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I would say that's the competition is keen. And that's good. And that's good for everybody, because I hope the best gets the nod. Eddie Murphy is up against some stiff competition, but so is Forest Whitaker who's up against Leonardo DiCaprio who is a tremendously good actor. And he's up against Will Smith. So I say the competition is very keen. I agree with Laura about "Dreamgirls" not being the Best Picture. And when you look at the list of the best pictures, you know, "Little Miss Sunshine," "The Departed," "The Queen;" this is really tough competition. And that's why I say one more time, this is not a time for Negritude, it's a time for achievement and recognition. But I'm still not going to watch the Oscars because I find those - that self-adulation insufferable. Tiresome.
But, you know, as Laura has described the book, it's in interesting book. It's a way of constructing a book which tries to make it of interest to your readers. But the most important thing for an autography is that the book is interesting - you, the person who's writing it. And I think this is what Barack Obama did. And so, I haven't read his book, and this story doesn't lead me to want to read his book. I will find out about Barack Obama on the campaign trail, as there will be more and more stories coming up examining his background because this is what they do in presidential campaigns.
I'm actually - I was trying to do both. One, the kid, Daniel, I was trying to help him out because of the environment that he's in, and he's recognizing some of the, you know, signs of violence already. But more importantly, it's like he recognized that his cousin is already following these footsteps of, you know, being involved in the gangs. The fact that he saw a gun in his house, you know, was alarming to him. So the question is now is that he doesn't - he can't go to his parents and tell his parents, well, this is what I found. This was going on. So, in this case, he approached me and told me, Eddie, this was going on, the situation, and I want to be able to help my cousin. How can I help him?
Well, our living situation has been pretty difficult recently. I live with my mother, my stepfather, my 13-year-old sister, my 21-year-old stepbrother, and 24-year-old stepsister in a three-bedroom house. So, it's pretty tight quarters. We are all sort of living together because, you know, money's been pretty tight and especially for the three, you know, 20-somethings in the house, and my stepdad works as kind of a mechanic, and you know, doesn't really make a lot of money and it's a pretty unstable business. And - so, it's kind of difficult emotionally for all of us to live in the same house at the same time. But we're all sort of pulling together, and helping each other out, and combining resources so that we can each, you know, get on our feet again.
Yes, I wanted to comment that I have exactly this experience. My career really broke up when I had children and I decided I wanted to be home with them. And my husband was the main money earner, and I did lots of different things. And in the last two years, I've done - I've been a wedding singer; I'm a business consultant; I'm a copy editor; I do tray(ph) designing for a Web site; I'm a family consultant; I teach parenting classes. And the other day, somebody - I had this exact experience that your guest said. I started to tell them what I did and I actually started to feel embarrassed.
And, Joe DiGenova, just briefly, does it seem to you based on this indictment that the prosecutor has a good case here? Mr. DiGENOVA: Well, it would seem so. I mean, after all, some of his witnesses are going to be Tim Russert, Matt Cooper, Judith Miller. This is one of these fascinating cases where the ultimate result of his investigation will be some of the principal witnesses against the gove--former government official will be reporters who were compelled to give testimony in a case. You know, I would suspect that that'll be pretty compelling testimony. It may not be testimony that reporters enjoy giving and they many not being--literally being the star witnesses for the United States government an amazing result but there they will be.
During this record, it's - strangely enough, I mean, we listened to a lot of T. Rex. And there was the- specially for "Black Sheep," we were listening to that and getting in that kind of glam, slightly snarly in that respect. But there's a kind of confidence to it. There's such a confidence to that in a I-don't-kind-of-care attitude that I think a lot of these songs required on this record. And I was: I'll try it. And it's something like, finally, I was thinking in the world of Elvis quite a lot for "Gravel & Wine," especially during the recording, singing part of it.
Well, you're absolutely right. That's the kind of thing that really brings out, you know, a lot of emotions, rightfully so I'm asking, you know, one of our African-American interpreters to take on the role of an enslaved worker, you know, that's something that a lot of them, I think, respond to, you know, with a lot of ambivalence. And so - and certainly, on the part of visitors, I think you're absolutely right. There are some folks who feel that that's really the logical culmination of this and that if you don't do that, you are kind of, you know, pulling back from the hard reality.
Well, I think symbolically, it made a difference. I mean, you certainly - the day after, I think you could not pick up a paper or have a conversation at the water cooler. People are not talking about reentry. I think it scratched the surface, and in some cases allowed people to start talking about the fact that at least somebody in somebody else's family has been in the system. So, I think symbolically, it was important. I think the numbers, however, speak for themselves. It was an initiative that was $25 million. However, we spend over $100 million a day just on supervision. So when you look at PRI, when you look at the Second Chance Act that's going to authorize possibly about 400 million, there's still an extreme inequity in terms of how much money we're putting toward the problem.
I think that's absolutely true. There's tremendous uncertainty about the future. The past is characterized by loss, the present by disorientation, and the future by uncertainty. And people need to know - and as you said, there needs to be evidence that people can feel that their concerns are going to be the concerns of others, not just now, not just for the next few weeks, but over the years ahead. And that's why it's crucial to create systems that are sustainable and to be there for people on an ongoing basis and to give them the skills that they need to do this work of rebuilding personally and nationwide.
Ready or not, the 2016 presidential race is underway. That was the voice of Iowa congressman, Steve King, speaking to a big crowd in downtown Des Moines, today, for what is the first big multi-candidate public event of the campaign season. Iowa, of course, will hold its first-in-the-nation caucuses just over one year from now. So when King, a conservative from the northwest corner of the state, invited would-be White House hopefuls to attend a daylong event in Des Moines, nine of them showed up. If it's Iowa and politics, there's a decent chance you'll find NPR correspondent, Don Gonyea, there. Don, greetings.
About a thousand students are enrolled in this experiment. If the non-compliance problem can be resolved and the research is deemed feasible, next year the study will try to enroll two thousand students to wear the masks at the first outbreak of the flu. But researchers are already talking about choosing different dorms to participate next time, perhaps smaller, more cohesive ones, where the sense of esprit de corps can be whipped up to get students to wear the masks in the dorm from the time they get up until they go to bed. For NPR News, I'm Tracy Samilton in Ann Arbor.
Well, I don't have a lot left to do except the horrible part of waiting, which is to me worse than working, getting ready for the storm. What we also did down here because we're close to the Port of Beaumont--it's right next to our city. We took literally hundreds of pieces of municipal equipment--vehicles, fire trucks, police cruisers, emergency personnel and equipment--and put them on board two ready reserve fleet ships, and we loaded all of our equipment with the operators on those ships. They'll ride high and dry out of the weather. And as soon as the storm is over and they can put the ramp down on that vessel onto a dry dock, they'll be rolling out in our city to remove tree limbs, to pick up debris, trash, to keep looters off the street. All I had to do is go to the captains of these two vessels and they said, `Use our vessels in any manner you want.'
Yes, one of the more interesting studies is on the flooding in Thailand. As you may remember from last year, it was a devastating flood that lasted a very long time in Bangkok, and the analysis of the precipitation in the basin that feeds the river down through Bangkok found out that the rainfall was about a 140-year return period. So it was something that would happen about once every 140 years. Yet the flooding was really massive, and part of the conclusion that they had when looking at climate models and being able to see how the climate models were projecting precipitation, that it was just a rare event, a moderately rare event, a 140-year return period, natural event, because the climate models were not predicting increases in precipitation due to climate change in there.
We suspect that some of you have foul ball stories of your own. And with the World Series set to get underway tomorrow night in the Bronx, we'd like to hear them. Our phone number is 800-989-8255. Email us: [email protected]. You can also join the conversation on our Web site. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Zach Hample knows a thing or two about the art of catching a baseball in the stands. He has over 4,000 Major League baseballs to his name, and swears he has not come home empty handed from a game since 1993. Zach Hample joins us from our bureau in New York. His book is called "How to Snag Major League Baseballs." Zach, nice to have you with us on the program today.
It's so interesting because what Carter said at the time was, I mean, it's very poignant to look at the talk. You may remember this, he said. In the year 2000, these will either be up there on the roof generating power, or they'll be in a museum somewhere. And in fact, they are in a museum. One of the other panels is in the private museum of the Chinese solar baron Huang Ming, who's put 60 million of these arrays across rooftops in China. We need to get back in the forefront of the industry that we once led and that we've now ceded to the rest of the world.
...As long as she's prime minister. There was vote in 2016. She has said all along, we're going to respect that. She is going to try to get the deal through next week. I don't think most people have much hope of that. She also said she's against putting up candidates for the European parliamentary elections, which means, again, you know, we're going to get past this cliff edge on March 29. But most likely if things play out as people expect, there will be another one coming up in mid-April and a lot of pressure on her and Parliament to get something figured out. Of course she's very unpopular now. There could be more pushes for her to resign. We're just going to see how this plays out in the next few days.
Oh, absolutely not. Robert Mugabe is never going to agree to be a titular president or head of state. So it looks as if both sides have had to compromise. That although Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, wanted full powers as executive prime minister, he didn't get all he wanted. So we're going to have this situation almost as we saw in Kenya after the disputed elections and the negotiations of two, sort of, centers of power. But if they both agreed to sign this deal it must mean they both compromised. But let's see how the actual sharing of posts - cabinet posts, ministers posts. And, of course, the real problem sometimes in Zimbabwe, the military and security forces, how that is going to be worked out. And I think that's what's going to happen over this weekend.
They mean it when they say it. I mean it right now. You know, the thing is, is that I thought the other day about how many books I have in my head. And I realized I don't have a long enough life to write all the books that are in my head. I've done Easy Rawlins. I really - I've covered it. I could stop writing Easy and write all these other books I have to write. Like for instance, I want to a write a series of novellas - science fiction novellas called "The Cross Town Omnibus to Oblivion." And there are five novels I haven't - the only thing that they have in common is a theme. And the theme is, is that in each one of these novellas, a black man destroys the world. You know, there are so many, so many things to write.
Right, right. So this is - it's sort of a, you know, it's a basic math problem for Facebook. They're running out of people on the planet to get on the site, and so what they have to do is get essentially more money from each of those people. Now, they don't get money from us, from the users directly, but they get money from the companies that want to advertise to us. Right now, on average for this year, Facebook is expected to make about - just about $5 per user. And at the valuation that investors are putting on them, they're going to have to sort of increase that every year for the next 10 years at a regular pace, or else, you know, or else their stock price will fall.
Sometimes history gets revealed in small, nearly forgotten scraps. The Allied invasion of Normandy took place on this week in 1944. On the evening of June 5th, the largest armada in history began to churn through heavy swells in the English Channel, and pink-cheeked young paratroops prepared to board airplanes that would fly through heavy gales to drop them in the darkness on Occupied France. The weather was so vicious, German generals were sure they could rule out any invasion, which convinced General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, that he could no longer keep 160,000 soldiers, sailors and fliers - American, British and Canadian - bottled up in ships and bases. I don't like it, he told his generals, but we have to go. So, Eisenhower paid his respects to U.S. and British paratroopers as they lined up to fly into battle that night. Their faces were smudged with ash, soot and tea for camouflage; their helmets sported twigs and leaves. It was a kind of dress-up that seemed to remind Ike, as he was known, how young were the men he was sending against a raging sea and scalding fire. He told his driver, Kay Summersby, I hope to God I'm right. And that night in a drafty cottage, under the roar of wind and planes, Eisenhower penciled a note on a small pad in his tight, precise hand that he would need to deliver if the invasion went wrong. Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops, he wrote. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone. It's telling to see today where Eisenhower made changes in his note. He crossed out this particular operation to write my decision to attack, which is emphatic and personal. And he drew a long, strong line under mine alone. When you see those words and that thick line on the note today, in the Eisenhower Library, you might feel some of the steel of a man who would so unflinchingly accept responsibility. Ike didn't try to camouflage failure in phrases like mistakes were made, our projections were not met or I will say nothing pending investigation. He wrote any blame or fault is mine alone. Dwight Eisenhower put the note into his wallet. The invasion succeeded, and although a lot of dying was ahead, his note never had to be used. But it revealed a character that was enduring.
Other studies show young Latinas also have the highest teen birthrates and the second highest high school dropout rate. Cultural clashes with parents, social isolation, and poverty are part of the problem. Today, young Latinas: why are they at risk, and what can be done about it? Later in the hour, we'll talk to musician Raul Midon about his music, but first, young Latinas. If you are a young Hispanic woman who remembers her high school years, we'd like to hear about your experience. Or if you work with high-school-age Latinas, we'd like to hear from you. Our number in Washington, 800-989-8255. That's 800-989-TALK. Or send us an e-mail to [email protected].
Well, it's just primarily getting infrastructure back up and operational, the processing of the budget, the way oil and gas and kerosene is distributed, security means, the generation of more police as I talked about earlier, things like sewer systems, cleaner water, even things like the distribution of fertilizer and products that will help crops grow better. These are just some of the hundreds of things that we worked with, ministers, like the minister of finance, minister of construction and housing, the minister of agriculture. So it was an event to try and bring the ministers to talk to the governors.
The organization itself has extensive support within the Shia community. As I say, it began really as a conspiratorial group but it's expanded into a real political party with all kinds of institutions which deal with military matters, but many of them deal with social, health matters and so on. So it really is an institutionalized party and it's not unusual to hear Lebanese refer to Hezbollah as the only real political party in the country. So it has a lot of support and it earns a lot of credit, particularly from the Shia Muslims, who largely populate south Lebanon, for its role in the resistance. So I would say today of the Shia community that makes up 40 percent of the total population, approximately, of Lebanon, probably half or more of that population very, very ardently supports Hezbollah.
Let's just say it. These are hard days for many people on the left side of the political aisle, with President Trump in the White House, Republicans in control of both houses of Congress and a conservative majority and control of the Supreme Court. It doesn't take much to find Democrats who say they are angry, depressed, even in despair - and then there are people like Dan Pfeiffer. He was one of the first hired for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential run. He was one of the president's longest serving senior advisers. Now he's the co-host of the wildly popular podcast, "Pod Save America." and he has a memoir coming out early next week about his time working with Obama. It's titled "Yes We Still Can: Politics In The Age Of Obama, Twitter, And Trump." Dan Pfeiffer joined me yesterday from member station KQED in San Francisco, and I started by asking him why he wanted to publish this book now.
Let me start though by alluding to something you said in your set-up, because I don't think it was true. You said I was critical of American farmers. Now, some farmers have taken what I say that way. But in fact, you know, I can't defy anyone to see - find things I have actually written that are critical of farmers. I am critical of various practices and I'm very critical of a system, a set of incentives that really forces farmers to plant monocultures and to consolidate and get bigger, and leaves them with very few choices in the way of either markets to sell their products or ways to grow them. And that's very different than saying you're critical of farmers. It really is a system that I'm critical of and it's a system that's been designed by other people and is the result of the kind of farm policies we have in our country. I think that's an important distinction.
Ms. STEPHANIE PORTNER(ph) (Student): I'm Stephanie Portner. I'm from Costa Mesa. I think it's really weird - just because like sketchy people can get on it, now. Because if it's just students then it's like - and like, I like how only people at your own school or people you know can see it. Mr. JOSH MOSER(ph) (Student, University of Southern California): My name is Josh Moser. I'm from Thousand Oaks, California, and I'm a broadcast journalism major. On the topic of Facebook, I really don't like it being open to the public. Facebook is supposed to be for the students. It's not supposed to be used by the faculty. It's a student-run thing. If this is open to the public, then I mean, the sole purpose of Facebook is just kind of out the window.
I would like to hear him reiterate some of the promises he made in the campaign of signing into law a bill to defund Planned Parenthood, signing into law a bill that will ban taxpayer dollars from funding abortions. He's already upheld his promises in appointing pro-life, anti-abortion judges - and Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court was a huge victory for our movement. So it'd be nice to hear him recommit to that, say he's going to push the Senate to actually get these votes done. There's been several pieces of legislation that have been passed by the House that are really just waiting for the Senate to take action on.
You would, and I think that some states and municipalities are focusing more on that because they see the role that grandparents have in keeping families together. And boy, God bless Shirley and people like her who step in like this. But you know, this is something, you know, they don't - Shirley should go run high schools. You know, we don't show our kids the reality. You know, some high schools have a health class where they give you a mechanical baby and you bring it home and it cries in the middle of the night. And that's, you know, it's something. But we - I think we don't show children and teenagers the reality of what this is going to look like. One thing I'd like to do is to see if there are any teenage fathers out there who would like contact us. I would love to hear from boys and men about this.
Well, I think it many ways, African-American Muslims share the same historical legacy as the rest of the African-American community. And so I think we have a heightened appreciation for the need of civil rights and human rights for all people. And so there's no doubt that Imam Mohammed was one who said, get out there, vote, participate in politics, engage in civic life and don't be afraid to offer leadership to the whole community. Not just African-Americans, but all people, people of all backgrounds and descriptions. And of course he was an interfaith leader and led by example. And I just - I remember shortly after I won my election, he came, he left Chicago and came to my parents' home. I happened to be in Detroit at the time. I'm from Minnesota, but my parents are living in Detroit. And he sat in my living room and we talked for a good half an hour, and he gave me a lot of pastoral advice which is ringing in my ears right now.
Most of them are really, really shocked and disappointed. I mean, this is not what they expected. You know, New Yorkers elected him with a record margin of a vote in 2006 because he pledged to clean up Albany. And I think lots of people were really hoping he would make a difference for a state that's really had a lot of trouble with corruption at the state level. My e-mails and phones were just packed yesterday with, listen, can you believe this? Including people who had worked with him for, you know, a decade. Like I can not believe this.
I have to say that one of the things that has always struck me about some areas of the sports world is that they seem sort of blithely unaware of the social implications of some of the things that they're doing. From this coach who was sort of talking about how he's losing because he doesn't have enough black folks on his team to now this, which--you know, anybody with half a brain, I think, if they looked at that--images, would understand that there's a resonance that sort of goes beyond just, you know, slapping Detroit upside the head right before an important game. And--but a lot of folks in the sports world seem unwilling to sort of face the larger implications of some of the things that they do and they say.
Well, last night there were lines forming already on roads leading into Jefferson Parish, and for those who aren't familiar with the New Orleans area, about half the population of the New Orleans metropolitan area is in the city of New Orleans, and about half the population is in what's called Jefferson Parish, which is a large suburb right outside of the city to the west. And it is that suburb, Jefferson Parish, where people are being allowed to come back into, and traffic this morning has been horrendous. Thousands of people wanting to get back into their homes. They're going to find a very ugly scene and it's going to be interesting to see how easy it is to get people to leave once they've come in.
Lt. Gen. HERTLING: I think we are seeing a decline, across the board, in America. And in fact, it concerns many of us in the military, and we're watching it very closely. This isn't a decline in our recruits; this is a decline in our American society in terms of their physical capacity. It's just a softer generation. But we can't afford to accept that. I mean, we've got to train soldiers to climb the peaks of Afghanistan, or subside in the deserts of the Middle East or anywhere in the world. General, are recruits these days less inclined, to use that old phrase, to salute smartly and charge up the hill when ordered?
Well, it's--I have an unfashionable view of history then because my view of history is that people change it, and you can't explain the Holocaust without Hitler and you can't explain the fact that the French were in Moscow in 1812 without Napoleon; it's just not possible. And you can't explain al-Qaeda without bin Laden. He founded it with nine other people. He was the leader from the beginning. He and Ayman al-Zawahiri his--I think, you know, instrumental in founding this. They've been instrumental in the ideology of al-Qaeda. They've had--they created a somewhat coherent world view, which unfortunately a number of people have signed up for.
Well, since these talks, the Taliban side began talking about extending the cease-fire there. There was some indirect talks yesterday and this came out of those. A cease-fire's been in place here for the past month. We're not sure how long it could be extended. It was due to expire this coming Tuesday. Though it's reduced the violence, it hasn't stopped it completely. In fact, this weekend, journalists in Pakistan are staging nationwide protests after gunmen in Lahore opened fire on a TV presenter and political analyst who's a well-known critic of Islamist extremism. The journalist escaped with minor injuries but his driver was killed, and there's a big uproar about this.
Today, the hospitals are still overwhelmed, people are being asked to donate blood, and the morgues are full. Today, Iraqis are burying their dead. Many of those killed were Shiites, so we're seeing relatives strap wooden coffins to the roofs of minivans and drive down to the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, where they'll be buried. There's been no claim of responsibility, but many here blame Sunni insurgents, all part of what they think is, you know, their aim at stoking sectarian tensions and keeping this conflict going. In fact, today in parliament Shiite lawmakers put forward a proposal to expel Arabs from the country. You know, Iraqi and American officials say that Arabs belonging to al-Qaida and other extremist groups have infiltrated the country and are believed to be behind many of these attacks. So it's not clear how - what kind of progress this proposal will have in parliament, but this is something that they're doing in reaction to this latest bombing.
Well, they do, and as a matter of fact, on last night's downhill it was used particularly effectively because they showed how the current first place holder was the Austrian, Walchhofer, and he went over the first jump and he didn't handle it particularly well, and the guy who ultimately won the race did it much better. But if you'd watched the video the way it ran out, you could actually see how they ran the slope differently, but it looked like the Austrian actually landed on the Frenchman's head, so yes it is quite alarming to watch if you don't understand what's happening.
We, like the Chinese and Russians, are investing in our nuclear weapons stockpile. The United States should not be buying into an idea that the expansion of a nuclear arsenal is somehow in our interests. I think George Shultz was warning lawmakers, warning policymakers. As a Cold warrior who was a part of a massive expansion of nuclear weapons and then eventually walking away from that potential threat, he's telling people not to do this. And I'm hoping that lawmakers will listen to him. We've already tried low-yield, small nuclear weapons. At one point, we even had a nuclear weapon called the Davy Crockett, which is effectively a nuclear bazooka. We've gone down this road before, and we decided against it. There's no reason to repeat past mistakes.
Yeah. That's good. We'll start on the first one. They're going to eat the sugar. They're going to convert it into lactic acid, and you're going to get an increasingly thickening mass that sort of starts to look like yogurt. TEXT: FLATOW: And next step? And the next step, you're going to want to seal the deal. You're going to really want to coagulate your milk, and by doing that, by adding rennet or microbial rennet, you get the proteins to knit together. They form a web that traps water and it traps fat. And your yogurty-puddingy stuff becomes like well-set Jell-o, if you will. And from there, it's all about how much water you want to keep and how much water you want to get rid of.
Well, it's remarkably calm, actually. When you talk to people, they are pretty much resigned to a period of some uncertainty. Most people are fairly hopeful that something better will come to Zimbabwe in the coming days, weeks, months and years than they've experienced over the last years of Mugabe - Robert Mugabe's increasingly autocratic and increasingly incompetent rule. There is a sense that the army who took power on Wednesday night need to start moving - sorry, Tuesday night to Wednesday morning - start - that the army needs to start moving a little bit faster and that some kind of clarity needs to be brought to the situation. But on the whole - people going around their business, and there isn't a major - any kind of major disruption.
These days, it seems like half of the planet posts to online social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. These are Web sites where users can create profiles, add other users to friend lists, and share photos over the Internet. And now, online social networking is moving offline to what we more and more have to call the real world. And people are using these sites in new ways - to recruit business and employees, and as well here, to form networks of many philanthropists. So, what are the new ways that you use online social networks? Later on in the program, forensic investigators identified the body of Egypt's famous woman pharaoh. But first, social networks redefined. Other than keeping in touch with family and friends, what do you use these sites for? Our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255, that's 800-989-TALK, e-mail, [email protected]. You can also join the conversation on our blog, npr.org/blogofthenation.
Sure export crops can become, can be a very important income source for small farmers. Now you, you ask the question in terms of large plantation farmers and that's a somewhat different issue, even though they generate employment but that's more questionable but smaller farmers earn a lot of money from export crops. You mentioned peanuts, those, I can't think of better ways to help poor farmers in Senegal and Gambia and West Africa than to open up our markets in the United States for peanuts from West Africa. Right now, we are keeping those farmers out of our markets in order to protect our peanut producers in the United States. If we could remove the import tariffs, the West African peanut producers can out-compete the American ones. They will make money, and they will escape poverty, and they will send their kids to school. Export crops can be a very important source of income. And keep in mind that hunger is not created by lack of ability to produce food. It is created by lack of ability to get access to food, whether you produce it or you buy it from your neighbor or from the grocery store.
Exactly. Every single fax manufacturer in the world is saying, I know, bank services. No. I mean, I think what's going to happen is that the services are going to spend these billions of dollars, which the government is going to force them to spend on revamping their IT systems and trying to get everything much more streamlined and effective. And, as we all know, because we've all worked for a big organization at some point in our lives, that's going to end in miserable failure. But it will be a hopeful miserable failure, and the least, while it's going on, will be able to think that it might work.
Well, one problem is that whether taking any particular shower is problematic, you never know, of course. Mycobacterium avium, or you use the term Mycobacterium avium complex, which is a good one to use because there are several organisms that fall into that particular bailiwick, that is they're all very closely related organisms. Other examples of these organisms would be, beyond Mycobacterium avium, would be Mycobacterium intracellulare, for example, you know, very close relatives of one another. So for a person with a normal immune response, I would say that probably there's no particular threat. The problem that arises, however, is that Mycobacterium avium disease, or MAC disease, Mycobacterium avium complex disease, is insidious. It can persist at low grade for many, many years. And then, and only then, become a problem. And again, the disease may be very well-developed before the symptoms are manifest, and that can be a problem.
So it was an easy vote. But the point is that they're turning to their faculty, their administrators and demanding this, these changes now, and I think that is a hopeful sign. But it has to be reinforced. You have to make it easy, you have to make it preferred. You have to - think of the changes in society that came about when we - that it was no longer the smoker's rights, it was the non-smoker's rights, and that changed everything and how we were able to move forward in public policy. And we're probably at that time in terms of our sort of unthinkable, continuous use of materials and energy, and that shift is coming.
Well, you know, I've been thinking recently that, you know, for all of this understandable attention that Michelle Obama is getting, this woman, who's the president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, right, she's extraordinary, because unlike Mugabe and these other incompetent, brutal clowns that run African countries, she's, like, cleaned up this place after a 14-year civil war. She's put a woman in charge of the police force. And she's done the things that the people actually need. And so all I'm just saying is that as the African who wrote in the email was saying, see, there's a whole other thing that's happening in Africa. See, the thing that is remarkable about Africa is that Africans have this - they have a very deep understanding of something, as I say in the piece, that everybody in the world actually knows, which is that life does - life is not self-destructive.
And he was just an inspiration. He found ways in which people could better themselves. He challenged the system. I'm thinking of a project that he and Dr. T.R.M. Howard, who was a physician in Mound Bayou have started. And these were little placards that you put on your car. Don't buy gas where you can't use a restroom. And that was a really very bold thing to do then. Medgar also was the first African-American to apply for admission to the University of Mississippi. People often think it was James Meredith. But Medgar helped James get in. But he was the first to apply. That was unheard of to take that kind of risk at that time. And, of course, he just rejected.
Hi. Well, my sister and I were huge "The Price is Right" fans growing up. And I guess when I was about nine, my parents were accepted to be on the show. And we always to a big family trip every year so we decided to, you know, make our trip around California so we could go out and my parents could be in the audience. And of course, we were so excited. I'm the middle of three girls. And so we thought, well how can we get - how can we prepare our parents to, you know, And so we thought, well how can we prepare our parents to - if they are, you know, if they're called up to be one of the preselected, how can we prepare them? So we were eating in a diner before the show and my oldest sister, Mindy, said okay, we have to bid on - we have to guess what we think the bill is without tip when the diner bill came. And so now, every time we got to dinner as a family, this is 20 years later, we'd still bid on the meal, which is so fun, it takes us back to our days in California 20 years ago.
It is a plan to hunt down and kill people around the world. And the idea was if the CIA found people, you know, where the military couldn't go or they couldn't send drones - you know, this could be in European cities, it could be in populated areas - that the CIA would cobble together hit teams to go kill those people. Now, some of this has been reported before, but for the book I describe a scene which hasn't been reported, where Cheney is sort of giving this authorization, and it's the scene where it's the beginning of the new CIA, where the CIA is identifying targets to hunt and kill.
It seems to be the same thing that we had heard and read about having happened in Florida that was exposed in a huge story by the Miami Herald last year, that Jeffrey Epstein would lure underage girls to his mansions either in New York or in Florida or elsewhere, and that he would have told them they were coming to give him a massage. It was a nude massage. That would turn into some sort of groping or even sexual assault. And that he also - the conspiracy charge against him is that he was also recruiting these girls to bring other young girls to his mansion. So the indictment claims that he had created a huge network with dozens and dozens of young girls - as young as 14 - who would come to his mansions, and - where they would be abused.
Exactly. Exactly. You don't. But the "Mommy Wars" story, the larger idea that women who are making a philosophical choice to stay home and women who believe that it's important to work while their children are small - that there's some battle between those two groups, that is really a myth. What's true is that most - many women, while their children are young, take some time to either stay home with their infants - we call that maternity leave - or work part time while their children are small. But the - but they are -the women who work and the women who stay home are the same women. That's - there's not a huge battle on the playgrounds between them.
Well, he was a warrior rather against his will and inclinations. He was a merchant by trade and came from Mecca in the Arabian Hijaz. And the people of Mecca, because they were engaged in traded, actually abjured warfare. They were not warriors, and the Koran shows that when warfare became part of the scene in the early days of Islam, many Muslims found this extremely distasteful and disturbing. Muhammad, however, found himself after he'd been preaching in Mecca for a number of years, having made very little headway - the subject of persecution, his - and eventually the people of Mecca, the Meccan establishment, attacked him, and their vowed intention would have been to exterminate the Muslim community.
Of all the engineering problems we need to solve before the first human sets foot on Mars, the worst turns out to be us. We're glitch-prone, inefficient, and our fuel is bulky. Our bones break down in zero gravity, we're hard to repair, and we leak. It would be so much simpler to remove us from the 520-day roundtrip mission to Mars, but where would the fun be in that? For the last two years, author Mary Roach has been documenting, in her words, the slapstick, surreal world of engineers, biologists and psychologists who aspire to land a sane, healthy astronaut on Mars. She tells their story in her new book, "Packing for Mars." We'll be talking with her in just a moment.
Just a quick point: part of - one way that you might get the mainstream media to do a better job of covering those aspects of the stories is to remind them that it's not only a question of accuracy, which it is, and a question of fairness and equity, which it also is, but it's also a question of survival for them, particularly in the larger areas. I saw a study very recently where at least 50 million people in the United States get most of their news, or a fair amount of news, from the ethnic media. That ought to be a wakeup call to the mainstream media as to what it is that people hunger for.
That's certainly the issue, and it's quite clear that we're not going to see any change in the existence of sports, the sports people like. People watch countless sports. One of the few sections of newspapers which hasn't declined, markedly, in page number is the sports section. And there's something in that sports experience that's very interesting and vital to people who are prepared to pay hundreds of dollars to sit in a stadium and shout on the behalf of one group of people as opposed to another. What is required as in any group with a high flow of movement, energy and activity is a kind of discipline, a kind of awareness of what's appropriate. And what I think will turn out to be crucial for the current Rutgers president, who's new, was that he didn't watch the tape until Tuesday, just a few days ago. And had he seen it, I can't imagine that any sensible man who'd already - also be in the medical profession would say this is acceptable.
Absolutely. There was a trial and several of the Bali bombers were convicted and two of them now face the death penalty. And after the Bali bombings, Indonesia really got serious about going after Jemaah Islamiah and several other militant groups operating in Indonesia with help from Australia and the US. Indonesia rounded up more than a hundred and fifty alleged Jemaah Islamiah operatives, and I think today most people, most analysts would tell you that Jemaah Islamiah is much weaker now than it was three years ago as a result of that effort, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have some operatives and some resources to carry out high-profile attacks like the Bali bombing, like the bombing of the JW Marriott in Jakarta in August of 2003, like the bombing on the Australian Embassy here in Jakarta just a year ago. So it depleted, yeah, definitely. But able to carry out at least one or two high-profile attacks a year, absolutely.
That's exactly what Chou is finding, Steve. She conducted a series of experiments where volunteers used different signatures. So Chou had them, for example, solve puzzles and anagrams and report whether they succeeded or failed. Or she had them flip coins and report what happened so that they could win a reward if the coins came down a certain way. Or she gave them a job and she said, report how much time you spent working on the job so I can compensate you for the amount of time you've spent. In each case, volunteers had to sign saying they had provided accurate information. But some signatures were in handwriting, whereas others were e-signatures. And systematically, Chou finds that volunteers are more likely to cheat - to report they've solved more anagrams, worked longer, gotten luckier with the coins - when they used e-signatures rather than handwritten signatures.
An African Union patrol of 50 Rwandan soldiers drives across the dry Darfuri landscape. Sitting in open backs of pick-up trucks, they have scarves pulled up over their faces against the clouds of dust whipping around them. They're on their way to three refugee camps near al-Fashir in North Darfur. The camps hold over 100,000 refugees. The soldiers' brief visit will be the only protection the camps will get for the day. In the camps, the troops fan out. They lack a translator to interact with the people. This is the reality of the underfunded African Union peace mission here. Back at the base, you can hear the soldiers' frustration as they discuss their job. Gambian Sergeant Lemean Torre(ph) has been with the mission for 11 months.
That means the first case that kind of started the epidemic. And so Whitehead and Snow ended up collecting all this data. But the problem with data is sometimes it just - you look at a statistical table and you say, well, I see a lot of numbers here, but I'm not necessarily convinced of this. And so one of the ideas that Snow had was that if he made a map of the outbreak that it might be, you know, more persuasive kind of visually. And so he created this map where he basically took all the dead, and for each address where somebody had died, he created a little black bar. And if there were 10 deaths there, you had 10 black bars. And when you did this and looked at the kind of bird's-eye view of the outbreak, you could see the deaths kind of radiating out from this central point where the pump was at 40 Broad Street. And so the map became in a sense a kind of marketing vehicle for his theory. It was a way of making it immediately clear to somebody who didn't want to look through all the numbers that there was something fundamentally wrong with the water in this pump, and it - over time it ended up working.
They have beautiful wheels. They kind of glide around stage. They light up. The funny thing is that they don't look at all like human beings, but they convey a huge amount of emotion. They have eyes and ears, so they react to the characters on stage. And they do make a variety of sound. Actually, at the beginning of the opera and the very end, they sing. But for the rest of the opera, they just send out sound that makes - it's electronic sound. It blends with what the orchestra's playing. And what we just heard was - it was purely electronic sound coming out of the opera-bots.
Luckily, yes. But one - two other things I want to mention though. That there - not only the safety of the team, there was the reputation of the United States. I mean, if we got caught doing something, or in somewhere we shouldn't be, that would have been an international flap between our country and whoever else, and probably the country we're working in. And then the third and most important was the life of the agent. I mean, the CIA leans on agents almost, I mean, not exclusively but, you know, a large percentage of the time to gather information. And this guy was very critical to their operations. And when I came back and complained about it, nobody cared.
Well, he - some years back, he published a book of his golf writings and some writings about other sports as well. He'd written about cricket and a little bit about rowing and various other things, but mostly golf. And I had an opportunity to go down to interview him at the hotel where he was staying in Boston. And he was incredibly gracious, just as nice and pleasant as he could be. And it was really fun. It was an honor. And at one point toward the end of our conversation, I decided to sort of ask an impish question and I said, how do you like the idea that on "Sesame Street" there's a character named Alistair Cookie and he hosts a program called "Monsterpiece Theater"?
Well, that's probably been the most interesting part of it. As the train rolled south, we would go through many tiny, little towns. And it seemed like every intersection we rolled through, there would be maybe just five or six - a family or some people who stepped out of a local business - or maybe it'd be a large group of several dozen or even a hundred people. They'd be on the overpasses. Even, at one point, as we were going past a refinery in the southern edge of Pennsylvania, saw a guy on top of one of those giant fuel tanks in his coveralls and his hard hat, just kind of taking a moment to stop and watch the train go by. So, a lot of people knew this train was going to be on this track, and a lot of them came out just to get a glimpse and hopefully, maybe get a wave from the incoming president.
Today, AIG officials acknowledged that the company lost nearly $25 billion last quarter, a record amount. That's forced government officials back to the drawing board. Under the new deal, the government will loan less money to the company, but it will buy an additional $40 billion in stock. And it will pay for it out of the $700 billion financial-rescue fund signed into law by President Bush recently. At the same time, AIG will get easier terms to pay back the loans it's already borrowed. Not only will it pay a lower interest rate, it will also have five years to make good on its debts, as opposed to two. In an interview on CNBC, AIG's chief executive, Edward Liddy, said the new terms would give the company more breathing room to sell off some assets and get its house in order.
They don't call it nation building anymore. That's for sure. They say that it's stabilization. The main thing they want to do is clear out landmines - ISIS left thousands of them in the city - and get basic services back on track like water and electricity so that people can move back to their homes if they have them. They're looking at smaller things. I mean, Votel said that this is - cleaning up the rubble is a massive job that could take years. What they're doing is focusing on the things that they can do. There are about 2,000 U.S. troops - at least that's the official count - that are in northern Syria. And USAID and the State Department have a small team of experts who are overseeing some of these projects - anywhere from 10 to 17 people on a given day in northern Syria.
Well, that is certainly true, Ed. You listen to proponents of capital punishment and their position is that the system works. Whether or not you languish in jail forever, hopefully your DNA or some material evidence survives, and then since you were cleared or acquitted then that's the system working. And it does--they never seem to speak also to the people who perhaps were, you know, executed wrongly. So personally I'm not for the death penalty primarily because it has the capacity to go the wrong way. There's human error that's involved. When you look at juries, when you look at who is continuously in the pool to be executed, they are largely poor people and they are largely people of color. And I think that's still problematic, and I don't see any human way of fixing that. I think it'd be better to have people just in jail, prison for life with no parole. And then if there is something that acquits them down the road, be that 20 or 30 years, then they have that ability to get out. But once you've killed someone, they're gone. And to say `I'm sorry,' that certainly isn't sufficient.
Well, here's what interesting about that. In that case, there was one case that was down in Dallas, and it was someone that they had found in a chat room who said he wanted to attack the U.S. His name was Smadi. And basically what happened is the FBI posed as someone who was like-minded, helped him get these so-called explosives, and then handed him the phone so that he would actually dial phone and ignite the explosives in this Dallas skyscraper. And, in fact, when he dialed the number, the FBI office in Dallas picked up the line. It was their number. And the way you pose the question, it sounded like this was problem, if you hand them the phone. But, in fact, what they found is if you have juries who think that you provided the explosives, you provided all this, you pushed it along. The guy actually dialed the phone, which meant he was - at least in the moment - thinking that he wanted to blow something up, and that's why he was dialing the phone. So that aspect of these cases is considered to be positive for the prosecution, as opposed to some sort of proof of entrapment.
Well, polls open at 7 a.m., and they close at 7 p.m. That's Greek time. But we may not know anything until around midnight. Public opinion polls released on Friday show that the vote will likely be close. That doesn't mean that a clear result will actually clear anything up after all this. A yes vote would please Europe, but it might mean that the government resigns - the Greek government resigns, and that would force new elections, you know, a lot more turmoil. And no would please the government, but it would make it much harder to return to the negotiating table because, you know, the Greek government is comprised of leftists and right-wing nationalists, who have really vilified European leaders. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras accused them of blackmail. Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has called them terrorists. I saw a campaign poster for the No Movement - that's, you know, voting against austerity and against European leaders' proposals. I saw this campaign poster that portrayed German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble as an ogre who drinks Greek blood. So I don't see how they will all be able to sit at the same negotiating table again.
Spokesman Mohamed Ghozlan says members joining anything other than the Brotherhood-sanctioned Freedom and Justice Party face expulsion.�He argues members can't be all over the political spectrum and at the same time claim to adhere to the Brotherhood's conservative Islamic values, nor can members run for president, as Aboul Fotouh is doing, and which is the official reason given for his expulsion. Analysts say the group enjoyed far more unity and loyalty when it faced a common enemy: Hosni Mubarak. He and his government accused the group of treason and terrorism and aggressively pursued Brotherhood members.�That forced the group to operate secretly in small cells, with power concentrated in the hands of only a few members.
Michele Norris of All Things Considered and Steve Inskeep of Morning Edition have been talking with a diverse group of voters in York, Pennsylvania about race. Their third and final conversation following Barack Obama's election airs on both of those shows tomorrow. Did your perception of race relations change after last Tuesday night? How has your life changed? Give us a call, its 1-800-989-8255. The email address is [email protected]. And you can join the conversation online, go to npr.org and click on Talk of the Nation. Now, we were hoping to speak with Ta-Nehisi Coates, he's contributing editor at The Atlantic but we haven't been able to get him on the line. And we're sticking with our best person, Dawn Turner Trice, she's a columnist at the Chicago Tribue. And before the break, you were saying that this whole election beginning with the Iowa caucuses has made you personally re-evaluate race in America.
No. In fact, what it did was, in the case of the Japanese, led to deflation, where things that were at a certain price one day were actually cheaper the next, and it didn't help. But the key here, and this is an interesting point that you raise, from President Bush's perspective, you've got to have spending that immediately goes into the bloodstream of the U.S. economy. And if it's spending that's on infrastructure, how can President-elect Obama guarantee that the money gets spent quickly, and that it actually is on programs that will lead to quick employment, lower the unemployment rate, and get people back into the stores by boosting consumer confidence? President-elect Obama's retort to this is he's got the governors on board to say they're going to put the money into programs right away. In specific, think about this, the transit in the country. The trains, the buses, the airports - they're all saying if you give us the money, we can put it to work right away. So that's one area. Secondly, Barack Obama has talked about the schools. And the school systems are saying, yeah. If you give us money, we can improve the quality of schools, and we'll get it going within the calendar year.
But the media just can't get it right, can we? Actually, Melanie entered the world just after Eric. They were perilously small at birth, each weighing just below or above two pounds, and spent their first three months in intensive care. Once they were home, the Torline living room became a nursery. Cheryl developed a color code system to keep track of the 12 to 14 bottles of infant formula that each baby had to drink every day. Friends and neighbors helped out, but Cheryl Torline remembers getting exactly one free box of diapers per child. No (unintelligible) freebies from diaper or toy companies, no free station wagon from a local car dealer.
We counted. Mike filed more than 3,000 stories for NPR since he started out as a freelancer in 1980. He covered both Gulf wars, a couple of conflicts in Israel, Bosnia, Kosovo. He was in Moscow for the collapse of the Soviet Union, in New York on 9/11, and as you know, he's focused most recently on Iran. As of this week he moves on from NPR, but we couldn't let him go without an exit interview. If you have questions about what it's like to cover momentous events like those, we'd like to hear from you, 800-989-8255 is the phone number. Email us, [email protected]. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.
But also, too, I think that Mr. Watkins made a good point that the uprisings are happening on--at--all around the country still. Right here, where I am, in Washington, DC, area, there are I think, about, approximately 100 young people who have been killed this year. There are homicides, over about 100 in Prince George's County. We have Latino gang violence. There were six people stabbed recently at a mall. And to add to that, in Washington, as well as PG County, which have a large number of black people, the school systems are rated near the bottom. So there probably are some correlations that we should be looking at. They've been there for decades and, again, we keep sweeping things under the rug and doing these stopgap measures, but we need to get serious.
First of all, I have to say that I am a student of human nature as would be anybody who's been in the world as long as I have which is 68 years. Most people are fickle. They're concerned about their own problems, they don't make a lot of money, so they can't give a lot of time to thinking about what travails I experience on the floor of the legislature. When they put me in office, they put somebody they could trust so in a manner of speaking, they've turned it over to me and said whatever needs to be done, Ernie's going to do it. So, I'd never go to my community and say, I want you all to turn out and do this or do that. My job is to do it alone. If Ali Baba can handle forty thieves, certainly I should be able to handle 48 white people in the legislature. So, the community is very strongly behind me and the problem that could develop is that of the cult of the personality. The notion that nobody can do this job other than me. I don't want people to have that attitude. Naturally it feeds a person's ego, but the situation is too grave for that. So I've been preparing people for the time that I'm not gonna be here and told them that rather than lament as they're doing the day that I leave, work with me while I'm here, let's get as much done as possible and ride this horse as hard as you want to.
Obama wants to put up to $5 billion that the government won't be spending in Afghanistan next year into a new fund for fighting terrorism. He also pledged to work with Congress to provide additional support for the Syrian rebels. Aides described today's speech as a chance for Obama to spell out his overall approach to foreign-policy, an approach that hasn't changed much during his five and a half years in office. Much of today's speech echoed what the president said when he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He won't hesitate to act on his own to defend the U.S. and its allies, he said. But in the face of lesser threats, he prefers to work in concert with others.
Well, at some point, I felt this record was about the losing of the ego. That was the most obvious thing to me. And, I guess, it was something that I'd been thinking about. So a lot of the characters and moments all lead to that. "On Being Frank" is one example. There's a tour manager who's been working for Frank Sinatra for 30 years. And Frank Sinatra died, then suddenly his life has been, I am Frank Sinatra's tour manager. His identity is completely tied up with Sinatra. So the song is about being lost in that kind of way. And there's a lot of that in the album.
This is George McDonald and I have a little bit of a cold. But John McCain is really four more years of George Bush's economic and social policies. I believe he will continue our crash course into the wall on the right. Barack Obama is a knee-jerk reaction to George Bush. I believe he will crash us into the wall on the left. Our country has been badly wounded in many areas and on many different levels, and it desperately needs somebody who can help it heal. We don't need more agendas either left-wing or right-wing. We need healing. Thank you.
Several days have gone by, and I still can't get over the range of emotions I experience watching the opening ceremonies. I was moved by the gathering of so many nations. I was awestruck by the pageantry on display, and I was impressed by the accomplishments of the athletes. And then I got bored. Yep, somewhere between Mauretania and Denmark in the parade of nations, I got that itch to see actual sports. So I logged onto the nbcolympics.com for a very different, but not altogether superior viewing experience. First, understand their similarity. NBC Universal doesn't care where you watch because they sell ads on both platforms. But the best way to understand the difference is to think of the Olympics as this massive buffet. Before the advent of the web, NBC was content to provide you one serving at a time with the meal of its choosing. NBC's cable channels offered some side dishes, too.
That's right. And there were a couple of things in the data, Steve, that made me think that Zanella and Banerjee are really on to something because the data not only showed which women were diagnosed, but how serious their cancer was. So oncologists would say the stage and the grade of the cancer. And what the economists find is that the co-workers of the women with the most serious cancers are the most likely not to get screened, presumably because these coworkers are especially scared by what's happened to their colleague. Second, the data showed where the women worked physically at the company literally - where they sat and how far they were from one another. And what the economists find is that co-workers who are physically closer to the patient also become less likely to screen. And both of those things I think point to the idea that when you find out that a colleague has been affected, you're scared and you don't want to find out that you yourself might be affected.
It includes lifting the cap completely the way that Senator Obama has, on many occasions, advocated. In fact, it would be a tax increase for school superintendents, for fire department lieutenants, for police captains. You go down and look at people who, in the high-wage areas - like New York, like L.A. and other places, even here where I'm talking to you from, Las Vegas - these are not rich people. It would be 2,000, 3,000 more out of their paycheck. I will not approve of that. We don't have a crisis in Social Security. We have long-term challenges that I believe can be met with relatively minor adjustments, as long as they are progressive and not imposing further burdens on people who should not be asked to bear the brunt.
Nothing is what Patrick Deggan(ph) chose. He writes on our Web site: We cut the cord four years ago, when our kids were 11 and 9. They read more. They spent more time with us at the dinner table. We allow them to watch shows on the PC, but the mindless channel surfing and repetitive show viewing has ended. I do not think I will ever become a cable customer again. I've gotten my life back and will live it to the fullest. Lots of reaction online to my essay last Saturday about the sartorial choices of some of our nation's top elected officials. Many of the male politicians at last week's bipartisan White House Health-Care Summit wore powder-blue neckties. I wondered why.
Well, as you said, nothing has been announced or officially confirmed, but the names have been leaking out of the transition team. And first among those is Steven Chu, who is a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist and a real rock star, if you will, in the scientific community because, well, not often do people win the Nobel Prize for physics, but he did it at AT&T Bell Lab with some very elegant experiments that I guess, in the world of physics, people are often quite thrown by the elegance and ingenuity of his experiments. He actually slowed down atoms using lasers so they could be studied motionless, which may not have a lot of practical application...
That is the voice of a British man who calls himself Macer Gifford. Late last year, he left his job as a financial trader in London and went off to fight the self-declared Islamic State in Syria. He spoke with us on the condition that we not reveal his real name because he fears for the safety of his family in the U.K. We've heard about how ISIS is recruiting foreign fighters to join their ranks, but it's happening on the other side as well. Just this past week, an American man, who died fighting against ISIS in Syria, was laid to rest. The British financial trader says they all knew the risks of what they were doing. He is our Sunday conversation.
I talked to somebody who was interviewed who said there was a comms person, somebody in the West Wing in the White House - there was a comms person in that interview with him. How many other interviews were like that? And I think that that - we should keep that in mind when we hear sort of these calls that this is this is tabloid trash, that nobody in the White House knew what was happening or that this was all Steve Bannon. Perhaps it really was all Steve Bannon inviting Michael Wolff into the White House, giving him unfettered access. But the White House is - and the West Wing is a small place. And it's hard to ignore. I certainly saw Michael Wolff when I was covering - when I've been covering the White House for the last year. It's kind of hard to ignore the guy.
But in the 1890s the U.S. government is looking for a test case to really determine whether Chinese people, whether born in the United States or not, can really be considered American citizens. And so they focus on Wong Kim Ark when he tries to re-enter the country in 1894, and they actually deny him readmission. So Wong Kim Ark fights back, and it goes all the way to the Supreme Court. The majority rules that the language of the amendment is very clear and that all persons born in the United States are citizens thereof and that citizenship is not something that is descended or inherited, but that it's about place and territory.
And now a birthday greeting. Ten years ago, I talked with Dan Werthimer of the University of California at Berkeley about a new project that he had just begun, one that would let people lend their personal computers to help scientists hunt for signals from outer space. And in the 10 years since then, five-million SETI@home volunteers in over 200 countries have donated over three million years of computing time to the project. And while we have not heard that phone home from E.T. yet phoning us, in fact, the project has also sparked other distributed computing projects. Dan Werthimer, chief scientist at SETI@home, joins us again today. Welcome back to the program.
And look. The president could have appointed an independent commission to look into this matter. Instead, he's issued the directive to his attorney general, who, as Ramesh points out, has significant credibility problems in terms of the way that he disseminated aspects of the Mueller report, misleading the public in that initial letter on what, in fact, the contents of the report were and giving that press conference where he was essentially going to bat for the president. It also is curious that the president who has wanted, you know, the investigators to be investigated this whole time has made this announcement at the same time that the courts have ruled in favor of congressional Democrats to access, you know, documents relating to his finances and at a time when the White House's efforts to stonewall congressional investigators are essentially being rebuked by the courts.
First of all, there's surprise. And also, there's a lot of worry about what might come next, this period of uncertainty. The military has been placed on high alert here. The government's been holding emergency meetings, and stock markets plunged on the news. We heard this report by Yonhap news agency that North Korea test-fired a short-range missile early on Monday morning before the announcement of Kim Jong Il's death was made. So some people are saying that's a routine thing, but others believe it's a symbolic show of force by North Korea. But all of this is contributing to the sense of nervousness among people here. And one person I spoke to said he felt there was a higher chance of conflict between the two Koreas. That kind of view isn't untypical.
Yes. He made the decision yesterday. He made the offer last night. I can tell you that according to the White House today, 12 to 15 candidates were seriously considered for this opening. The president met with Harriet Miers, just trying to decide if he was going to offer it with her, on three occasions prior to last night. They met September 21st, again September 28th and then again September 29th. Then last night, she was invited to the White House, to the residence, for dinner. The president was there. First lady Laura Bush was there. Recall that Laura Bush said--told reporters recently...
As I sat amid stacks of boxes in a stranger’s living room in Fairfield, California, back in 2008, I saw that my search was over. I had succeeded in a quest to track down the personal and professional papers of Douglas McGlashan Kelley, a psychiatrist who had examined the top Nazi prisoners held for the first war crimes trial in Nuremberg in 1945-46. My trail had led me to his son’s house. A United States Army major, Kelley had gone to Nuremberg at the request of Allied prison authorities to deliver a simple opinion on the mental fitness of 22 notorious defendants held for trial on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. These included Hermann Göring, Hitler’s designated successor, the first head of the Gestapo, and an architect of the Holocaust; Rudolf Hess, the Third Reich’s deputy führer and Hitler’s longtime assistant; and Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazis’ pseudoscientific party philosopher and Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Kelley transformed that assignment, however, into an obsessive search for a common thread of mental illness that could account for the heinous behaviour of the men widely regarded as the worst criminals of the 20th century. Kelley never identified a shared disorder, or anything resembling the ‘Nazi virus’ he hoped to discover. Instead, after subjecting the Germans to intensive rounds of psychological testing and personal interviews, he shocked even himself by concluding that the leaders of the Third Reich were psychiatrically normal men possessing an opportunism and hunger for power that thrived in the social and political upheaval of pre-war and wartime Germany. There were many other such people among us in every nation, Kelley believed. The boxes in the living room contained the secrets of Kelley’s psychological assessments and interviews – the keys to the personalities of the men who ran the Third Reich, some of whom, like Göring, ended their lives by suicide. After Kelley’s death in 1958, the papers passed through the hands of family members, unseen by anyone else, until they ended up with a son who gave me access to them more than 60 years past the trial’s end. By that time, all the defendants were long dead. From this treasure trove of long-hidden material I wrote The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (2013). A few months ago, at the end of a presentation I gave about the book at the Mayo Medical School in Rochester, Minnesota, a woman in the audience – the school’s staff attorney, I later learned – rose to speak. She posed a question that has left me wondering ever since: ‘How do you justify making public the medical records and private information of the people you write about?’ At first, I found the question dumbfounding. I had just been speaking about Göring, who was convicted of grievous offences and heinous acts against humanity. He died in 1946. Someone was sticking up for this man’s right to medical privacy? Putting aside my thoughts on whether Göring deserved any common courtesies and consideration, I explained to the questioner that I’m not a medical provider, and I do not have to follow the ethics of another profession that places a premium on the privacy of patients, living or dead. I have never sworn by the Hippocratic Oath in all my years as a writer. Furthermore, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, a federal US law that regulates the disposition of medical records and protects the privacy of patients, applies to hospitals, medical providers and insurers – but not to writers. Even if it did apply to writers, HIPAA’s privacy protections last for only 50 years past a patient’s death, making the records of Göring and most of his fellow Nazi defendants clearly free from any restrictions on their use. ‘Don’t private medical records deserve more permanent protections?’ my questioner persisted. I could imagine an institution taking that position to bolster its reputation and maintain the confidence of its patients, some of whom might want their medical information forever buried from public view. But, I told her, ‘my personal ethics emphasise satisfying the needs of my readers. If readers have to know something to understand a story, I’m obligated to do all I can to report it to them, providing I don’t hurt an innocent person in the process. Courts have long established that people should have no expectation of privacy from journalistic investigations past death’. The amplified sound of my voice died down in the lecture hall, and the questioner at last sat down. The matter seemed settled, except I kept thinking about it. Do the deceased have some claim on me for their privacy? Was my handling of sensitive medical information truly ethical, and did my readers really have to know all I dredged up for them? Concerning the medical records of the dead Nazis, the answer was clear: their information lay within the public domain, and my efforts to give meaning to those records and set them in historical context undeniably served the public interest. This was crucial information about the behaviour and psyches of the men behind the Third Reich and the Holocaust. How could I harm their rancid reputations any further? Medical school attorneys aside, few would question the ethics of my decision to expose these medical records. But I had similarly dipped into another batch of medical records several years earlier, and here my ethics were not incontestable. During my research for The Lobotomist (2005), a biography of Walter Freeman, the neuropsychiatrist who pioneered and championed psychiatric surgery as a treatment for various forms of mental illness, I mined the medical records of some of the 40,000 peoplein the US who had undergone lobotomies between 1936 and the late 1970s. I found those records mixed in with Freeman’s other papers in the archives at George Washington University. I wanted to challenge the preconceptions of my readers by telling the stories of patients as factually as I could. If readers could think of these unfortunate people less as generically lobotomised victims and more as spouses, parents and children whose lives had been disrupted in specific ways by mental illness and its treatment, it would be easier to grasp lobotomy’s attractions and limitations. Also, writers of the future could more easily follow my trail if I used genuine identifying information. Ethicists in the biomedical and behavioural sciences have long fought historians on the assault on privacy that this approach brings; they value anonymity and collective data over the experience of the identified individual. A patient of made-up background could never live in the imagination as vividly as Alice Hood Hammatt, 63, who grew up in Topeka, Kansas, loved going to the theatre, and was vain about her hair To me, including identifying details from the medical records was essential to fulfilling my narrative and journalistic goals, and I knew I’d eventually be challenged for doing so. I had no fear of challenge from actual patients, because I made sure that I included the sensitive information of dead people only, but I didn’t know what to expect in response from their family members – the stigma of mental illness might have left some of them unaware that their relative even had a lobotomy. The disastrous evolution of lobotomy was so important to understand that I pressed ahead nonetheless. Many books and articles by medical practitioners identify patients only by initials or by using invented names. However, ‘A H’ or ‘Mrs H’, a patient of obscure or made-up background, could never live in a reader’s imagination as vividly as Alice Hood Hammatt, a 63-year-old woman who grew up in Topeka, Kansas, loved going to the theatre, was vain about her hair, and had a husband named Theodore who struggled to find help for his wife’s deep depression and episodes of public exhibitionism. That’s why the identity of Hammatt, the first American to receive a lobotomy, appeared – for the first time – in The Lobotomist with full details of her case, along with medical and personal information on many other psychosurgery patients who had died decades before I wrote my book. (I included the name of only one then-living lobotomy patient, Rosemary Kennedy, sister of the late president, John F Kennedy, because her treatment had been public knowledge for years.) When I weighed the benefits of illuminating patients’ lives by using their true names and circumstances against the benefits of maintaining the secrecy of their identities, I concluded that establishing their real humanity won out. And my readers were the winners. A few years after the publication of The Lobotomist, the challenge I dreaded finally arrived. I heard from a woman who had watched a television documentary based on my book, had wondered whether her deceased mother had received a lobotomy, and finally confirmed it through her own research. Even though I had not mentioned this patient in my book, the daughter disapproved of my publication of the actual names and details of other patients. ‘I would consider the use of my mother’s name or image an invasion of privacy,’ she wrote to me. ‘As a parent myself, I would dread my children discovering such family history online or in a book or magazine.’ She questioned whether it matters if I use a patient’s real name or give a fictitious one. ‘I would guess that my family was not alone in burying the truth about their family members who underwent this operation,’ she said. ‘When the genuine names of patients are printed, an author should understand that this information may be a bombshell to family members and others who knew the patient.’ She maintained that a good writer should be able to convey the nuances of a patient’s story without disclosing identifiable information. I don’t believe it’s possible or desirable to do so. As writer and reader, I always sense that I lose essential shades of verisimilitude when I know some aspect of the tale has been fudged. If the name is missing or altered, what other factual tether has been frayed, intentionally or not? Nonfiction writers should not lie, especially in the pursuit of someone’s truthful experience Here’s the remarkable thing about literature, factual or fictional: readers imagine characters in their mind’s eye and identify with subtle aspects of the characterisations. Small, specific details transform into universally felt feelings. That’s what gives great writing its power. A detail untruthfully presented changes the reader’s experience and the magical chemistry of the narrative. I steadfastly believe that the dogged adherence to fact – not to be confused with maintaining an impossible pose of objectivity – is the only way to allow nonfiction narratives to resonate with readers. Nonfiction writers should not lie, especially not in the pursuit of someone’s truthful experience. Nevertheless, the daughter of the lobotomy patient is persuasive. She would have been hurt if I had mentioned her mother’s name in my book. Knowing that, should I change how I use the medical records of the deceased? I’m afraid not. Maybe this is why I was never interested in a medical career, but for me public interest will nearly always trump personal privacy. I agree with Allan G Bogue, former president of the Social Science History Association, who years ago sparked controversy by declaring that knowledge advances best when researchers have unrestricted access to private historical records, including medical files. ‘Open’ should be the default status of these records after the decades pass and the subjects die. My tenets as a nonfiction writer are that individual experience and identity are crucial in storytelling, that others should be able to verify that my work is factual and that, after death, nobody’s life should be off limits to researchers. Even so, when a future story urges me to include sensitive medical information in my writing, I might hesitate. I’m not sure what will happen during that pause. I might think hard about the consequences of exposing family health secrets. I will probably examine the actual need for sharing the information. And then in all likelihood I will proceed as before.
Former Senator Eugene McCarthy died yesterday at an assistant living home here in Washington. He was 89 years old. McCarthy, a Democrat from Minnesota, served five terms in the House of Representatives and two terms in the Senate. A staunch opponent of the war in Vietnam, in 1968, McCarthy challenged President Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Johnson won the New Hampshire primary that year, but McCarthy received 42 percent of the vote, a showing that embarrassed Johnson politically and led to his dropping out of the race. Johnson gave his support to then Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, another Minnesotan. Senator Robert Kennedy, of New York, also entered the presidential race. Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles the night he won the California primary. When the Democrats met for their convention in Chicago that summer, the gathering was marked with rhetorical confrontations inside the convention hall and violent confrontations on the city streets between anti-war protesters and police.
You know, some people have said I want to - not only do I want to know that my tissues are being used in research, I want to be able to say, you know, I'm fine with you using it for cancer research and all of this other stuff, but I don't want you to use it for, you know, say stem cell research or something that doesn't sort of - you know, isn't in line with my beliefs. And, you know, there's a lot of concern that that's going to inhibit science, or that people are going to get the idea that everyone is walking around with these gold-mine cells that are worth millions of dollars, which isn't the case. It's very rare that a cell is worth something. The value of cells to science is in large quantities of them that they can use.
Oh, we certainly want to add video because that's really important because, again, you know, if we're just sort of a static Web site where it's sort of go-and-find-out-what-bird-you-saw, it's not near as interesting if we can say, gosh, here is what a red-winged blackbird looks like in a picture, but gosh, here's a video as well. Here is what it looks like when it's flying. Here is the call. If you go to the site right now - and I think, actually, you might have been using some of the bird calls - we've got on the site right now the audio for almost every bird. So, some of your guests were saying earlier, one of the best ways to identify a bird is to listen to it. Again, we can help you do that, I mean…
Well, one of the interesting possibilities are the so-called super-symmetric particles. It's an idea that we have in physics that what we we don't really like the standard model. It works great, but there are a lot of problems with it. There - some of them are aesthetic. Some of them are observational, like dark energy and dark matter. We don't know what those things are, and so there must be something besides a standard model of physics. One of the things that might solve some of these problems is the super-symmetry theory, which says that for every normal particle, like an electron, there's also a much heavier counterpart. And those heavy counterparts, you can make in a collider, or you can see their effects in a precision experiment like this muonic hydrogen result.
Hi. Thank you. First time ever I've called in to a talk show, and I've called in because I'm upset. I'm upset about these scare stories that keep coming out that seem so unsubstantiated. The bird flu particularly, my understanding is that there have been 60 deaths within three years. We have that many in drive-by shootings in my town. The people who have died, my understanding is that they worked with birds. There's nothing to say that we're going to have a pandemic. It reminds me of the flu way back when President Ford, and that turned out to be...
That's all we knew. It's all we could determine from what we could see with our eyes. Hemoglobin is a physiological process, and these do not fossilize. You know, what fossilizes are the bones and teeth. So up until this point, we've had no knowledge whatsoever of how any extinct animal has actually worked. Now, what we're able to do is bring really key elements of these animals back in the lab and determine precisely how they worked. So the mammoth actually had to develop changes to its hemoglobin, and this allowed them to keep their extremities very cold for months on end - really, we believe. And this would dramatically reduce their heat loss and hence their energy requirements, which would be very advantageous for them surviving, you know, winter in the high Arctic.
Yeah, so there is more - it's a disease in the industry, so to speak. But the company I have in mind, of course, is Valeant. And Valeant is a company that was actually founded or built on the idea of maximizing shareholder returns. And the CEO, then Michael Pearson, made no bones about it. And he was ruthless about taking drugs that had cost maybe a thousand dollars a year and by the time he was done with them, they cost $300,000 a year. And this happened over and over and over again. Of course, eventually, they became the poster child for this and...
Thanks for taking my call. I'd like to make a point and ask you also a direct question to the spokesman for the prime minister. I'm a Sunni Muslim, and we all know, Americans know, the whole world knows that the most civilized people in terms of educational, scientific leadership in Iraq are the Sunnis, as well as also they are the people who led that township for many, many years through many difficult times. If Americans are the culture that are pushing the Sunnis on the sideline, but even if that becomes--even if they succeed in doing so and the Shiite and the Kurdish support them, it's also logic to say that there will never, never be a stable, democratic Iraq ever again without the Sunnis' major contribution, and not only the Sunnis, but the Islamic parts of Iraq, which are also ...(unintelligible) Sunni which Americans also, you know, contend that they are the minority. Sunnis are not the minority in Iraq, and everybody knows that. And I'd like to ask also the prime minister spokesman, why is it that there is a media war against Sunnis, and at the same time, they want the Sunnis' contribution at the same time they are fighting a war against Sunnis? I want to--somebody to also explain to me that point.

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