, have either missed their planned reopening date or not yet set a date for reopening. Almost all countries have offered some form of remote learning during closures, whether online, by broadcast (radio or TV) or through paper packets. However, while 3 out of 4 countries overall count remote learning days as school days, only 1 in 5 low-income countries do so, in recognition of how few children are actually able to access these resources. Half of low-income countries reported not having enough money to pay for things like handwashing facilities and protective equipment for students and teachers. Only 5% of high-income countries said the same. These findings are in line with another recent analysis by the foundation Insights for Education, which estimated that nearly half of the world's 1.6 billion primary and secondary students would not return to school before the end of 2020. According to that analysis, 84% of the students who won't return to school live in low-income countries. For decades, the development community has been working to get more children into schools. Formal learning is seen as key to economic progress and political freedom, and the education of girls and women has even been identified as a major building block in the fight against climate change. In recent years, according to the United Nations, the world was moving in the right direction, with more and more children in school. Now that progress seems to have reversed, at least temporarily. According to UNESCO, more than 250 million children were out of school just before the pandemic, a number they say is likely to jump nearly 10 percent this year. |
On February 9th Ensemble | On February 9th Ensemble Wien (VEEN--the Vienna Ensemble) presented "A Viennese Cafe Concert" at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, California. From that program we'll hear the quartet perform the Tivoli Glide Waltz by Johann Strauss, Sr. and the Rudolfsheimer Polka by Josef Strauss. (Encore Recordings) |
U.S. Women's Soccer Team Named Time Magazine's 'Athlete Of The Year' | End of year sports honors are starting to pour in. Time Magazine has named the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team its “Athlete Of The Year” and Sports Illustrated selected a member of the team, Megan Rapinoe, as its “Sportsperson Of The Year.” Host Lisa Mullins speaks with Here & Now sports analyst Mike Pesca (@pescami). He hosts the daily podcast The Gist. This article was originally published on WBUR.org. |
Buzzing Bees Drive Off Mighty Elephants | Elephants trample crops in Kenya, destroying the livelihood of many farmers. Now research says bees may be able to scare the pachyderms away. Oxford University zoologist Lucky King says researchers discovered a few years ago that elephants avoided trees with bee hives. To test whether this is true, researchers recently hid speakers inside a hollow tree and played bee sounds. King says the recording caused the elephants to run off. It turns out that although bees cannot penetrate the elephant's thick skin, the insects are attracted to their eyes. And when elephants accidentally break a hive open while feeding on a tree branch, the agitated bees have been known to fly up pachyderms' trunks. All this has taught elephants to steer clear of bees, King says. With their new finding, researchers are trying to figure out how to use the bee sounds to help Kenyan farmers ward off the crop-trampling elephants. King talks to Alex Chadwick about the novel solution she's working on — creating a sound-barrier of bees. ALEX CHADWICK, host: Back now with DAY TO DAY. By cartoon myth, elephants are scared of mice. Now an Oxford University researcher says bees actually provoke pachyderm pandemonium. Lucy King is a zoologist who studied in Africa in Kenya, trying to keep elephants from trampling farmers' crops. She joins us now from Nairobi. Lucy King, welcome to the program. And whatever made you think that elephants might be scared of bees? Ms. LUCY KING (Zoologist, Oxford University): It's interesting. We've been looking at this idea for a few years now, and it all stems from a study, which my co-authors - Iain Douglas Hamilton and Fritz Vollrath - did a few years ago. And they discovered that trees with beehives in them were not being damaged by elephants. But, of course, it's very hard to get live African bees into the path of elephants, so we decided to record the sound and take the sound to the elephants to see if there was anything there worth studying. And what we saw was incredibly dramatic. CHADWICK: So what you did was get - record the sounds of these bees and then play them back from loud speakers near where the elephants were. And what happened? Ms. KING: We actually fitted a wireless speaker into the fake tree trunk that we made, and we managed to get that within about 10 meters of the elephant before driving off and filming from a distance. (Soundbite of bees) Ms. KING: And when we first played the bee sounds, the elephants stopped immediately what they were doing, turned around to the speaker, and they started turning their heads from side to side with their ears out, their trunks up, trying to smell and trying to work out what was going on, where the sound was coming from. And then one of them would usually trigger a retreat, causing the whole of the herd to either run or walk very fast away in the opposite direction. CHADWICK: We think of elephant hide as being almost impenetrable to anything. How was it that a bee could hurt an elephant? Ms. KING: No. A bee could not sting an elephant through its skin, but having spoken to a lot of local people in our area, they tell us stories of bees being attracted to elephant eyes, and that must be very painful to be stung around the eye. But I think the key thing is that elephants forage up in trees by breaking branches and stripping leaves. And I think this triggers a hive sometimes to be smashed open, and they get bees up their trunk, which must be horrendous. And the elephant's going berserk trying to... CHADWICK: That would hurt. Ms. KING: ...swing their trunk around, trying to get it out. CHADWICK: Well, tell me what do you think the results of this research might be? These farmers find that their crops are trampled by elephants, and they don't like it. They shoot the elephants. So maybe you could surround a crop with speakers. But sooner or later, they'd figure out that these were just speakers, not real bees, wouldn't they? Ms. KING: You're absolutely correct there. And I'm doing an experiment right now - I'm just in the middle of it - to test that habituation theory, because elephants are highly intelligent. And without a painful stimuli after the bee sound, I think they would very quickly get used to that sound and start to come back. So what our results really are showing us is that it's a way to understand the behavior. And now what we want to do is try and use live beehives around field of crops to see if it has the same effect as the sound, which we think it will be. CHADWICK: Of course, the problem there is that these bees, they'd be as happy stinging farmers as they would be stinging elephants. Ms. KING: Yes. Unfortunately, that's true. And I - believe me, I've been stung a few times, so I know it's really not fun at all. What I've discovered is that elephants, generally, they invade people's farms from one direction, so they'll come from a forest reserve or a game park or an area where they feel safe, and they'll come into the Samburu f |
British Troops Attacked Near Basra | Six British troops were killed and eight others were injured in two separate attacks north of Basra on Tuesday. It was the bloodiest day for Coalition forces since President Bush declared an end to major combat. Reporter Nick Fielding of <EM>The Times of London</EM> joins Neal Conan to discuss the attacks. <BR><BR>Guest:<BR><BR> <STRONG>Nick Fielding</STRONG><BR> *Reporter, Sunday <EM>Times of London</EM> |
Novak Djokovic's 'Golden Slam' Dreams Are Crushed With Olympic Semifinal Elimination | TOKYO — Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic was upset in the men's Olympic tennis semifinal by Germany's Alexander Zverev. The loss on Friday means world No. 1 ranked Djokovic won't be able to complete an elusive Golden Slam — winning all four Grand Slam tournaments and an Olympic gold medal in a single year. No man has ever done it, but Djokovic put himself in position by winning the first three Grand Slams this year. In the early stages of the Olympic tournament, his chances still looked good. Djokovic cruised through the first four rounds without losing a set — against the fourth-seeded Zverev, it seemed like that would continue after he won the first set 6-1. A frustrated Zverev smashed his racket on the court several times and pounded a ball into the stands. "I was playing his game. I was rallying with him a lot, so I needed to change it up," Zverev said after the match. "I started playing much more aggressive, I started to swing through the ball a little bit more, and yeah, I tried to dominate that way." It worked as the match, played in sweltering Tokyo heat, swung Zverev's way. He won the second set 6-3 and then dominated the third, 6-1. The final set was a stunner with Djokovic appearing low on energy at a time when tennis fans are used to seeing him stage fierce comebacks. After Zverev rifled a backhand winner to clinch the victory, he and Djokovic embraced at the net. "I told him that he's the greatest of all time, and he will be," Zverev said. "I know that he was chasing history, is chasing the Golden Slam and was chasing the Olympics, but in these kind of moments me and Novak are very close. He will win the most Grand Slams out of anybody on tour [Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal all have won 20], but I'm also happy that I'm in the final." Zverev, who wept after his victory, will play the Russian Olympic Committee's Karen Khachanov in the gold medal match. Djokovic plays for the bronze against Pablo Carreno Busta of Spain. |
Coroner: Death Of Getty Oil Heir Most Likely Natural Causes, Accident | The death at a Hollywood Hills home Tuesday of Andrew Getty, one of the heirs to the fortune of one of the wealthiest and best-known families in American history, was most likely from natural causes or an accident, authorities and family members said. The death appeared to be from natural causes, Los Angeles County coroner's Assistant Chief Ed Winter said, but it has been initially called an accident because of medication found at the scene. He said coroner's officials need to await the results of further examination and toxicology tests, which could take up to 10 weeks to process. "The tentative information that we do have is that he was not feeling good for the last couple months," Winter said, "and he supposedly had an appointment tomorrow with a personal physician." Neither the coroner nor police had officially identified the man, but a statement from 47-year-old Andrew Getty's parents, Ann and Gordon Getty, confirmed it was him. A woman calling to report that someone had died sent officers to the gated home on Montcalm Avenue shortly after 2:15 p.m. They found a man dead in a bathroom, police spokesman Jack Richter said. Police Cmdr. Andrew Smith said the woman who had called police was cooperating with the investigation. Richter said she was not arrested and he did not know her identity. Coroner's vans and news trucks were parked outside the century-old luxury home on one of the winding roads in the hills that are home to many of the film industry elite. Getty is one of four sons of Gordon Getty, a San Francisco multibillionaire who is among the richest men in the United States. The family statement provided no further details on the death and asked that the media and public respect the family's privacy. It said further statements will be issued as information becomes available. Andrew Getty's grandfather J. Paul Getty was an industrialist who founded the Getty Oil Co. and was at one point named the richest living American by Fortune magazine. He had five sons and died in 1976 at age 82. J. Paul Getty was an avid collector of art and antiquities, and the Getty name is best known in the Los Angeles area for the museum that houses much of it, along with many other high-priced artworks bought since his death. Another Getty grandson, J. Paul Getty III, lost an ear in a grisly kidnapping in Rome when he was a teenager. The family reportedly stalled on paying a ransom, and the kidnappers cut off part of his ear, sending the severed organ to a newspaper to prove they had taken him captive. The oil heir, then 16, was freed after five months in captivity and a payment of $2.7 million. He died in 2011 at age 54. |
Clinton & Albright Join Mideast Talks | NPR's Ted Clark reports that yesterday both President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. |
'Mr. Penumbra' Bridges The Digital Divide | Author Robin Sloan has spent time on both sides of the digital divide, both as a short-story writer and an employee at Twitter — where he described his job as "something to do with figuring out the future of media." Sloan's first novel is called Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore. It's the story of an unemployed digital designer, named Clay, who finds work in an unexpected place: a dusty old bookstore. "Clay is a pretty common character here in San Francisco," Sloan tells NPR's David Greene. "He went to art school, and then came out here to California to make his fortune — or something." As the novel opens, Clay's job has become a casualty of the recession, and he's casting around for anything that will help him stay afloat — when he's not getting distracted by interesting articles he finds online. "It's the great agony and the ecstasy of the Internet today. I think we have more great stuff to read than we ever have before, but of course the downside of that is we have more great stuff to read than we've ever had before," Sloan laughs. Clay falls for a young woman named Kat, who works at Google and who embodies another San Francisco archetype — the Renaissance man (or woman), who can do just about anything. "Somebody who can design, somebody who can code, and somebody who frankly is really at the heart of these enterprises, really driving them forward," says Sloan. "And so I wanted to kind of paint that character, and help people understand why a programmer could be a really cool character, and in fact, kind of the most compelling, charismatic character in the whole story." Without giving too much away, we can say that Kat joins Clay on an adventure through a sort of literary underground centered on the titular bookstore. They use Kat's modern Google tools to try to crack a code that members of the underground have been struggling with for centuries without success. And at the center of the book is a message: Embracing modern digital technology doesn't mean giving up the values of the past. "I wanted to do something that kind of bounced back and forth between the real world and the virtual world, the new and the old," Sloan says. This isn't the first time Sloan has undertaken that kind of project. Some readers may recognize him as the author of the iPhone app Fish, which was essentially an essay on liking and loving things on the Internet, delivered in multiple fonts and colors that force the reader to slow down and consider each screen carefully. "If you come from the Internet, as I do — I think of it as sort of my native country — there's a lot of great things happening on the Internet, but one of the things, one of the feelings you just can't escape is the sense that it's really hard to keep people's attention," Sloan says. So both the book and the Fish app were an effort to capture people's attention and give them a reason to engage. Books, says Sloan, are among the last things to which people pay continuous, deep attention. "When I'm using the Internet, I have 25 tabs open, and even if somebody sends me ... something interesting, odds are I'll forget about it, or it'll get kind of lost in the shuffle," he says. "Whereas if I find a book, especially a novel, and I make that decision to kind of sit down with it and start it, I think it gets a kind of attention, a quality of attention that's actually really rare these days." And, by the way, it's pretty easy to pay attention to Mr. Penumbra — the cover glows in the dark. "When you're making a print book in 2012, I actually think the onus is on you, and on your publisher, to make something that's worth buying in its physical edition." |
Fla. Tomato Growers Say Mexico Trade Deal Is Rotten | Half of all tomatoes eaten in the U.S. come from Mexico, and tomato growers in Florida aren't happy about that. In fact, they're willing to risk a trade war to reverse the trend. At JC Distributing In Nogales, Ariz., one misstep and you're likely to get knocked over by a pallet full of produce. Forklifts crisscross each other carrying peppers, squash and especially tomatoes from trucks backed into the warehouse loading dock. "This is a Mexican truck being unloaded," says JC President Jaime Chamberlain. "He's just waiting for his paperwork to get back." JC is one of a number of produce distributors just north of the Mexican border. Chamberlain says his company alone handles more than 87 million pounds of tomatoes each year — tomatoes sold in stores across the country. "This is a box of grape tomatoes, and this is from a grower of ours in Jalisco," Chamberlain says. For 16 years, the Mexican growers have agreed not to sell tomatoes below what's called a reference price. That was supposed to protect Florida tomato growers from cheap Mexican tomatoes. But Florida sales have dropped in half anyway, to as little as $250 million a year, while Mexican sales have tripled to more than $1.8 billion. Reggie Brown, who heads the Florida Tomato Exchange, says Mexican growers have been dumping tomatoes — selling them for less than it costs to produce them. "The Mexican industry has for significant periods dumped product into the U.S. market during the 16 years of the agreement," Brown says. So Florida growers are pushing the Obama administration to end the price agreement. "What would happen if the suspension agreement went away is free trade would truly exist between Mexico and the U.S. in the tomato industry," Brown says. Lance Jungmeyer, who heads the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas, which represents the Mexican tomato industry, says Mexico is not dumping tomatoes. "It would be impossible to sustain hundreds perhaps thousands of Mexican tomato companies for years on end selling below their cost. They wouldn't be able to do that," Jungmeyer says. If the tomato agreement goes away, though, Florida would be free to file an anti-dumping case against Mexico. If that happens, the Commerce Department can impose punitive tariffs on Mexican tomatoes — making them much more expensive and giving Florida an edge. Mexico could then put heavy tariffs on billions of dollars in products the U.S. sells there: pork, beef and corn. It would be a trade war. Jungmeyer says what's really going on is that consumers just plain prefer Mexican tomatoes — tomatoes ripened on the vine instead of with ethylene gas, which he says Florida growers use. "If your choice is a tomato that doesn't really taste like a tomato or a tomato that tastes like a tomato, you want the tomato that tastes like a tomato," Jungmeyer says. Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington, D.C., think tank that supports international free trade, agrees. He says the Mexican tomato industry has innovated, and Florida growers are hanging on. But Florida voters are important, and no administration wants to be seen as responsible for losing jobs there. Even if, as Hufbauer says, Florida's future isn't in tomatoes, it's a symbolic industry. "The mental image of the little house on the prairie has most of us captivated in Florida; the little house on the prairie is a tomato grower, a sugar grower or an orange grower — a small part of the economy, but a big part of the popular imagination," Hufbauer says. Ending the tomato agreement would cost jobs in Mexico and the U.S., says distributor Jaime Chamberlain. "Your packaging, your marketing, your advertising, your transportation is tremendous. I don't know what would happen to all these trucks on the American roads if you were to eliminate a specific commodity out of the Mexican agricultural deal," Chamberlain says. Negotiations are continuing, but last fall, the Commerce Department indicated it was siding with Florida. A number of big produce buyers, including Wal-Mart, are siding with Mexico. The trade agreement is set to expire at the end of this month. What's at stake are higher prices and fewer tomato choices. Of course, you could grow your own. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: You can learn a lot about the world by following the story of a humble tomato - from the vine to your hamburger or salad. Tomatoes are a staple part of the American diet. More than half of all the tomatoes consumed in the United States come from Mexico. Mexican tomato imports have risen dramatically in recent years. Growers in Florida are not happy about that and that is today's business bottom line. Here's NPR's Ted Robbins. TED ROBBINS, BYLINE: One misstep at J-C Distributing and you're likely to get knocked over by a pallet-full of produce. Forklifts crisscross each other, carrying peppers, squash, and especially tomatoes from trucks backed into the warehouse loading dock. JAIME CHAMBERLAIN: Yes, th |
Episode 764: Pub In A Box | Here's what Kazakhstan, Hong Kong, and Ireland have in common: They all have Irish pubs. And a bunch of them are the product of one man: Mel McNally. McNally spent his final year in architecture school studying the architecture of Irish pubs. He and his buddies hit up all the famous pubs in Dublin, and brought along their sketchbooks and measuring tape to answer one question: What makes these places work? A few rules emerged from their study. The architecture of the place should create spaces that encourage people to mingle in different-sized groups. And no matter where you sit in the pub, you should be able to see the bar. Now, he ships Irish pubs to every corner of the globe, in 40-foot long containers. And inside of those crates are the elements he's found that'll make an Irish pub "authentic:" knick-knacks, vinyl floors, and dark wood panels. Today on the show, we drink a few beers and ponder the eternal question, is this a great bar or what? Music: "Acrobatic" and "All The Good Ideas." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook. Subscribe to our show on iTunes or PocketCast. ROBERT SMITH, HOST: Wherever you go in the world, the Irish bar, the Irish pub looks pretty much the same - dark wood, smoky mirrors. AILSA CHANG, HOST: And, of course, lots of old guys joking around. SMITH: Got any Irish in you? RANDY MANCUSO: I'm half Irish. SMITH: Half Irish. Which half? MANCUSO: My mother's half. She... JACK SCOTT: The good half. (LAUGHTER) SMITH: This is my neighborhood Irish bar in Brooklyn. It's called Farrell's. And it's filled with retired police officers like Jack Scott and his friend Randy Mancuso, who works in the engine room of the Staten Island Ferry. SCOTT: I think women look in here and say, oh, there's 20 guys, I ain't going in that joint. MANCUSO: Yeah. It has that reputation. We don't frown on women coming here, we don't. Is this a place to pick up girls for a date? No, it's not. SCOTT: No. It's not. MANCUSO: But, I mean, you can. I've brought my wife here plenty times. It's a man's bar. CHANG: Now, the mystery of Farrell's to me is that it works at all. It doesn't try very hard to be genuinely Irish. They serve Bud and Bud Light in these giant Styrofoam cups. And I didn't see anyone at the time drinking Guinness anywhere. SMITH: It's Irish because it was started by an Irishman a long time ago. SCOTT: I was here when they cut the ribbon in '33 - all right? - when they first opened the place. SMITH: Not true, but it feels true. SCOTT: Everybody knows everybody in this - guy - look at this guy. Hey, look, see? See? (LAUGHTER) SMITH: Irish bars like this one spread around the world. And they feel pretty much the same because Irish immigrants were copying this hazy memory of what pubs were like back in Ireland. Here in America, they simply put their names on the front of it, made the beer cheap and called it a day. CHANG: But one Irishman had a better idea. He thought if you could just figure out what made an Irish pub work, you could take it apart, reproduce it and sell it. SMITH: You could put an Irish pub in a container, stick a label on it and ship it anywhere. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) SMITH: Hello and welcome to PLANET MONEY. I'm Robert Smith. CHANG: And I'm Ailsa Chang. SMITH: Today on the show, we're going to knock back a bunch of beer and we're going to ponder the eternal question - is this an awesome bar or what? CHANG: It's the story of the man who designed a thousand Irish pubs. You've probably been in one of them. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) SMITH: Before we meet the mastermind of the modern Irish pub, we thought we should experience his work firsthand. CHANG: Pub crawl. SMITH: Pub crawl. We already checked Farrell's off the list. Next stop - one of the newest pubs in New York City. CHANG: A pub so exclusive, you have to submit to a full-body scan just to get close to it. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: This is a general boarding call to all remaining passengers travelling on Virgin Atlantic flight VS46. SMITH: We should tell people where we are. Where are we? SIOBHAN BRETT: We're in Terminal 4, JFK Airport. SMITH: The most Irish place to be. BRETT: (Laughter) I've never felt more at home. SMITH: We invited along a genuine Irish person, Siobhan Brett. She's also an economics reporter who agreed to be our guide on this part of the crawl. Siobhan wanted us to see the Tigin pub in JFK Airport because this right here is a little island of authenticity in a vast generic wasteland. (SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MOVES LIKE JAGGER") MAROON 5: (Singing) I've got the moves like Jagger. SMITH: I believe this is the Irish band Maroon 5 singing behind us. (LAUGHTER) BRETT: Traditional band, if ever. CHANG: OK. Music aside, Siobhan says that the place is doing something much more subtle and smart than just slapping on an Irish name, especially for an airport bar. SMITH: Because it doesn't just look Irish. Everything in this place is from Ireland, from the dusty bottles on the shelves to the massive chairs. BRETT: The furniture is all so heavy-duty |
Pakistani Aviation Industry Embroiled In Pilot Fraud Scandal | Pakistani aviation is under pressure after the aviation minister’s revelations that about one-third of all the country’s pilots fraudulently obtained their licenses. NPR’s Diaa Hadid reports. This article was originally published on WBUR.org. |
Using DDT to Battle Malaria | The United States banned DDT in 1972 and environmental groups are trying to outlaw the pesticide worldwide. But in developing countries, it continues to be a cost-effective way to combat malaria, a disease that kills more than 1 million people a year in Africa. South Africa has resumed the use of DDT in its fight against mosquitoes that carry malaria. Public health officials in Pretoria say DDT has been dramatically successful. Since South African health officials resurrected a program to spray houses with DDT, the number of malaria cases and deaths has plummeted, NPR's Jason Beaubien reports. Malaria is the second-leading cause of death in Africa after AIDS. After South Africa stopped using DDT against the disease in 1996 malaria cases climbed steadily -- from 11,000 in 1997 to 42,000 just three years later. In 2001, South Africa went back to spraying houses with DDT and malaria cases plummeted to pre-1997 levels. In the town of Ndumo near the South African border with Mozambique, the regional health clinic is very quiet this year. Three nurses sit in a back room with nothing to do, Beaubien reports. One of them, Chabuli Ngongo, has worked at the facility for 10 years, and says things haven't always been so peaceful. "In 1999 and year 2000 all the staff here were suffering from malaria," Ngongo says. "I had malaria myself four times." During the malaria season of 2000, more than 7,000 people were diagnosed with the disease at the regional clinic. Almost 100 of those patients eventually died. During the first two months of 2003, the clinic has seen only 21 people with malaria. Ngongo attributes the dramatic decline primarily to the reintroduction of DDT. "It has gone down a lot," Ngongo says. "I think it's because of the spraying." South Africa also distributes insecticide-laden bed nets in malaria-prone villages and sprays mosquito breeding pools with larvicide. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency describes DDT as a "persistent, bio-accumulative and toxic pollutant." The EPA says it damages the liver, the nervous system and can make people infertile. It was banned in the United States in 1972, but it is so potent that traces of DDT can still be found in the Great Lakes and other waterways. DDT's longevity makes it a dangerous pollutant but it also makes it a highly effective mosquito killer. In South African towns, DDT sprayed on the interior walls of houses will still be lethal to mosquitoes eight to 12 months later, making for a cheap weapon in the anti-malaria arsenal. Though other African countries use DDT -- including Swaziland, Madagascar, Uganda and Ethiopia -- its use remains controversial. Mozambique health officials worried about the long-term effects of the pesticide and have refused to use it. Zimbabwe gave up DDT out of concern that traces of the pesticide might be found on its lucrative tobacco crop. The World Wildlife Fund has called for a global ban on DDT but supports South Africa's limited use of the substance for malaria control. Richard Tren with the group Africa Fighting Malaria says the campaign to ban DDT worldwide is coming from Western environmentalists who don't appreciate how lethal malaria is in Africa. "The chances that someone is going to die of malaria in the U.S. is practically zero… so you don't need to worry about it. But the risks that people face in Africa are completely different and we need different tools." Tren and officials with the South African Ministry of Health say they've seen no adverse effects from DDT on the people whose houses have been sprayed. Health officials say DDT has been a lifesaver and that the country's dramatic reduction in malaria couldn't have happened without it. |
Book Explores Bin Laden's Mystique | Former <EM>Washington Post</EM> reporter Jonathan Randal has written a new book: <EM>Osama: The Making of a Terrorist</EM>. Randal explores the circumstances that have drawn followers to the al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Hear Randal and NPR's Robert Siegel. |
Biden Calls Trump 'Totally Irresponsible' As Trump Team Insists There's Evidence Of Voter Fraud | ABC political director Rick Klein and Washington Post White House reporter Toluse Olorunnipa joins Here & Now‘s Tonya Mosley and Peter O’Dowd about the week in politics. This article was originally published on WBUR.org. |
'On The Ice': Boys With A Secret, And A Chill Inside | In Barrow, Alaska, they must be dancing in the streets. For the second time this month, a tiny town that sits north of the Arctic Circle has become a marquee name. Along with Drew Barrymore and three stranded whales, Barrow became the unlikely star of the inspirational mammal-rescue picture Big Miracle. Now it serves as an arena for teen angst in the sympathetic feature debut of a young Inupiat filmmaker, Andrew Okpeaha MacLean. In most respects, On the Ice is the kind of straight-ahead, underprivileged-teen drama beloved of Sundance audiences. Packed with teachable moments and a mostly non-pro cast, the film centers on two best friends who get into deep trouble when a fight with a third boy over a girl turns ugly. The terrible accident that follows becomes a poorly hidden secret that keeps shame, guilt and long-festering resentment on the boil between two very different young men bound by old loyalties. Qalli (Josiah Patkotak) is a stolid, college-bound good boy from a supportive home, while his childhood buddy, Aivaaq (Frank Qutuq Irelan), struggles with the legacy of an alcoholic father who died young and the inattention of a mostly dead-drunk mother. Crystal meth also hovers and occasionally moves in to occupy center stage. But it's a minor player that MacLean rarely uses; he's not in this to clout us over the head with quack sociology, or to define or demean the community in which he grew up. Indeed, it's not booze or drugs that threaten the young of this tribe so much as the icy landscape. It's a cinematographer's gift — the director of photography is Lol Crawley, who also shot Lance Hammer's arresting extreme-indie Ballast — but a color-drained nightmare that might drive anyone to drink or drugs. (Or the impulsive violence that drives this film's bare-bones plot.) Big Miracle's running joke was the lucrative tourism bonanza that came when the media flocked to cover the whale rescue, but On the Ice can't afford such easy uplift. Just as an inner-city slum hems in its dwellers, so Barrow is marooned in an endless sea of white ice, relieved only by the bright red of the boys' snowmobiles — and of the blood that flows from a fatal knife wound. No wonder that an Eskimo variant of hip-hop — alternating on the soundtrack with an eerie lunar score by Czech-born composer iZLER — serves as an exuberant survival anthem for the youth of Barrow, just as mutant rap forms do for marginalized native youngsters from North America to New Zealand. Perhaps it takes an insider to tell a hopeful native tale without recourse to goo or mawkish wallowing. However depleted by the ills that plague a region dependent on a single industry that's threatened by eco-collapse, MacLean's Barrow clings to the vestiges of a once-vibrant ritual life. Staggering under the collective burden of poverty and the compound troubles it brings, the town's damaged families — not least its feisty, take-no-crap girls, pregnant or not — still gather organically for the enchantingly named "sing-spiration" that will carry a dead member to the next world. Many of their ceremonies may be gone or eroded beyond recognition, yet a father finds an inventive way to create a rite of passage for a suffering son and his friend, each groping for ways to tell the truth and move on. Where to, and how it works out, MacLean won't tell us. But it's a relief to know that this is one corner of America where helicopter parenting is not an option. Don't all migrate at once. |
Turkish Cleric Denies Involvement In Coup Attempt | From his exile compound in the Poconos, the cleric accused by the Turkish government of leading a failed coup attempt last year, Fethullah Gulen, denies any involvement. |
Obama Signs Health Care 'Fixes' | Saying again that he believes the health care overhaul law is an "important milestone," President Barack Obama just signed the so-called fixes that include reforms in loan programs for college students. And as the Associated Press puts it: "The signing capped a yearlong political struggle between Obama's Democrats and opposition Republicans that has set the stage for a bitter campaign for control of Congress in November." |
NPR News Wins 2010 IRE Award | An Associated Press article published last month highlighted that public media is building up its investigative reporting capacity ..."as newspapers and TV networks cut their staffs and cable television stations have filled their schedules with more opinion journalism." NPR News' deep-digging efforts were honored today with a 2010 Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for "Prison Profiting: Behind Arizona's Immigration Law." Reported by NPR Correspondent Laura Sullivan, "Prison Profiting" detailed gatherings that bring together state legislators with representatives of powerful corporations and associations, and how one organization facilitates the shaping of state laws with little scrutiny. In two reports that aired in October 2010 on the NPR newsmagazine Morning Edition, she revealed how Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce discussed the idea for the bill with a membership organization of state legislators and powerful corporations and associations – including the largest private prison company in the country – called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the secretive way ALEC allows companies to author "model bills" with the state legislators. "Prison Profiting" was produced by Anne Hawke, and edited by Deputy Managing Editor of Investigations Susanne Reber and Senior National Editor Steven Drummond. The judges praised the series by saying, "While most news outlets focused on the consequences of the bill that allowed police to lock up anyone they stop who cannot show proof of legal residency, NPR's investigation went behind the scenes. The judges thought NPR's decision to look at the law as a new business model made this entry the overwhelming winner in the category." The IRE also named the NPR News Investigation Home or Nursing Home: America's Empty Promise to Give the Elderly and Disabled a Choice a finalist in the radio category. Brain Wars: How the Military is Failing the Wounded, an investigation from NPR News and ProPublica, was named a finalist in the digital category. The IRE Award completes a hat trick of sorts for Sullivan and Drummond. They recently received a a duPont-Columbia Silver Baton Award and Peabody Award for their three-part investigative series "Behind the Bail Bond System" that revealed deep and costly flaws in the U.S. justice system's bail bond process. Congratulations to all the winners for this well-deserved recognition of their difficult and important work. You can find more information on the IRE Awards at their website. |
Environmental Crisis Possible In Wake Of Leak At Wastewater Plant In Florida | A leak in a reservoir at a now-defunct wastewater plant in Tampa Bay, Florida, is causing all sorts of headaches. Hundreds of homes within a mile of the plant have been ordered to evacuate in case of a total collapse of the reservoir, which could cause catastrophic flooding. There are also concerns about how discharging the water will impact the environment in the long term. Here & Now‘s Peter O’Dowd speaks with Matt Pasek, a professor of geoscience at the University of South Florida. This article was originally published on WBUR.org. |
California Braces For More Swine Flu Cases | In California, there are 11 confirmed cases of swine flu. State officials are bracing for an increase in that number. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says the infrastructure established a few years ago to handle the SARS scare will allow California to respond to whatever happens. |
Supreme Court Debates Military Trials for Detainees | The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday in a case testing the validity of the military tribunals set up to try accused terrorists now being held at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The case involves Osama bin Laden's one-time driver, a Yemeni citizen named Salim Ahmed Hamdan. The U.S. government says Hamdan was a confidant and bodyguard of bin Laden and helped transfer weapons from the Taliban to al-Qaida. Hamdan claims he was just a chauffeur. He says he was trying to return home in 2001 when he was captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and turned over to the U.S. military for bounty. At issue is whether the president has the power, on his own, to set up military tribunals to try Hamdan and others on war crimes charges, or whether the other two branches of government, the Congress and the courts, have a role to play. Attorney Neal Katyal, who represents Hamdan, told justices Tuesday that the military commissions established by the Pentagon on President Bush's orders are flawed because they violate basic military-justice protections. "This is a military commission that is literally unburdened by the laws, Constitution and treaties of the United States," Katyal said. Several justices seemed deeply concerned that the government had gone too far in its plans to hold a special trial for Hamdan. Some were downright indignant over the Bush administration's claim that a new federal law bars the high court from ruling in the Hamdan case. Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative appointed to the court last year by President Bush, recused himself from Tuesday's arguments because he had voted in the case while serving on a lower court. Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito, the newest justice, hinted at their support for the administration's position. Alito pressed Katyal to explain why a defendant before a military commission should be given something that defendants in civilian criminal trials normally don't get -- the chance to challenge the case before a verdict is reached. "If this were like a [civilian] criminal proceeding, we wouldn't be here," Katyal said. " The whole point of this is to say we're challenging the lawfulness of the tribunal itself." Alito suggested Hamdan should wait until his trial is over before questioning whether charging him with conspiracy violates the laws of war, as his lawyer contends. But Katyal brushed aside the contention. ''The government has had four years to get their charges together on Mr. Hamdan,'' he said. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy questioned Solicitor General Paul Clement about the legal safeguards for the trials. Justice Stephen Breyer also asked what would stop the president from holding the same type of trial in Toledo, Ohio, not just at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Defining the Rules of Military Justice The core issue before the court is whether the president as commander in chief has the unilateral power to set up military tribunals. The Bush administration contends that in addition to its inherent constitutional authority to try accused war criminals by military commission, it also has that power under the force authorization passed by Congress in the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Hamdan's lawyers counter that the force authorization makes no mention of military tribunals. They concede that military action of necessity allows the detention of prisoners seized on the battlefield. But they argue that the force authorization does not allow for trials outside the rules set down by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That code provides guidelines for battlefield trials and includes specific rights for the accused, such as the right to legal representation, the right to be present and to have the evidence tested by a lawyer. The Uniform Code of Military Justice's regulations strictly separate the judges and jurors in military trials from the command structure, and they allow a review by an independent court review. In contrast, say Hamdan's lawyers, the Bush military tribunals provide none of that. Defense attorney Katyal says the trial that Hamdan faces at Guantanamo has been a "constant moving target." "The rules change all the time," Katyal told NPR. "They changed even after the Supreme Court was asked to hear the case." For example, although the rules of the Guantanamo tribunals originally guaranteed that the defendant could be present at his trial, they changed midstream, and Hamdan was excluded from the jury selection process. Last July, the president authorized evidence obtained through torture, but on the eve of the Supreme Court argument, he revoked that rule. Among Hamdan's other complaints is the fact that the evidence to be presented at his trial could be in the form of unsworn written statements that could not be tested with cross-examination, and that, if he is convicted, the verdict and sentence would be reviewed by the president, not an independent court. Repercussions of Case Unclear Hamdan |
Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros On World Cafe | A band's sound is only as big as its members, and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros' music is huge. The 10 members are a whirl of roving horns, as well as whistles, claps, shouts, strummed string instruments and percussion involving drums, hands and anything else they can find. The group's communal folk sound blew up in 2009 with the heart-pounding, foot-stomping single "Home"; with its universal sentiment, the song includes a back-and-forth between frontman Alex Ebert and bandmate Jade Castrinos. In this World Cafe session, Ebert describes how the pair came to terms with performing "Home" as their relationship evolved from an undying friendship to a romantic relationship and back again over the past few years. Attempting to dissolve the categories and definitions of relationships in a blend of light and love, Ebert and the gang perform songs from their second album, Here. This segment originally aired on June 8, 2012. |
Top Chinese Officials Fired After SARS Cases Surge | China fires its health minister and the mayor of Beijing after the government reports a jump in SARS-related deaths and a tenfold increase in the number of infected people in the capital. Severe acute respiratory syndrome, a flu-like illness that has killed more than 200 people and infected almost 4,000 worldwide, is believed to be caused by the coronavirus, which also causes the common cold. Hear NPR's Richard Knox and NPR's Rob Gifford. |
Analysts Weigh Recession Forecast | Investors are worried about the mounting evidence that the United States is headed for a recession. Many economists say that if a recession comes, it would probably be over quickly. But they say a downturn overseas could prolong it. |
Weak Job Growth Numbers Reported | The federal government releases new employment figures, and the data show that while the economy was still adding jobs last month, it was doing so at a rate well below what most economists believe is needed for strong growth. NPR's Jack Speer reports. |
Discarded Mobile Homes a Growing Problem | NPR's Adam Hochberg reports that some local governments are taking steps to rid their communities of junked mobile homes. In some rural areas, there are thousands of abandoned trailers dumped in the woods and along roadsides. They are often difficult and costly to remove. |
What If You Could Change Your Child's Future In One Hour Every Week? | On a summer afternoon, Ciara Whelan, a teacher at a New York City elementary school, knocks on the apartment door of one of her students in the Bronx. Melissa, the student's mother, welcomes her guest with a huge platter of snacks — shrimp rolls and dill dip. Melissa explains that this past school year — third grade — her daughter, Sapphira, fell behind in her reading because she got a phone and spent too much time messaging her friends on apps like TikTok. (We're not using their last names to protect the student's privacy.) "I think it was not even about school itself — I think it was just distractions in class," Melissa says. This home visit is the kickoff to a reading program called Springboard Collaborative. Springboard runs after-school and summer programs with struggling readers in low-income elementary schools in 13 cities across the U.S., including Girls Prep Lower East Side Elementary School, which Sapphira attends. Once each week, a family member — mom, dad, grandma, an older sibling — attends an hourlong workshop to help learn and practice the strategies students are learning in class. "Parent engagement is the beating heart of our programs," says founder Alejandro Gibes de Gac. "It's the spirit in the cocktail." Here's why he believes this is so important. About 1 in 3 fourth-graders in the U.S. is reading below grade level, according to the test known as the Nation's Report Card. This figure hasn't changed for decades — not with more testing, not with the Common Core. Gibes de Gac points out that children spend most of their waking hours outside the classroom. Like an orange, he likes to say, you can try to squeeze as much juice as you can out of that wedge that is class time, but there's a lot of untapped potential in the remaining segments. Yet most parent-engagement efforts from schools, he argues, are lightweight, marginal — a fundraiser here, a game night there. He says few programs directly share teaching strategies from the classroom for a core subject. Sapphira's Springboard program is held in an upstairs classroom at Girls Prep Lower East Side, a charter school in Manhattan. A roomful of dads and moms are crammed into little chairs alongside their daughters. Everyone is wearing a blue T-shirt that says "SPRINGBOARD COLLABORATIVE" on the front. Jehron, Sapphira's dad, sits with his daughter, holding an index card to help mark her place in the book Sideways Stories From Wayside School. "You're going too fast, OK?" he tells her. "Right now you need to slow down." After a few minutes of reading together, Whelan tells parents to ask students to summarize what is happening every few pages, to check comprehension. "If they can't tell you, it doesn't always mean the book is too hard," she explains. In the past seven years, Springboard has collected what Gibes de Gac calls, tongue-in-cheek, a "nauseating" amount of data to prove its effectiveness. For example: In just five weeks, on average, 3 out of 4 students get to the next reading level or even further. One district, Oakland Unified School District, had an independent evaluation that found that Springboard was one of its most effective literacy investments. The program also gives books to each child. Backpacks full of school supplies and tablets are offered as incentives for completing the whole program. The idea, Gibes de Gac explains, is for families to practice setting goals and forming new positive habits. When the program follows up six months later, the evaluations show that families are still reading together more than before. Gibes de Gac started this program when he was only 22, and his personal experiences played a big role in its development. His father is a Chilean playwright who was imprisoned by Augusto Pinochet's regime for a political play titled Libertad! Libertad!. His mother, a teacher, was born in Puerto Rico, and his parents met in Paris and subsequently toured with their own theater company. When Gibes de Gac was in kindergarten, his parents came to the United States in search of better schools. It wasn't always a friendly place to be. As an eighth-grader, he published a memoir of his experiences being bullied as an immigrant student. "I became passionate about the right of other people to a great education." He made it to Harvard University. Then Teach for America in Philadelphia. "I was teaching in a Puerto Rican neighborhood. I saw myself in my students. I saw my parents in their parents. "It was more than just our shared language and complexion," he explains. "It was the look! My students' parents looked at their children with all the love, commitment and potential that any parent sees in their child. And yet my school and our system approached low-income parents as liabilities rather than assets." He said that the school system often treated his parents as "pushy immigrants with bad English." Instead, he says, parents are "the single greatest underutilized resource to helping children who are struggling." This is |
Who Invented the Blackberry? | This morning Doug Holtz-Eakin, a top McCain policy adviser, brandished a BlackBerry for reporters and said, "You're looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create." Okay, cue the laughter. McCain isn't exactly known as the most tech-savvy candidate on the trail. He's admitted in the past to not knowing how to operate a computer or send e-mail. So why did Holtz-Eakin, on McCain's behalf, risk pulling an Al Gore (who, as we all remember, sort of took credit for the internet in 2000)? Well, facing questions from reporters about what McCain did as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that would help him to understand and deal with the current economic crisis, Holtz-Eakin pointed to his BlackBerry, the little communications device so addictive that you can never put it down -- not on the train-ride home, not at dinner with your significant other, and not even, it seems, at an important press conference. Holtz-Eakin was trying to make a larger point, of course, that McCain's leadership on the committee in regulating (and deregulating) the telecommunications industry qualifies him to deal with financial markets. However as the folks over at The Trail note, even that point isn't especially effective since the Commerce Committee has no oversight whatsoever of banks or financial institutions. The Obama campaign quickly jumped on the BlackBerry claim, peddling the Politico and AP versions of the story to reporters. McCain, for his part, has already dismissed the blackBerry comment via an aide, saying it was "a boneheaded joke by a staffer." For the record, the BlackBerry was invented by a Canadian wireless device company called Research in Motion. Also, time for a shameless plug: Doug Holtz-Eakin was on Morning Edition today. If you missed the interview, don't worry: you can download NPR mobile on your BlackBerry and listen whenever you'd like. |
Tariffs On EU, Canada And Mexico Impact 'Critical Supply Chain,' Economist Says | The White House announced Thursday that it will impose steel and aluminum tariffs against the European Union, Canada and Mexico. Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson speaks with Diane Swonk (@DianeSwonk), chief economist at Grant Thornton, about the effects of the tariffs, as well as the Federal Reserve proposal to ease the Volcker Rule, which was created to limit risky trading on Wall Street. |
'Lawrence' Of Arabia: From Archaeologist To War Hero | Scott Anderson's book explains how British officer T.E. Lawrence used his knowledge of Arab culture and medieval history to advance British causes.<em> Originally broadcast Aug. 19, 2013.</em> |
Santorum's Problem With Women Could Be His Glass Ceiling | As February began, Rick Santorum's presidential bid was polling in the mid-teens among Republicans. Now, we find ourselves two weeks deep in the Santorum Era. His national polling number has doubled since he won the Trifecta Tuesday events in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri. Those were small contests with few participants and zero delegates at stake. But Santorum threatens to win far larger and more meaningful tests in Michigan and Arizona a week from now, and in Ohio a week after that. If he does, he will close out Mitt Romney's claims of inevitability and unite the party factions that have searched for months for an alternative to the man from Massachusetts. That feat has eluded all the other Romney rivals who have had brief moments atop the polls. In this, the most topsy-turvy primary season since polling began, we have seen Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich all peak and fade. At this point, Gingrich is the only one of them left in the race, and his star has fallen so fast that the panic he briefly caused the establishment has passed. Read More The establishment must now cast a wary eye on the former senator from Pennsylvania, whom voters there rejected in 2006 by 18 percentage points. Party pros watch as Santorum doubles down on his statements regarding social issues from education and the environment to abortion and contraception. They wince as he speaks of the president's "phony theology ... not based on the Bible," and his spokeswoman alludes to "radical Islamic policies." But the new front-runner's words should not be what worries Republicans most — Santorum's biggest problem lies in his numbers. He might well win the Republican nomination if he remains the hero of the Tea Party and the social conservatives who include many white evangelicals and traditional Catholics. But as such, can he win in November? Specifically, can he win among women? Attracting the votes of women was already the No. 1 affliction for the GOP in 2012. Nominating a candidate who personifies the gender gap in American politics is not a likely antidote. Four years ago, John McCain of Arizona had trouble with several categories of voters: people younger than 30, people of color and women. But women mattered most because women cast a majority of the total vote. That's right. In 2008, women cast nearly 8 million more votes than men did: 53 percent of the total. And that was a big problem for McCain because he got only 43 percent of the female majority. To counter that deficit, he would have needed a big majority of the men, bigger than the 55 percent George W. Bush had among men in 2004. He would have needed to be in the neighborhood of the first President Bush's showing among women in 1988: Bush beat Michael Dukakis that year by a single percentage point among women, but ran away with the men's vote by 16. McCain fell far short of those marks. Instead, he narrowly lost to Barack Obama among men, finishing with just under 49 percent. Let's remember that McCain could boast the first female running mate in GOP history: Sarah Palin. He was a hawk on the wars and an opponent of abortion, but so was George W. Bush when he got 48 percent of women's votes in 2004 with Dick Cheney as his running mate. Where would Santorum fall on this scale? It is possible he might name a woman as his running mate. New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez has been mentioned as one possibility, particularly given the swing state she represents and her appeal to Hispanic voters. But Santorum also would face a powerful headwind because of his positions, longstanding and often repeated, on hot-button issues among women. While he has done well among women who turn out for GOP primaries and caucuses, the November electorate will include far larger numbers of independents, Democrats and Republican women who were not active in the nominating contests. Santorum will have a problem on abortion, not because he is anti-abortion (as all the Republican candidates are) but because he gives the issue a pre-eminence in his array of causes that makes many Americans uncomfortable. The same could be said for his virulent opposition to gay marriage and to women's current and proposed role in the military. But his crusade for the restoration of traditional mores goes further. Santorum says he would not ban contraception, but he opposes it. The overwhelming majority of American women use or have used contraception and want access to it. Santorum also opposes the inclusion of prenatal testing in insurance plans, arguing that too many prenatal tests lead to abortions. He also has been outspoken on public schools, calling them "factories" and choosing to home school his own seven children. His disapproval of women working outside the home when their children are young is also well known. Many of these issues have been regarded as settled law or settled politics for a generation. The notion that they are to be reopened and revised disturbs many women, including many who do not consi |
Answering Your Coronavirus Questions: Unemployment, Exercise And Video Game Recs | On this broadcast of The National Conversation, NPR reporters answer your questions about what you can do if you've been laid off, how to exercise and practice social distancing, and video games. |
'American War' Explores The Universality Of Revenge | It's 2075, and America has been beset by flooding linked to climate change. The President has banned the use of fossil fuels. The southern states have broken away, looking to protect the coal mining industry. A rabid civil war is taking place. A weakened America sees new empires in China and the Middle East meddling in its affairs — and Mexico has annexed most parts of the Southwest, from Texas to California. This dystopian world is the setting for a new novel, American War, by Omar El Akkad — who spent much of his career as a journalist with Canada's Globe and Mail covering real disasters and conflicts. El Akkad says that of all the characters he created for the book, only one came to him fully-formed: Sarat Chestnut, the young girl at the center of the story. "At the start of the book she's six years old," he says, "and to me she's sort of this very curious, trusting, defiant young girl whose chief attribute is this kind of rebellion against unknowing. She wants to know as much as possible. And the central arc of the book is essentially her life, and how her desire to know, her curiosity, is sort of used against her during this war." Interview Highlights On Sarat's dark path I didn't want to write a book with good guys and bad guys, and a clear dividing line between them. The idea behind writing it, when I first started, had to do with the universality of revenge. That we all suffer the same way, and we become damaged by suffering in the same way, regardless of which part of the world we grew up in, or what we believe. On deciding to write this story as fiction There's not much in here that's fully un-anchored from something that happened in the real world ... I've spent the last ten years writing nonfiction, I've spent the last ten years writing journalism, and so it was very interesting for me to take that world and recast it as something fictional. But there's nothing that doesn't have some kind of analog in the world. Fiction's always been my first home, since I first started writing, and so in a sense, it freed me up to say things I couldn't say in a journalistic capacity — nor should I say in a journalistic capacity. The best journalism isn't necessarily good writing, it's just necessary, and this was a very different world, to be able to say things, and also to be able to bury subtext, and to say things without saying them. On whether we're supposed to have sympathy for Sarat after her terrible acts No. I don't think you're supposed to have sympathy for her. My only hope is that you understand why she did it. I think one of the things that's been lost in this incredibly polarized world we live in is the idea that it's possible to understand without taking somebody's side. So my only hope is that when you get to the end of the book, you're not on her side, you don't support her, you're not willing to apologize for her — but you understand how she got to the place where she is. Editor Jordana Hochman, producer Peter Breslow and web producer Petra Mayer contributed to this story. |
Friday Morning Political Mix | Happy Friday, fellow political junkies. Of course, it's hard to be happy if you're one of the more than two million federal workers either furloughed or working without pay, or one of the millions of other Americans whose lives are disrupted by official Washington's dysfunction. It's Day Four of the federal government shutdown, 2013 edition. And an end to the disagreement still doesn't seem in the offing. On that grim note, here are some items of political interest worth mulling over this morning. Yielding to the logistical challenges of pulling off a major overseas trip with much of the executive-branch staff furloughed by the government shutdown, President Obama cancelled his scheduled Asia trip. An unhappy White House blamed House Republicans for setting back U.S. economic and strategic interests since Obama won't represent his nation among other world leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Bali, Indonesia, ceding the field to China and Russia. The very people Tea Party activists could care less about, the Republican establishment, are even more upset that the conservative insurgents behind the shutdown are damaging the party's effort to reshape its brand after recent national election failures, reports The New York Times' Jonathan Martin. Some constitutional-law experts have argued that the president could solve the debt-ceiling problem himself by broadly and creatively interpreting his powers to safeguard the nation. The president is apparently not among those experts proposing what one White House official called "unicorn theories" writes Adam Liptak in the New York Times. Obama insists it's Congress' job, not a president's, to ensure the nation doesn't default on its debts. Alas, no $1 trillion coin. The morning after, the reason is still unclear why Miriam Carey, 34, of Stamford, Conn., drove her car erratically near the White House and Capitol Hill and failed to stop when police ordered her to, causing mayhem and leading them to shoot her to death, reports the Washington Post. The event raised anxieties in a city already on edge because of a recent mass shooting and the political and financial angst caused by the government shutdown. The federal government shutdown is damaging the private sector. The Labor Department won't issue the all-important jobs-data report, a critical gauge used by economists and financial markets for decision-making. As Daniel Gross writes in The Daily Beast, companies like Sikorsky, the helicopter maker, are facing real or potential layoffs, creating a downdraft on an economy with a ho-hum recovery. Newark Mayor Corey Booker, a Democrat, seems to have more of a contest in the special election for a U.S. Senate seat from New Jersey than many observers expected. His Republican rival, Steve Lonegan, a former small-city mayor, has made significant gains in some polls. All of which makes a Friday debate loom larger, writes Matt Friedman of the Newark Star-Ledger. Meanwhile, Politico's Maggie Haberman writes that Booker is seen as having run a campaign far less dynamic than his famous Twitter presence. Bring back the pork. It's been noted numerous times that in past eras, a House speaker or Senate majority leader could grease the political skids for legislation with ear marks and backroom deals. As Alex Seitz-Wald notes in a National Journal magazine piece, we got rid of much of that approach that made corruption easier but sort of worked. Trouble is, we have yet to replace it with anything that works as well which helps explain our current governing crisis. How polarized have Americans become? The answer depends on which method researchers use to ask people their views. Princeton political scientists Lori Bougher and Markus Prior write in The Monkey Cage blog that Internet polls made respondents appear more partisan than old-fashioned face-to-face polls. |
Bush Meets With Pope, Discusses Iraq, Africa | President Bush met for the first time with Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday, where the two discussed the war in Iraq, the U.S. humanitarian record, aid to Africa and the situation in Darfur. After posing for photos, Benedict asked the president about his meetings with G-8 leaders in Germany - the pontiff's homeland. Then, the topic changed to international aid. "I've got a very strong AIDS initiative," Bush said, sitting with Benedict at a small desk in the pope's private library at the Vatican. The president promised the pope that he would work to get Congress to double the current U.S. commitment for fighting AIDS in Africa to $30 billion over the next five years. The pope also asked the president about his meeting in Germany with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has expressed opposition to a U.S. missile shield in Europe. "The dialogue with Putin was also good?" the pope asked. Bush, eyeing photographers and reporters who were about to be escorted from the room, replied: "Umm. I'll tell you in a minute." The pontiff gave the president a drawing of St. Peter's Basillica, an official Vatican medal and coins. "It's beautiful, thank you," Bush said of the drawing. The president gave the pope a rare edition of an autobiography of John Carroll, the first archbishop in the United States and founder of the Roman Catholic Church in America. Bush also gave the pope lithographs of documents from the National Archives and a walking sticking made by a former homeless man in Dallas, Texas. Bush also has one of the white sticks, which are inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Bush's visit was met with heavy security. Thousands of police deployed in downtown Rome to counter demonstrations by anti-globalization groups and against Bush's meetings with the pope and Italian officials. The White House deputy press secretary, Dana Perino, shrugged off the anti-Bush protests. "That is what democracy is all about," she said. "He understands not everybody is going to agree with him." In a statement, the Vatican said Bush had "warm" talks with the pope and the Vatican's No. 2 official, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. They discussed international politics, particularly in the Middle East, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Lebanon, the "worrisome situation in Iraq" and the "critical conditions in which the Christian communities (in Iraq) are found," the statement said. The pontiff expressed his hope for a `'regional" and `'negotiated" solution of conflicts and crises that afflict the region, the Vatican said. Attention was also give to Africa, the humanitarian crisis in Darfur and Latin America. They also discussed moral and religious questions relating to human rights and religious freedom, the defense and promotion of life, marriage and the family and sustainable development, the Vatican said. Bush arrived in Rome Friday night, after a stop in the Czech Republic, three days at a summit of industrialized democracies on Germany's northern coast, and a quick, three-hour visit to Poland. A stomach ailment forced Bush to miss a few meetings at the summit in Germany, but Perino said the president, while "not 100 percent," was feeling better. The president stays in Rome Saturday night before going on to Albania and Bulgaria. From NPR reports and The Associated Press |
Scotus: Sexual Predators | The Supreme Court ruled today that states can keep violent sexual predators locked up after they serve their prison sentences even if they are not mentally ill. The 5 to 4 decision came in the case of an admitted pedophile from Kansas. The justices said such people can be held if they are considered mentally abnormal and are likely to commit new crimes. The court ruled such confinement - intended to protect society - does not violate the constitutional right to due process and is not double punishment for the same crime. NPR's Chitra Ragavan reports. |
Problems with an All-Volunteer Force | Commentator Ed Palm is a retired Marine officer who lives in the Seattle area. He's also a Vietnam veteran. Palm sees a disturbing new trend in the all-volunteer force. |
Voter ID Backer, Opponent Agree On One Point: Voter Rolls Are A Mess | There are few people further apart on the issue of new voter photo ID requirements than Laura Murphy and Hans von Spakovsky. She's director of the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office. He's with the Heritage Foundation and a former Justice Department official under George W. Bush. So when the two went head-to-head Thursday on the issue at the National Press Club in Washington DC, there were a few sparks. Murphy called the mostly Republican-backed laws "nothing short of a crass power grab" by those who want to keep certain people from the polls. Her group is challenging several laws in court, arguing that they discriminate against minorities, students and others, who are less likely to have the required ID. They also tend to vote Democratic. Von Spakovsky, who's been a leader in pushing for such laws, says they're needed to help prevent voter fraud. He noted that some of the plaintiffs in the ACLU case in Wisconsin have driver's licenses from other states, adding: "They could be attempting to vote twice and perhaps the ACLU wants them to vote twice." Read More For the most part, though, the debate was civil and a replay of arguments that have been heard in state legislatures across the country. It also showed once again that both sides suffer from a lack of data. Murphy used an oft-cited statistic that more than 21 million voting-age Americans don't have government-issued photo ID. But as von Spakovsky noted, past challenges to these laws have failed in part because opponents have had a difficult time producing actual voters who've been harmed. Murphy says her group and others are actively gathering some "very compelling stories" right now of legitimate voters who are unable to get the required photo ID in states such as Missouri, Wisconsin and Arizona. And, indeed, there have been numerous stories of voters — especially poor and elderly ones — who lack the documents they need to get a photo ID, such as a birth certificate. Von Spakovsky cited, as he has in the past, a number of cases of voter fraud over the years, although most analysts have found no evidence that such fraud is widespread. When asked how a photo ID requirement would stop someone determined to commit fraud, he responded: "No one says that photo ID is a perfect solution to this kind of security problem." But, he said, along with other security measures already in place at the polls, it would make it much tougher for anyone to commit voter fraud. Murphy countered that since fraud is so rare, "we have to ask ourselves whether the burden of going after this tiny group of people is worth the burdens placed on legitimate eligible voters." Especially she said, when voting is such a fundamental right. The two did agree on one thing — that voter registration rolls are a mess that needs to be cleaned up. They both cited a Pew Center on the States report last week that there are more than 2 million dead people registered to vote, and about 24 million registrations that are invalid or inaccurate. |
What's Next for Bush's Cabinet? | Discussing the fallout after the resignations of Attorney General John Ashcroft and Commerce Secretary Don Evans. Hear NPR's Michele Norris and former assistant attorney general Viet Dinh. |
Crowds Join Slain Youth's Parents In 'Hoodie March' | A rally was held in New York City's Union Square Wednesday night in memory of Trayvon Martin, who was shot dead by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla., last month. The man has not been charged in Martin's death. |
'Don't Think A Robot Could Do This': Warehouse Workers Aren't Worried For Their Jobs | The wheels of a tall, metal cart squeak as Chris Beatty, 26, pulls it through a maze of aisles inside a cosmetics warehouse in Burlington, N.J. A hand-held scanner helps Beatty find specific items, such as face cream or lipstick — to be sorted, packed and shipped to online customers. In his industry, this is called picking. Asked if a robot could do his job, Beatty responds with a long pause. "That's a tough one," he says eventually, "but I don't think a robot could do this." Or, maybe he just doesn't want to think about it. "I love my job too much," he says, with a smile. His optimism matches the findings in a new NPR/Marist poll. The survey shows 94 percent of U.S. workers — across all industries — say it's unlikely they will lose jobs to automation. Interviews with numerous warehouse workers at Beatty's employer — Radial — and others employed by Amazon revealed their confidence about the future. But many forecasters aren't as sanguine. They point to giants like Amazon and Walmart speeding up warehouse work with machines. Thanks to surging online shopping, retail warehouses are booming, and so are jobs. But the unavoidable buzzword is automation. Labor economists say the industry is quickly learning the same lesson that reshaped manufacturing — intense competition and larger scale lead to a big push for efficiency to keep costs down. The warehouse companies tend to say that robots will supplement and ease human labor, not replace it. For example, Amazon, which has rolled out thousands of robots, maintains a massive workforce and is perpetually on a hiring spree. Amazon says it has more than 75 fulfillment centers, the majority of which employ at least a thousand full-time hourly associates. "Our 25+ robotics fulfillment centers employ 2,000 to 4,000 full-time hourly associates," an Amazon spokeswoman told NPR. And warehouse employees themselves believe it will be hard for automation to squeeze them out of work. "There's a lot of jobs in here that could be taken over by machines, but who's going to run the building?" says Marc Munn, who manages the department where Beatty works. "If something breaks ... I don't think we'll have other machines in here to fix that, so that's where my job comes into play." Packer Bibiana Ramos points out the precision and care of her work. "I know there's machines that make boxes, but not this kind of boxes," she says. Ramos folds tissue paper inside a special box, placing cosmetics on top and gently affixing the shipping label. "It has to be kind of ... meticulous," she says, "so it could have a good presentation." Alex Economos, who runs the Radial warehouse, says investing in a lot of robots makes more sense in a large million-square-foot Amazon facility than a small or midsize operation like his — robots aren't cheap. He shares the story of RFID chips — little tags that started popping up in warehouses years back, when he worked for Walmart. They held the promise of easy, instantaneous automated accounting of all the items in a pallet, for example. But they didn't take off, he says, because of the cost of tagging every single item, especially cheap common goods like toothpaste. Plus, the machines for now aren't really that skillful. "You could never say never," Economos says. "But at this time ... you would literally need a robot with the dexterity, with the fingers to pick up something light, as small as a ChapStick, and as large as a bottle of shampoo." One Amazon warehouse worker says her job includes making boxes for items that the scanners can't handle — like a fishing rod that's too thin for the lasers to recognize. "A lot of the machines I see or deal with in the warehouse really aren't that great," she says, speaking anonymously to not violate the terms of her employment. "There are just so many things that you need a competent human to deal with in our warehouse." But she's actually eager to see robots deal with heavy lifting and the messy parts of the job. That appeals to Beatty, too, once he learns that Amazon has robots to bring the shelves to workers, instead of workers walking the aisles in search of products. "That would be pretty cool," he says, "to see a robot bring some of your work 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, Be |
A Tribe Called Red: globalFEST 2013 | The night ended with bumping beats down at Webster Hall's Studio space with the Ottawa-based Native collective A Tribe Called Red. The group calls its style "pow wow step" — an imaginative and dance-floor-ready blend of beats, aboriginal singing and dancing, and visuals and audio samples that turn "Indian" stereotypes on their heads. But the most memorable moments in the set come when A Tribe Called Red invites a dancer out to perform a traditional hoop dance, twisting and turning hoops into elegant and beautiful figures. Set List "Wird" "Native Puppy Love" "Guermo Azteca" "Jumbo" "Murderer" "Electric Pow Wow Drum" "Cherokee People" "The Traveler" "Look At This" "Tribe Awards" "Moombahcore" "The Road" Credits Producers: Mito Habe-Evans, Bob Boilen; Videographers: Gabriella Garcia-Pardo, Mito Habe-Evans; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Video Editor: Denise DeBelius Assistant Producer: Denise DeBelius; Special Thanks to: Webster Hall, globalFEST 2013; Executive Producers: Anya Grundmann, Keith Jenkins. |
With Ticket Tax In Limbo, Airlines Raise Prices | Congress failed late last week to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration. That means the agency can no longer collect the ticket taxes that passengers normally pay. It could have been a nice price break for travelers, but airlines raised prices by about the same amount as the tax. |
Filmmaker David Balsiger on Bush's 'Faith' | Balsiger's film <EM>George W. Bush: Faith in the White House</EM> has been released as an "alternative" to Michael Moore's <EM>Fahrenheit 911</EM>. Interviewees share their experiences on how President Bush demonstrates his faith. Introduced at the Republican National Convention, the film is now on DVD. |
Remote Antarctic Trek Reveals A Glacier Melting From Below | Scientists watching Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier from space have noticed with some alarm that it has been surging toward the sea. If it were to melt entirely, global sea levels would rise by several feet. The glacier is really, really remote. It's 1,800 miles from McMurdo, the U.S. base station in Antarctica, so just getting there is a challenge. Scientists have rarely been able to get out to the glacier to make direct measurements. "This was a granddaddy of a problem," says Tim Stanton, oceanography research professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Stanton not only wanted to get to it, he wanted to get to it with 20,000 pounds of gear, so they could drill into it. Stanton and about a dozen colleagues spent several years planning this mission, which involved multiple aircraft and remote support camps. In fact, they took four trips to Antarctica before they finally succeeded. It wasn't just getting there that was hard. Bill Shaw, a colleague of Stanton's, says Antarctica has its own way of serving up trouble. "You're in your tent sleeping, and you start to hear things flapping and then you wake up to find that all your neatly piled batches of gear are now covered in several feet of snow," Shaw says. "You're going to spend the next several days digging it out and getting going again." That happened more than once during their seven weeks out on this remote piece of ice. They chose this spot because the glacier here is actually being undercut by ocean water, which flows below it. The team's challenge was to drill down through the ice sheet, which is twice as thick as the Golden Gate Bridge is tall. Melting those holes involved heating up a metal rod and circulating hot fluid through hoses to the rod, as it gradually ate its way down through the ice. "Everybody was shlepping hose," Stanton says. "They needed lots of support, so that's what we did during the drilling phase. As soon as the hole was through, we immediately started deploying instruments." In particular, Stanton wanted to measure the currents flowing right under the ice sheet. He wanted to test how salty the water was, and to find out how quickly the ice was being eaten away by the comparatively warm seawater. They also grabbed a sample of the mud from the seafloor below. "To see what's down there is quite remarkable, because I can assure you, nobody else on this planet's ever touched the mud before us, underneath an ice shelf like that," he says. Their instruments showed that meltwater from the glacier was flowing rapidly toward the open ocean, and cutting into the ice above as it went. "I was surprised by how much like a river this was. It's a river, but instead of eroding a channel, it's melting a channel," Shaw says. And it turns out that channel is melting very fast. As they report in Science magazine, the ice in that channel was disappearing at the rate of 2 inches a day. Stanton said their measurement is consistent with what scientists had inferred from satellite measurements. "Don't forget, this happens day in and day out," he says. "We saw no changes over the 35 days that we were reporting on in this paper. It's a phenomenally high melt rate compared to what we observe in the Arctic, for example." At the moment, it's contributing a tiny amount to rising sea levels. But the melting has been accelerating in recent years, and if it keeps accelerating, in the very long run, the Pine Island Glacier could add several feet to global sea levels. The results are sobering, but Stanton says when the drilling system finally punched through the ice and he was able to position his instruments, he felt he'd conquered this grandaddy of a problem. "That was remarkably satisfying," he says. "It really had been a long, long road." With luck, those instruments will continue to run for another two or three years — and send their data back via satellite to Stanton and his colleagues, in the cozy confines of their labs. RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: Something alarming has been happening on Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier. It's been surging toward the sea. If the glacier melted entirely, that would raise global sea level by several feet. Scientists have watched the glacier from space but have rarely been able to get out to this very remote glacier. Now some scientists are setting out on a mission to drill through that glacier. NPR's Richard Harris reports. RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE: Pine Island Glacier is really, really remote. It's 1800 miles from McMurdo, the U.S. base-station in Antarctica. So just getting there is a challenge. Tim Stanton, from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, not only wanted to get to it but he wanted to get to it with 20,000 pounds of gear, so they could drill into it. TIM STANTON: This was a granddaddy of a problem. HARRIS: Stanton and about a dozen colleagues spent several years planning this mission, which involved multiple aircraft and remote support camps. In fact, they took four trips to Antarctica before they |
Songs We Love: Mary Gauthier, 'The War After The War' | There's a cartoonish perception that it falls to hawkish country singers to take up for the military and to lefty folk singers to protest the very idea of going to war, though there are actually quite a few exceptions to that rule. In four years of volunteering with the nonprofit Songwriting With Soldiers, singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier has been working in an environment where such divisive us-and-them thinking has no place. She and a handful of accomplished songwriter peers have spent numerous weekends holed up with active duty members and their families at secluded retreat centers, collaborating on songs that make tangible the toll of combat. From that body of songs, she's culled 11 vignettes on her arresting new album Rifles & Rosary Beads, including "The War After The War," which NPR is premiering today. It's a devastating testimony to the quiet suffering of the partners and spouses who welcome soldiers home. Gauthier is two decades into a recording career that's earned her respect among fans and fellow practitioners of serious songcraft, but all this time, she's most often turned her unflinching eye on herself: her own processing of abandonment and adoption, youthful rebellion, recovery from addiction and romantic grief. "It's a relief in some ways," she reflects during a Monday morning phone call, "to have stories that I'm so passionate about and really wanna tell, but I'm not pulling them from my own experience anymore. I find that this is every bit as important to me, if not more. I'm in there in a certain way, because the way I tell it, my voice is there. But it's not my story. It's their story told through the filter of my voice." She spoke with NPR about what it's like giving poetic shape to soldiers' soul-baring and why she feels it'll connect across all manner of ideological divides. What comes of being cut off from the outside world for a couple of days in the focused environment of a Songwriting With Soldiers retreat? Fundamentally, our job as songwriters is to sit down and listen. So there will be generally 10 to 15 veterans and four songwriters. We introduce ourselves and we play a little show for 'em the first night, maybe two, three songs each, so they can get a feel for who we are as songwriters. They know who they wanna write with after we play a few songs. The next morning we get up and have breakfast together, and then we go into different parts of the retreat center and sit down with our veteran and we ask them just a few questions and they start talking, and we find really quickly a thread to a song. Because we all need to write at least two songs, usually three songs in two days each, we've gotta roll. We don't have time to piddle around, and that's a really good thing. We listen with intensity, and as soon as they stumble onto something that sounds like a title or a thread, we start to find the music behind that. I can honestly say that within two hours, I can get a song out of what they're saying. And I didn't know I was capable of that. That was one of my big concerns going in, is that I'm slow when I'm writing my own songs. "I Drink" took me two years to write. It seems like soldiers might be reluctant to talk about their combat experiences with people who haven't been there and don't know what it's like. How do you overcome that? You know, I think that's a stereotype. I haven't come up against that once in four-and-a-half years of doing this. Here's the deal: We're not therapists. We're not looking for a diagnosis. We don't talk about politics ever. We don't judge what they've been through at all. What we're honest-to-God trying to do, and they know it, is to get the best possible song that we can from their experience, and it opens them up, because they know they're not being appraised. We create this place that's safe, and they feel it and they start talking and shock themselves with what they say. The old stereotype of "soldiers don't talk" is, I think, [tied to veterans of] World War I, World War II. And of course, Vietnam vets didn't talk because nobody wanted to hear it. They came back and they were despised and belittled for their service. This is a different generation. I was told by the director of the retreat center we worked at last weekend that the new statistics are in around this generation of people who served, meaning the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, they scan 55 percent liberal, not conservative. They're young people. They're reflective of what you'd see on a college campus. At couples retreats, I've worked with lesbian couples, married with a child. I've worked with a huge number of couples that the true demographics of American diversity. How else has your perspective changed during this process? What I did learn is that there's a giant civilian-military divide in America. One-half of 1 percent of our population serves. We have so few carrying the burden for so many, and their families carry it too. Getting to know these folks and growing to love |
Obama To Hold Town Hall At Facebook Headquarters | President Obama holds a town hall meeting at Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. Facebook users have been submitting queries for more than a week. NPR's Mara Liasson talks to Michele Norris. |
America's First Spaceman | His feat is tucked in the timeline of aviation history -- somewhere between Chuck Yeager ripping through the sound barrier in 1947 and John Glenn making his orbital flight in 1962. But in his day, Capt. Iven Kincheloe, who flew a rocket-powered plane to the edge of space one morning in 1956, was as much a star as those other two famous aviators. NPR's Bob Edwards reports. On Sept. 7, 1956, the day of his historic flight, Kincheloe was crammed into the cockpit of a Bell X-2. The experimental aircraft was dropped from a Boeing B-50 carrier plane at 29,500 feet. Then Kincheloe, who had flown more than 100 missions in the Korean War, took the X-2 nearly 100,000 feet higher -- to a record 126,200 feet. It was 26,000 feet higher than anyone had ever flown before. Dr. Raymond Puffer, an Air Force Flight Center historian, describes what Kincheloe would have seen at that altitude: "The sky turns dark, indigo blue. You can easily see the curvature of the earth. He could see from San Francisco down to Mexico... he was weightless for something like 56 seconds, but he didn't particularly notice it because he was so tightly strapped in..." The feat earned Kincheloe celebrity status. He appeared on the popular television game show I've Got a Secret, where the panel was supposed to guess what he did. Because he was so famous, it didn't take long. Kincheloe was chosen, along with two other pilots, to fly the next-generation test plane, the X-15. While waiting for it to be ready, he flew test missions with other planes. On July 26, 1958, Kincheloe was killed when the engine of his F-104 airplane failed soon after take-off. He managed to eject but was too close to the ground and parachuted into the flames. Neil Armstrong, a friend and fellow test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in the 1950s, says Kincheloe probably would have been at the center of America's space program. "I know had he survived that he would be very much in the middle of whatever was going on subsequent to that point. He may very well have been selected for the astronaut program. He was certainly capable of doing that -- or he might have chosen to do something else. But in any case, he would be at the forefront out at the edge of the frontier and having a ball doing it." |
Linton Weeks Says Chill Out | NPR's Linton Weeks checks in with a long view of the current crisis. The headline: History's Advice During A Panic? Don't Panic See? |
A-List Celebrities Flock To Late-Night 'Graham Norton Show' | The late-night talk show<em>, </em>imported by<em> </em>BBC America, has been around for years. TV critic David Bianculli says it's never been better — it's like eavesdropping on an all-star cocktail party. |
'Down In The Treme...' | There's pride on Mass. Ave. Three weekends ago, I watched the premiere of David Simon's Treme at a friend's apartment. (He served catfish, which was delicious. And Popeye's, which was also delicious.) Hours before the second episode aired, I broke down and ordered HBO. I'm glad I did. So far, the show hasn't disappointed. And the music has been great. There has been so much of it, I've struggled to keep track of what I want/intend to download. Thanks to The Village Voice's Rob Harvilla, I found the "Songs From Treme" Tumblr page. If you like what you hear -- and you will, I promise -- HBO makes an official playlist available after each episode, too, complete with links to iTunes. |
German Leaders Emerge From Marathon Talks With Blueprint For New Coalition | It may have taken a marathon — but the party leaders who walked into a negotiating room in Berlin roughly 24 hours earlier emerged Friday morning with smiles on their faces and a preliminary deal in hand. Before a cluster of media in Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her center-left counterparts announced they have agreed to a draft deal for a coalition government. The 28-page blueprint lays out a proposed compromise between Merkel's conservative bloc and the Social Democrats, who have governed Germany together for years but lately have shown signs of significant friction. Now, the leaders must take the deal back to lawmakers in their own parties, who will determine whether to confirm, change or reject Friday's agreement. That confirmation is by no means guaranteed. Despite the long relationship between Germany's centrist factions, diverging policy goals and poor showings in September's elections have led lawmakers on all sides to re-evaluate the benefits of continuing their partnership. Indeed, shortly after that election, Social Democrat leader Martin Schulz vowed not to renew their "grand coalition" and instead go into opposition. And, for her part, Merkel made clear the Social Democrats were not her first pick for a coalition partner — but after talks with other party leaders collapsed in November, she had few other choices if she wished to end the stalemate that has left Germany without a new formal government for nearly four months. Merkel, Schulz and several dozen other negotiators renewed coalition talks on Sunday. Since then, the fate of a possible deal remained very much in doubt, with the principal points of contention centering on immigration policy, climate regulations and the tax code. Reuters — which reports having seen a draft of the agreement — describes a blueprint that pledges close cooperation with France and the gradual abolition of a tax implemented to support the former East Germany. They also agreed to limit arrivals from asylum-seeking migrants to roughly 200,000, as well as a monthly cap on "the number of migrants who will be allowed to join their family living in Germany," according to the BBC. The leaders also reportedly agreed to abandon the country's stated aim of reducing carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2020 — though Reuters reports the blueprint "foresaw Germany generating 65 percent of its energy from renewables by 2030." Still, as NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reported, "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." Merkel acknowledged there are no guarantees this proposed deal will ultimately be adopted. "There will be difficult tasks to come," Merkel told the media, according to Reuters. "The coalition negotiations probably won't be easier than the exploratory talks." The Social Democrats plan to meet Jan. 21 for a party conference in Bonn to discuss next steps. Even if coalition negotiations prove fruitful, it remains unlikely the new government would take office before April. |
CDC Says Flu Vaccine Should Be More Effective This Season | Last year's flu vaccine didn't work very well. This year's version should do a much better job protecting people against the flu, federal health officials said Thursday. An analysis of the most common strains of flu virus that are circulating in the United States and elsewhere found they match the strains included in this year's vaccine, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The results will hopefully encourage more people to get their flu shots, CDC Director Thomas Frieden said during a news conference. "Get vaccinated," Frieden said. "That's the best way to protect yourself, your family and your community against flu." The CDC recommends annual flu vaccination for people 6 months and older. The flu season in the U.S. can start as early as October and stretch into May. Cases typically peak between December and February. Public health officials were surprised last year when the dominant strain of circulating flu mutated after the flu vaccine had been formulated. As a result, the vaccine was only about 13 percent effective against the main strain. The flu vaccine is usually about 50 percent to 60 percent effective. The poor protection provided by the vaccine contributed to last year's flu season being unusually hard on the elderly, Frieden said. Officials recorded the highest hospitalization rate from the flu among the elderly ever documented, Frieden said. In addition to getting vaccinated, Frieden also urged people who get sick from the flu to stay home and to start taking antiviral drugs as soon as they can. Antiviral drugs can minimize the symptoms and help people get better faster, he said. |
Women's Groups React | -- NPR's Margot Adler reports on the reaction of women's groups to a federal judge's decision to throw out the Paula Jones' sexual harassment case. |
As Social Media Giants Plan For Disinformation, Critics Say It's Not Enough | Facebook and Twitter have plans for an election season rife with disinformation on their platforms. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg explains what lessons the company learned from 2016 and what they're doing differently this time. She spoke to NPR's Audie Cornish about that, and about the burden of work falling on women during the pandemic. Hear more of their conversation here.Critics say the social media giants are too large to realistically enforce their own policies. NPR's Life Kit has a guide to voting by mail or in-person this election season. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.We're working on an upcoming episode about pandemic precautions and we want to hear from you. Fill out the form on this page and we may follow up on your response. Email us at [email protected]. |
The Lesson Plan For A New School: Teaching 'Joyous Service' | The two births that would change everything for Taylor Delhagen were due to occur 24 hours apart. If all went according to plan, his school would come into being one day, and his first child would arrive the next. The baby boy's impending arrival had Delhagen contemplating the gravity of his role as a teacher opening a charter high school in one of New York City's poorest neighborhoods: Brownsville, Brooklyn. Four of the five founding teachers, the 31-year-old Delhagen among them, came together from a nearby charter, where they'd had success producing high test scores among low-income students. But they had felt stifled in what they see as a more vital task: developing human beings. Now comes the chance for Delhagen to more freely offer an education he would want for his own son. He's teaching in a community that's four miles away — but in many ways a world apart — from Brooklyn's gentrified Fort Greene, where rent on his family's two-bedroom apartment just spiked 18 percent. He and his colleagues were heavily involved in designing Brooklyn Ascend High School. The school year began on Sept. 8, the day before his wife's due date. Principal Melissa Jarvis-Cedeño spent most of her budget on accomplished, experienced educators, rather than saving money with rookies. She hired only one teacher who was relatively new to the profession, a math teacher starting his third year in the classroom. Delhagen is teaching social studies. His class looks and feels sometimes like a theatrical production, as he stands on a chair directing charges scurrying about. His larger goal is to help this school's 66 ninth-graders not just to dodge the life of poverty and crime that surrounds them, but to exercise real choices about their futures. He's keenly aware that each one of these students is someone's child. But as a new father, he can no longer work until 9 o'clock every night like he did when he started teaching a decade ago. Nor can he get so emotionally invested in his job that he makes himself sick. Nationally, one of the biggest reasons education is so inferior for students in poor neighborhoods is their schools' inability to keep engaging, effective teachers like Delhagen. Burnout among young, ambitious educators is common in the first few years, especially once they start families of their own. Jarvis-Cedeño knows that of all of her school's innovative elements — from a liberal arts curriculum to a beautiful building to a discipline system stressing character-building over suspension — nothing is possible without excellent teachers. She is trying to make the job sustainable for them, and for herself as she cares for a husband with cancer. One example: She told Delhagen to take as much paternity leave as he needed. 'Who Are You?' On Aug. 28, Delhagen was feeling optimistic and surprisingly calm as he decorated his sixth-floor classroom in a restored theater that now houses several charter schools. He kept his green-cased cellphone by his side should his wife, a middle school English teacher, go into labor early. He planned to take off three days when the baby arrived, and then work half-days for four weeks. ("And you will go home," his principal told him. "Will you really?" his wife asked.) His lessons were ready for the first 14 days of instruction, all focusing on the danger of studying history from a single perspective, the subject of his research when he did a Fulbright fellowship in India last year. He had a schedule to alternately run and bike to work to stay fit with minimal free time. Five days later, 18 high school freshmen shuffled tentatively into that room for an orientation activity. "Namaste, everybody," Delhagen said, using a Sanskrit greeting meaning "the light in me honors the light in you." His arm around a boy taller than he is, he told the students they had three to four minutes to write answers to the following: 1) What do you want to do with your life? 2) Who are you? Who do you want to be? 3) What do you stand for? Many students found the first question the easiest. "Shouldn't you know who you are before you know what you want to do?" Delhagen probed them. Students then received papers listing 60 values, from respect to achievement to adventure, and had to circle the five that meant the most to them. It was the beginning of an extensive process to get students and parents to choose four core values for the school. Over the summer, the teachers and administrators voted on a fifth value, selecting the option suggested by Delhagen: seva, a Sanskrit term he defined as "joyous service." ("Selfless service" is also a common translation.) At a planning session in late June, one teacher questioned whether they all can live in joyous service every day. "Aspire to it," Delhagen replied. The middle child of a progressive Presbyterian minister and a social worker, Delhagen heard a lot about service growing up in places including Philadelphia and a tiny orchard town outside Rochester, N.Y. At the College of Woo |
Financial Reform Bill Gets Partisan Embrace, Snub | Another day, another super partisan vote on Capitol Hill. So it was on Monday with financial-reform legislation that passed out of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee by a 13 to 10, straight party-line vote. The bill, authored by Sen. Chris Dodd, is meant to restrain some of Wall Street's worst practices which contributed to the financial crisis. The senior Republican on the committee, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, had earlier indicated he objected to having just a week after Dodd introduced the legislation to review it. In a statement last week, Shelby telegraphed Monday's Republican rejection of the bill: This bill is 1,336 pages long. Forcing the Banking Committee to vote on this proposal in a single week is unrealistic and undercuts the potential for bipartisan agreement. With the passage Sunday night of health-care overhaul legislation still fresh in everyone's mind, a statement from President Barack Obama about his support for Dodd's bill and what he would and won't support took on added punch. We are now one step closer to passing real financial reform that will bring oversight and accountability to our financial system and help ensure that the American taxpayer never again pays the price for the irresponsibility of our largest banks and financial institutions. For that I congratulate Chairman Dodd and the Senate Banking Committee. By creating a new consumer agency, we will finally set and enforce clear rules of the road across the financial marketplace. And as this bill moves to the floor in the coming weeks, I will continue to fight to strengthen the bill and against attempts to undermine the independence of this agency. I will also oppose efforts to add loopholes that could harm consumers or investors, or that allow institutions to avoid oversight that is critical for financial stability. I urge those in the Senate who support these efforts to resist pressure from those who would preserve the status quo and to stand up for long overdue reform that will protect American families and the long term health of our economy. |
Jobless Numbers Loom Even As Economy Makes Gains | When the Labor Department releases monthly unemployment numbers Friday, investors will be hoping for signs of new job growth. New York Times columnist David Leonhardt says that analysts will be watching the news closely, wary after September's rise in unemployment. There are fears that the nation's unemployment rate could reach 10 percent. But that number isn't comprehensive. "That includes only people who are actively looking for work," Leonhardt tells NPR's Steve Inskeep. The U.S. jobless rate omits two large groups: those who are out of work but didn't seek a job in the weeks before the sample; and workers who have found part-time work when they would like to be employed full-time. Using those numbers, Leonhardt puts the nation's level of "underemployment" at 16 percent — or around 1 out of every 6 American workers. And in California, the underemployment rate rises to 20 percent, Leonhardt says. Many people are watching the October jobs report carefully, as it may reveal whether September's dip was an anomaly — or a sign of continued economic troubles. As for recent news that the U.S. economy is making gains, Leonhardt says there are reasons to be optimistic — but that those gains are not likely to quickly translate into jobs. Leonhardt does see potential bright spots in the economy, including growth in exports — thanks in part to talks with China that may improve America's trade imbalance. But that doesn't mean Leonhardt thinks America should focus on being a net exporter, as it was in the 1970s. "I think it's important to remember that countries that have a much greater share of their economy based on exports than we do are poorer than we are," Leonhardt said. The idea, then, is to focus on exporting both goods and services. "We also want to make sure that we're educating our workforce, so they can be making the kind of goods that other countries want." A return to the 1970s isn't what America needs, Leonhardt says. "I think we should want an economy where we're exporting higher-value goods than Germany is today — or that we were in the 1970s." STEVE INSKEEP, host: Tomorrow the government comes out with its monthly unemployment numbers and there are fears that the jobless rate could reach 10 percent. Of course that number's only part of the picture of unemployment in this country, so for more perspective we've brought in David Leonhardt of the New York Times. David, welcome back to the program. Mr. DAVID LEONHARDT (New York Times): Good morning. Thank you. INSKEEP: We're around 10 percent now, but that's not the only number - the only measure of unemployment, underemployment or just plain struggle, is it? Mr. LEONHARDT: That's right. That includes only people who are actively looking for work, so that they've looked in the last few weeks. There are obviously a lot of people out there who are unemployed and would like to work but have not actively looked in the last few weeks. Maybe they've gotten discouraged. And this number doesn't include them. It also doesn't include people who would like to be working full-time but can find only part-time work. And so when you wrap in that second group, the people who would like to be working full-time but are working part-time, you get a rate of underemployment of about 16 percent. So really that means one out of every six people who would like to be working full-time right now and has been actively looking for full-time work isn't able to find it. INSKEEP: No matter how many times I hear that calculation, it makes your jaw drop a little bit. I mean, 10 percent is still - you can wish it off and say it's only 10 percent - 16 starts to sound really, really, really serious. Mr. LEONHARDT: It does. And in some states, including California, it's up around 20 percent. This rate of underemployment is still not quite as high as it was in the early �80s, but it's getting there very quickly and it's getting very close. INSKEEP: You write in the New York Times that the monthly jobs report that's coming out on Friday is a more important one than usual. Why would that be? Mr. LEONHARDT: Because for a number of months over the summer things were getting better. The number of job losses each month were shrinking. Wage growth was picking up a little bit, and then things slid backward in September - job losses grew, wage growth slipped a little bit. And so the question is was that some change or was September just a blip? And we're going get a really good sense of that tomorrow. INSKEEP: Now, we did just have official economic growth come out the other day for the third quarter. How does that fit in here? Mr. LEONHARDT: Just think about a business. If you were running a business and you saw your sales picking up, you wouldn't immediately go out and hire new workers. You would try to get your existing workforce to meet that new demand. And so we should see growth before we see growth in employment. INSKEEP: Where is the recovery going to come from? Mr. LEONHARD |
Live Coverage: State of the State Address | Live Coverage: State of the State Address — The California Report presents a special statewide broadcast of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's State of the State Address. Host Scott Scott Shafer is joined by The California Report's Sacramento Bureau chief John Myers, along with the following guests: Jackie Speier, former state senator; Joe Dunn, executive vice president of the California Medical Association; and Dan Schnur, political consultant. |
Amnesty International Criticizes U.S.-Led Coalition For Mosul Civilian Deaths | NPR's Kelly McEvers speaks with Donatella Rovera, senior crisis response adviser for Amnesty International, about evidence of American airstrikes destroying houses with entire families inside in east Mosul, Iraq. |
Art World Works to Recover Looted Iraqi Antiquities | Art experts join forces to begin tracking the estimated 170,000 objects looted from Baghdad's national archaeology museum. Antiquities dealers pledge to help recover stolen items by refusing to sell them, and some collectors say they will not buy. David D'Arcy reports. |
Fisher-Price Recalls Rock 'N Play Baby Sleeper Tied To Infant Deaths | Updated on April 12 at 4:21 p.m. ET Fisher-Price has issued an immediate recall of all models of its Rock 'n Play baby sleeper, according to a news release from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Fisher-Price, which has sold approximately 4.7 million of these sleepers, is advising that consumers stop using the product immediately and contact the company for a refund or voucher. "Since 2009, there have been more than 30 infant deaths involving the Rock 'n Play," the commission's acting chair, Ann Marie Buerkle, said in a statement. "This issue has been a top priority for the agency. CPSC has been investigating incidents and analyzing the data regarding how they relate to this product. In addition, CPSC is continuing our investigation into other inclined sleep products." Fisher-Price General Manager Chuck Scothon said in an emailed statement that the company "stand[s] by the safety of our products." "However, due to reported incidents in which the product was used contrary to the safety warnings and instructions, we have decided to conduct a voluntary recall of the Rock 'n Play Sleeper in partnership with the Consumer Product Safety Commission," he wrote. On Wednesday, the federal agency tasked with regulating consumer products said it had "identified a hazard with rollover issues," in which babies move onto their stomachs or sides and can't return to their back. That same day, Scothon defended the product in an emailed statement, saying the company "stand[s] by the safety of the Rock 'n Play Sleeper," which he said meets all applicable safety standards. But on Friday, the company reached an agreement with the CPSC to recall the product. Earlier in the month, Fisher-Price and the agency had jointly issued a warning recommending that consumers stop using the sleeper by the time their babies are 3 months old or when they begin to be capable of rolling over. Now they are advising that parents immediately stop using it. An investigation by Consumer Reports found that the sleepers were tied to the deaths of 32 babies. According to the report, the deaths can be traced back to the crib's inclined design. "If the baby's head falls forward or to the side it compresses the trachea and that limits the oxygen that they can take in," said Rachel Peachman, a deputy of special projects at Consumer Reports and author of the investigation. "We believe that it is not a safe product for parents to use for infants of any age, and the safest thing to do is to recall the product immediately." The American Academy of Pediatrics called for a recall of the product. Ben Hoffman, a pediatrician and member of the American Academy of Pediatrics' Committee on Injury, Violence and Poison Prevention, said he has had "significant concerns" about the Rock 'n Play sleeper for a long time. "We know the safest place for a baby to sleep is on a flat, firm surface," he said. "It's not safe for a baby to sleep at an angle, whether it's a car seat or a swing." Hoffman said he has found Rock 'n Play sleepers to be "incredibly popular" with families he works with, who believe that the incline can help babies who have trouble sleeping owing to acid reflux. According to Fisher-Price's website, this is exactly how the idea for the Rock 'n Play originated — a mom looking to make a product that would allow her spit-up-prone baby to sleep through the night. But Hoffman said studies have shown sleeping at an angle can actually make reflux worse for babies. Combine that with the risk of suffocation, and Hoffman said the Fisher-Price product "is just not a safe sleep environment." "I would urge every family that has one to never use it again," he said. "That's why [the AAP] feels ... a recall is really important." |
Stay-At-Home Dads On The Rise, And Many Of Them Are Poor | The number of dads staying at home with their children has nearly doubled in the past two decades, and the diversity among them defies the stereotype of the highly educated young father who stays home to let his wife focus on her career. A new study from the Pew Research Center finds that almost 2 million fathers are at home, up from 1.1 million in 1989. Nearly half of those men live in poverty. "The largest share of stay-at-home dads are actually home because they're ill or disabled," says Gretchen Livingston, a senior researcher at Pew. "So that could be contributing to their low income, obviously." Another chunk of men say they're at home because they can't find a job. "About 22 percent don't have a high school diploma," says Livingston, "and 36 percent have just a high school diploma but no college experience." Still, the fastest-growing group among stay-at-home fathers is men who say they are home specifically to provide child care. Five percent said that in 1989, and 21 percent say it today. Just half of stay-at-home fathers are white, and black dads are twice as likely as white men to be home with their children. Mark Portis, who lives near St. Louis, is African-American and dropped out of high school in his junior year (he later got his GED). He has two young children with his wife, but he also has three older daughters he never lived with, he says. He never married their mothers. When he finally did marry, he says he wanted things to be different. "I've been a stay-at-home dad for ... six years," he says. His 6-year-old son is at camp, and his 3-year-old daughter is being fussy about lunch. "She wants candy," he says, laughing. Portis used to be a manager in an auto parts shops, but his wife earned a lot more as an accountant. When they decided someone should stay home with the children, it made sense that it was him, he says. "I love it," he says. "It's fun. I can be 110 percent involved in the kids and what they have going on." Portis says his support group of full-time fathers is almost all white. But it doesn't surprise him that many stay-at-home dads are black. "[For] a lot of African-Americans, that's how they were raised," he says. "Everybody has to work; everybody has to contribute. If you can't afford child care, one works nights, one works days and you're just kind of passing the kids back and forth." "We have a long-standing tradition in African-American families of fathers doing a lot with their kids," says Scott Coltrane, the provost at the University of Oregon, who has studied fathers for three decades. Coltrane says black dads who live with their kids have always helped out more at home. And in today's labor market, they're also more likely to be out of a job. "What's different is culturally now, most parents do a little bit of both," he says. "We expect women to work. We expect men to do more at home." That, he says, is the biggest shift in the past few decades, and it's true for everyone, regardless of race. Two million stay-at-home fathers is a much bigger number than the Census Bureau's number of 214,000. But the bureau's definition is extremely narrow, including only primarily married men who say they are home for the entire year specifically to care for family. By contrast, Pew's latest report counts all fathers, married or not, who live with a young child and did not work at all in the past year. AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: The number of full-time stay-at-home fathers has nearly doubled in the past two decades - that's according to the Pew Research Center. The center counts 2 million such dads at home, and you may have heard this kind of headline about stay-at-home dads before - white-collar professional quits high paying job to watch the kids. But as NPR's Jennifer Ludden reports, the Pew study shows a much more varied reality. JENNIFER LUDDEN, BYLINE: It seems every media report has him. You know, the lawyers say who signs on to be Mr. Dad so his globetrotting wife can boost her own career. In fact, Gretchen Livingston of the Pew Research Center finds nearly half of stay-at-home fathers live in poverty. GRETCHEN LIVINGSTON: The largest share of stay-at-home dads are actually home because they're ill or disabled. So that could be contributing to their low income, obviously. LUDDEN: Another chunk say they can't find a job. Although, the fastest-growing part - men making the choice to provide childcare. Pew finds just half of at-home fathers are white. Livingston says black dads are twice as likely to be home with their children. LIVINGSTON: About 22 percent don't have a high school diploma and 36 percent have just a high school diploma but no college experience. MARK PORTIS: My name is Mark Portis, I've been a stay-at-home dad for five - well, actually, six years. LUDDEN: I catch Portis at his home outside St. Louis while his 6-year-old son is at camp and his 3-year-old daughter's having lunch. PORTIS: OK, you don't have to eat it all, just leave it right there. She wants candy for |
Democrat Apparent Winner In Pennsylvania Special Election | Tuesday night was a big one for Democrats. In a southwestern Pennsylvania district that Trump won by 20 points in 2016, voters appear to have elected Democrat Conor Lamb to fill a vacant House seat — a huge upset for President Trump and the Republican party. The race has still not been officially called, but barring a recount, Lamb has a small but insurmountable lead over Republican Rick Saccone. This episode: host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political editor Domenico Montanaro, and congressional correspondent Scott Detrow in Pennsylvania. Email the show at [email protected]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations. |
How Are Screens Changing The Face Of War? | Part 5 of the TED Radio Hour episode Screen Time - Part I. About P.W. Singer's TED Talk Today airstrikes involve generals dictating - and soldiers carrying out - orders behind screens. Strategist P.W. Singer describes how screens have complicated the nature of war. About P.W. Singer P.W. Singer is considered a leading expert on 21st century security issues. He's a strategist at New America in Washington, D.C. He's also a contributing editor at Popular Science magazine and the founder of NeoLuddite, a technology advisory firm. Singer is the author of several books, including Wired for War and The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, and most recently, the co-author of Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War. |
Latin Roots: Essential Latin Funk | Today on Latin Roots, World Cafe's ongoing series highlighting different genres of Latin music, we have another installment in our Essentials series. This week, we unearth some crucial Latin funk by turning to Josh Norek, host of radio's The Latin Alternative, for his picks. The genre got its start in late-'60s New York and continues to thrive in various permutations today. Back then, Afro-funk morphed into Latin Funk with help from musicians like Ray Barretto. We hear one of the forms in which the genre endures in the music of Venezuela's Los Amigos Invisibles, a group involved in the '90s funk revival. Norek's extended Latin Funk playlist is also available on Spotify. |
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